3 Capital Wells That Never Run Dry (Live Call)

On raising capital. We'll touch on this in a minute. This is how I this funnel of investors. You work and buy your way into a room, how you connect, and then how you close your rooms as well. This is how we've gone out and done pretty well with raising capital. We've now helped hundreds of funds launch through Fund Launch, and we've helped people across the board do this.

So now, why I have authority to talk on this subject, I just mentioned a second ago, but we'll touch on this for a second, and then we're going to dive right into the content. So, I want to make sure though of what we're doing today that you know that I have at least some salt to speak on this subject.

So, a couple things. Number one, this is actually pretty cool. We just hit the Inc. 5000. Um, now I say we, this is all of us. Fund Launch just last week got listed on the Inc. 5000 as America's fastest growing companies at number 2652, which is pretty awesome. So, and that's not just us. That's our community, the Wall Street Rebel community. Congrats to y'all. This is amazing. This big journey to be one of the fastest growing companies in America is so cool. So, congrats to all of us. I mean, this was like this was so cool. We just hit this last week. Uh, and anyways, there's me and Mason, my co-founder on there, which is pretty cool.

Furthermore, I'm not going to bore you with my whole backstory, but just as a snapshot, this is what I have done. So, in college, I started two funds out of Blackbridge Holdings. You can see over here, we did over 219 deals uh over three years. We actually sold that fund to a competitor. Actually had a good exit on that. Uh after that, we then have done a few other businesses that I currently run now.

So I just mentioned Fund Launch. We have over we have now started to help people learn about funds. My dad co-founded a deca billion dollar family of real estate funds. I can talk about more of that story in a minute. Um, I didn't know he had any money until I really was in college. My dad is a very low-key, just simple dude. Uh, very conservative, drove a car with a dent in the door my whole life and yet was managing tens of billions. Billion with a B, billions of dollars of real estate in their funds. He's now retired and and exited that. Um, my brother is also an investment funds attorney, worked at the largest law firm in the world, has now spun out and is now doing his own thing right now. Um, and so we came together and started to create content around funds. We are the untraditional managers. None of us went to Ivy League schools. None of us worked on Wall Street. We're more, I'm gonna pull my cowboy hat. We're more the cowboys, cowboy style, untraditional manager. And we've seen now through Fund Launch over $300 funds have now launched through Fund Launch. So kudos to y'all. This is our community. Amazing what you guys have done. $4.7 billion dollars reported client AUM. Uh, we're a bootstrap company. Again, just hit the Inc. 5000. Um, I think that revenue number is outdated as well. That's just last few years. Um, anyways, amazing what's happened.

And then I currently run two funds actively right now. I'll take the I'll take my cowboy hat off now as I go to fund manager mode. I should have like a button-up or a jacket, but I run two funds currently. So, I run Ugly Unicorn. This is an investment crypto blockchain fund. We started in 2022. We've raised about 24 million of equity that we currently actively manage of equity in this fund uh in crypto. We've done extremely well as a firm. And then we last year launched Fund Launch Partners that raised $27 million of equity. We've done nine deals so far. We actually are investing into the our favorite funds that come out of Fund Launch. So, some of y'all, if you have a great fund, you come through Fund Launch, the average check is about a million dollars commitment we put into these funds. We've done nine deals so far. We actually take a we partner with someone in their fund. We write them a check and then we help them grow. Uh, we are that's what we're taking a part of their GP, a GP stake. I think we have three or four more deals under LOI right now that we're looking to do. We're trying to do another about 17 to 18 more deals here in the next uh, you call it 18 months here, year, year and a half. Um, pretty darn cool. Uh, we'll talk more about Fund Launch Partners in a minute, how we raise the capital. So, over $50 million of equity, not debt, equity raised between these two funds that I currently actively manage right now. So, I feel like I have some authority to talk on untraditional managers, what we have done to raise capital in this sense. Is that making sense?

Furthermore, some other cool stuff. This is my beautiful family. This is Lauren. Uh, and we have we live in Utah. This I we grew up on the same street together. I have two kids. We have uh nine chickens. Back to my I'll put my cowboy back back on. We got nine chickens. Yee-ha. We live on an acre and a half. We just planted 20 peach trees. Uh, anyways, I I love living out in Utah and it's it's amazing. So, family is of utmost importance and and what we put into all of our values here at Fund Launch. Um, here's our, you know, some of the stuff we do at Fund Launch, which is pretty cool. Uh, we put out a lot of free content as well. Here's some of our events we've done as well.

All right, enough about me. I have authority to talk on this subject. All right, at the end of today's call as well, we are going to do rapid-fire Q&A on the iPad. So stay till the end. If you have questions, I actually want to cue them up and we're going to go rapid fire and I I want to answer your questions, even talk about your specific case at the end of today's call.

All right, y'all feeling good? So, today we're going to talk about three capital wells that I have used that never run dry. At least so far, they haven't run dry. We'll see if they run dry in the future, but haven't run dry so far. And I want to give you a sense of at least where we go to raise capital. Now, as we get into this, I'm going to make a big preface. Raising capital is extremely hard. Running funds is extremely hard. This is not for everyone. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. This is extremely hard work. This is one of the hardest businesses to run like on earth is running a fund. But per Forbes, it is actually the most uh of industries, fund and investment fund management is the number one category of billionaires for people that and you know number one is funds, number two is tech, number three is manufacturing, number four is fashion. Okay, this is the number one category of billionaires. This is not easy. This is not for everybody. But if you can lean in, if you can figure this game out, at least for a lot of people, it's been extremely profitable game to play in. And what we've done at Fund Launch is taken this huge behemoth of an elephant, you know, swallowing, trying to eat an elephant, and we've condensed it down to a step-by-step process to help most people figure this out. Sound fair? Yeah. Can I get a give me a give me a yee-ha in the chat? Give me a yee-ha in the chat. We'll get in. All right, let's talk. Let's talk well number one.

All right. Well, number one that I have gone to time and time again is events to raise capital. Now, again, $50 million of equity raised. Uh, right now, our portfolio companies have over, I believe, $250 million of portfolio AUM and Fund Launch uh, our all of our students combined is about $4.7 billion. And when we survey and talk to these groups time and time again, events is an amazing way to raise capital. So, and you're like, "Okay, Bridger, I get events are fine, but let's go the next step deeper on events." There's two different types of events. Events that you host and events that you attend. I believe both are very, very useful sources of capital. Again, a well, we're talking about a well here where you can pull and find capital to raise money from. So, let's talk about both of these and how we have leveraged both of these in our fund. I want to give you actually some tactical things that I have done that have worked for me. The first one we're going to talk about hosting your event. Now I want to tell a quick story around hosting events. There are big events. There's small events. I'm using this events term very broad. You it could be a a poker night at your house with six people. That is a small event that gets people in your world. It could be a large multi-thousand person event like I showed right here that we have thrown. This is a 2,000 people we had in Miami. Uh, this was I think this was in Orlando. We had about 1,800 people at this one. Okay. There's huge events. There's also small events, but I believe hosting events are huge because let me tell you maybe a quick story on this. Well, sorry. Let me I'm going to show you some of the events and I'll tell you the story. This is an event we threw last week. I think this is the 13th Cars and Coin we have thrown. Um, I'm going to play a video here. I don't think you'll be able to hear the sound, but no worries. You can just kind of just see uh, you can kind of just see what it looks like here. Okay. So, what we have done is we say, "Hey, there's people with supercars." People with supercars like to generally hang out with other people that have supercars. We also have seen uh sometimes people with supercars, you know, don't like to post in publicly or whatever, but they they'll come to events like car events. So, we make this event completely free. It is usually invite only. This last event you see here, this video that's playing, we partnered with a guy in Utah, wealthy individual. But we said, "Hey, let's throw a Cars and Coin at your house. We invite we'll invite all of our people that we know that have supercars. You invite your people that have supercars. We'll all bring them together and then we'll talk a little bit about coin." And so you'll see here, we brought some cool people with cars. Me and Dan and and Todd, who's the guy here, we'll get on stage. We only talk for maybe 20 minutes, something like that. It's not that long. But we just and it's all for free. We're not It's not some big sales pitch. It's not something crazy. We're just trying to get people in our ecosystem, right? We've done 13 of these. We usually throw two to three a sum, you know, per summer. So, we've done these for years and we've now built a brand around we people that have like they buy a supercar around us. Hey, when's your next Cars and Coin? I want to come be a part of it. Okay. It's been a very cool way to attract people with cars. Again, free event.

Now, you might say, "Well, Bridger, that works for you. It doesn't work for me." Let me give you a few more examples of things that could work for you. Um, local poker nights, uh, get-togethers. you. I mean, you know, Dan, my partner, always has supercars, so he loves cars, so we did Cars and Coin. I've seen other people do um, you know, there's one that suits and supercars. There's another one that people that love, you know, I'm trying to find where are high-net-worth individuals and where are they already gathering. It could be box seats at a a local event. Uh, it could be I think we have my next slide here actually talks through some of these events here. Again, there are two types of rooms we can get into. You can work your way into rooms or you can buy your way into rooms. Wealthy people are already hanging out together. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's kind of like um, you know, I when I first got into capital raising I was like, okay, how do I have to go like assemble these people together and go find them? Which we did Cars and Coin and we kind of pulled people together and we did some of that, which is good. But as I've progressed, I'm like, wealthy people already hang out together. They're already in spots. They already are at the box seats for, you know, I'm in Utah, the Utah Jazz. They're already in the Ferrari club of Dallas, Texas. They're already in the whatever exclusive, you know, uh, health club or the country club. They're already hanging out together. I just got to insert myself into those crowds, into those places. Y'all following? You don't need to go reinvent the wheel. These groups already exist. And so again, the question is, you can see the slide here, but how do I get into one of these rooms? You can work your way into these rooms or you can buy your way into a room. And you kind of I'm sure you're reading ahead here. Working obviously you got to work it. So there's networking groups, real estate meetups, social media, events. We talked we'll talk more about events in a second. LinkedIn on our last uh Fund Launch Partners are, get this, our largest investor, and we'll talk more about social media in a minute on I think that's number two or number three. Our largest investor came from a cold DM outreach on LinkedIn. Isn't that wild? It was a cold. Now, we sent I don't know hundreds of DMs on LinkedIn with no response. One of the guys responded. They wrote their family office wrote a $5 million check into our fund and they I've already signaled for fund two or fund three they want to add more into fund two and three and we we were ecstatic about that cold DM but it was a lot of work, tons of work.

Right now, the other side is buying your way in. So let's hit a couple of these uh, you know, we you can read ahead obviously. Ferrari club, pay to pitch, box seats, pay to play, networking. Last year uh, last year I joined the last few years I've joined different mastermind groups. I joined joined a group that was uh $24,000 for one year to join. I joined another one that was $30,000 years to join. 30 thou $30,000 a year to join that that that group. We got three events. That was it for 30 grand. You came to three events a year and you had to pay for your flight to get there and go and you and you might be sitting there like, "Man, that's a waste of money, Bridger. You wasted a ton of money." Maybe I did. But when I go to those events, every there's about a hundred people there. Everyone else also paid $30,000 to be there. Pretty good group, right? We'd go to these cool spots and hang out. 100 people. Everyone there is paid 30 grand. It's pay to play networking. From that group, I went, that was a couple years ago. I have I have since still then I still have investors that are joining our funds that were like, "Bridge, remember we met three years ago at that event? We were at this thing. It was the group that we had joined three years ago and they've already assembled that group. I joined a group uh this was about 18 months ago. It was $150,000 to join one group. Now you might say that's a lot of money and it is. I you know I'm not I'm no billionaire. 150 grand is 150 grand. I mean that's good money. But we joined we we wanted to learn all this special information and stuff and help our business, which it did. But also everyone else in the group had paid a $150,000 to be there. Pretty good group to be in, right?

My dad, fun story I've shared before, but from one of his early funds, his partner came in and he had bought box seats to the Utah and I'm in Utah for crying out loud, right? Like everyone's like Utah's in the middle of nowhere. He bought box seats to the Utah Jazz back when the Jazz were kind of good. Okay. And these were, I think they were 30 or 40 grand a year, something like that. And my dad, who's very conservative, was like, "What the heck? Like, we can't spend this money, blah, blah, like we have no blah blah." And he was like, and his partner was like, "Hold on, John. John, before you before you rip my head off, he goes, "We are having such a hard time getting in front of high-net-worth individuals." You know, we call them up and they all have a gatekeeper. They have an assistant, you know, and hey, is Mrs. Johnson available? Uh, sorry, Mrs. Johnson's busy. She's in meetings. Blah, blah, and we can't. Hey, can we get a meeting with her? No, she's busy. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's very hard to sometimes to get in front of high-net-worth individuals. And he, this my dad's partner, this is years ago. He said, John, imagine we call in and we say, "Hey, um, this is the assistant. Hey, we're just calling in. You know, we're local entrepreneurs in the area. We actually have uh two box seats tonight. The Lakers are in town. We got LeBron in town. We wanted to invite Mrs. Johnson and her husband to come out with us. We got uh parking, the garage, parking underground. We got dinner beforehand at the arena. And then we have box seats for LeBron tonight who's in town. That assistant is going to pass that message on to Mrs. Johnson." And what happened was they actually did this. Their obviously intro rates went through the roof. And what happened was Mrs. Johnson, her husband, would come out to the game. They'd meet him and they now could spend three or four hours together watching the Utah Jazz play the Lakers in box seats with a dinner and a chef that was out there cooking and slicing up sushi for him. And they got to talk and get to know them. And then by the end of the dinner, they could, you know, talk about what they're doing, their fund, their projects, what's going on, and create a relationship with this person. It was a way to get past the gatekeeper. Y'all following? Again, this is buying your way into a room. Wealthy people are already assembled. How do we get in front or get into those rooms? Y'all, is this making sense? Give me like a yes in the chat if that's making a little bit of sense.

All right. Now, so this is other people's events. I'm going to go back here for a second. Um, I want to talk about throwing your own events. Well, let me talk about other events while we're on it. There are other events that are phenomenal that already have gathered people together. Here's a few examples. So, we mentioned Fund Launch Live. We've thrown a couple of those that gather good people together. Uh, the Maguire Woods Emerging Manager Conference. Uh, Lincoln, my partner, attended this uh just earlier this spring. Phenomenal spot. They gather they gather in I don't know dozens if not hundreds of family offices. They set up pitches for you. Go there. Me and Lincoln joined the Greenwich Economic Forum. About 200 people. Um, that was about I can't remember it was like $15 grand. We had to apply to get in. We joined. We flew out to Greenwich, Connecticut. Met with Ray Dalio, was there. All these billionaires were there. It was really cool. Again, we're getting in the right rooms. Milken Institute, I connections. There's a bunch of these groups out there that you can actually they've already assembled the people for you and you can go insert yourself into those groups. Y'all following? Okay, back on um, hopefully this making sense. One last thing I want to mention is I have seen tons of success by hosting my own events. Now, this might not be you. I just talked about attending events, hosting events. So, we mentioned Cars and Coin and I want to tell you I think back to when you were 13, 14 years old. You remember going to that first, I don't know, boy-girl party when it was like kids from the middle school or whatever, like maybe you're 12 or whatever the age was, but like all the cute girls and guys were they were all getting together at like this the first boy-girl party. Y'all following? Maybe I'm just maybe that was just for me, but y anybody else had that? I remember going and it was like, "Okay, where where's the Oh, it's a Saturday night. It's at this person's house. Seven o'clock. We're all hanging out and a ton of people are coming to this boy-girl party." And what did everyone say? Oh, it's at It's going to be at Jessica's house. Jessica's hosting this. Everyone, yeah, we're going to Jessica's house. She's got an awesome house. You can have a party. The party's at Jessica's house. And you may not even know who Jessica is, but you show up and everybody the connection there is the host of the party. And all week long everyone's talking about going to Jessica's house on Saturday night for the party, you know, at her house. When you host an event and people are coming to your event, what happens is people talk about the host. There's a ton of value around hosting events. When people come to our events and they're telling their friend, "Oh, I'm going to this guy Bridger. He's this guy on YouTube. He talks about funds. We're going to Bridger's event, Fund Launch Live, or we're coming to Cars and Coin. It's this guy Bridger and Dan. They have this fund. They're throwing at this guy's house at Todd's house. So, we're going to go." And that's people, even though they don't know you, then they show up to the event and everyone, a lot of people want to meet the host. And so, it puts you in a position where you're meeting everybody at the event because you're the host. Oh, hey, welcome. How'd you hear about us? Oh, yeah. It's great to meet you. and you're in a position where everyone wants to connect. You're the you're the super connector in the room. Y'all following? I had a I had a friend tell me he's like the best capital raising thing he ever did was a weekly poker night at his house. He he would invite six to eight people per week. Every like it was every like Thursday night at his house. They'd come and they'd play poker. They play, you know, hundred bucks, you know, hundred bucks buy-in. Small hands, but it was fun. And they would they would he had like a core group of like three or four people and they always made a point to invite new people each week. And so every week they kind of cycled in new people. Some people do this with golf or other things but again, there's but it's like oh we're playing poker at Bridger's house on Thursday night. You should come check it out. It's a fun group and you get three to four hours to connect with people. All right y'all following? Is this making sense? All right, because we're talking about well number one, hosting and attending events. There's always events to attend and I would implore you to start hosting a few events. You're welcome to even steal the Cars and Coin idea if you want. Just invite me, okay? Just invite me or we can co-sponsor one together if you want to do one in, I don't know, in San Diego or Dallas. We might even fly out and do a Cars & Coin with you. Okay? All right, y'all following along? Cool. Work your way behind your room. Okay, that's well number one. Let's now talk about well number two.

So again, we're talking about raising capital. What are wells that I can find people from? So well number two when we're talking about that was just the first one, kind of getting in the right rooms. Let's talk about well number two. Y'all right. Well number two that I keep going to is around building my list. Now you may have seen this before. I'll give I'll give credit where credit's due. This is uh uh from Alex Hormosi. He talks about the core four. And you can see here these are people who you know, people who you don't know. And this is one to one private and one to many public. Y'all following this kind of matrix? So people who you know, one to one private, that's a warm outreach. These are people that you already know, right? People that you already know. If people that you don't know, one to one is would be cold outreach. That would be like, you know, a private cold email or private LinkedIn message, right? One to many of people that you know would be posting free content to your followers. Okay? And then one to many public of people you don't know would be like running paid ads and/or content as well that people can go find that's publicly available. Y'all follow them. Now I'll give out shout out to Alex. They just did an amazing launch this week. This is actually a picture of if you guys know these two. This is actually us at Bear Lake a few what was it three years ago. This is before Alex was famous. Now Alex and Ila are famous. But they came out and hung out with us. Alex and I think Leila's taking the picture actually. Um, I was trying to flex my muscles on Alex. Hopefully that's my dad and that's Mason, my and this is I think Alex's friend that came with us. So shout out to him.

So let's talk about this for a second around building my list because when you go to raise capital, what do people always tell you when they go raise their first round of funding? They always say this, "Oh, we went to our friends and family first." Right? That's what people say. Go raise from your friends and family. And I put this little emoji here, but people, a lot of people in our group like, I don't want to raise from my friends and family. They don't want to raise from their friends and family, but a lot of people, this is who you are raising from. This is a well that you are drawing from. Now, I I feel that I actually personally don't love raising from my family. And if you don't love raising from your family, then don't don't raise from your family. I I typically don't really raise or talk to my family about investments. I just don't want to do it. But I do raise from my friends. And friends is a big term. I'm always trying to make new friends and people in my circle. Because to be honest, if you're raising your first time fund, your first time capital, the people that are going to put money in are the people who already know, like, and trust you, and those are most likely people that you would consider friends. And they would consider you a friend. And when you go to these events like well number one, you actually build a friend pool. You build your rolodex. Y'all following now.

So Bridger, how do you like how do you do this though? How do you not make it awkward? How do you like go and actually pull from this uh, this well? Okay. Um, number one, don't make it awkward. Like don't make it awkward. you have not so I'll from from the beginnings of of running for like a fund that you're doing if you're putting together a fund and you're trying to raise money number one you should have a lot of your personal net worth tied up in that fund so bare none you should say hey I am putting a significant amount of my money into this project but I don't have enough to complete the thing so I'm reaching out to some to friends and family and people around me to see if anybody else wants to get involved in this amazing deal. I have looked high and low. I've looked across the universe and of all the deals I looked at like, man, this one is phenomenal. That's why I am putting a ton of my own money in and we're we're asking around for to get help or feedback on what we should do for for uh to put more money in. Okay, that's number one, the psychology you should have. This deal is phenomenal. I'm asking around. Now, there's a favorite my one of my favorite quotes ever is this with friends. When you ask for money, you generally get advice. When you ask for advice, you generally get money. When I go to my friends, I will ask for advice. I'll say, "Hey, I'm putting together this real estate property on 123 Main Street. I think it's phenomenal. I'm thinking of putting a lot of my net worth into this thing. Hey, you're you've been a friend of mine, you know, for years. Would it be okay if I run this by you and get some of your advice on how I should you know, you've done tons of deals like this. I would love to get your advice on thinking about this deal. Do you have 15 minutes for a quick Zoom call? I could run you through it and see see what's going on. If they're somewhat of a friend of yours, most people will agree to a 15 or you can even say be exact, a 12-minute Zoom call that I could get your advice on a deal. Again, ask for advice. You generally get money. If you ask for money, you generally get advice. So, I would reach out to people on your phone connections, whoever you have, mentors in your space, and ask them for advice. You'll be surprised when you hop on those calls. One of two things will happen. You'll run them through the deal. The first thing that might happen, they're going to poke a ton of good holes in the deal. They're going to say, "Man, Bridger, this sucks. You're missing this and this and this." You gotta and you and you'll say, "Thank you so much for pointing out some pitfalls in this. I appreciate it." And you say, "Hey, let me go see if I can fix those. Is it okay if I meet back in three or four weeks from now and I'll see if I fix some of these holes?" Yeah, sure. Let's meet back in three or four weeks. Okay, that's scenario number one. Scenario number two is they go, "Dang, this is actually pretty good. Are you actually like raising money for this thing?" And you'll go, "Yeah, I'm actually raising money for this thing." And they might go, "Huh?" Or the doc, you know, "Hey, I'm putting together docs right now. Hey, you know, whenever it's ready, give me a call. Actually, I might be very interested in putting money in this thing." An amazing, phenomenal way to not be awkward, to not pressure anybody. If you go back to my slides, if you don't want to, if you're worried about pitching family and friends, then don't don't pitch them. Ask for advice. Ask for advice on your family and friends. Okay, y'all following? Making sense? Don't make it weird. And also give people an out. I never try to hard close anybody. I am about building relationships with people. And like yesterday, I pitched my fund to three separate individuals on calls. I'm actively raising capital always. I was on three calls yesterday. the end of the call, I go, "Hey, what do you what are y'all thinking? Which bucket do you all think you you come to? Do we have a closing in a month?" You know, temperature check where on a, you know, scale of 1 to 10, where are you guys falling in? And I always give them an out. Hey, if it's not the right time, I don't want to put you in a bad situation. You know, it's okay to tell me no. It's not a big deal. I care about our relationship more than a deal. But, man, I think this thing is phenomenal. Me and Dan have over around a million dollars each in this deal. We think it's amazing. What What are What are you thinking? and they'll they'll let us know. And I'm okay if someone says no to me. I'm gonna I'm pitch I'm going to kiss a lot of frogs. I'm okay with it. I'm not I don't want to burn any bridges because guess what? A year maybe it's not the right time. A year from now, two years, it might be the right time. So, I'm gonna I want to make it make sense for them. I want to have a deal that makes sense for both of us. Y'all following? Don't make it awkward. Ask for advice, not money.

The second thing I'll say on well number two, again, family and friends. You might say, "Well, Bridger, I don't have any family and friends that have any money." which might be totally true. Or I've already gone to everyone I know that has money. This is what happened with Fund Launch Partners. Okay, Fund Launch Partners. We were raising money last year and we had kind of tapped everybody we knew that had money. So, guess what we did? We brought on advisors who have a bigger list quote list than you. And actually, I'll share my screen here. So, if I go over, you guys can see this Fund Launch. This is Fund Partners website here. So we had we had raised I don't know how much money we had raised but not enough. Okay. We were trying to raise this $27 million. So me, Lincoln, Adam and Mason were going out hitting our and we had already hit, you know, our people and just wasn't the right time for a lot of people. So then we went and tried to find some advisors and we started to talk and we asked for advice. We found uh these two guys right here. Let me see. Todd was first. I'll point out Todd. This guy um had done some pretty cool stuff in his career. You can see three bullet points here, but I mean some phenomenal stuff. He loved what we were doing. We asked for advice. He's like, "Man, are you guys actually doing this?" And I'm like, "Yeah." He goes, "Man, I I probably want to put some money in." And we say, "Great." And we said, "Well, Todd, you know, you're well connected. What if we we gave you some economics, gave you a few percentage points, and maybe you helped us reach out to some more people to help close this race?" And he thought, "That's interesting." We talked for a month or two. He then brought us his friend which was this guy Troy Templeton. Troy you can read here has ran a number of different funds done over six billion AUM on his last fund. Had just retired from his last fund. I mean this guy was phenomenal. And he came in and we gave the we asked for advice and he said man I really like what you're doing. Can I give you some money? We said sure. And we said Troy we're trying to close this thing up. Do you have anybody? If we made it interesting for you, do you have anybody in your space? He said, 'Yeah, let me let me think.' So, we gave him a piece of our firm. Troy and Todd together, I think raised about I think we got the numbers yesterday, anywhere from 60 to 65% of all the money we raised because they went out to their rolodex and we had guys from Troy. We had multiple people. We hopped on a call. They're like, "Hey, Troy told me this thing is awesome. I trust everything Troy touches turns to gold." So, I'm look I'm thinking about putting one maybe 1.5 million in. We said, "Awesome. We'll take it." The next guy, he's like, "Hey, I love Yeah, give me the 15-minute pitch. Cool. I You know what? I don't need to see the docs. I just I trust Troy so much. Yeah, I'll give you I got two million coming your way." Like, I'm not even kidding. We had multiple calls like this when we had spent a year Yeah. Maybe not a year, eight months with us four over here banging our heads against the wall trying to raise money. We got these two guys, we gave them a good chunk of our GP and management co so that we could then go and use their rolodex. Y'all following? So, and I go back to this. Well, it is most time you're raising from family and friends. So, figure out a way to get more friends and that might be bringing on advisors that have a bigger list than you, that can have a bigger friend list than you do. Again, because most first-time funds, emerging managers, you're raising from people that already know, like, and trust you. Yes, you can go out and find cold people 100, and we've done that. But the vast majority of the dollars that are probably going to come your way are people that you're already building relationships with.

The last thing I'll say here, using our well analogy, dig I'm gonna put my cowboy hat on here. Howdy, y'all. Got my I'm gonna throw some yaws in. All right, I got nine chickens. I'm a I'm a wannabe farmer. Okay, I'm not a farmer. I'm a wannabe cowboy. All right, dig your well long before you need water. If you're watching this today and you're like, "Well, I'm not raising money right now." Great. Start building the well. Start building people around you, a team, a rolodex of people that are mentors, coaches, people in your space that are helping you with whatever part of your life. I have been doing this for years. I just did it. Yes, I I I I like to I tell you only things that I'm doing actively. Literally yesterday, we are building right now Fund Launch AI. You can see my t-shirt. We actually have a a working prototype. It's amazing. It's probably going to be public in a couple weeks. I'll talk you about this in just a few minutes. We're going to make this live to black card members very soon. It's a full AI builder that builds your fund, your pitch deck, finds capital for you. It's It's actually really darn cool. But me and Mason were sitting there actually like, "Man, who do we think we are that we're just going to figure all this out on our own? Let me text a number of guys local to us. We have Silicon Slopes in Utah that have already exited tech companies." And I thought through my list, I'm like, "Huh?" And these are people I have built relationships with for man five, six, seven years. Two guys exited their well, sorry. One guy sold his company for over a billion dollars to Adobe back in the early 2000s. Uh, the other guy, I don't know what his exit, but multi-hundred million exit. Another guy sold his company for $54 million to Snapchat. They're all technologists. There's four guys I texted yesterday and I texted him and said, "Hey, you know, yeah, I haven't talked I hadn't talked to these guys in probably six months, eight months, any of them." But I said, "Hey, we're building this cool thing called Fund Launch AI. Do you have 15 minutes? I know you're busy and you're a legend here. I know you're busy, but you have 15 minutes. I could run this by you and get some advice on building a tech business. We've never really built tech before. I'd love to get your insights because you're just a legend in the space." All four of them texted me back yesterday, Bridger, I'd love to hop on with you. Let's do a call. Let's do Let's go to lunch. Let's go meet up. And I and I I'm asking for advice. I'm saying, I'm a young guy. You're an older guy. Plea please share your wisdom with me. And I threw in there, hey, we got this young budding company, Fund Launch. We just hit the Inc. 5000. Like, we're growing, but we need people like y'all. Old mentors. I'm saying old. Old mentors love to help young mentors because it reminds them of who they once were. If you can show to an older, let's call it older mentor with money, you're this young budding version of a, you know, successful entrepreneur that's going out and get it. You'd be surprised how many people want to give advice. How many people want to actually help? They want to be advisors. They want Now, not everybody. Some people will tell you no for sure, but you'd be surprised how many people it lights them up to like help young entrepreneurs. And we we might even give these guys a stake in our business. We'll give them one, two, I don't know, percentage points to be a board of advisors for us. But it goes and builds the rolodex. Y'all following? So build your well long before you need water. If you already have tapped every piece of water you guys have, bring on advisors that have different wells than you do. No one does this alone. No one goes out and launches funds alone. This is a team sport. We are playing a team game. All right, yeehaw. Give me a yee-ha in the chat. All right, let's go. Put my put my props down. All right, here we go. I got some other props here. I got a Fund Launch AI hat. I got a I got a few more in a minute. I'll bring out. Hold on. We'll get here in a second.

All right, so back to my slides here, though. We are building a list, right? You can build a list in a lot of ways. These can be meetups, LinkedIn, newsletter, streams. Uh, build out your list. I'll come back to this in a minute. I want to touch on a few more of these um to give you more ideas. Like for example, we have written a quarterly newsletter even before we had like a full-out fund built. I built a newsletter and it's just a LinkedIn post of how I viewed the market, what I saw in the marketplace, what was going on. I I would send this out to to train my audience. Oh, Bridger is a guy that looks and watches the market. He puts out insights on what he's seeing. Um, so sound good? Okay.

Now, uh, we're going to get to number three. So, I've already shared two. I'm I'm going to come back to I'm going to hit a few things on I want to share save it for number three. Three is a way that we have raised now uh I don't I don't want to give you the exact number but millions of dollars this year even last month. I think we closed around two $2.1 million last month using this strategy in our own funds. There's just it's worked for us. So I'm going to get to that in a second. That's well number three. And then we'll pull up the iPad and we'll do more of this.

Now before I go to that I want to talk about what we do at Fund Launch. If y'all haven't seen our business, we are on a mission at Fund Launch. Because you might say, "Well, Bridger, you run these funds. Why do you do a webinar like this? Why do you do content? Why do you even run Fund Launch?" Now, don't get me wrong, we make running money running Fund Launch. I do make money running Fund Launch. Uh, it's Inc. 5000 company. We've done very, very well. However, I feel extremely blessed because I had a dad who ran a deca billion dollar family of funds, a brother who's an investment funds attorney, and we did this in an unconventional manner. We did it as these, you know, these untraditional fund managers. We didn't go work on Wall Street. We didn't go to Ivy League schools, but yet we figured out this game of investment funds. And over the years, we've had a number of people come to my office and started, "Can we get on the whiteboard? Can you teach me how you guys did this?" And so, finally, we started to make some small YouTube videos. They got into bigger YouTube videos that turned into a course that turned into like this whole incubator. We've now had over a thousand people go through our incubator for funds. We've had 110,000 people take one of our courses online for funds. And we said our mission at Fund Launch is to democratize Wall Street. There are big firms out there, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard that are consolidating industries very quickly. Uh, you've heard from the World Economic Forum, they want us to own nothing and be happy. They want to have all ownership in the hands of a few people. They're saying you're going to rent your house, you're going to rent everywhere, and you're going to be you're going to rent your car. you won't own anything and you will be happy. And I absolutely hate that idea. I'm a big believer in capitalism. Capitalism done right is a beautiful thing. It drives prices lower for everybody. It's an amazing thing when groups are actually competing against each other. However, in some places in the market, we don't have capitalism. We have a cartel or a dualopoly or a monopoly where only one or two or three businesses run and

control everything. Uh, big pharma is a great example. Uh, even big finance is a great example. There's only, there's about 10 large banks that run everything. There's been no new bank started in like 15 years. It's a cartel. I believe we need more people to understand this game of high finance so that we can democratize Wall Street. I am not okay with three firms, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, that control everything. I am okay with 10,000 independent firms all competing and driving prices lower and making better products for consumers. I'm all about that. I love capitalism in its truest sense. And that's why we're on a mission to democratize Wall Street. I feel imperative to shout from the rooftops how funds are built, how they're put together. If you've seen today, we talked about cap raising, but our whole YouTube channel and content is all around this.

Okay, we've now helped thousands of entrepreneurs around the world in this game of funds, which has been pretty cool, and we want to do more. That's why we're building AI tools. We're trying to take this, this time to build a fund from here down to here and hopefully down to here to make it as, it's still hard, but to make it a lot easier to go play in this game. Y'all following?

So, the biggest thing we did last year to capitalize on this mission was we actually built a full education suite and platform to help more people understand this game. So, I'll go quick. This is Alt Street. Anybody in Alt Street, type like a yeah, yee-ha in the chat if you're in Alt Street. All right. Alt Street is an amazing platform. We actually went out and found some of the top fund managers around the country. We flew film crews out and actually filmed with them. This is Bob Elliot, for example. He was uh at Bridgewater with Ray Dalio, and he actually shares a full course on how they ran at Bridgewater and now he spun out and runs his own fund as well for uh, let me go back, for, I'll go here. This is actually the Alt Street platform. Here it is. Mark Malik, this guy runs a 1.5 billion dollar quant fund. He actually sat down with us. It's very high quality. Shares how they run their quant fund, what they're doing. Pretty cool, right? You can go back here. You can see uh, there's Bob Elliot, hundred billion dollar fund at Bridgewater. Mark Malik, Vincent U delivered 20% returns at Gondor Capital. Brian Estus runs a runs $160 million crypto fund. My dad, John Pennington, we filmed with him. So you can go, you can go see all these different types of group. Vina Jetty down the line.

Now we thought it'd be really cool to charge for this. We can make a ton of money selling this. But then we thought, our true mission at Fund Launch is to to democratize Wall Street. And if it costs money, it's not democratizing Wall Street. So we made pretty much all of our education for free last year on Wall Street. You, you can clap that up. That's pretty awesome. This is completely free. I believe more people need to understand what funds are. Alt Street, our YouTube channel, our content is pretty much for free. Now, we do have our fund academy. We do have some courses that are paid for, but we have, like, we are now transitioning to more, more stuff is just completely free to help more of y'all figure out this game. Currently, Alt Street, I think, has over 25,000 users on the platform. Like, literally right now, you can just go to altre.com. You create an account, put your email in, and you are in for free. Our only ask is that if it's useful to you, if you like it, please go tell a few people about this platform so that we can spread this mission to more people. Yeah. Isn't that kind of cool? Boom. There's free gift number one. Are you happy you showed up today?

All right. Now, the second thing that we do at Fund Launch is we, the education we have pretty much pushed to free. We want to teach things for free. What we do is if you want help implementing a fund implementation, we have that is paid. Okay. So over here, implementation is paid. We help people. That's how Fund Launch makes money. If you want help with our legal team, with our advisors to actually implement and build a fund with you, that's what we do with Funda. Sound good? So education is all for free. Once you're ready to actually launch, we believe we can do it faster, more cost-effective, and have a better result by going through Fund Launch. Now, let me give you a sense of what we do at Fund Launch and actually how we implement some of this stuff. Would that be all right with you?

So, at Fund Launch, we have a couple different programs, but our main one is called Blackheart. Blackheart is our implementation platform at Fund Launch. And again, it is not free. This is paid, okay? This is paid. And there's different tiers of Blackheart depending on what you need. But I'll give you an overview of what we do in Blackheart. All right. This is a screenshot of what the backend dashboard looks like. So when you join Blackheart, this is what you look at. You'll see consulting, incubator, communication, events that we do in here. All of your credits all in here with a CRM and all. Actually, I'll double click on a couple of things here. We have our full calendar. We do daily office hours, excuse me, where you can go meet with coaches and work with our team to go and build your fund. This is the fund builder. We actually go through and build your fund with you in the platform to answer every little nitpicky question that you might have when building out a fund. So again, when you join Blackheart, you get the full Fund Launch platform, six-stage process to launch your fund, guided builder to craft each detail and strategy, and dynamic dashboard with progress tracking, full analytics, and actionable next steps. Sound pretty cool? Yeah.

Now, oftentimes, at least for me, I didn't need tons of help. You guys are all smart, but I did get stuck. You know when you get stuck on one or two or three things? What we found was we wanted to help you get unstuck. So, what we said is we're going to do group consulting. We do one-on-one coaching and also group office hours. So, every week we have multiple office hours, sometimes multiple per day of legal Q&A, capital raising, investment thesis, general Q&A. Like, I go live every Wednesday with our group where you can hop on, ask questions. Kind of like in college, you could go do office hours. We do the same thing. So every day of the week, someone's live. You can hop in, talk to them, and get an answer to a question to figure out where you're at in your fund. All right. So here's group office hours. Here's a picture of some of our coaches. These are all people that have gone out. They actually, most of them currently run their own funds or single asset funds right now. For example, Ben Julius. He's in Canada. I believe right now they're doing over $15 million development. And he once or twice a week hops on and actually just answers questions, shares what he's doing in there. Uh, Dan Pearson does, has done dozens of private equity deals. Peter Privian uh runs currently actively runs a hedge fund and I think once or twice a week hops on an office hour to just answer questions about this. These are all, not all, but most are people that are actively raising and running funds right now. Okay, so that's the second thing you get is group coaching, one-on-one calls, etc.

Now, one of the biggest value-add features we have in the past is our community. I mentioned we've had over a 100,000 people take a course with us. In some of these groups, we've whittled it down to our top people. So, when you join Blackheart, you get community where you can actually work side-by-side with other people that are, they might be building similar funds to you. Okay. Furthermore, it's oftentimes hard to build Excel models, proformas, but easy to plug your data into someone else's model. So, when you join Blackheart in the implementation, we actually give you, we actually paid a group $10,000 to build one of these Excel models. It's pretty, that's a pretty good Excel model. When you join Blackheart, you get access to these Excel models. You can plug and play. You download them and you can put your stuff into these Excel models. Wouldn't that be pretty cool to have? So, we give this to you guys as more implementation tools to help you go launch.

Now, you might also need help with marketing funnels, websites. So when you join Blackheart, you get access to Fund Launch 360. This is a full marketing platform and CRM. So inside of here, you get CRM, website builder, investor email, SMS sequences, calendar, booking system, marketing automations. I use this pretty much every day for Ugly Unicorn and Fund Partners to track my pipeline, to get investors queued up, and to have a place to email out, text, and use my list. All right. So when you join Blackheart, you get access to the Fund Launch 360, the backend. We have data rooms, KYC, AML, investor reporting, entity management, all inside of there. So again, you get the Fund Launch platform, you get the group coaching calls, professional Excel models, and Fund Launch 360 when you join Blackheart.

Now, how many of y'all would like help putting your legal docs together? We have now done this hundreds, not dozens, hundreds of times. And we have partner law firms that work with us inside of Blackheart that we cue you up because you want to make sure when you launch that what you're doing is compliant. It's buttoned up. You don't want to go raise capital from family and friends and it's, you know, your docs are all wonky or it's not compliant. We want to make sure things are buttoned up, they're compliant, it's filed correctly. This builds confidence with your investors and the people that you know best when they join your thing. They know it's buttoned up. It's done the right way because you know and you want something that can scale as well. One of the biggest problems in the world is you don't know what you don't know. Have you anybody ever felt that before? Like, especially with funds, it's like the unknowns of the unknown. Like, I don't even know the questions to ask to make sure it's done the right way. You know what I'm talking about? So we make sure that is built into you and done correctly. When you join Blackheart, you actually get full legal setup for your single asset fund or full out fund depending on what you do inside of Blackheart. We can figure out all the legal for you in there. So again, you get fund filing, baseline fund documents, formation council, etc. in here all through the Fund Launch 360 platform and with our partner firms. You can see some screenshots here of data rooms and other things like that that we have in the backend. And we have a lawyer that reviews everything and signs off before you go out and launch. Pretty nice, right? Uh, to go and do this. So again, available add-ons. We can help with blue sky filing fees, ADV filings, international funds. You might ask, does this work for me if I'm in uh, the UK or Dubai? We can hop on a phone call and we can talk more about how that works. But again, for most people, we can actually help them uh, through what we've done. So you get the Fund Launch platform, consulting, professional Excel models, Fund 360, and full fund legal setup when you join Blackheart.

Kind of like, you know, I love this analogy. Some people, myself included, when I'm building a business, I'm going to use the analogy of building a house. We think we need, you know, we're going to go build a house and or our business and we're like, okay, I'm going to build this business slash, let's use the house analogy. So, I'm going to go build this house. All right. So, I need to go learn how to be a plumber. And I also need to go learn how to do electrical work. And oh, I gotta, I gotta learn concrete and like pour my foundation. And I also, I should go learn how to do framing. And I should also learn how to do siding and finish work. And what happens is if you try to do this all by yourself, it can take an extremely long time to build a house. I mean, that would be unreasonable. You would not go do all that. But oftentimes, we do that in our business. We're like, "Oh, I'm going to go build this business." So, I need to go figure out how to build a sales team and do marketing and do the back-end compliance and I'm building a fund. So, I'm going to figure out the investment strategy and I'm going to fill out capital raising and I'm, and it's way too much and most people never launch. The truth is most funds never launch. Most businesses never get built fully because the founder, and I'm saying this from experience. I started six businesses my first two years of college and I tried to do this. I tried to go build the entire house myself. And what I learned over time, and I think what led us to now have an Inc. 5000 award and a lot of success in our businesses on business seven, eight, and nine were all eight-figure businesses. When business one, two, three, four, and five, six were kind of, they made like five grand, 10 grand, 20 grand. What was the shift? It was shifting from it's not the how, it's the who. I'm the founder. I'm going to figure out the blueprints. I'm going to work on the plans. I'm working on the vision, the strategy, and I'm going to find really good people who have done this before, who know what they're doing to go pour the foundation and to frame the house and to do the finish work and do the plumbing and the electrical. And guess what? It's still my house. But I'm, I'm not naive enough to think I can do everything by myself. The offer in Blackheart is this. It's your business. You don't, we don't take a slice of your business. It's yours. But you're hiring us to come and implement all these things to help you move faster because we've done it before. We've already blazed the trail. We've done this not with one people or 10 people, with hundreds of people. At Fund Launch, we have a team. I think we're about 55 to 60 people as a company. I mean, we do this day in and day out. Y'all following?

So, the next question, okay, Bridget, this is cool and all. How much does it cost? Okay. Uh, well, the answer is it depends. It depends on how much you need. Uh, Blackheart, I'll just tell you straight up, it's range anywhere from, you know, it can be as low as six, $7,000 all the way up to about $50,000 to go and build a fund, which is, by the way, a phenomenal price. If you go Google right now, hey, I ask ChatGPT as we're live, how much does it cost to build a, you know, a private equity fund? We can even do it live here. You guys can see my screen. I'll just go to chat. How much does it cost to build a private equity fund? Let's just ask. We'll let, we'll let it search here for a second. Most are $40 to $70,000. They can go as high as $300,000, $15 to $400,000 for legal fees. What we do is we negotiate bulk discounts with these law firms that they give us and we pass those discounts on to y'all. Okay? We go find tax, audit, compliance teams, and we say, "Hey, we've got a big group. You know, you usually charge $40,000 for this. You know what? We're going to give you, we have a lot of volume. Give us a group discount for our people at Fund Launch." And they're, these guys are sharp. They know what they're doing. And that's how we can do this for not $100,000. It's, you know, 10, 15, 20, $25,000 depending on what you need and what you need it. So, we build a custom package with you. Is that making sense? If you do this on your own, you can, you know, this, here's your ranges. You know, the the lowest can be 40 up to maybe $400,000. There's a high price for ignorance in this game. The unknowns of the unknown. I had a buddy actually. He spent over $500,000 launching his first fund because he went and talked to lawyers. He said, "Lawyers, help me figure out, you know, my fund." And they asked him, "Okay, are you doing an American or European waterfall? Are you running a Reg D 506b or 506c? Do you want to do a 3c1, a 3c5, or a 3c7 fund?" And he was like, uh, I don't know. And the lawyer said, "Oh, no worries. Let me teach you." And the lawyer's billing him $1,000 an hour and teaches him what is an American and European waterfall, what's an open-ended or close-ended fund, what's a 506b, 506c fund. You don't want your lawyer to also be your teacher because it's a very expensive teacher to have. Furthermore, cost isn't just money, it's time. Money you can earn back. Time you can't really get back. Your time. When you join Blackheart, you're not only getting a, I believe, a huge cost reduction, you're getting a time reduction because we have done this before. And it's not just the legal part. It's the compliance. It's the audits, the tax people. It's the actually building a fund that people want to have. It's the go-to marketing strategy to find investors. Y'all following?

So, we have different things for different people. Free content if you're just starting out. But we have single asset funds and full out Blackheart. If you want to have help implementing your fund, you're curious about this, you see on the bottom of the screen here, we are taking, so Blackheart currently is closed and we are taking deposits right now to join the next cohort. So how we're doing this right now, we have closed Blackheart and we have taken deposits for a cohort to join on the 1st of September. So today is what? Thursday the 21st. As of today, we have 32 deposits right now to join Blackheart in the next cohort. Now, what we're doing, every person we hop on the call, we interview them. We make sure they're actually a good fit for the cohort. Currently, we have 32 deposits down to join the next cohort. On today's Thursday, on Monday, the cohort is starting. We're doing the introductory call, onboarding calls on next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then September, that first Monday of September, Monday, Tuesday, we're doing our first onboarding call with our new cohort into Blackheart. If you would like to learn more or be considered to join the next cohort, and I, and I promise, it is, we have 32 deposits as of this morning. We're taking more, but we really don't want to have much more than that. Now, we anticipate there's a chance maybe a couple of them fall out, but this is, we're already pretty much filled up for this cohort, but if you want to join and be involved, again, time is money. There's a link down below here. You guys can join and go book a call with one of our uh, senior funding advisors. What they're going to do is they're going to hop on. They can walk you through in your situation. You might ask, "Does it work for me? Does it work for crypto funds or debt funds or private equity funds or real estate funds? Or does it work if I'm in Canada or if I'm in Mexico or if I'm in Louisiana? Does it work for me?" Hop on a call down below. We can look through your situation, see if it's a good fit. We can answer all your questions and see if you'd be a good fit for this cohort. But again, time is of the essence. We have 32 deposits. We're opening this cohort right now. So, if you want to book a call and and talk more there about implementation, there's a link down below at funlaunch.com/call. You can open that up right now. I'll give you a second. You're not going to miss anything. I'll give you a second. This is your permission to go open up Chrome, Safari. Actually, if I come over here, you'll even see it here. It'll look like this. funnel.com/call. What we'll have you do is we'll have you put your email in. So, I'll put in bridgerf@funlaunch.com. Click submit. This will come through. It'll open up a Calendly booking link and tada. You can book a 30-minute meeting with a Fund Launch consult. You'll see calls are available today, tomorrow, and Saturday. We are starting onboarding on the 25th for this cohort. So, we're taking deposits to the 25th and 6th and 7th. We're starting to do onboarding calls and then we will have our full kickoff. Oh, well, let me click. But September, I believe it's going to be September 1st. We're going to do our kickoff call for this cohort. Now, when you join with a cohort, what's cool, this is what Harvard Business School does. You join in a cohort and you join together with other people as well. So you, you're going to work with our coaches, our advisors, but you also have right now 32 other people that are also joining with you that are your peers side-by-side. So if you get stuck, you know, you might ask the teacher, but ah, the it's not making sense from the teacher. Let me ask my buddy over here that's also doing a real estate fund or private equity fund. What are you thinking? How would it work with you? In the past in these cohorts, we have seen a number of people team up actually and say, "Hey, you're doing private equity. Oh, I'm doing private equity. Why don't we just, let's partner up or hey, let's share resources or maybe you don't want to share, that's fine too, but let's share notes on what we've used for capital raising." We have an amazing community at Fund Launch of people that give and share and help one another. And when you join with a cohort, this, this cohort I think is going to be phenomenal. By the way, when you join with a cohort, you get your peers side-by-side. You get uh coaches and that are kind of above you that are going to pull you up and you get 1,200 other people that have also, that are also in Blackheart that have gone before you. I'll pull up my Slack channel. When people are in Blackheart, um, you'll see this here. So in, in Blackheart right now, we have over, oh, look at that, 1,400 people that have gone before you in Blackheart. So you can message and Slack and talk with them. You can go, we have a deals channel if everyone drops what their current deals are that they're working on. You can go see what deals are, capital, all that kind of stuff inside of the Blackheart platform. So again, if you're curious to learn more, you don't, there's no pressure, but if you would like to learn more and you're curious about helping implement your fund right now, go to funlaunch.com/call. You can book a call with our team and we can go from there. All right, we'll leave that link live at the bottom of the screen as we move on. Sound good? All right, let's, uh, let's keep going on here.

Oh, as a bonus, actually, I didn't even share this. As a bonus for this cohort specifically, this cohort is going to be our first beta test users into, drum roll, please. I'm going to put my hat on for this one. I got my hat here. We are rolling out in the next few weeks, Fund Launch AI. So, we have a working prototype currently. I've been testing and playing with it for the last few days. It is phenomenal. Um, this is some. So, I, I typed in, hey, I want to build a Las Vegas value-add fund. It actually went and built me a scroll deck. It went, we have 147 data points that we have found that go into building a fund. The AI actually goes and builds those data points for you in a full blueprint. You can see the screenshots here. It actually breaks down your fund structure, capital raising plans. We have a, a new tool as well. We went and found, we'll see if we can roll this out on V1. And it might be a V2 feature, but we went and found 15 family offices in Las Vegas that are interested in value-add and actually pulled name, phone number, and email for those family offices and populated them for us because we are building and this, you know, this is hypothetical, but a value-add multifamily Las Vegas fund. Isn't that phenomenal? We are pretty excited about this. We are going to roll this out to beta users, just to Blackheart. The cohort that is joining will be on that list as the first group of beta test users that can start using Fund Launch AI. Isn't that kind of cool? That's a bonus when you join on this cohort. Okay, you can see my Fund Launch AI shirt, my Fund Launch AI hat. Uh, as we roll out V1, I believe this will give especially untraditional managers a huge advantage when building their fund. Again, we want to take the time of, you know, it takes maybe this long to build a fund right now. Fund Launch by itself and Blackheart has shortened it to this amount of time. Fund Launch AI, we believe will shorten it to maybe this amount of time where you could go build a full out fund in not months, not even weeks, maybe even days. This then goes and populates legal docs. We work with lawyers and attorneys and your coaches to help refine all the stuff you're building in your fund to take this process way down. We're pretty excited about it. We'll do a full public rollout soon, but I, I couldn't, I couldn't wait today. I had to just, I had to tease it. I'm just giving you a little tease, a little tease today on FundLaunchAI. So again, uh, if you want help implementing your fund, book a call now. Funlaunch.com/call. Go book a call. There's only a number of call spots available. Once they're gone, they are gone. So there's a, we have my, my team of senior advisors. There's only a handful of them. They're outside my office right here. Uh, they are taking calls today, tomorrow, and Saturday for this next cohort. If you're curious, if you're on the fence, I'd get your partner call and be like, "Yo, let's book a call. Show up to the call and we'll be from there." All right, sound good? All right, I'll take my hat off here. Let's, uh, let's move on.

So, today's call we talked and we'll leave that link live. It's still active, so you can go book a call as we talk, but I wanted to keep talking about raising capital today. Does that sound good? Give me a yes if y'all are still there. You guys still live? We still got people on. Give me a yes if this is still working.

So, to review, well number one, we talked about hosting and attending events. We talked about cars and coin, what we've done there, other events that we can go to. Well, number two, we talked about Fund Launch Partners. Bringing on advisors that are bigger than you, that have a bigger list, a bigger rolodex than you. Sounds simple. A lot of people don't do this. It helped us raise, I think about 65% of our money in our last fund for our $27 million raise came from advisors who brought in their networks as well. We gave them equity in the business. They're now partners. They're on the investment committee. And it was one of the best things we ever did. Okay, let's now talk about well number three. Uh, this well last month for Ugly Unicorn, I believe, raised us over one point, I think it was 1.1, $1.2 million in July just last month. This is stuff that's worked for us right now. And I'm actually, I might even share my screen and actually walk you through what we did. Um, but I'll, I'll, I'll go to well number three here. Okay. So, well, number three, back to the core four was down here. So, we talked already about warm outreach, even cold outreach right here. Posting free content has been massive for us, our brand, and even now raising capital.

Now, let me double-click on this because you might say, "Well, Bridger, it's easy for you. You have a following already. You already have 400, whatever, I think it's $350,000 social media followers." This works for, I've seen it work for people that don't even have followings and if now, so let me just give you a few examples. Um, let me, let me open this up and I'll tell you a quick story. So years ago, I uh, this is when I was first starting my, you know, my story is my first six businesses when I joined, uh, you know, I was in college. I started a Chinese tutoring business. I started a website building business. We were doing, you know, building funnels and ads for people. Uh, we were trying to build this little tech feature that would go into a, a snowboard. Anyways, and I kept kind of striking out and I remember thinking about literally the the Kardashians and I thought, you know, you know, Kim and what's their, Kylie and the, whatever that whole family and I was like, and I remember sitting one, I was, I was feeling a little defeated and I was like, man, it must be easy for them. So easy. They just have a social media following. They just post on Instagram and they make, it's like a million dollars per post they make. And I'm like, it's so stupid. I was like, this is so dumb. I'm over here grinding my face off and someone else just, this cute girl on Instagram can just post something and she makes $100,000. And I thought, that's so, I, I was like, the, the life is so unfair. And I was going, pity Bridger. Ah, like I've got to do it the hard way. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I sat there and said, I can either hate them or I could try to join them and what if I could do something like this and maybe I could post on Instagram and raise money or have, you know, I'm selling my little widget and people would follow and do it. And then I thought, no, I'm not gonna post on Instagram. That's stupid. I'm not doing that. Like that's dumb. And then I went back and then I kept having this reoccurring thought like, "Well, then you better take that excuse out of your brain. Stop complaining about having not having a social media following when you never post anything on social media ever." And finally I said, "Fine, I'll, I'll try it out." And actually, I'm going to share my screen for a second. At the time, I'm going to go to Instagram. Okay, some of you know my Instagram. This is my Instagram right here. Okay, we have an okay following. We're not even that big, by the way. We're pretty small on social media. Okay, I post stuff. I don't know. I don't even get that many much engagement. Like, I don't know. I, I'm still not good at social media. I'm trying to figure it out. Okay. My original uh, Instagram was this. I think it was bridger_pen. Yeah, here it is. I, this is my Instagram account from uh, when I was in just like high school when I got married. I just, you know, I had a couple followers like, you know, this is my social media account. Actually, this video is crazy. Uh, we went, we went and anyways, I'm just showing my, this is the cool video. Come on. Look at this. This is me in the right here. Come on, dude. So, this is my just friends and family social media, right? And I, I remember this is like 20, man, I think 2018. And I thought, man, it's so annoying. So, then I said, well, my dream customer is not my family and friends who follow this account where I'm in the redwoods or whatever. Like it's not this group, okay? My dream following is somebody else. So, I went and created a different Instagram account. I left this and I went and created Bridger Pennington at the time had zero followers, was a brand new account. No one knew about this account. And I, I don't have enough time to scroll. If you scroll down, you'll see my original post where I was just testing out business content. Um, as you know, it started to do better. So, we started to get a following. We ran ads behind this. I was running, I had about 50,000 followers on Bridger Pennington, not Bridger Pen. And I had one of my friends come up to me and like, "Hey, Bridger, I saw, do you have another, do you have another Instagram account?" Because I saw this Instagram account. It has like 50,000 followers and it's like, it looks like it's you posting on it. And I said, "Oh, oh yeah. We've been doing that for the last like two or three years." And he's like, "Oh, I had no idea." He's like, "Why don't you tell me about it?" I'm like, "Because you're not my dream audience. I don't care to post for you, right?" Like, and he's like, "Oh, that makes sense." And so, I made what I called a business, a business Instagram. Now, I'm getting a little technical here, but this by itself, and not I'm not talking Instagram, Instagram, YouTube, podcast. We'll talk about this in a sense, has served me incredibly well. And I don't like being on social media. I don't like posting. I don't like, but it has served my businesses and brands extremely well. And instead of being sour and be like, "Oh, the, the, you know, Kylie Jenner is so lucky. She's a billionaire because of her social media." Why don't I start leaning into it and try to figure out this game? Now, I know what you're thinking. You're like, Bridger, I'm not that guy. And that's okay if you're not that guy. You don't need to do social media like Bridger does social media and you, well, yeah, it's not, I don't know if I do that, blah, blah. You guys know Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio, this guy, founder of Bridgewater Associates, net worth $14 billion. I think it's more than that. I think that's a little low. You know, one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time is a pretty big influencer now. Is Ray Dalio doing selfie TikTok talk style videos? No, he's not. But he does post. I'm going to go on X here. He posts these very interesting blog articles. So like every once in a while here, you can see X article. He'll post his thoughts on the market. Uh, look at this. 172,000 views. You don't need to go do like an Instagram TikTok video. Don't do that. If that's not you, don't do it. He, he, he's a very good author, obviously. He's written a couple amazing books. He goes and writes out his thoughts on the market. Is that making sense? Now, he's recently has done some more of these videos with his team, but most of them are more written. Is that making sense? Uh, very big. You know, let's see right here. 1.7 million followers. Kind of cool. Another one. You're like, I don't, okay, that's one guy. What about Bill Ackman? Uh, act, I think it's like this. Bill Ackman. Bill Ackman never posts his face. Has 1.8 million followers, but tweets his thoughts on the market and he's become very influential. I think he swayed the tariff war. He, he was one of the big reasons that Trump did a pause on the tariff war back in April. Multi-billion dollar fund manager works for them. Okay. So you don't need to just do the traditional, you know, style. Let me go to, I'll go to my account here. Let's see. I don't even know how to use Twitter. I'm not good at Twitter. So a few months ago, I did, uh, look at, oh, we're live right here. Inception. We are Inception live. Here we go. Um, let's see. I think I might have unpinned it. Articles. I wrote an article like this. Six, almost 59,000 views. I wrote this was back right during the tariff war. I wrote this article on Scott Bessent's plan to break the China, China's economy. Scott Bessent was on the team with George Soros that broke the Bank of England. Could he break China's economy? Interesting. This actually got picked up. I got published in a few articles and things online like the, I think TechCrunch posted it and other, and pretty darn cool. So you can be different, but I believe where we're at in social media and in life, it has benefited me so greatly.

Furthermore, if you're just starting out, uh, another amazing tip that has helped me a ton, um, start writing quarterly investment memos and summaries on the market. I'll share an example. uglyunicorn.com. You can go, you can see our investor reports. We've done this now for years. I'll, I'll show you our last report, Q2 2025. You can come and open this report up. I post this on LinkedIn and other spots as well. This is our take on the market. So every quarter, and now I would recommend even before you launch your fund, like if, if you're like, hey, I want to do a fund in commercial real estate, you know, I'm doing value-add. Start writing your take and if it's not, you have someone on your team, market insights on how you think about the market and just start posting them to LinkedIn and your files. Hey, this is our, you know, Q2 2025 take or Q3 2025 take on the commercial real estate market in Dallas, Texas. For the people that read this, which we've actually found a number of, it's not a lot of people, but the people who do read it are raving fans of us. We've had people hop on our calls and they're like, "Bridger, oh, dude, I went and read a bunch of your investor reports. I think the way you guys think about the market is so sharp. I want to learn more." So, I mentioned back to well number three. Last month, we raised over $2 million of equity for Ugly. Many of them came from content that we had posted online. We didn't pitch anything. This was just content like investment reports. The other one, uh, I'll give shout out to my business partner, Dan. Dan Young. I'll go here. Uh, Dan's Millionaire Code. So my partner Dan, he posts these. You can go watch, go, I would actually recommend go follow Dan Young and go see some of these videos. This is just him. He goes live about crypto. Is crypto going to zero? He is just giving his thoughts on the market. We're not giving investment advice. We're not pitching. We're not selling anything. Dan just shares and he doesn't get that much engagement. Like, okay, 10 comments, 11 comments, 100. Like, these are not going viral. You would be so shocked about how many people. You can see the view count. This one actually did well. 27,000 views, but this one 4,000. You can see right here, Dan just does these live streams. 5,000 views. The people that watch these though, incredibly valuable. Last month, we had a number of people DM us, "Hey, I would love, do, do you guys run a fund? Can I learn more?" Now, our fund is a 506C, meaning we can publicly advertise and generally solicit our fund. Okay, so per compliance, we can actually do stuff like this. I would recommend you doing the same. We have had, you can't believe, and these are like Fortune 500, you know, CFOs or people that just exited a huge company like, "Hey man, I, I was watching Dan's videos online." We had a guy yesterday. He's like, he, we hop on the call with him. We're about to present our whole fund. He's like, "Oh, dude." He got, he's like, "I'm easy. You guys, I've already watched all of your videos, Dan, on, and I love the way you think about the market. Just tell me some details about the fund. I'd love." And we, the whole call was, we did one last week. It was like 15 minutes. The guy was like, "Yep, yeah, sign me up for 250. I'm down for $250,000." Because he had watched our content for months on the market. And we had been established as a market expert, market leader, especially Dan. He does a really good job of teaching and educating. And again, I'm not saying selling and pitching. I'm saying teaching and educating on his market where people say, "Wow, Dan is an expert, man. This guy is sharp. He knows crypto way better than I do." And they'll go find us. Hey, yeah, you know, they hit contact us or they go, we have a video here of us walking through the market, how we think about the market. Now, these are lay-down closes and these are people that this is a well of water that we have just seen slowly tap into.

Now, I'll give you one other story. Uh, man, two years ago, we did like a big push and tried to sell and like, I, I think I did a webinar. We did a webinar like, "Hey, come join Ugly Unicorn. This is why you should, you know, invest in our fund." We got like, almost zero sales from that. Like, it literally flopped so hard. I can't even tell you how hard it flopped. And I'm like, dude, I already have a, I have a following. We have a big list. We invited all these people to a webinar. We did this big pitch. Join Ugly Unicorn. It's amazing. Sign up. Blah, blah, blah. We got like, I don't know, one person that joined and we're like, man, I guess this doesn't work. I don't know. And so we went back to the drawing table and really what happened was Dan started doing videos and now we have raised, I would say quote unquote millions of, and last month over $2 million and I don't know how many millions from social media from people that watch and get educated on our asset class. They read our articles on how we think about the market and they go, "Wow, these guys are sharp. They know what they're doing. You know what? If I'm ever going to do crypto, I'm going to call these guys up." Same thing is true with uh, Fund Launch Partners, wherever that is right here. Fund Launch Partners. We post uh, we're trying to do more, but a lot of content on GP stakes, our market, educating people publicly and just establishing that we are experts in our field. That's it. We are just trying to show that we're an expert in our field. We're not pitching. We're not selling. I just want to be perceived as an expert in this field. Y'all following?

So, back to I, my invite for y'all. I keep saying y'all. Let's put the cowboy hat on. My invite for y'all. Invite for y'all. Start with something. And if you don't want to pitch your people on social media, start a new social media account because no one sees it. The easiest ones I would start with, a blog. If you're a good writer, start writing. Write insights and you have ChatGPT and Claude help you write. But write insights on your market. When someone looks you up like, "Hey, you know what? Who's this Bridger Pennington guy?" If they go look up your name, what pops up? If it's currently nothing, some of these blog posts might start popping up for me now. You know, we've got some stuff here, but you can see some of our stuff pops up. LinkedIn articles, YouTube channel. Like, there's hopefully good stuff that pops up when someone types in your name. Is that making sense? If it, if it's not there now, start creating it so that things pop up when people Google and look you up. Um, is that making sense? Blog. If you're a good writer, that's the first easiest one. Second easiest one to do, start a podcast or an interview show. I'm going bon, this is bonus material here. You guys cool if I give you a bonus? This changed my whole life for a well, back. I'm going to show you because you might say, "Well, I'm gonna, I, I'm gonna suck at this, Bridger." Well, yeah. Guess what? Everyone sucks at it. No one flips on the camera the first time or the thing or writes the first blog or article and it's good. Everybody is bad. Everybody sucks at this game until they don't. This is what you do. You start and you suck and then you suck less and then you suck less and you suck a little bit less more and then you finally get kind of good and then you're kind of okay and you get better and better until you're kind of good at this thing and you're like, "Ah, this is actually normal." And then you become better and better and then you're great. That's how it

It's for everything in life. So, you might as well just start where you are now. If you wait till you're good or perfect, you'll never start. There's a reason why most people never get going. I'm gonna go. So, I'm pulling up my YouTube channel and we have left these on here.

If you go to videos here and you see our oldest videos, these are my first videos that I published on YouTube six years ago and they are very embarrassing. I don't like watching these videos. You can go watch. I've got I just it's out of f. Look at this camera is out of focus. We had this little light in the back. I don't know what we were doing. We uh and these it is funny. It's funny. You can go. The content here is really funny. Um, you can go watch, but I like to leave these up so that you get a sense of. Look at this. This is like my second iteration of the studio. We bought this little mic off Amazon. Still blurry. I think it's focused on my computer here. It's not focused on my face. Like, but I like leaving these up so that you can go look at like, yeah. Bridger once upon a time, like sucked. I think um, if you look up Mr. Beast, I want to say he's done the same thing. If you go to his channel and go to videos and go to oldest, go look at Mr. Beast's first videos. You're like, "Oh, he's been doing this for 13 years." And they were playing uh Minecraft and he just slowly got better and better and better until he became the best YouTuber in the world. He's worth over what, six or seven billion dollars now. It doesn't. No one. No one. It happens overnight. Look up uh, I think Alex did the same thing. Alex Hermosi. Everybody sucks. Everybody is terrible. I think he did the same thing. He leaves his old videos on here for that purpose. You go to oldest videos. Yeah. Look at this video. Seven years ago. Everybody is bad at this. No one's good at this. But they start and they get going.

Now, for you, it might be a vlog video like this. It might be YouTube. It might be a blog post. I cut myself off earlier. I think starting a podcast interview show is such an amazing way to get people attracted to your brand. And what's cool about. I'll show you one that we did. Funds that won. We need to get back to this. We started this podcast with Lincoln. He went and just interviewed people that have good funds that are winning. This show gets like zero views. Like, and it's what's cool about podcasts. There's no view count though. Like, you you would not know if this got 100,000 views or zero views. Now, what you can. The one thing you can see is reviews. This has 23 ratings and it's got five-star reviews. Okay, 23 ratings. I guess that's fine. There's no view count. All you can see is number of. We've done 60 episodes and we've had 23 reviews. Okay, the guests we've brought on here, Brock, uh, Brent, you know, you can go through. These are like multi-millionaires, like really successful people. You'd be surprised who says yes. And this isn't me. This is Lincoln. He doesn't really have a following. He just reached out to people. And you'd be surprised how many people say yes to hopping on a show with you. You can film a show literally on Zoom on a on your iPhone. You can film a podcast and publish it right now. You go to um, Riverside and then you use like ankor.fm. We've loved using Ankorf FM. It's now bought by Spotify, but you go use this. It publishes to all the platforms really easily. But guess what happens? Lincoln can sit down for 34 minutes and talk to Peter Burke. Peter Burke is a very busy dude. Kind of hard to get 34 minutes with him. But on a podcast, it's one-on-one. 34 minutes. You got to build a relationship with somebody by interviewing them on your show. And what this does, again, back to we talked about building like your friends and family, right? This builds out more friends than what you would have had before. Is this making sense? Huge, like huge, huge bonus to doing this.

Now, I know you're probably sitting there like, "Okay, fine, Bridger. I get it, but I don't want to. I, you know, I, it's not for me. I'm not the guy. I don't know." I then don't make the excuses. If you're gonna not do it, then stop. And this is for me. Stop being mad that Kylie Jenner makes a million dollars per Instagram post. Stop being mad that Grant Cardone, love him or hate him, has raised, I don't know, a billion dollars off of his social media platform. Stop being mad about it. Don't be mad at Bridger because we raised about $2 million last month from doing this kind of stuff. You can either be mad or you can lean into it and try to figure out this game and start simple. My my advice to anybody is don't overcomplicate it. Don't spend $20,000 trying to build a studio like Bridger Studio. You can sell our back camera if you want. Like, don't go try to build that. Like, you don't need to build this. You need an iPhone. You need a a little mic that's $30 on Amazon. Like, you can start for pretty much nothing and just get going. Do an iPhone. What's funny enough about my social media, my iPhone selfie videos outperform all of my professional videos. All these iPhone are the best ones. That's at least for me. Okay. So, don't overcomplicate it. Don't make it something crazy. Just start and get going. Can I get a can I get a yes in the chat from well number three? Okay.

So, um, now for the next few minutes, uh, so again, now if you want to talk to our team about implementation, you can go to funlaunch.com/call. We will help implement your fund. Again, all street is for free, but if you want help implementing, putting this together, we have a cohort that starts next week. We have 32 deposits. uh book a call for today, tomorrow, or Saturday. Monday morning, we are starting on the onboarding calls and getting one-on-one onboarding. And then September 1st, the full cohort will go live. You guys are going to be the first people to have bonus access to Fun Launch AI. You'll be beta test users in there. And it's going to be pretty cool to give you access to all that cool stuff. If I go back here, you can see all the uh all the bonuses material you get. Professional Excel models, consulting, legal setup, fund 360, all included when you join Blackheart. All right. So, go check that out down below.

Now, um, okay. So, we talked already about hosting and attending events. We talked about, you know, cars and coin events that we've thrown other events I've attended. We talked about bringing on advisors to help build out your friends and family. Ask for advice, not money. When you ask for money, you generally get advice. When you ask for advice, you generally get money. All right.

Now, let's talk uh let's go a little bit further. I wanted to share a few stories. Actually, I'll show. I have I have eight or five stories, excuse me, that I want to share about my journey when building a fund. Is that cool with y'all? Can I share? These are quick stories. They'll go pretty fast about uh building this out and building a fund. But I actually I want to share a quick story. Um, on back on well number three on building out a social media following, I was actually in the airport. This is uh three months ago on our way to our Dallas event with Black Card members. So I was flying to Dallas. We had all of our Black members flying into Dallas. We're gonna do this big event and I was in the airport and literally the guy next to me going through security. I was like, "Dude, that's that I think that's that NFL quarterback." And I couldn't put his name on. I was like, "Who is that guy?" He's literally next to me. Like we're putting our bags through the thing. I'm like, "Who is that guy? Who is that guy?" And finally like, "Oh, it's it's Jiren Hall. He's the backup quarterback on the Seattle Seahawks right now. And he played at BYU. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, that's him. It's Jiren Hall." And he's next to me. He's all swagged up and he's just he's just normal dude. He has no no people with him. It's just him. He's flying by himself. And I am literally the guy next to him. And so he goes through security first. And I am waiting on the other side of security. And I'm like, "Okay, how often do you like I'm like, "I gotta say something to this." But I'm like, "I don't want to be like, "Oh, give me an autograph." Like, you know what I I I want to like somehow I don't know. I was like, how do I connect with this guy? I think about cracking a joke about it. And I I come up with this little I was going to anyways approach him in a I thought a status alignment way where I could crack a joke with him and we could anyways I'd say hi to him. Okay. I had this little plan. So he goes through security. He's waiting for his bag on the other side of security. I go through security. I walk in. This is a totally true story. I walk through security and you know how they check you or whatever and I they're like you're clear. They give me a thumbs up. I walk through and then he we make eye contact and I'm about to open my mouth and he speaks first. He's looking at me and he speaks first and he goes, "Hey," he points me just like this. He goes, "Hey, aren't you are you that guy on YouTube that talks about private equity and funds a lot?" And I was like, "Yeah, like yeah, I yeah, I I I'm Bridger. I I talk all about private equity." He goes, "Oh, man." He goes, "I love watching your videos on flights. You know, we fly a lot in the NFL. I sorry, he didn't say that. He just said, "I fly a lot. I love watching your videos on the plane. I'm trying to put together a fund and stuff that I'm doing right now." And I said, "Oh, yeah. I love doing that. I love helping out." And I And I was like, "What's your name again? Sorry. Who are you again? You know what's you want an autograph? Are you trying to you know?" Anyways, uh, I wish I would have said that. I did not say that. I wish I would have said that. But I go, "Hey, are you Jiren Hall?" like NFL quarterback and and he goes, "Oh, yeah. I'm Jared Holling, man. Good to meet you." And he goes, "Yeah, I love, you know, we're trying to put are you he's doing a fund?" He goes, "Well, I'm looking to put together a fund with some NFL players to go invest in stuff." I said, "Great, man. That's awesome." And I said, "Hey, I've loved watching your career. Congrats." And he goes, "Yeah, I'm flying. I'm flying actually back out to training camp right now." And we So, we talked for a few minutes and actually we exchanged contact information. I said, "Hey, let's just share numbers if you ever have, you know," he goes, "I'd love to call you if we have questions about a fund." I said, "Great, awesome." So, we shared contact information in the airport. where we kind of split up and he went to his plane, I went to my plane. Isn't that sweet?

Now, I was like, man, for all the times I hate filming, I hate doing social media. I was like, it was worth it in that moment. And I wish I would have said, you know, you, hey, do you want an autograph from me or whatever? Anyways, I wish I would have done that. That would have been so freaking good. But, uh, um, it is such an interesting and I I didn't know this when I started doing content. I go to networking events now and there usually is a good chunk of people who already know my business. They know what I'm doing. Like, "Oh, Bridger, I saw your post. Are you guys doing fund launch AI?" Like, "Oh, yeah." And like, it's I I there's it's a it's becoming more of a warm outreach. Even when I go to and people like, "Hey, we've never met before, but oh man, I like and they they want to they want to come meet me or tell me about something." It has changed the way I go to back to the first one. When I go to events, it is it has been absolutely transformational. It's been phenomenal. And I'm still pretty small. I don't have that big of a following. We need to hopefully get this message out to more people. But what I'm sharing you that because I didn't want to do social media. I didn't want to start. I started with these crappy videos that slowly just got better and better and they're still not even that good. But it's transformed the way I network where NFL quarterbacks in the airport are like, "Yo, you're that private equity guy." I would implore you to start on the journey. It takes everyone a lot of time. You just saw Mr. Beast from 13 years. Okay. I'd implore you to do that.

Now, all right. I mentioned six stories. You guys cool if we dive into these and then I want to answer some questions. We'll pull out the iPad. But this is a a few stories um and we're going to go fast on these that transformed my life when building a fund. Because you might be asking the question, well, I don't know if I'm ready. I don't know if it's the right time to build a fund. I don't have the money or resources to build a fund. Bridger, I'll do it next year or I'll do it the year after that. And I used to tell myself this as well. I was like, oh, I'll, you know, I'll do it, you know, I'll wait for the perfect moment. I'll wait for the moment when whatever the stars are going to line and then I'll do it. And what I realized was I kept waiting for that moment year after year after year. And there was so much value. And I I didn't I I more have happened into this. So I'm going to I I'll preface this first story and then we're going to get into the boardroom story in a second. But you guys, some of you know my story. I went to college my first two years. I come to find out my dad is running a decillion dollar family of funds from his partner who is super rich and wealthy. My dad drives a car with a dent in the door. We live in a small, not a small house, but a normal house. His partner lives in this beautiful house. And I come to find out they're they make about the same amount of money. And my chin drops to the floor. I'm like, "What?" Like, "Dad, like, why, you know, why? We never go on family trips." Like, you know, like why don't we ever travel? Why can't I order? There's no drinks. Like, we go to restaurants. Nobody order drinks because we're trying to save money. Like, nobody. It's water. Water for everybody, you know? Like, that's how that's how I was raised. And I'm like, "Dad, you're managing eight half billion dollars of real estate. That's twice as big as Cardone Capital. Like, why can't I order drinks at the restaurant?" Okay, so anyways, I digress. My dad is phenomenal. You guys will meet him when you join. He comes to our events. He's awesome. But I my dad started to teach me about investment funds. So, we every Sunday night he'd teach me about funds, how they're built, all the intricacies of funds, GPLP structures, the formation of funds, all the stuff around the SEC funds, etc. I then launched my first fund at age 22. I build a fund. My I pitch my dad for money. My dad says, "No, I will not invest in your fund." And uh, he didn't didn't invest in my fund I think for eight years. Uh, my dad never invested in a fund, a deal, anything I did. But was a great mentor and coach. And so I went out and raised my own money, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, then millions of dollars on my own funds. Finally, actually this year was the first time my dad has ever invested in anything I've ever done ever. And he put like a small little check into Fund Partners. That was it. And he's now retired and he s he's at his lake house and whatever. But I so I want to that that dovetails my backstory a little bit. So I learned about funds. I was at a young age and I was running a fund at the time and I got invited to go to the boardroom. Okay. I got invited by this one guy named Mike. He thought I was, you know, somewhat special. Mike is, you know, twice my age. He invites me to this meeting with two other individuals that are also twice my age. So get this. There's three guys there and then me. I'm the fourth. Okay. The three guys that are twice my age are all multi-millionaires. One of them has a private jet. The other one, you know, they drive Rolls-Royces. They're like in these huge houses. Like I mean, these guys are very successful individuals. I am 24 years old. I get invited to this meeting and they are talking about a fund that they're going to put together. And they invited me because I've I've launched one or two funds. I started posting on YouTube and stuff. My dad ran a fund, right? So, they invite me to this thing. I showed up to this boardroom. It is very clear and evident that I am not wanted in this meeting. The one partner, Mike, who invited me, he wanted me there. The other two partners are like, "Who is this kid? Get this guy out of here." And so, they started talking about their fund that they were going to build without Bridger. Y'all picturing this? We're in this nice boardroom. They were planning to raise a hundred million fund to go do opportunity zones. So, they start putting this, you know, they're putting this deal together on what they are doing. And I it's clear that Bridger is left out of the conversation, which is fine because I'm like, I'm 24 years old. Why am I even here? But then I had this crazy moment of insane courage. It was one of those moments where, you know, preparation had met opportunity. I had been learning the intricacies of funds for the past two, three years. I knew a lot about funds. For a lot of people on this call, you're like, Bridger, where do I start? I always tell you, education. Get into the education. start learning this game, which I had done, and I actually had applied it and now launched my own. I was on my second fund at the time. So, in this crazy moment of courage, these guys are all talking. I kind of raised my hand. I'm like, I'm a little sheepish. I'm like, "Hey, hey, real quick. Uh, what are you guys going to do? Are you guys going to like run an American or European waterfall? Are you going to do what's your prep, your catchup, your carried interest? Uh, are you guys running a 3C1, a 3C5 fund, 3C7 fund? Like, what are you doing?" And the whole group kind of looks at me like, "What? What are you talking about?" And I'm like, "Oh, yeah. These are I mean, these are pretty simple, fund terms. Like, what are you guys going to do?" And they go, "Take the go to the go to the whiteboard. Explain what you mean." So, I go up to the whiteboard and I start to explain to them over the next about seven minutes. What's an American and European waterfall? What's pre, catchup, carried interest? What's a 3C1, a 3C5, a 3C7 fund? What's the rules around them? Because I had been educated on these things, very niche fund things that they did not know about. My clout in the room went from zero, dirt, nothing to they wanted me to be a full-out business partner with them in this fund. 25% equity partner in this fund. I'm not joking. At 24 years old, all these guys are twice my age. Why? Because I knew things about funds that they did not know anything about. Now, if I would have sat on the sidelines and done nothing and didn't know anything about funds, I would not have been able to speak up in that conversation. But I had spent the past two years every Sunday night on the whiteboard trying to figure on YouTube videos, trying to figure out this game, reading PPMs, reading legal docs. There wasn't Fund Launch didn't exist back then. I had to just learn from a dad, mentors, Google, legal docs to just put this all together like out of out of thin air. There might be a situation for you in three months from now, six months, 18 months when you're going to be in a boardroom or a meeting and the company that you work for, you're at is getting bought by private equity or there's partners discussing about taking down a 200 unit apartment complex or there's somebody else talking about trading a, you know, an algorithmic forex trading fund. And you are going to be if when you go through and educate yourself and lean into this, you'll be able to raise your hand and be like, "Oh, hey, I actually know about that. Oh, really? Yeah, I did this fund launch thing. I went through all the education. I did their implementation strategy. I know all of it." And preparation meets opportunity and your clout because very few people understand this game of funds. Very few people know the stuff that we teach literally on Alt Street or on our YouTube channel for free. And then furthermore, even less people know all the implementation stuff we do with Fund Launch through the our our incubator. Don't waste the chance to be the preparation time so that when that opportunity meets, you can capitalize on it. Okay. So, if you want to learn more, funlaunch.com/call, you guys can go book a call and talk to our team.

Okay. I already mentioned this six businesses. My first years of college, I was hitting my head against the wall. Business after business after business. I mentioned this. My dad can talk me this. I kind of I'm going to skip this one. I'll come back to this one later. We need to. Now, I want to talk about this number three. Well, sorry, last thing on number two that I'll share because you already heard half of that story. I was trying any business that just could make sense. Like, anybody done this? Like, I I went on YouTube. I was just like, any business that like how do you make money on YouTube? I was I did real estate wholesaling. I wholesaled two houses. I built websites for people. I was doing ads and funnels. I did a Chinese tutoring business. I served a two-year church mission for the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints. I served in Taiwan. I I sold religion door-to-door for two years as a missionary. Okay? And by the way, I always say everything is easy after that. you know, like capital raising, get a lot of rejection, whatever, but it is very hard to sell religion door-to-door in a foreign country in a foreign language in Mandarin Chinese. Okay? So, I came home. I started a Chinese tutoring business. By the way, if you ever see church missionaries on the road, the little name tags, give them a wave, honk at them, you know, it's it's tough. It's it is hard. They left their families. They don't, you know, they're at home. They left their girlfriend. I was out there just knocking doors, talking to people on bicycle, you know, in Taiwan for two years. Uh, no, we don't go to school. We don't work a job. It's all we do day in and day out. So, be nice to missionaries if you see them. Um, but I finally I was trying every all these different businesses. And what I found I finally said, "Huh, okay. Number one, to do any business, anything, it takes a lot of work. Anything, you know, the people, oh, I have this little side hustle that makes my like everything that's worth doing is worth doing." Well, it takes work. So I said, "Okay, I'm I'm in my career right here. I'm trying I was still in college at the time, but I'm trying to start these businesses." And I thought, it's really interesting. Some businesses have way more capacity for growth than others, business models. A quick example, I don't have the slides in front of me, but we did a quick study. I had a friend who wanted to be a chef, like a, you know, like a just a chef. Go to culinary school, be a chef. If you if you are the best chef in your city, the best you are and you got to work for 20, 30 years, you become the best chef in your city. You're making maybe a few hundred thousand per year. Now, let's say you're the best chef in your city. You get sent to Las Vegas, like the, you know, most chefs like, "Man, I want to have this top restaurant in Las Vegas that's making millions of dollars." So, we actually ran the numbers. The top restaurants in Las Vegas are making about $40 million a year. The net, that's revenue. The net take-home is about 10%. So, their net take-home is about $4 million. And then you split that between partners. So, as a chef, you know, the top chef in Las Vegas, you're maybe making a million dollars a year, which is pretty good. That is the tippy top. You're working 30 years. That's the very top. The top fund managers. I actually ran the study. Uh, Ken Griffin last year made $4 million in the first uh, four uh, let's see, five hours of January 1st, 2024. He makes $4 million by noon of the first working day of the year. We're on different universes as as far as money. The top chef in Las Vegas makes $4 million a year. Ken Griffin makes $4 million by lunchtime, his first working day of the year. These are not the same. And so I started to look at business models that even if you're okay at, you would still make way like if I'll take real estate. Real estate's a good vehicle. If you're okay, if you're like, you know, average or a little bit above average in real estate, you're still probably making more than a top 25% chef in the world. Is that making sense? Just because you're in a better vehicle, a better business model than someone else. Is that is that a following? My first six year, you know, six businesses, my my first years of college, I was trying everything. And then I finally figured out I want to be selective about which business model I want to get into. Y'all following? And so I found a couple business models that I really love. Number one was funds. Funds are an incredible business model. They produced more billionaires than any other category on earth per Forbes, the Forbes whatever thousand list of billionaires. Finance investment fund management is number one. Thought man, I might as well dedicate my life to that. And number two actually was online and informational products. This is what we do with Fund Launch and tech. Like that's a really good business model. Can we can we figure that thing out? Is that making sense? I would implore you to think through the actual model you are in. You might be the great analogy I love to use is let's say we're in a 10-mile race and we're trying to go 10 miles and we're running against uh, you know, some Kenyan, you know, runners that are like these world-famous runners. We're probably going to lose. Okay, these guys are awesome. They run like, you know, you know, the K, like these crazy runners that are like all they're all from Kenya and they just crush it in every marathon. We're probably losing in a 10-mile race. All right, but let's say me and you had a bicycle. I don't know. We might compete pretty well. They are the top runners in the world and I'm kind of just an average dude, but I have a bicycle. I might win in a 10-mile race. Or take a 10-mile race and uh maybe you have a car. You could be 300 pounds overweight, but you have a car. You're in a better vehicle. You will probably beat the best runners in the world from Kenya or a really good bicyclist like me, cyclist, and on a bike because you have a better vehicle. I decided I was like, I'm gonna pick and be intentional about the vehicles that I get into. And I said, I'm gonna figure out this game. I don't care if it takes me one year, five years, or 20 years. I'm gonna figure out this game of funds, investment fund management, because it's one of the best business vehicles ever to be involved in. I love sharing these uh, I don't know if I have the slides here. They might have them here. No, I don't have them. But if you look across the internet, a lot of big groups are getting into the fund game. Okay, let me move on. Does that make sense?

Now, again, if you want help implementing your fund, go to funlo.com/call.all. You see at the bottom of your screen there. All right, let's go to business story number three. You guys cool if I keep going? We feeling all right. Business story number three. The first event I ever attended, I went to an event. Mason, my my at the time just buddy in college, kind of business partner, drugged me up to an event in Boise, Idaho. And I'll put my hat back on. Okay. For Boise, Idaho. All right. So, Boise, Idaho. I go up there, it's a this internet marketer guy. I go up to Boise. I I'm in the crowd. It's like 100 people, 200 people there. And he talks about online marketing events, what were, you know, all this kind of stuff. And I was like, this is pretty cool, you know, how to like run ads and funnels and and at the time I was like, I don't know if I love this. Like at the end of the event, he pitches a thing from stage and it was $15,000 to join. Now granted, I am at the time I am in college. I am engaged to be married and I got like I don't know what I got five grand to my name. You know what I mean? Like this is where I'm at in my life. Okay. Uh, maybe I had I probably had a little bit more money than that actually because we had done a few businesses, but I I mean I'm in college. Like I'm scraping by. We're in this I'm I'm living in a $300 a month $300 a month apartment. Okay. Uh, and I'm scraping for gas like and I'm engaged. I'm trying to pay for a wedding and I'm, you know, we're at this event. Mason is younger than me. Okay. He's like 18, 19. I'm 21 at the time, I think. 20, something like that. Can't remember the the exact age. $15,000 pitch. Mason turns to me and he's like, we're doing it. And I'm like, whoa. I'm like, Mason, we're not doing this. It's 15 grand, dude. We're not buying something for 15. We got no money. What are you talking about? He's like, Bridger, no, we should do this. we already and at the time we were playing with this ad and funnel and you know website building business. That was one of my first six businesses. He's like, "Dude, no, if we if we if we if he helps us with this stuff, I bet we'll make more than 15 grand over the next year. Like we could do this." And I was like, "Well, I went back and forth and back and forth and I was like and he's like he's like, "Bridger, I'm doing this with or without you." And I'm like, "Mason, we don't have the money. We don't even have the money." And they offered a payment plan. And the payment plan was uh, I believe it was five grand down and $1,000 a month. And we negotiated it to stretch it out over 10 months. Does that make sense? So five grand down, 10 grand over 10 months. $1,000 a month. We like begged them to give us this payment plan. They said, "Okay, fine. We'll give it to you." And Mason's like, "I'm doing this with or without you." He goes, "We have a credit card. Let's put on this credit card. We will make money doing this." And I I was I had to make a choice. And I liked Mason. We had done okay. Hey, we were running these little websites. I think we had made about five grand total. And so we were going to put all of our money into this little thing. We said unwillingly, yes. I said, "Fine, we'll do it." And I said, "You better make this thing work. Give him a threat." He's like, "Bridget, we're make this this will happen." So we spend the 15 grand. We're on the way home driving home. I call my fiance now, my wife. I'm like, "Laren, guess what? We just spent $15,000. Woo. You know, and she's like, "Are you serious?" And I'm like, "Actually, yeah, I'm serious. Uh, we got to make this business thing work." And she's like, "Okay, we'll talk when we get home." So, I'm like, "Honey, are you on for the ride?" She's like, "I'm on for the ride. Let's do this." So, me and Mason, what happened that changed my entire trajectory of my life spending that $15,000. Couple reasons. Number one, the training was pretty good. It did help us a lot. We started to make some money. We barely were making our $1,000 payment a month, but we still we were trying to make it and we actually some of it helped us. The bigger thing though, me and Mason were in school. We were doing other stuff. We now had our feet to the fire. We had to pay this $1,000 a month payment. So me and him, we started working overtime. We found a this like secret room on campus that like no one used and we could like go and work there. We'd go work there every day for like hours and hours. Me and Mason would go and we're trying to figure out websites and funnels and all this kind of stuff. It it made our attention focus. I'm guessing a number of you have business partners or people you're talking about doing business with and everyone's like, "Yeah, yeah, that sounds cool. Yeah, like okay. Yeah, like we'll maybe do a fund together and then a week goes by and then two weeks and then a month goes by and oh, it's Halloween's coming up. Oh, and that's it's the holidays. We can't do a business." And it's Christmas. Oh my gosh. And then all of a sudden your year is gone and it's January 1st again, 2026. Okay, guys. New Year's resolution. Let's get together. Okay, let's let's do a fund. Let's get it going. And then, oh, you know what? Ah, Jimmy had a birthday last week. Okay, well, you know, we'll get back on it. And then nothing happens. You you waste months and then a year and then two years go by and nothing happens. And you sit there and you wait for something to happen. The biggest best thing that happened to me and Mason ever was paying that because it made our attention go, "Oh crap, we got to focus on this thing." And we did. and we started this little internet marketing business and it did well and we actually made good money and then I kind of broke off. I started my funds and then guess what? Like a year or two later, preparation met opportunity. I had ran my funds for a few years. We had done well and we had this idea. What if we could help people online with funds? That'd be a cool idea. And I I called Mason like dude what if we did this? And we were we were still friends. We're still kind of working on stuff on the side. But I'm like dude I'm good at funds. what like what if we did this I already run a fund and we were like we know exactly what to do because we had practiced two or three years prior on all these websites and funnels we put together funnels and marketing we launched what at the time was called Investment Fund Secrets. It's now called Fund Launch. Our first month we did about $80,000 of revenue in one month as college kids. Our next 12 months after our official launch, I think I believe we did about $2.5 million in sales. We were an overnight success. We're now on the Inc. 5000 of fastest growing companies in America. Wow, Bridger, that's so cool. It it happened because two or three years prior, I can't remember the exact date, we spent $15,000 on a course. It put our feet to the fire. It made us learn the industry of how to run ads, funnels, do webinars, this whole thing. Right now, I'm talking about to you about doing a fund. And it's not cheap. It's expensive to come and implement, put this together, but it may put your you and your partner's feet to the fire. It may cause you to turn and look at this thing more. And maybe even the current deal that you're trying to figure out now might not work out. And that's okay. This might prepare you for the meeting you're going to have in December, in a few months, with someone that you've never met before. And you're going to understand how funds work. You're going to know how they are implemented. And you can move way faster than competition. And people are going to want to partner with you because of the unique information you have. Y'all following? That's what happened for us. That's how Fund Launch turned into an overnight success. That's an Inc. 5000 company that's now building AI tools and helped hundreds of, you know, over a hundred thousand people. Y'all following?

All right, that dovetails well into story number four. And again, if you want to book a call, it's still live fun.com/call. Go book a call with our team if you want to implement. All right, I'm taking the hat off, Eric. Hats on and off. Maybe I'll trade hats. How about we go this? My Fund Launch AI hat. Okay, here we. Everyone's laughing at the props. I'm trying props out today. We'll get a little drink. Um, back to that original story. I was a Can you can read ahead here. Entrepreneur versus entrepreneur. I'd never heard this term before. I was I used to be someone who loved talking about business and I would read the books and I was always I like this is back in college. I would go to the entrepreneurship meetups and clubs and the other stuff and I loved telling I date these I was going on dates with girls and I always would tell them, "Oh yeah, like I'm starting businesses and stuff like I'm this business guy. Like I'm figuring it out. I'm trying stuff out." Like I loved telling people about the businesses I was going to do or what I was going to do. And I had a mentor tell me, Bridger, you kind of sound like a entrepreneur. And I'd never heard that term before. He goes, "It sounds like you want to be an entrepreneur, but you actually don't like doing hard work or doing anything. You like talking about entrepreneurship. You like going to a whiteboard and whiteboarding it out, but you don't actually like doing hard work and leaning in and making big bets and actually putting risk capital on the table to make it happen. You kind of sound like a entrepreneur. You're not an Bridger. Stop telling people you're an entrepreneur. You're a entrepreneur." And it hit me in the face like a ton of bricks because it was true. Truth cuts to the core when it's actually true. You know what I'm talking about? Hard truth and I was like dang and I didn't wanted to admit it but I wasn't a entrepreneur. I started these six businesses my first two years of college and I was talking business and thought thought I was so cool and I wasn't actually an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur gets stuff done. An entrepreneur makes things happen. Doesn't matter if capital's in the they they can find the capital. Doesn't matter if okay I don't have the right partner. Fine. I'll find a new car partner. They have a employee that's not working out, they'll find a new employee. Entrepreneurs make stuff happen. They move. If they have partners that aren't committed, fine. I'll just do it. I'll commit. Mason, in that previous story, he was the entrepreneur that said, "I'm buying this thing with or without you. I'm making I am I am betting on my own success. I'm sick and tired of being a entrepreneur. I'm going to turn into an entrepreneur." And that hit me like a ton of bricks. And I was like, crap, I got to do this thing. And I was thankful that I could join a, you know, a path. Someone had trailblazed it before me for Fund Launch at least building an online internet business. No one had done that for funds. I was grateful enough to have a dad who had kind of done it. And if you're like, "Bro, Bridger, you're lucky to have a dad." Yeah, I know. Duh. That's why I built Fund Launch, so you guys could have access to my dad and 15 other mentors just like him and a brother and a full team of people all around you to help go and think tank and build a fund for you. That's why we built this thing. It's like Bridger, you're so lucky. Yeah, I'm trying to make you lucky as well. We're on a mission to democratize Wall Street to make this whole huge elephant of starting a fund way simpler, which we've already done. And with Fund Launch AI, we're trying to make it even way simpler. It's still hard. It still takes work. It still takes an entrepreneur to go make stuff happen. So my invite is what the invite I got was stop being a entrepreneur and turn yourself into an entrepreneur. Make something happen. If you want to talk to our team, there's a link down below.com/call. Go book a call if you want to talk about actually being an entrepreneur.

All right, final story. I was at university. So I go back. I'm going back. I was at university. I had done well now. So going on my story, I had done well. I had started a few businesses. I was running my fund at the time. Uh, Fund Launch had actually taken off and now so I was but I was still in school. Okay. This guy came to our university from Harvard. We were like, whoa, Harvard guy. So and this and he wasn't just from Harvard. He was he went to Harvard Business School and then just sold his company for like oodles of money, tons of money. He comes and speaks at this event. I'm listening because I'm the guy, you know, that goes to all the events. I'm there and he finishes his speech. It was a really good speech and just goes to the back of the room and he's sitting there and I'm sitting in the back of the room right next to him like he is like I don't know 10 feet away from me and I'm like this is my like I'm gonna go talk to this guy. Like I don't know what I'm going to say but I'm gonna talk to this guy. And I had a burning question I wanted to ask him. And so I go I go up and I say, "Hey, I'm Bridger. I'm a student here. I I really appreciate your talk." And I said, "I have one question for you. Did you have a second?" and he's like, "Yeah, I got a second." Currently, right now, I'm a student. I uh I've built I have this small fund that's running while I'm making good money. At the time, I I was making over $100,000 a year as a student in college. And I'm like, I'm doing good. Like, I'm I'm here, but I I think I'm gonna I might drop out of school to like really pursue this. But also, I have a job offer. I I So, I was, you know, I was trying a bunch of stuff. I had a job offer in Silicon Valley at the time to go work at a big firm. It was a, you know, it was a six-figure salary, signing bonus, all the stuff at this awesome firm. And I uh I go to him and I'm like, you know, what should I do? Is it better for me to, you know, do the normal route, go to school, get the job, and then when I'm 30 or 35 or 40, whenever the time is, then I'll go start my business and drop out and go do all that because I'm worried right now if I drop out of school, like I won't have a degree, like I won't be able to come back. You know what I mean? Like that's it's kind of a scary moment. Should I just kind of give up on these little startups and like do that.

The traditional route and go from there? That was my question. Is that making sense? To this very well-educated, whatever Harvard guy that we thought was so cool. And he actually was really cool. And he goes, he kind of looks at me with this blank stare. Like, "What are you talking about?"

And I'm like, like if I'm like, I re-explain. I go, "It feels really risky to like drop out and like do this whole thing." He goes, "Bridger, if you drop out of school and you go pursue all this and it completely fails, do you have a friend or a family member that you could move in with that would, you know, you could sleep on their couch, they'd have a roof over your head, maybe some air conditioning, and maybe even some food in the fridge?"

And I was like, "Yeah, like I have somebody in my life that I could move in with." He goes, "And like they'd be nice to you and you could like for a couple months you'd get your feet back. Like if you really hit rock bottom, you could." And I was like, "Yeah, you know, I have a few people in my life. I think if I if I really called them up, I could probably sleep on their couch."

And he goes, "Bir, what are you talking about? Your worst-case scenario, everything fails, you lose what? Five, you got five grand in your bank account. It all goes to zero. And you have to go move in with a loved one with a roof over your head with food in the fridge." He goes, "Your worst-case scenario is better than 90% of the world lives right now."

I was like, "Huh?" He's like, "90% of the world doesn't have running water, electricity, food over their head or a roof over their head, and food in the fridge, and family members who or friends who love them that will let them live with them." He goes, "We're we're not talking about risk because you like you live in America. This is amazing. That's your worst-case scenario. Now, what's?" He's like, "What's if it goes well, what's going to happen?" I'm like, "Well, I would make millions of dollars." He's like, "So, your upside is you make millions of dollars. Your downside is you get to you live better than 90% of the world lives right now."

And I was like, "Wow, you put it that way, huh?" He goes, "Furthermore, if you drop out of school and you reapply, do you think the school will accept you back in? They already did once." He's like, "Schools are designed to make money. They would love to have you back, dude. You you'll you'll get back in for sure. You can finish your degree if it all goes zero."

I was like, "Huh? Never thought about that way." And he goes, "Furthermore, like like look at this." Essentially, what was showing was risk-adjusted rate of return. You have you have asymmetrical risk, which is a fancy way of saying relatively low downside for relatively large upside. I was like, "Huh, that's interesting." He goes, "Man, if I was you and I was barking on something good, I would go after it in full force."

And I did. I ended up dropping out of school. We went after this. And like we just shared, we've had some good success for our businesses. That was a huge moment of risk. A lot of us think about risk in this crazy fashion. We think risk is like it's everything. And reality is if you really drive down to the worst-case scenario, it's actually not that bad. It's really not that bad.

Furthermore, and I I'll go one step further with a few other people I talked to. I think the worst worst-case scenario, I mean, we could die. You could die in a gutter or whatever. I guess that's really bad. But I'll give you a bad-case scenario is you're 70 years old. Your body's worn out. Your joints are hurting now. And you look back at your life and you go, "Man, I wish I would have taken a chance on myself." Back in 2025, there was that AI boom happening and crypto and blockchain was happening and I just missed it. Remember back in 1995 when the internet was coming out and everyone was building these internet companies and I just, man, I just missed it. And remember when 2008, 2009 when there's the real estate crash and real estate was like pennies on the dollar and I should have gone and bought some and I just I missed it. I never I just worked for the man my whole life and I never really tried to do anything great. That to me is a much scarier future. A life full of regrets.

I think Nietzsche said there's never something as noble or as great as being as a human being in the pursuit of something great. It's one of the most rewarding things in life is being in the pursuit of something great. We have some pretty cool stuff going on in the world right now. It's never been easier to be an entrepreneur ever. Bar none. I will die on that hill. We have every tool available to us. And if you fail, guess what? There's bankruptcy. There's all these nets, food stamp. There's all these nets that catch you. If you're in America, I mean, this is a phenomenal place. And the worst case, and then back to the Harvard professor, he's like, the worst worst-case scenario, guess what? We love, and he goes, I run a business. I love hiring people who have tried something. He goes, worst worst-case scenario, you have to go back and find a job. You're such a more interesting candidate to interview and put on your resume that you went after something. You went and tried to build a fund and you built it and maybe it failed, but you went and did something with your life rather than just taking tests and you got a good score on your test. Good. Whoop-de-doo. He goes, "I love hiring. You stand out. Like you you're we reward entrepreneurship in America. America loves entrepreneurship. Whether you win or fail, we love it. We like fantasize it. We make TV shows about it." And he goes, "You have everything to gain and really not a lot to lose."

I was like, "Dang, that's a crazy thing to say." And it pushed me over the edge, that kind of tipping point of like I'm I'm really jumping into this and it made me move in that direction. All right, those are my six sto five stories here with six. I give a bonus story there. So if you if you want to learn more, talk to our team funlash.comcall. We go from there. I promised as at the beginning, I want to do a few a little bit of Q&A. I want to answer some of your questions. We have a bunch of stuff we can talk about. I want to do some Q&A. I want to hit some of your questions you guys have. Um and I'll I'll as you're queuing those up, put them in the Q&A box. There's a little Q&A box at the bottom. People on Zoom, people on YouTube and other spots, just type it in the chat. We'll pull all of them up for us. So, if you can cue those up for me on the screen while you're queuing those up, I'm actually I got one more prop here I didn't I didn't bring out, I believe. Uh, today's my prop day. Here we go. I got my uh my armored vest here. All right. It actually does have weight in it. It's got body armor in it. Here we go. We are uh you know, you might ask, why is this so important right now? Why, like, bridge again, why do you do this? I I'm going to go I'll go briefly through this and we'll hit some of your questions. I believe we are at war with these big institutions that it is a you know a wartime and urgent calling. Right now there are three companies taking over the world. Vanguard, State, BlackRock. Combined they manage $22 trillion. That's of 2022. It's got to be a lot more than that by now. Um 40% of shareholder votes in the S&P 500 with the next two decades. I mean, these companies are taking over the world. If you look at the Fortune 500 companies, top companies in the world, the top shareholders are Vanguard and BlackRock. I think on like 490 of the Fortune 500 or the S&P 500. And why? Because they they sell ETFs. So BlackRock, you can buy their ETF, they go buy the index, right? But they are the they are the proxy vote. They're the ones who vote on your behalf. What's the job of a CEO? The number one job of a CEO is to return and increase shareholder value. So when your largest shareholder, BlackRock or Vanguard, asks you to do something like implement an ESG strategy, you're probably going to do it. If you wonder why, you know, back in 2010, 11, 12 all these companies started doing ESG, which is environmental social governance strategies. It's because BlackRock mandated it. They said every company we you have to have an ESG initiative. And so overnight and I I used to wonder like how did all these companies all do this the same thing overnight. It's because they mandated. And overnight they had all these environmental, social, and governance rules that they were putting into all of their companies, which to be frank was probably a good idea. It was like, hey, this is a good idea. Like, you know, let's go save the environment. Let's be more equitable. All this stuff. And then it kind of turned the other way. And actually BlackRock came out about two years ago and said ESG was a big mistake. It was it was had the right intentions but it was implemented the wrong way. Does that make sense? Now I don't I'm not here to talk about ESG. I'm here to talk about one company can influence the Fortune 500 companies overnight like that. If you're in real estate, we are seeing mass amounts of real estate being rolled up. One in seven homes purchased by Wall Street in 2022 is bought by these big firms. In 2023 is one in five homes. In 2024, it was one in three homes purchased by Wall Street. Okay, we're seeing mass consolidation efforts. We're seeing industries being consolidated right now. There's the big four accounting firms. It's because everyone they bought up everybody else. We're seeing food and food production. Um, you know, Coco Melon just got bought by Blackstone. Okay, we are seeing I'm going to skip this video, but you are seeing mass consolidation. A lot of the media news outlets that we watch are all owned and controlled by the same people. Here's the six largest media giants. And actually Disney bought 21st Century Fox. So now there's five large media giants that own pretty much every channel me and you watch. This is food and food production. This is car companies. They're all controlled by just a few, you know, number like FCA, for example. They own Fiat, Maserati. They also own Chrysler, Ram, Jeep, and Dodge. Okay. Down below, like Volkswagen Group. It's the same group that makes Audi, Bugatti, Bentley, Porsche, Lamborghini. They're all made by the same company. Do you realize that? It's all owned by just a handful of companies. That's why I believe more people like us need to be the Wall Street rebels. We need to go and help more people launch funds because I am not okay, I said this before, I'm not okay with three or four firms that run the whole world. That's a that's what's called a cartel in economics or a duopoly or even a monopoly. I'm not okay with that. It It's not healthy for society to have that. I am okay with 10,000 independent firms all competing and fighting to drive prices lower for consumers. I'm okay with that. That's capitalism. Capitalism is beautiful. I love capitalism. The problem is a lot of industries right now don't have capitalism. Big pharma does. There's only a couple of firms that control everything. There's a lot of arguments right now around big tech, big finance right now, big four accounting firms. I mean, we are seeing mass consolidation and yes, we could protest. We can write to our congressperson. To be frank, those have kind of lost their luster in 2025. I believe the way we fight back is we use the same tools that they used to do this, which are investment funds. If you can build a fund that goes and democratizes Wall Street, we go and buy up these firms and split these things up and compete with against them with the tools that they have used for decades. That's how we do it. I get so heated about this because the funds that you launch actually directly affect my life and the funds that I launch directly affect your life. I can go back to this slide of mass consolidation of car washes, dental practices, food franchises, even social media accounts are being consolidated right now. We need more people to democratize and decentralize. And we can do this the the best way through funds by pooling capital together and going and having regular people like me and you that aren't Wall Street elite people to go and do this. That's why I get so heated about this. This is the time for the retail investor, the rise of the retail investor. We're seeing this massive rise of people like us going out in the market and actually buying more much of the space. We've seen this major rise of the retail investor. That's why I believe we need more people to launch funds. That's why we call ourselves the Wall Street rebel. Yeah. Does that make sense? So, if you want to learn more again, funnel.comcall. Let's go from there. Now, um, let's pull up some Q&A. I want to answer some questions. This thing is actually weighted. So, I'm like, man, I'm like getting tired over here. This is a good workout. have a weighted vest while I do a webinar while I'm standing. I'm wartime CEO. Here we go. Wartime bridge. Now, let's pull some Q&A if we can. I'm going to pull up the iPad as well. If you can queue up those for me now, I'm going to be honest with y'all. We've been on here for a little bit. I need to go to the bathroom really bad. So, I'm going to run to the bathroom real quick. We'll put up a holding screen for a second. Uh, and queue up your Q&A. I will be back. You guys can time me. I'm going to be back here in I don't know, 30 seconds. Hopefully pretty quick. Sounding good, Briggs. People in the Q&A, you guys cool the to hang out for just one second. Type your type them in the chat, but also Q&A both work. We'll pee up and if you can put those on the screen for me, that'd be awesome as well. And then we'll pull the iPad up and we'll just start uh you can share the iPad for actually share the iPad for a second. So, I'll just start making notes of uh of uh the what you're doing and we'll we'll go there it is. We'll go through the fund launch formula. We can answer questions around legal formation, building your fund, etc. All in here. Does that sound fair? All right. All right. So, give me one second. I'll be back. Uh, give me one second. See you guys. All right, here we go. What's up, y'all? I'm back. Uh, all right. We actually have a bathroom right here, which is so nice. So, did you sign me? Hopefully, it was quick. Not too bad, right? All right, let's post some Q&A, uh, if you can for me. Um, actually, I'll pull it up on my screen as well. So, let's answer some questions. I want to whiteboard stuff out or or answer things. We'll try to go quick to be able to uh to get everyone settled here. So, do you have that Q&A box? I'll pull it up on my screen as well right there. Okay. Nice. And then we'll grab them from YouTube as well. If you can cue if you have I think Reream will pull them up pull those up for you. Okay. Let's do this. All right. Give me one second here. All right. Sweet. So, a few questions from the live stream. Can you post content if you run a 506b fund? How often do you cohorts for Blackard? What was the price range for Blackard? Oh, yeah. Good question. So, can you post content if you run a 506b? Yes. Uh, so I'll zoom in my iPad here. Um earlier I talked about regggd funds. This is rule 506b and 506c. I talked about you can advertise here with 506c's. Okay. Uh 506bs cannot do general solicitation. Um if you actually look at most of our content, it's not general solicitation. Uh we are just posting about our asset class. I'm not I'm not telling you, hey, we have a fund that gets a 20% return and we have this. Like, I'm not pitching a fund. So, and same for 506bs. Uh Ray Dalio, I think his funds are 506bs. Uh Bill Ackman, his funds are 506bs and they just post articles about their asset class, how they're thinking about it. There's no um they're not generally soliciting. Okay, that's the rule. Now you could ask a lawyer to look through and a compliance group to look through all your market materials but what they don't want to have happen is general solicitation where you are like you know generally soliciting putting out mailers or email campaigns or go invest here through a 506b you can generally solicit through a 506c. So uh if you now but you can talk about the general partner. You can talk about what you do as a firm but you cannot sell a security in a general solicitation. So I can't sell the fund. I can't say hey we have a fund a multifamily fund three that's amazing and I can't do that. Does that make sense? So it's a little bit of a you know nuance there for my funds. I I'm like I'm already on social media. I'm just going to do a 506c where I can advertise. Oh shoot. Uh, but we have to verify everyone's accredited status here. It's a difference. All right, someone asked, "How often do you do cohorts for Blackard?" So, this month's cohort, uh, we're closing, uh, next week. So, uh, the next cohort, I'm not sure when we're doing the next cohort. Uh, we've closed it off this month. So, people have not been able to join Blackard for the last little bit. So, I do not know the next one. We like, we want to get everyone settled in here and join this cohort. So, there's no guarantee that there's going to be one next month or the month after that. There's no guarantee. So, uh, we might do something. We'll see. But no guarantee. So, if you're on the fence, I would I would at least invite you to hop on a call, at least talk and see if it's the right time for you and make sure it's a good fit for you. But if if it's even close, um you know, this is going to be a really solid cohort. I believe we have 32 deposits for this cohort already and uh and probably more after today. What's the price of Blackard? So, Blackard ranges um Blackard and single asset funds. It depends on what you need and what you're doing. If you're doing a single asset fund, uh, you know, it can be as low as six, seven, $8,000 to put every that's including the legal docs, the lawyers, everything. Uh, if you want help with your pitch deck, multiple calls, you want to do international feeder fund, there's other stuff. Uh, Blackard will range up to maybe $45 to $50,000. So, anywhere from, I'll call it anywhere from like seven grand to $45,000 is kind of your range. Um, we want to make something work for you. So, we will make a, you know, you hop on a call with our team. They can build a custom package for you. If you want to come to all the events, get all the, you know, extra extra all the bonuses. Yeah, you're probably closer to the $45,000 range. If you're like, "Hey, I just need, you know, I want to launch my fund. I want the legal. I want to just do, you know, standard." You're probably in the middle somewhere. Uh, but that's your range right there. Good questions, y'all. Um, another question here. Would you recommend starting with a fund or doing a syndication single asset fund? if I'm just raising capital for the first time. Uh, good questions. Let me zoom out here. You guys can see my screen. Yeah. So, we talk about the fund launch formula. Today, we didn't talk much about this, but briefly, this is how we run all of our content. Our actual, you know, the back end is all built around the fund launch formula here. So, uh, I, you know, most people want to go talk to legal first. I tell you, hold on. First go over here, focus on your deal, then frame that deal out, and then go get verbal capital commitments. And you can see it's a circle here. Ask for advice, not money. And you're probably going to tweak your deal. You're going to tweak your frame. And the goal of doing this is to get validation. Your whole goal is to validate your fund. This is a little more built out with our sub framework. So you can see how we we have little sub things here. The whole goal of this is to validate that you have a good fund idea. Okay? And then and only then we go to legal. Legal for me is actually the easy the easiest part. It's not that hard. The hardest part is getting making sure you have a good fund. We then do legal. We then go launch your fund. This is the launch phase. And then we go you have your first close with capital markets. We then go buy assets. We do asset management. And then we continue to grow our firm through firm management. You do this pretty much forever. You know, you're always buying assets. You're building out your firm and you're raising more money. That's how big funds are growing. So, this is the fund launch formula. You have the fund launch side and then the fund management side here. Now, the question was, if I'm just starting doing my first time, should I do a fund or a, you know, a single asset fund or a one-off deal or a fullout fund? I would probably tell you do one deal at a time if you're just starting out. And you can, that's what we help people do as well. So, funnel.com/call. we can help you do this. I would come in with one deal. Do your deal and strategy. Figure make sure that's really solid on one deal. Frame that deal out how that deal is going to look and then go ask for advice and try to get some verbal commitments lined up that will validate you have a good idea. But I would tell you and that will help. And then you go do a full cycle deal. You do legal. It's a lot cheaper. This is probably closer to like seven grand, eight grand. You can go do all this for a single asset fund legal setup. It's compliant. You build all your entities and then you launch. You fund that deal. You do one deal and then you build a track record and you can do your next deal and you fall under the same c you see you use the you don't build like I I wouldn't suggest building an SPV or a syndication. I would do a single asset fund. It builds you a track record and you can use all those a lot of those same entities to do your next deal and next deal and you can get those returns audited and it builds you a brand as someone who does deals. And then after you've done a number of deals, then I would say go do a fund. And a fund is where you're going to do multiple deals together. So instead of doing one deal at a time in a SAF, you're going to do multiple deals through a fund. And you're going to say, I'm going to go buy, you know, 15 different properties over the next 18 months. And we're going to do a fund to do that. And you pull everything together into a fund. Hopefully that's making sense. Follow ask another question if that's not making sense. But there you go. All right, let me pull up other questions here. Maybe scroll back for we can see some other ones or people are live on YouTube as well. We can see some of those. Um, yeah, question around well we didn't even talk about today like you know what is a fund? How are funds built? Um, what's the difference? How much time does it take to do a fund? Let's see. Let's hit the timing question for a second actually. So to do all of this, we just talked about single asset funds. We actually had a guy crazy enough join our we have a a platform under Blackard called single asset funds. He went through and built his entire single asset fund uh in less than a week. He went all the way to launch. Now the legal form sometimes government agencies take like a week or two. So it was like a week to build it all plus I think probably two weeks to get all the docs done. So probably three weeks total. Built the whole thing. We then had another guy join single asset funds. He did all of this beginning work in one day. He did he used the platform. We built this brand new platform. He did all of it one day and then plus probably a week or two to get all his entities filed and he was bam. He's ready to go. Isn't that kind of crazy? Um now for that's for a single asset fund. For a fullout blind pool fund it depends. Again, we want to get clear validation. You know most people are probably you know validation everything but put together probably about three month three to four months to put it all together. It's pretty standard. It's okay. We can go as fast or as slow as you want to go though. It's it's all up to you. Uh we can we we go with you at your pace. So but I'd say on standard three to four months is probably pretty standard. Um if you really know what you're doing and you got everything else. Some people it takes them eight months and that's okay. You're building a a you know a big business here. This is a not a hard not an easy business to build. You're you're raising money from you know hard you know good people. You're raising hard-earned money from good people. You got to make sure you're buttoned up. You're compliant. You've thought through all the problems all the stuff there. And so uh yeah it does take some time for good reason. Now, FunLaunch AI, it's hopefully you, the first cohort, y'all, you guys are going to have a chance to be beta test users on it and be if if you want to be involved. This hopefully will take that time way down even further, which is that's what we're pushing for. I'm pretty excited about um actually, let's do this for a second. Let me share this. Give me a gonna go black on you. There we go. So inside of uh I think I have the platform here. So this is when you join Blackard or single asset funds. This is what your platform looks like. You can see here u this is I'm in Blackard right now. You can kind of see that. But you'll scroll down you'll see here's the calendar of coaching calls. So we do office hours almost every day. You can see here if I zoom in you can see we have office hours you know pretty much every there's four office hours on Monday. Tuesday's got two of them. Uh, you can see Wednesday, I do Wednesdays with um with another one. So, you can see six days a week we have office hours. And then down before you can actually go and book one-on-one calls with your coaches. So, you'll book as you move through the fund builder, you'll build one-on-one calls with coaches here. So, you can go with meet with Gabe, for example. You can see what he's doing. Uh, he's in Canada. So, we have we have a lot of guys in Canada as well. There's Ben. He's in New York. You can see his uh, you know, his details here. He's got an MBA, got Brent Mott, he's actually the guy that I talked about that did uh four house flips to 72 homes the next year. Uh, you can actually talk to him. He's now a coach. Uh Vu, you can look at you can go down the line. Adam Campbell did his postgrad study uh at Harvard, did his uh masters of accounting, so he helps build financial models and stuff like that with y'all. There's some really, really cool people. You can meet with these people inside of Blackard. You just book a meeting right there. Jim Radio actively runs a hedge fund. very good at licenses, figuring out how to work with all these different groups. You can come and see all them. And then you come into the incubator. So this is the fund builder. Oh, I think I we just changed this actually. So for me at least on the back end because we're putting in FunLaunch AI right there. So FunLaunch AI will work right in there. But you'll see phase one of the fund builder. Phase two, phase three. You can see all this here, which is pretty cool. Communication channel. So you'll see we connect Zoom um and we have a full Slack channel. So you'll see your Slack messages here in Zoom. All of our stuff here. We actually are building right now. This is in beta mode, but you'll see we're starting to build all the dots of Blackard members around the country. So, you can go and see like, hey, who are all the Blackard members in Florida? This is about uh 10% built out right now. So, we have about 10 times more dots than you'll see, but you can see around the world. We got people all over the globe here in Blackard, which is pretty cool. Um anyway, it's kind of fun. And then down here, you'll see access to FunLaunch 360. So, this is the platform I use. Um, let's see here. Just go let that load up here. You'll see you connected there in the paper west and you have your credits and service. While that's loading so you can see you have entity formation into we actually have interns now that we're placing. We have two interns that just came off. We're placing those into your funds. Pitch deck design events pass. You can see all of our partners down here, referral programs and different phases, the different type of partners you might want to use here. Uh, and then events. So, our next event, we're actually going on a cruise um next month. Uh, there are I I it's about sold out. Like the the whole cruise ship is sold out. We're going on a Mediterranean cruise next month, but every day there's people that cancel like the whole cruise ship. There's one or two spots that come open. So, we might be able to get you in if you guys want to come on our Blackard cruise. And then we're planning out our 2025, 2026 events here pretty darn soon. Um, you can see FunLaunch 360. So, this is my platform I use. I can do all my marketing out of here, calendar, contacts. I do my LP pipeline. So, I actually move uh through the pipeline here. People that I'm talking with or working with, I can kind of move them through my pipeline here. Uh, let's go down to marketing. I send all my emails out of here for my fund. When I, you know, when I meet people, I put them on my contacts list here. You can see I can go and build my email campaigns that I'm sending out to people. You can see I send them all here. It's It's pretty slick. So, you get access to all this when you join uh when you join FunLaunch. And this is only for uh for me to see, but FunLaunch AI coming out pretty soon. So, you can see the AI fund builder here. We have our full AI chat. You can go and build your value add, you know, value add fund. Go in your fund builder here. Build your blueprint. Go through. We're we're working through some kinks right now on it. We should be ready to go here in just a few like probably a week or two. We're going to make this thing live for all y'all in Blackard. We're going to just roll it out just to our Blackard members in this cohort and then when and uh and then we'll probably go public here uh maybe a little bit later, but we want to we want to work through this. But it's kind of cool. You can go and build out your whole, you know, scroll deck. This is all built off of one or two prompts over here on the left. So, it'll help moving the time to to build way faster. All right, enough enough preview of FunLaunch AI. I can't be demoing too early for y'all. I gotta get out of here. So, pretty darn fun. All right, let's take one or two more questions here. I'll go back to my iPad. Again, if you want to talk more though, funnel.comcall down below for people who have deposits. I am actually doing a Q&A call here in just like an hour. So, we'll be hopping over to that Q&A call just in a little bit with uh we can actually work on people's funds. Will a single asset fund work for starting a hedge fund? Good question. So, uh single asset fund the equivalent is what's called a hedge fund incubator. So, a hedge fund incubator is how people do, you know, a a more bare-bones version of a hedge fund. Instead of spending 30 or 40 grand to do a fullout hedge fund, you can probably spend, you know, seven to 10 grand to do a hedge fund incubator. People invest or partner with you through the GP. That's how they join the incubator and that's how they're done there. But yeah, you can do it through that. We have and we have a full incubator platform uh as well. So, come talk to our team. We can help you with that. Uh diversified investment is my goal. Will a SAF accommodate my desire plan to pull funds together that will diversify into real estate, PME, and stock trading as as my way to give solid ROA back to investors. If you're doing multiple multiple assets, um you know, a single asset fund is a single asset fund, right? It's one asset. Uh if you're doing stock trading and real estate and private equity, whatever it is, uh you probably want to do more of a blind a fullout fund because the doc and all it is the documents are just more complex and you need, you know, more sophisticated documents when you're doing multiple assets and multiple trades in one. I would do a fullout fund. A single asset fund probably won't serve you well. That's what I'd say. Qu another followup. Can you do that? The answer is yes. You you can trade crypto and stocks and real estate all in the same fund. You can do it. Now, I will tell you from experience, the bigger question is, do you want to do that? And let me tell you this. When you are selling your fund, you're trying to show that you have an edge, you are trying to show a potential investor that you are an expert in a certain field. That's what you're trying to show. We'll kind of erase this for a second. You're trying to show somebody, you're pitching me, I want to know that you are an expert in a field. And so when you pitch me and you're like, "Hey, oh man, we are absolute experts in crypto. Oh, and by the way, we're absolute experts in real estate. Oh, and by the way, we're absolute experts in Forex." It comes off like you're BSing me. It comes off like really really you're first-time fund managers and oh and you just happen to be experts in crypto, real estate and forex all at the same time now can you do it? The answer is yes you can do it. Would I suggest doing it? No. Uh very rarely do I see funds do this and be successful at it. Now can you do it? Yes. If you can show that you're an expert in all these fields and why you're doing it together and yes it might make sense. I've seen funds do this. What I would what I would tell you is I'll change colors here. I would set up a separate fund that just does crypto with people who work 24/7 just on crypto. And then I would set up a different fund that just does real estate. And I would set up a different fund that just does forex. And I would start them at different times. I'd start this one this year and then this one next year and then this one the year after that because you want to be focused. Running an investment fund is extremely hard job. It's even harder when you're doing multiple asset classes. So, um, and and and and investors are going to call BS. They're going to go, "Really? Really?" I think it's going to be hard to get validation on that idea. But if you feel like you can get validation, then go ahead and do it. The market will tell you if this is a good a good deal or bad a deal. That's why we do. We spend the majority of time in Blackard here validating, working on your fund, tweaking it to make sure you have a really good offering that when you open it, people are dying to get involved. People are like, "Man, this is this is amazing. I want to I want to hit this thing right away." Okay, question from YouTube. I can't read that actually. Sorry, my eyes are small. Can is everybody read it out for me if you can? >> Yeah, good question. And so yeah, hedge fund incubators, we do that inside of Blackard under single asset funds. Yep. So we can help you with incubator again, we help with all the implementation across the board. So hedge fund incubator, single asset funds, fullout funds, we do all of that and we have different groups and people and processes for each one. So yeah, we help with all that. Yep. So if you're interested, I would book a call by the way. FunLaunch.comcall. This is not, you know, this is a call you guys can hop on and an, you know, ask questions. We want to talk to you. You want to talk to us. See if it's a good fit. If it's not a good fit, don't join. Really, don't. Like, if it if it's not going to help you move faster, be more cost-effective, don't join. But I'll tell you time and time again for people that I talk to and work with, we have built an incredible product at FunLaunch. So, come on. I would say book a call, talk to our team, see if it's a good fit for what you're doing, and you can go from there. Uh if I create a fund for real estate investment, can we acquire both the hotel property and the hotel business or only the property? So yeah, you're you're starting a business, you know, you're starting a a fund. The answer is you can do both. Yeah, I just said that on the other on the other one. So if you're you know, you're buying a hotel, you have the hotel business, and you have the hotel real estate. Now, same question like I asked before. It sounds like you were doing a real estate fund. um you know, okay, great. You guys are you guys are buying you guys are good at real estate. Awesome. Why are you also are you also good at running a hotel business? That's a different skill set. Now, maybe you are. So, yes, I you can buy those together. You can totally do that. But I would that's that's what a uh a smart investor is going to ask you. Okay, you're good at real estate. Awesome. Why are you also good at hotels? Or are you good at both? Or you're good at this? Why are you buying the real estate as well? So, and some funds, just so you're aware, some funds just buy this and other funds just buy this and some funds buy all of it together. So, it's up to you on what you think would drive the best risk-adjusted rate of return. What is the best risk-adjusted rate of return for for you and your team? Oh, someone's saying the cruise is full. Yeah. So, the cruise I think today I they just text me today it's full. But we usually get like tomorrow or the next day somebody cancels. Like I'm talking the whole cruise ship. Like someone cancels. There's We've seen this last couple weeks. It's been full and it's not full and it's full and it's not full. So, as of today it's full, but I uh I would anticipate there's probably but you got to be on it. I mean, you got to watch it every day. I I bet a spot or two opens up. We're going to the Mediterranean. So, it's Barcelona, then Italy, France, Greece. It's going to be a really fun cruise. So, should be fun. And we'll and we're gonna we'll throw more events as well. We'll have events uh I think we're doing one in January, June, and October of next year. So when you join Blackard, you're invited to those events as well. We just did an event last week at our at our office. We had everyone fly out. So we love, you know, again, when you join Blackard, like we are trying to give you every angle possible to help you be successful. Hey, come to our office. Come work with us. Come hop on Zoom calls. We have office hours. Slack me if you have questions. You know, we have the full software now, FunLaunch AI that's going to help build it with you. We have a place where you can go find capital uh find uh you know leads for capital as well. So do staff go for those trip? Yeah, currently no. So single asset fund people it it's just for like full full Blackard members uh right now. So for SAF people they you guys had an event a couple months ago but this this one's just for Blackard. Yeah, just for full Blackard members. So just so you're aware kind of single asset funds is here and then the full Blackard is here. Uh, so for staff people it's uh it's not included. Now I think I think you can pay to upgrade to come to the event though. So if you're like, "Hey, I would love to come to the cruise." Uh, talk to my team or send us a message at bridgerf fun.com and I think we can upgrade you to uh to come to the to the cruise if you'd like to come. All right, y'all. Let's see how we're doing here. Great event last week at FunLaunch HQ. Yeah, it was fun. We had everyone here just down I'm in my office, but down we have a b fullcourt basketball court in our office. So, we had everyone there. We set up the, you know, lights and cameras and everything. It was pretty fun. Did a bunch of breakout sessions, worked on people's funds. It was, it was a good time. Can you use these coaches for references for background background validation? You mean for your like your team? Um, we just have actually allowed our coaches to, you know, if you want to if you're like, "Hey, I love working with Adam or Steve or whoever the coach is." Um, we can talk and and we've had some coaches join people's teams or sit on their advisory boards or FunLaunch partners. That's what we do. We sit on your advisory board. So, if you want that, just bring that up when you're on uh when you're I would say join the platform first. Start working on your fund. We like to work with people that have already got, you know, that are already good, you know, that are already working through this and have a good deal and stuff and and let us know. And I it's Yes, we're we're looking to do that right now. So, because more people they people a lot of people have asked like, "Hey, can can you be on my team? Can you help me?" We're like, "You know what? Let's do it." So, we've got a good structure through FunLaunch Partners. Help people do that. Yep. Yeah. Pretty cool. All right. Um, what's an incubator fund? Yeah, an incubator fund. This is for hedge funds. You can see my screen there. An incubator fund. Uh, so I'm I'm jumping ahead here, but we got a GPL structure. This is how your fund works. An inc so this you know a fullout fund, you know, let's just say is going to cost a good amount of money. Let's call it 30 grand to like build this for legal docs. Right now Blackard's a little bit cheaper than that, but let's call it 30 grand. A hedge fund and you're bringing in limited partners. You have LPAs and PPMs to bring those people in. That's the documents they sign. The 30 grand is a cost to buy those documents, right? It's pretty expensive documents to just build a hedge fund incubator. What's happening is you actually don't have limited partners. Hence, you don't need an LPMP. So, your cost is way lower. What happens is you're bringing in partners through the general partner and you're and that's I would say five people or less. probably you're bringing in five partners here and they're all grabbing 15% stake or 10% stake. They're partners with you and they do a GP commit into the limited partnership and because of that you don't need those people over there use this. You don't need LPB you just have an operating agreement and it's much more cost-effective to do this. You could probably start this whole thing for I think you know it's like seven grand something like that. So instead of spending 30 grand, you spend seven grand. And but what happens is you can now get audits done on your performance and you can actually build a track record. That's not it's not cherry-picked track record. It's an actual track record. And then once you're ready, you can go hire the lawyers and you can actually upgrade this to a fullout fund for, you know, you go pay the 30 grand and you do a full and then you bring in people that are LPA. you know, you have your LPA, PPM, your limited partners come in and now you have, hey, our firm's been in business for multiple years and you have a track record. It's audited financials. It's all in one system. So, that's a lot of groups like doing a hedge fund incubator as a start. This is usually only for trading funds is a hedge fund incubator. Uh, a similar thing happens though with single asset funds. You're doing a much more simplified LP and PPM. you're building out a track record and then once you're ready, you're launching, you you keep the same management co. This stays the same. Then you open up a new GP, a new LP, but you have a track record and then you go build out your full blind pool fund. So, it's a good way to build a track record if you're starting out, whether that's a single asset fund, an incubator, and that's what we help people do. And then once you're ready for the fullout fund, we can help you with that as well. We call it a blind pool fund. And that's what we help you with. Uh oh, shoot. To go do all that. Is that making sense? All right. Final call. FunLaunch.comcall. Go book a call with our team. Um, we're taking uh deposits over the weekend until Monday. Monday we're going to start onboarding people in this new cohort. And then uh we'll be kicking off the cohort everything September, first week of September. So next week is the deadline for people to join uh this cohort with Blackard to get going, get everything moving, get into Falli, etc. All right, y'all. great call today. Thanks for joining. We'll do more of these in the future. If this was useful, please uh go find us on social media. Um you can tag, comment, you can take a picture of us, yo, I was live with Bridger today. Uh as a thank you, if nothing else, just if you can share our content with more people, we want to push this message out to more people. So if you can share altreet, that's a free platform on funds. altreet.com, go share altreet. if you can share our share our YouTube videos with others. We want to spread this mission to more people. We'll do more trainings in the future um with that. So, y'all are amazing. We'll probably be back live here in the next hour. We're going to do a Q&A session with people actually the cohort members who have deposits down. We're doing a Q&A and kind of diving into their funds at uh in just about 45 minutes here. So, look out for that. We'll probably be live on go look on our YouTube channel, Bridger Pennington, our YouTube channel, and you can go check us out there. So, all right y'all. Thank you so much.