Animal Spirits Podcast - Talk Your Book: Bring Your Own Deal

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

On today's Talk Your Book we spoke with Rocket Dollar CEO Henry about self-directed IRAs.   Find complete shownotes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Like us on Facebook And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits Talk Your Book is brought to you by Rocket Dollar. If you go to Rocket Dollar.com backslash Animal Spirits, you can download for free the Rocket Dollar Guide to Self-Directed retirement plans. I feel like Michael and I learned a lot about these on the show today, but you can learn what a self-directed retirement account is, what you can and can't do with these accounts, and some of the benefits. So again, rocket dollar.com backslash animal spirits. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's Wealth Management.

All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritt Holt's Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Ritt Holt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. All right, Ben, I just got off the phone with Henry. because I needed some clarification on Rocket Dollar and what it is. So Rocket Dollar is a platform that allows you to invest in alternative assets, think anything that doesn't trade on the

stock exchange or bond for that matter. So anything like a privately held company or crypto or anything. And one of the things that I asked him, so one of the neat things about about Rocket Dollar. Henry is Henry Yoshida, who is the CEO and co-founder of this company. One of the neat things about Rocket Dollar as opposed to Alto IRA. So Al-Alta, is a platform where you move over your IRA, whatever qualified account you have, and they've got all sorts of vendors on the platform, right? Rocket Dollar is similar, except you can bring your own deals, which is super cool. So Peter Thiel, instead of spending thousands of dollars on lawyers and legal fees, which I guess is 0.000 all the way out one basis points on his Facebook

investment, you could do that for a much smaller dollar amount. It's a $350 initial setup, and it's a $15 monthly fee for this service. Again, if you were to do this with lawyers and accountants, it's thousands of dollars to get the setup. So, all right, here's what I wanted to ask Henry about. Let's see you can invest $50,000 into a privately held company or something and you had inside information. You knew it was going to go up 20X in the next year.

You knew that you were going to turn your $50,000 into a million. But you said, you know what? If I'm going to turn my $50,000 into a million, I don't care about taxes. If I'm going to net 600 grand, I'm cool with that. But Henry reframed it for me. Here's why you would use a qualified account. Let's say that you hit it big with one of these investments. If you turn $50,000 into a million dollars, do you really, like, because my point was,

like, if I want the money now, then I don't care about taxes. But at the same time, if you're going to have a monster return, then that's obviously assuming you do get the monster return. But you don't, why do you need all of that pile of money coming to you today? So a 10%, you have the option, the privilege, to pay a 10% penalty is maybe like the terminology that gets our head backwards because we call it a penalty. But here's what I'm going with this. Let's say you turn 50 grand into a million dollars, right? And you want to peel off a 100 grand.

So you pay the 10% penalty on 100 grand. You pay ordinary income taxes just the same exact way you would if it was in the taxable account. And then you let the other $900,000 grow tax-free, tax-deferred. So you have the privilege or the option of paying the 10% penalty. Does that make sense? To not take it all and let the rest ride tax deferred. So some of our talks, your book episodes have to deal with investments or platforms or fintech solutions for individuals.

Some of them deal with solutions for advisors. This is one I think is both. This one can be used for individuals. And I think advisors will find a lot of help in this too because you're talking about investing in a startup or a privately held business. you could also do this for a rental property. If you want to invest in a rental property, you could set up an account with Rocket Dollar and invest in that in a tax-deferred manner. You could do a bunch of rent-prol, anything you can think of to invest in. You can invest in

your friend's restaurant or something like that. You could set up an account through Rocket Dollar to do it in a tax-deferred way. So you're basically setting up a self-directed IRA to invest in what you want. So you could be Peter Thiel and Mitt Romney, right? A $5 billion IRA is within your sites with this setup. this was one of those conversations that or not either way this is this is what well so what so you could do a self-directed IRA or a solo 401k then this was one of those conversations where we got we got done recording and we were like wow this is cool it makes a lot of sense and his background being in helping other people set up tax deferred accounts in his previous life through being a regular financial

advisor wasn't lighting to me yeah we kind of thought this was going to be one thing going into it and it was a totally different thing coming out of it. The whole being able to invest in alternative platforms through an IRA, that does make sense. But the self-directed stuff is really interesting in what I came away with on this. So, all right. And please enjoy our conversation with Henry Yoshida, CEO of Rocket Dollar. We're joined today by Henry Yoshida. Henry is the CEO and co-founder of Rocket Dollar. Henry, thank you for joining us today. Hey, thanks a lot, guys. Appreciate it. All right. So I just want to start this conversation by saying that I was definitely skeptical of the fact that we need to have alternative investments inside

of an IRA. However, I'm a convert. I am a believer. I am a user. I do have alternative investments inside my IRA. So I am super excited for this conversation. I guess a good place to start is what was the inspiration behind Rocket Dollar? Where did you come up with this idea from? A lot of people don't know. They know me more as a fintech founder. I had to start up prior to this, but I started as a financial advisor in the year 2000, so right when the internet bubble was bursting. And the way that I survived in my financial services career was I made a pivot super early, which was I basically learned that I'm not going to get individual clients to open an account with me, but I can set up all these small businesses retirement plans. And that just

kind of became my professional and personal identity for the last 20 years. So you've had experience on this side of equation retirement accounts, basically? I've set up 100. of accounts for billions of dollars across Merrill Lynch and an R.A. that I co-founded and that eventually sold. And so I come from that traditional retirement space. And I just learned very early on, it wasn't about staking your reputation on telling people what to invest in, but saying, hey, dollar for dollar, if you put your investments in one of these types of accounts and kick the tax man down the road, dollar for dollar, an investment in my vehicle that I set up for you will be better than the same investment outside of it. I grew up in the hedge fund world, but I was

on the nonprofit side. So it didn't matter as much having hedge funds in those accounts from a taxable perspective because it didn't matter. But if you're an individual with a hedge fund or a hedge fund like account, some sort of alternative, the taxes on that can be enormous, the drag on that. This idea made sense to me right away. So why is it that you think there hasn't been a bigger custodian that has tried to pull this off? Do you think they're not believers in this stuff yet or they don't think it's big enough to move the needle? Why is that? I came from that traditional side of the industry. And I think that there's a lot of dollars and a lot of people and a lot of powerful people that are probably have a vested interest to make sure that maybe this doesn't become

a super big, big thing. At the end of the day, 401Ks are actually what helped mutual funds really, really take off. I mean, the target date funds as an example, they're cash cows for asset managers right now. And then in 2005, oddly enough, you get this legislation passed at the federal level. The signer of that document was actually Mitch McConnell's wife, Elaine Chow, who was the Secretary of Labor at that time. And that set us on a path to where all companies, including Ridholtz, Wealth Management, Rocket Dollar, Facebook, and Google can now automatically enroll participants into a plan as long as they put people into a target date fund. So let's talk about, stick with legislation.

Was there a piece of, was there something in the law that made this possible? In other words, prior to whenever that was, you could not have done something like this. Here's the crazy thing. There is a law that's allowed for alternatives and other investments to be inside of what we call tax qualified accounts. but that law is the same law from 1974, ERISA. So Employees Retirement Income Security Act, because what's codified actually in the code is the only two things you can't invest in are specifically defined as collectibles and life

insurance. So basically anything outside of that is okay. I guess the legislation that maybe that I'm talking about that made this possible is you can invest in collectibles. However, now a lot of the collectibles are fractionalized. So you actually, I don't know if that law was circumvented or if that made a lot of this sort of stuff possible. Well, I would actually say right now that it really hasn't been codified and defined. So it's probably the same thing.

You guys on this show talk a lot about cryptocurrencies too. So there's a big debate on whether is that an actual currency or is that property. I mean, people haven't really defined what that is. So it's the same thing in collectibles. So a piece of art is a collectible. But if you securitize it and IPO it on a digital alternative investment platform, is it now a security? or is it still collectible? Where does the law come down on that?

They haven't defined it yet, so it's too soon. How are all of our 70-year-old politicians going to figure that out? Isn't that the kind of idea that this stuff is still all so new that it's hard for them to, that's all the crypto regulations stuff, right? It's hard to understand what is the security and what's not and where does it fit? I think that that's an interesting part of it. So on your platform, so it's not just IRA is correct. You can do a solo retirement plan as well, like a solo 401K or a step IRA.

That's sort of stuff too. Yeah, so there's lots of direct. derivatives of IRAs, but they all kind of trickle up to that main one. So SAP, Roth, traditional, inherited beneficiary, you name it. But you're right. One of the other products that we do offer is a solo 401K. So the way I analogize and kind of know it a little bit about your audience and how sophisticated they are, that a solo 401K is kind of a blend maybe between a corporate 401k and an IRA. It's a one-person company. So it just allows you to do 401k deferral limits, but inside of a tax advantage account for a one-person business, of which there's many

more now than there used to be. The young people have that, probably those side hustles or whatever we want to call it, is much more prevalent than it ever was in the past. Exactly. Yes. Are you seeing more account creation on your platform, or is it more people transferring in existing accounts that they have set up? So we have a pricing model. One of the things that we set out in the early stages was that we are really set up for people to transfer. So my thesis, And coming from this sort of traditional what they call defined contribution industry, I mean, maybe we should step up one layer abstract up that there's about $34 trillion in retirement accounts in the U.S. And then a subset of that that's IRAs to me is, hey, someone did something to open this account. They rolled an old 401k over and so forth. So that subset is $12.5 trillion. So I think when we were setting up Rocket Dollar, the thinking was that it makes sense for us to help people unlock some of those existing trillions of dollars to then go do other investments that they now have access to thanks to a lot of these great platforms that you feature on your show. Okay. So they might have an IRA somewhere and they hold some stocks

and bonds and they decide, you know what, I'm going to diversify a little bit. So I'm going to take a chunk of that. I'm going to sell out of these stocks and bonds. I'm going to roll that over to rocket. And then I'm going to invest in crypto or real estate or one of these other alternative platforms on your service. Exactly. Well, I would even say that's what I did. Yeah. And remember, it's a way to diversify a little bit further. And I might even change your statement say that people might have an IRA. I mean, there's three of us on this call. There's very realistically, we're finance nerds. We probably have four old 401ks and seven IRAs between us on this one call. So, Henry, to Ben's point, like I had probably $22,000

or thereabouts sitting inside of a Roth IRA. And at one point, I was trading a little bit. And then I just held the SPY for a few years. And I'm like, why do I need to hold SPY inside of my Roth IRA? My entire livelihood is in the stock. market between my company, my 401K, which every two weeks, I'm putting as much money as I can into the stock market. Like, I don't need more stocks. So the idea that I can, A, have fun, and that's a big component of this, B, maybe have a different stream of returns. And listen, maybe it goes to shit. Maybe I on to perform, but I don't even care. The social aspect of it, the fun aspect of it. So, for example, Ben and I are on Angelist. Is Angelus on your platform?

Angel List, they were. And then because of a partnership and exclusivity they had with a competitor of ours, they made it pretty difficult to accept investments from our customers. All right, well, the hell with Angel List. We're pulling out. Working with them on that, though. Let's double click on this. How do companies get on your platform? Do they come to you? Do they pay a fee?

Do you vet them? How does that whole process work? We like to think of ourselves as a real open source IRA platform. So we say, hey, look, the way we structure our accounts, it enables our customers to then decide what they want to go into. So we are, just like you asked earlier, we are largely driven by initial transfers in because of our pricing model. So our average customer has a little over $100,000 with us

and does a little over three deals in their account on average. That's very different than a lot of these, like let's say maybe the 1.0 fintech consumer wealth management products that were robo advisors like my last company. So because of that, we also felt like, hey, they need flexibility. And in addition to bring transfers, we are very big on BYOD, like bring your own deal. So usually that's what initiates someone opening an account with us because they have a deal they want to do. And then when we start to see that certain numbers of those deals might go to a platform like Equities in or a platform like BlockFi and so forth, then we just

reach out to them and say, hey, look, we have customers that are starting to do some of your stuff. We'd love to have this sort of formal engagement with you from a marketing standpoint and just show other people how to more easily give you money on your platform. I mean, I'm aligned with all these alternative platforms. All of them want more money that's long term and tied to individuals who want to diversify onto their platform. And I'm a Picks and Shovels company that helps enable that. Is there a financial relationship between you and the companies on your platform? So the only financial relationship is actually a benefit to the end consumer in that

they actually get a discount off of opening an account if they come through one of these codes. So to me, no. But to the consumer, yes. You've actually had people come to you and say, hey, I would like to invest in this alternative platform that is not available yet. And you will sort of make that introduction. If it works, you're able to facilitate them. is that you're saying that's how you get some of your partners no they actually already know how to do it

so once they enable the account with us so maybe i should step back real quick so the way we deliver our IRAs so i was just curious what this whole bring your own deal is i guess i'm trying to understand that bring your own deal people have a lot of deals they want to do so they may want to make an angel investment into a friend of a friend startup they may have an investment property who want to purchase so that's a bring your own deal that's actually the majority of our deals are not on some sort of digital platform so we recognize that early on that that was the market the wanted to do these alternative investments. So the way our product is structured, it's analogous more to like an IRA bank account.

So what we also tell people is that we do the IRA, you do you as an alternative informed investor with some portion of your monies into your deal. So you could have created Peter Thiel's $5 billion IRA on here then. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. As a matter of fact, we have a lot of venture capitalists and a lot of retired executives actually oddly enough from traditional financial services companies.

So just so you know, those folks are interested in doing this too. So how complicated is that? So for somebody who's never really done that before, if somebody has a deal but they want to tax shelter it because they obviously have high hopes that it's going to be a 100-bagger or whatever, how does that process work? Do you help with that or are people really on their own? The customers are able to self-service. So remember, I think the harder part is for the customer to, one, get comfortable,

become aware and then find a deal that they want to do. The IRA part is a component that we take care of because if I offer those customers an IRA bank account. We just say, hey, look, you basically find the deal. You initiate and transact in that deal using our bank account. So just use the entity name that we create in the name of your IRA. You go make that investment. So our thesis was that it's going to be very, very hard. And this is true throughout all technology. The reason why every mobile app looks the same, it's because you don't have time or the ability to teach 80 million people how to do new app configuration. That's why people like us that are probably mid-30s and older. We have trouble using some of the new social

media apps because they're not following the convention that we're used to. So, Michael and I have made some small investments in some startups in the past year. Okay. Not a huge portion of our capital, but this would be a way for us to do this in a tax-sheltered manner. We sent money to Sweden, right? We did. How's that startup investment doing? It's probably a scam, but no, I'm kidding. It's a Ponzi scheme. No, I think it's hopefully going to do well. But yeah, we've always thought you could only do it through a platform like that or we just hadn't figured it out yet. So this makes a lot of sense to us. You asked the question at the beginning of this show about why has no custodian gotten big and become, let's say, this fidelity or Schwab or this full service company like a Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley in this particular space. And I just think that no one's really ever thought about it from the standpoint of why don't we actually just try to take the position of what the consumer wants. The consumer now pretty much needs to diversify outside of 6040. I mean, you guys are the directors of research. I mean, you don't really go and tell these clients that, hey, look, 6040 balance fund, you're good. Call us 25 years later, and you should

be fine. And you'll look just like the people on the front of those brochures for annuity products. That's not really the world we live in anymore. So the stance we take is that, hey, we should put it on ourselves to make it easy for people to diversify into alternatives and maintain the IRA account structure, which has existed for decades so people can do this because when Peter Thiel and Mitt Romney and others were doing this, they probably had to use very specialized cosodians and very unuser-friendly platforms with an army of accountants and attorneys. Yeah, so they probably had to pay an arm and a like for that service. So what do your fees look like for all of this? We go flat fee structure. So we have a one-time sign-up fee of $360 that we

take right at sign-up. And then ongoing, it's $15 a month for us to do the compliance. the reporting and the maintenance of the platform and that account structure. And then we think that, hey, at 360 and 15 ongoing, the amount of money that you would pay us is actually less than what you would otherwise pay to taxes. If you dollar for dollar did that same investment. And it was a hundred bagger outside of this account. Does that 360 come from inside of your account? Do you have to pay that with like a credit card or something like that? Right now we charge it outside in a credit card. So we want our customers to kind of maximize their ability to deploy dollars into their deal. some rewards for that. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, I think I even know that we have bonus

rewards if you use like American Express with us right now because we're a small business. But it's like a subscription product like most other things these days. Yeah. And that's what we're saying is that look, what's happened now is that the whole market has now been enhanced because there's a whole bunch of new investment products that people never even thought were investments in the past. So what we're trying to do is we're bringing this sort of IRA as a service infrastructure to this particular new generation of investment platforms. Very interesting. Is this for accredited investors only? So that's the beauty of it. So our qualifications, we're an IRA provider. So you only have to

qualify to open an IRA and a bank account in the United States to be our customer. But the way that customers are gated is that sometimes they might want to do investments like a startup investment in Sweden. You probably had to attest that you're an accredited investor for that particular one. But if you just want to use our account, basically invest on a crypto exchange platform or buy a rental property, you would not have to attest to being accredited. You could do that with our account. So the gating of being accredited or not is dependent on what you invest in and outside of us as a provider. So who are some of your most popular partners that people tend to put their money in? I think just the landscape, it obviously changes based on time, but equity zen is a big

one. BlockFi. We get a lot of customers that kind of come through us and go to BlockFi. But Again, the majority of them are these deals that are never going to show up on a platform. They're very, very hyper-localized. And the beauty of, I think, what we created at Rocket Dollar was that people, depending on where you guys are, you guys are physically in two different locations doing this show. So one or the other of you are going to give each other maybe advice or have knowledge about particular real estate investments or small business investments or startup investments that are local to your community and maybe calibrated to your area of personal expertise,

for example. I know everything bagels. I know the everything bagel landscape and Ben is pretty keen on cherry farms. Okay. That's exactly. And then I live in Texas. So we have customers that literally have everything from race horses and cattle to crypto and startup investments and sweeten otherwise. From your approach, you must have a really neat look on some of the deals that are going on that aren't public. Are you seeing some things and like raising your eyebrows? I'm always amazed at what people are able to invest in, but I give a lot more credit to the people that you have on this show that actually take the plunge and create their own platform. You know, I've heard ones for art and for wine and for securitizing vehicles and shopping up real estate loan portfolios, for example,

and I think those people do a great job of being creative and creating the investment products. All I'm trying to do is help and say, look, I have a chance to bring trillions of dollars of long-term very good tax treatment money into these platforms and help us all succeed in this alternative investment ecosystem because otherwise we don't have a chance to diversify in the 21st. How does the ongoing reporting work from your end? If you're doing these one-off startups in a restaurant or a business or a land deal or something, how does it work from a valuation perspective? Is that something that like the client updates on their own? Is that something that you're looking at comps? How does that even work? Are there even any updates or

they held at cost? How does that look? So for the most part, a lot of transactions, they're pretty illiquid, so not a lot of things are happening on a month over month or even a day overday basis. But once a year, we're required to actually ask that client if it's a true one-off investment to provide an estimate of fair market value. And that's actually the rules for all IRAs. So just the fact that you might have an IRA at Charles Schwab, for example, and they give you valuations throughout the market trading day. And at the end, just because it's available, they don't actually have to do that, but once a year by law. So I saw something on the site, and I wasn't exactly sure on what was going on. Can you buy pre-IPO shares directly on the platform?

Not through the platform. So remember, we are a gateway to help people access their money. And then they would go to, let's say, some platform that allows that, whether that's equities in or shares post, which is now a part of Forge and so forth. So two questions. The user experience for any piece of technology software is incredibly important. So what is a sign-up process like? And if somebody gets tripped up, do you have a customer service team?

One of the things that I'm really, really proud of is that we do have a phone number that people can call. So that's kind of... Hallelujah. It's a big thing. And it's easy to remember a number. It's 855 Rocket D. So people can call. They can ask questions on the pre-sales side, just like that. But as far as the sign-up itself, you're right.

It's table stakes today to have an online digital sign-up. And that online digital sign-up serves a purpose for me as the provider and then serves a purpose for the user, which is an easy format to go through in, let's say, five to seven minutes. But what the purpose it serves for me is I'm also simultaneously capturing information. need to satisfy the AML and KYC requirements for our bank and custody partners. But to them, they're providing information that's pretty easy. So, Michael Patnick, address, and so forth. I'm curious. What is it that you do being an expert in this retirement space that some of

these companies couldn't just have an IRA option on there? Why is this so hard for some of these fintech platforms to do that? Is it just more reporting in regulation? Are there economies of scale? What is the reason that some of these companies don't just have an IRA option on their own? Yeah, Robin Hood. Robin and still listen to the IRAs, right? Yeah, they're just now getting into traditional IRAs. I really view that this is a different business. I mean, one of the things that I like, and you asked about what's the genesis for Rocket Dollar and how did it start? And I kind of view that, hey, 20 years into being an expert working with retirement plans, this is probably from a personal and professional standpoint, the company

that I was put on this planet to build in a sense, like someone that came from the traditional side, who's now understanding that, hey, the market, the environment, and people's attitudes have changed, quite frankly. And now someone needs to put a platform that makes it easy for this. So the simple answer to your question is probably there isn't anything stopping any of these businesses from getting into this. But they all have their own primary bread and butter business to run. And my role in this ecosystem is to provide this very easy, very secure, very known and trustworthy IRA as a service platform to actually be an additive to all of these platforms in the form of money. So, Henry, the market's pretty hot right now. When are you

guys going public via spec? Well, the way the market's going, maybe next week, depends on when the offer comes through. But I like the chance. I got my last startup. We ended up taking a deal pretty early. So I think with this one, I really want to get a chance to work with a lot of people, build a company. And I think that the fidelity of the 21st century, quite frankly, is going to be built in the 21st century as a start and will not be built on the foundation of 3,670 publicly traded stocks only. I love that. In terms of the platform at its size, can you disclose, like, how many people, sort of

the assets that are on the platform? We have thousands of customers registered in all 50 states, so including Michigan and New York State, where you guys are. We're right at about 400 million in customer assets overall. So it's become pretty broad base. And what we've learned about that consumer segment that we serve is that we probably only have somewhere between 5 to 25% depending on age, investable asset level overall, maybe risk tolerance and access would probably be the fourth factor of that person's overall investable

assets. So we represent a pretty small share of investable wallet right now. So I think that's interesting to grow. With some of these partnerships you have, I mean, obviously crypto is kind of an easy one to understand in terms of the growth. Are there any other types of alternative investments where you're seeing some growth that maybe people aren't talking about as much? or it would maybe surprise some people to see that this is like a burgeoning asset class here. I see this a lot, but look, this is probably, once I say it, it's painfully obvious, but I would say just tangible real estate and income producing investments. You guys talk about a public stock market that allows meme stock companies to get levered up

to over 125 times their actual tangible book value. And then we have this world of cryptocurrency that's less than 12 years old overall. So what we see is we see a lot of people that just say, you know, I'm taking my my gains off the table. I'm buying three properties with this old 401k plan. I'm over 15 and a half and I can create a really good supplemental income stream on top of Social Security. So just tangible. Rental housing. Interesting. Rental housing. I mean, it's as boring as it sounds. People love it because they say that's real. I can talk to the tenant. I can go see the house and so forth. So Henry, let me ask you this. We're big Blockify fans. Ben has an account. I don't because

they're not allowed to do business in the state in New York. I think it's the only state that they can't do business in. If I set up a rocket dollar account, I want to play within the rules. But is that a way for me to skirt the, you know, what do we think? No, because here's the funny thing about IRAs. IRAs always stand for the word individual, the I in IRA. So everything tied to the account always goes back to the individual human being underlying, even though if you look at your statements, they actually list another company. What if I registered in Michigan? I live in with Ben. All right.

You could do that. I think there's like a germination period for that domicile repatriation. But maybe you can get past that. But I don't know if you guys will keep working together. Oh, I have something. Yeah. So my account, I think I have two accounts out of Alto IRA. If I wanted to transfer that from there, is that a process that is going to be a pain in my neck?

So sometimes it depends a little bit on the investment. investments that are underlying. But the answer is that we've done transfers in to Rocket Dollar from 165 plus different financial services firms, including the one you just mentioned. So that process for us is no different than if you're moving from a fidelity, from Transamerica, 401K, you name it. We built, in addition to the onboarding and front facing system and platform, we spent a lot of time and money to build an inbound transfer system because at the end of the day as business owners, we just thought that, hey, we need a real good module to bring the money in to our platform.

Last thing for me, Henry, can you give us a sense of the team you guys hiring, are you building? How many people are we talking? What's going on? Yeah, as we record this today, I think that we're about to put out another five to 10 job wrecks, typical sort of spread proportionally 60% across product and engineering. We have a full executive team. We just brought on a chief product officer who had previously built consumer-facing fintech products that are used by almost 100 million people. So for Apple, Walmart, and Square.

How are you growing? Are you taking external capital? How is that growth happening? So we're in the process right now of working with a new institutional round of capital that we're in the final stages of closing right now. Very cool. But we did take early investors actually using our own accounts. So one of the things that we did was we carved out the half a million dollars when we first started the company, actually coming in from rocket dollar account holders, or early beta testers. I love that. Very cool.

Well, Henry, this is great. Thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you very much. And then I think we created one too. So I want to make sure this is a difficult concept and kind of new to people. So we created a site. So we have an ebook that we're happy to give away for free to folks. And we put it up at rocket dollar.com backslash animal spirits.

So right there you can download pretty easy. Just walks people through the process and everything. Yeah, we will definitely link to that. And it's probably better than me, just kind of randomly picking bits and pieces out. Very cool. Awesome. Thanks to Henry. Again, go to Rocket Dollar.com backslash Animal Spirits for a free ebook to learn more about this stuff and send us an email Animal SpiritsPod.com.