Investing Billions - E64: How Startups Can Access $13 Trillion in Retirement Capital - Eric Satz

Starting point is 00:00:00 Tell me about the Peter Thiel Roth IRA story. In my very first pitch deck, I mentioned two individuals in that deck. One was Peter Thiel and the second was Sam Altman. Peter Thiel famously had invested $100,000 from his Roth IRA into Facebook in an early round, and that $100,000 turned into a billion dollars. And so what I used to say was, we're allowed to choose how we're going to make a living, and yet somehow we're telling them they're not allowed to also invest savings in those businesses. You can bet your life.

Starting point is 00:00:30 You bet your job and your weekly, monthly, annual income. But you can't bet your savings. How much should an ultra high net worth have in alternatives? Eric, I've been excited to get you on the podcast. We've been friends since I led your seed round back in January 2020. I just had an investor tell me, well, that was a very obvious decision to lead that round. I was very pleased to hear that. So welcome to the 10X Capital Podcast. Thanks for having me, David. Glad to be here. Before we start, for those that don't know what Alto does, what does Alto do? Alto enables individuals to easily access their retirement funds for purposes of investing in alternative assets.

Starting point is 00:01:16 And alternative assets have taken on sort of a broad meaning for a lot of people. So for us, one way to think about it is non-registered, non-publicly traded securities. It's private equity, venture capital, real estate, passion assets or real assets. And then of course, crypto, which we can talk about whether or not crypto is an alternative asset anymore. You can trade it 24-7. It's incredibly liquid. So all things alternative with your retirement money at Alto. Typically, retirements have been IRAs, 401ks. If you have an employer, you log into your 401k and you get like five different funds. So how is it that you can invest your retirement funds in non-public vehicles? IRAs and 401ks are different vehicles. 401ks are sort of under the supervision

Starting point is 00:02:02 of your employer. And whenever an employer has fiduciary responsibility in one way or another for the actions of their employees, they take the most conservative route possible and one that raises the least liability for them as the employer. When you are investing out of an IRA account, there's no, let's just say, employer oversight, right? It's all about what we refer to as self-direction and self-directed investing. And ever since ERISA was created in the early 1970s, it's allowed you to invest really in anything you want. When you get into a self-directed IRA construct, which is what Alto does, now it's really up to you. We're not going to play judge

Starting point is 00:02:46 and jury. We're not a fiduciary. We're really an administrative partner. And we do all of the necessary reporting to the IRS on your behalf. But more importantly, we have created a transaction engine or transaction hub, which makes it easy for you to put your money to work in these alternative assets. And for GPs at a private equity fund or a venture capital fund or a real estate fund or someone raising money for a company, we make it easy for them to accept that IRA capital. And we did that. It's not really rocket science.

Starting point is 00:03:20 It's just that this was this really paper-intensive intensive, time consuming, expensive proposition that we said, let's take some technology and apply it against I was a very loyal customer of Pensco IRA before I joined, before I found about Alto. And just Alto was just orders of magnitude better from a user experience. Tell me how you went about solving the problem. Well, we can start with your experience, by the way, because your experience and my experience were the same. I use Pensco myself. And Pensco is actually why I started Alto. Like, did you not? So we both have the same. I use Pensco myself. And Pensco is actually why I started Alto. Like, did you not? So we both have the same pain point.

Starting point is 00:04:07 And the problem was I used Pensco and I thought to myself, this really can't be this hard or this complicated or time consuming or expensive. Let me use another custodian. And so I ended up using three custodians for three different investments. And it was all bad. And it was all different. Like when you go place a trade to buy, you know, Alphabet, your experience at Fidelity and Schwab or whatever, Robinhood, whatever platform you use, it's largely the same, right? Like I go, I click a button, I say I want 100 shares, I push buy or I push sell, whatever it is, and I'm done. But in making these alternative IRA investments, and each of them, by the way, was in a private company, my experience of trying to execute that transaction at each of these three different custodians was entirely different.

Starting point is 00:05:02 Each required a different set of due diligence material. Each required different things from me. Each required different things from the company that I was investing in. And each required me to do all the work for all the parties. And then I had to write a check at the end for the privilege of being able to make the investment, right? So I'm talking about the check that I wrote to the custodian for, for custodying the asset. And it was like seven, $800 investment or something asset. And it was like seven, $800 investment or something absurd. And it would take like 10 weeks. Yeah. It was like getting a mortgage. Oh my God. It was crazy. But, and, and the thing was, I was comparing that 10 week.

Starting point is 00:05:35 So like, look, I tore my hair out. I was comparing that 10 week experience to what in a non IRA construct is a 10 minute experience, right? You get the docs, you sign them, you send the check, you're done. And so the question was from first principles, how close can we get to that? That required us to go to the rule books, if you will, to the regs and to ERISA and say, okay, what's required, what's not? And to basically build a workflow that would allow us to collect all the information that was required, ignore everything that wasn't. And then we did one other thing that was really important. We engaged what we refer to as the issuer, which is the company or fund that you're investing in.

Starting point is 00:06:16 And we said, you know what, rather than requiring the investor to do all the work to figure out like the EIN and the bank account number and all this, the address of the issuer. Why don't we just let the issuer do 10 minutes of work and save the investor like an hour of back and forth trying to collect all those things that they've probably never heard of or didn't know existed. And so by including the issuer in the process, we really smooth things out and we allowed subscription documents to flow back and forth in an appropriate manner for electronic signature, which didn't exist in this industry prior to us and now does, right? I mean, that's like a table stakes. You could

Starting point is 00:06:56 DocuSign anything, but for some reason you couldn't do DocuSign in the standard IRA world. And so we fixed that as part of the workflow that we built. We just said, you know what? We're going to ask people for what's required and we're not going to ask them for the stuff that isn't. Not rocket science, just trying to take that which is complicated and make it really straightforward and simple.

Starting point is 00:07:17 And the very first time I heard of Alto was when I was making an AngelList investment and I was scrolling down and it had a little check mark that said, would you like to do this through your IRA? And being a Pensco customer, I thought it was very fascinating. I basically investigated further and I reached out. Tell me about your platform integrations and how you've used that to build a business. That's a great question. I think you've probably heard me say this before. It's better to be lucky than good. I mean, it's best to be both lucky and good. But our

Starting point is 00:07:46 integration with AngelList is one of the, and I do believe, by the way, that in order to be successful with a startup, you kind of got to get lucky here and there. You never know exactly where it's going to be. And your timing has to be right. And, you know, it's kind of hard to know whether or not your timing is correct. And with AngelList, it was one of those sort of business development calls where we had this theory that we wanted to integrate with the other investment platforms that were popping up at the time. Remember, this was the beginning of sort of the reg CF craze, right? And regulation crowdfunding, Title III, the Jobs Act, and Republic, and WeFunder, and others. And AngelList was certainly the leader in the clubhouse in

Starting point is 00:08:26 terms of what was happening for angel investment activity. And then it would, of course, grow and evolve into what it is today, which has been spectacular to watch and see. Lo and behold, in our very first business development call with AngelList, Mike Dougherty... I think he has his own startup now. I need to reach out to him. It's been a while. Yeah. And, you know, sort of a well-known Silicon Valley AngelList character. Love Mike for obvious reasons. In our first business development call where I was explaining to him why IRA capital would be important for this type of private alternative investment, he sort of watched the demo and then he said, yeah, I get it.

Starting point is 00:09:07 This is different. Let's integrate. And that was it. And so once we were integrated with AngelList, then that was like the stamp of approval, right? I think integrations are one of the most underrated business topics. It essentially drives down CAC, not close to zero, but almost close to zero. And some of these financial products, you have CACs that are in the thousands or tens of thousands for enterprise. It's pretty wild. So you got AngelList as this blue chip client for fintech, and then you just used it as a reference to get all the other platforms. Unpack that a little bit for me. I agree with your comment, by the way, about the importance of integrations and what it can do for CAC. The flip side, of course, is that you can also die

Starting point is 00:09:45 waiting, you know, early stage companies can die waiting for this integration with this big distribution partner. And that's why I say there's luck involved, luck and timing and having Mike Dougherty on the opposite side of that early Zoom, you know, that was lucky for us. He just got it, the light bulb went off, and so he did the integration. The thing about integrations is that not only does your team have to have the technical chops and know how to deliver, but you need the engineering team at the partner to have the right chops, know how and prior prioritization from product and senior leaders to put you in their roadmap. I don't know if you remember this, but the original thesis was, you know, 70 plus percent of investable assets in the United States live in these retirement accounts. Put a number on that. We're talking about trillions of dollars, right? Yeah, that's right. So IRAs alone are like 13 trillion, 401ks are maybe eight to nine trillion, which is counterintuitive. Most people think there's more money in 401ks, but there isn't.

Starting point is 00:10:47 There's more money in IRAs. How much of that is Peter Thiel? The godfather of IRAs, yeah. By now, probably a trillion, but at least a billion, we all know. Just ask Congress. So you're talking about the original thesis that a lot of the money was – I thought that was still a thesis. So how has that thesis evolved? Well, no, that's –'s actually the thesis hasn't changed. I think the way we execute has

Starting point is 00:11:10 evolved. So, but the thesis is that in order for alternative assets to make it into the mainstream, you have to look at where the mainstream has their cash and they have cash in retirement accounts. So the whole idea was to make it easy for individuals to sort of how we open the show, right? Make it easy for individuals to access their retirement accounts and invest in alternative assets. That was the thesis. That's still the same. And I think we're still right. And what's different is execution.

Starting point is 00:11:38 So originally, you had to have your own investment opportunity, sort of the way you had investment opportunities when you went to Pensco and then eventually to Alto. And then it was, you know what, you could go to one of our investment platform partners, AngelList, for example, Republic, for example, Masterworks, for example, and you can find an investment opportunity there and then invest with your IRA via those platforms. Now we have just at the end of last year launched the Alto marketplace. So now you can come to Alto. You don't have to know what it is you're going to invest in. You can come to the Alto marketplace and you can find your own investment opportunity there. And so we have really started in the fund space with both some private equity,

Starting point is 00:12:23 real estate, venture capital fund opportunities. I think we've already done a wine funds. We've got a whiskey funds coming. We have two really large asset manager names coming with private credit funds, but I can't disclose who they are. So that's exciting. And the execution continues to evolve. The team continues to get better. When we first started, it was a little bit like shouting at windmills in terms of the importance of alternative assets and, you know, 40-30-30 instead of 60-40. And now it just sort of seems like every wealth management report that gets written says you need to have an understanding of alternative assets. You need to know how you're going to invest in the space. You need a good advisor to help you do that. And we're fortunate in that we're sort of positioned right in the middle of it.

Starting point is 00:13:10 You have a strong personal belief in the importance of alternatives being open to IRAs. Why is that? I have a very strong belief that alternatives ought to be open to all people. And as we were discussing earlier, most people have money in their retirement accounts. So that's why IRAs. But to go back to the point that alternative assets really ought to be available to most people, I think we have historically had a very paternalistic approach and oversight to what people can and can't invest in. And I think it's somewhat hypocritical.

Starting point is 00:13:43 I mean, if you just think about the percentage of the population that small businesses employ in the U.S., it's like we're allowed to choose how we're going to make a living. Like I can go work for Alto, you can go work for 10X. At some point, there were people who were choosing to work for Facebook before Facebook was Facebook and Google before Google was Google. And yet somehow we're telling them they're not allowed to also invest savings in those businesses.

Starting point is 00:14:10 You can bet your life, you bet your job and your weekly, monthly, annual income, but you can't bet your savings. And, you know, bet's probably not the right word. You're making an investment. And there's a saying that wealth does not beget intelligence, but intelligence can beget wealth. I think we too often forget that intelligence can beget wealth. And if people can show themselves worthy of doing their homework and diligence and choosing to invest in what it is they want to invest in, I think they ought to be allowed to do that. We've seen in the institutional world and institutional LP world, institutions that have not leaned into venture the last 20 years have really started to lag behind. There's

Starting point is 00:14:53 been this, I guess, gap between richer and poorer institutions. And the same seems like it should apply in the individual world. No argument for me. I totally agree with you. I think what's really interesting, if we were to pull the regulation crowdfunding apart, which I don't want pulled apart at all, but if we were to get really critical, I think it would be really fair for someone to ask the question, is investing in early stage companies on crowdfunding platforms the place that you should start with the American public in terms of where they're putting money to work? Or should we have said, this is where funds should make themselves available to the American public? We should let the American public invest with those asset managers who have proven themselves over time.

Starting point is 00:15:45 Right. So they have some sort of track record or you put up other guardrails, which says, you know what? If a fund manager is able to raise 80 percent institutional capital, they can take 20 percent retail capital. No matter what the retail investor looks like. A signal of sorts, a signal of a legitimate fund. A signal rather than noise. And, you know, so I would argue if we were going to start someplace, we should have started with enabling the retail investor to participate with fund managers. But instead we said, hey, you get to invest in the next Facebook, which I also like. But, you know, there's something in VC investing and early stage investing, which I know you know, that the power law, which says really you need a portfolio of, you know, call it 100 companies because you really don't know which one, two or three are your big winners.

Starting point is 00:16:35 To your point on power laws, after you get about 30, somewhere between 30 to 50 companies, depending on how much you model a breakout, you're more likely than not to have a breakout in your portfolio, which historically led to 3x plus returns. But I think if you look at how institutional investors build their portfolio, they first start by doing funds. And then, you know, five, 10 years later, they start to build out their direct business, which most high net worth and most individuals have an intuition to do a single investment, try to beat the manager that's been doing it for 20, 30 years, and then go to the managers because they don't want to pay fees. I think you and I are saying the same thing is where you really should start is by understanding what the people who do it for a living are doing and how

Starting point is 00:17:16 they do it. Going back to Jason Calacanis' book back about five, six years ago, and he brought up a really interesting point, which let's say you have a million dollars to invest. You should put 1% of that or 5% of it, let's call it $50,000 for the first couple of years. Make small bets, make all your mistakes on small dollars, and then take the $950,000 and invest it much more intelligently. I don't know if he did that or not, but his portfolio approach, whatever it is, seemed to have worked. From one VC to another, tell me about the Peter Thiel Roth IRA story. In my very first pitch deck, I mentioned two individuals in that deck. One was Peter Thiel and the second was Sam Altman. And this is back in 2015 or 16, I think. And Sam had

Starting point is 00:18:00 tweeted at some point that he thought it was crazy that you could only invest your 401k in stocks and bonds. You couldn't invest in private companies. I was like, hey, over here, we'll help you fix that. And then Peter Thiel famously had invested $100,000 from his Roth IRA into Facebook in an early round, and that $100,000 turned into a billion dollars. And so what I used to say was to participate on Alto IRA, and certainly in crowdfunding, you don't have to have $100,000. You can have 100,000 or 1,000 or 10,000. And you can still get the same ROI that he got. You're not going to get the billion, but you still get a big return.

Starting point is 00:18:40 And Congress tried to, I think it was the Peter Thiel bill, or that was the name of the bill. They tried to basically make him pay. That was the nickname. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about that. And obviously that failed. And tell me about that congressional bill. Look, I think that's just sour grapes on the part of some folks in Congress.

Starting point is 00:19:00 It's like we made the rules. He played by them. I'm going to assume he played by them. Them's are the brakes, right? Like the government said, hey, I want to collect my tax today. And so if you pay me on those retirement dollars today and then put them to work and you promise not to take them out until you reach retirement age, then it's tax free when you get there, because you gave me money today. This is the government saying to the investor, give me money today.

Starting point is 00:19:29 Well, he made a hundred thousand dollar investment having already paid his taxes. He's going to get to the end. He's going to have more than a billion dollars in there. And Congress decided they didn't like that. Or at least I should say some in Congress decided they didn't like that. Like, I don't know what to tell you. I think if you live by the rules, you die by the rules. The congressman told me on a similar note, they will never get rid of the Roth IRA because the Roth IRA is a free loan to the government. So whoever's in Congress will

Starting point is 00:19:59 never vote to give themselves less money in the short term for long-term gains. It's a conflict of interest. Yeah, look, it says, hey, give me your tax today. Give me your tax today. It's like, okay, I'll give you the tax today. And that way, as I invest, I don't have to pay you tax tomorrow. And that's the trade we made. We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsor. Most businesses use up to 16 tools to hire, manage, and pay their workforce,

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Starting point is 00:21:12 I think that's a very personal question. And I think it really depends on someone's risk profile and also how much effort and work they're willing to do to assess the investment opportunities in front of them. I was having a conversation with another founder yesterday about a particular investment. And he just said, like, I don't know how founders find the time to do due diligence on other investment opportunities. I just don't have that kind of time. So I do nothing. And I totally understand where that person's coming from in this particular context. There are other people who, you know, they'll hire RIAs or other financial advisors to help them.

Starting point is 00:21:56 And they talk about portfolio construction. I think where we are today is that for most people, and I'm talking about high net worth individuals, whether it's your $3 million credit investor or your $5 million qualified purchaser, it's going to be somewhere between 10 and 40% of your portfolio. But what you're trying to do with true portfolio diversification is reduce the volatility while simultaneously increasing your returns. And so there's a lot being written right now about 40, 30, 30. That kind of feels right for people who are in that QP qualified purchaser zone. If you're someone who needs more frequent liquidity, it's probably 5% to 10% of your portfolio. And you want to figure out exactly what that 5% to 10% is getting invested in, right?

Starting point is 00:22:44 Because what you don't want to do is exactly what Jason was saying. You don't want to take it all and invest it in one company. That's a bad strategy, right? But you can invest 20% of that 5% to 10% in three different funds. You could invest in a piece of property. You could, you know, whether it's commercial or residential, you can invest in crypto. People just get into analysis paralysis and people have been thinking for now 10 years, 11 years, should I put all my money in crypto? Should I put no money in crypto? And they've

Starting point is 00:23:16 seen this kind of incredible wave. I interviewed the CEO of Bitwise and he actually has some data on sharp ratios that shows that anywhere from one to 5% is the correct amount of money to have in crypto for institutional investors. There's this whole trend trying to get people just to put in 1% into crypto, I think is really important getting them out of that analysis paralysis, because certainly alternatives have a space in people's asset class, just a matter of getting started, making mistakes with small dollars and learning and adapting to the asset class? The average person should have one to two to three percent exposure to crypto. I'll even go so far as to be a little bit more specific. Bitcoin and ETH at the very least. I think both of those assets are here to stay. When I first learned about Bitcoin, for me, it was probably 2014,

Starting point is 00:24:08 you know, so about 10 years ago. It just kind of made sense to me. And part of that was I've never understood gold once we went off the gold standard. Like, why is it worth what it's worth? Like, what are you going to do with it, you know, if the, if the apocalypse, you know, hits. I never, I never understood gold ETFs. Because the one time you want the gold is you can't use it. So I just thought that was always interesting. I'll tell you, I'll tell you why gold ETFs exist is because most people can't actually take the gold. Right. So I get why they're a product. I don't understand why you would buy them. Yeah, no, me, me neither. And so when I started learning about Bitcoin, I was like, oh, wow. Like this and not to not too late thereafter, they started talking about Bitcoin as a as a gold replacement.

Starting point is 00:24:57 And there are lots of quantitative analyses that that are made that, OK, if there are X number of Bitcoin available in the world, and gold is worth X, and if it gets replaced, whatever, like that Bitcoin, a single Bitcoin is going to be worth whatever it's going to be worth. And like, I kind of get that. And so, look, all of my Bitcoin, I and Ethereum for that matter, I hold in my crypto IRA at Alto. You eat your own medicine. I do. You know, the dogs eat the dog food, right? And I'm a macro level person.

Starting point is 00:25:33 I think big picture is going to be here for a while and it's going to be worth a lot more than it is today. Humans are terrible traders from a psychological perspective. That's proven. Very few of us can be Warren Buffett, right? It's funny you say that. I listened to an interview of Stan Drunkenmiller, who's considered one of the greatest traders of all time. And he said, nothing felt as cheap as after it had gone up 60% because you have these positive emotions. And I reflected and I said, if this guy who's

Starting point is 00:25:58 in his 70s, one of the greatest traders of all time, has been doing it for 50 years, he struggles with this issue of liquidity. i probably should be humble enough to not think that i could outstand drunken miller it's stan drunken miller so i i love illiquid ass asset classes when i don't need the liquidity uh nearly every person i know that's made money in crypto serious money it's been through funds that were illiquid i know so i know there's these theoretical people that have owned bitcoin since 2011. Maybe I've met a couple, but I think they're much more of a myth than a real thing. And I think the people that have made a lot of money have been locked up or in illiquid instruments. My thesis is that

Starting point is 00:26:35 investing in alternative assets and both funds and direct companies is the best thing for people to do because you have a thesis at the outset and you can't wake up one day and decide, I'm getting out, you know, just because the winds are blowing in a different direction. You're going to live with that investment. And I think that's good for the exact reason that we're talking about, you know, which is that you're supposed to buy low and sell high. And most people do just the opposite because we're emotional and our psyches work in funny ways. True alternative asset investments force you to lock in

Starting point is 00:27:12 and live with your thesis. We're going to be wrong from time to time, but at least we're not going to be wrong in the interim because we push the sold button or push the buy button just because we saw some price movement. A lot is said about your stock goes down 80% and then you sell it. I always struggled with if my public book goes up 40%, I'm like, yes, let's lock in that game. That's what I struggle with. And that's why I'm thankful for the illiquidity in venture, because you have companies like Alto that in my book are up over 10x.

Starting point is 00:27:43 If I was getting offers every day, depending on my mood, maybe I would have sold early. And this kind of forces that and forces you to kind of be long towards assets that have this asymmetry, right? And when it works, it works exceptionally well. When it doesn't work, typically, you know, there's some exit and some downside protection. I don't mean to pick on Robinhood and sort of we all know the meme stock stuff and all the trading and options. And you know, I don't I really don't think that's good for the average investor. But they were so Robinhood was so good at what they did and the product that they built,

Starting point is 00:28:14 that people were just checking all the time, right? Like, oh, buy so buy so but like, not a healthy investment. Not a healthy investment approach, in my opinion. We'll get right back to the interview. But first, to stay updated on all things emerging managers and limited partners, including the very latest data on venture returns and insights on how to raise capital from limited partners,

Starting point is 00:28:38 subscribe to our free newsletter at 10xcapitalpodcast.com. That's www.10xcapitalpodcast.com. That's www.10xcapitalpodcast.com. There is academic research that shows that the more people check their public portfolio, the worse their returns. It has actually been studied, which is intuitive. I believe it. In terms of Alto, how does somebody actually use their IRA and Alto to invest into companies? Yeah, so you can still do what we call BYOD,

Starting point is 00:29:06 which is bring your own deal. So that, which was the core Alto product number one, where you come to Alto, you create your IRA account, you'll either transfer from another IRA or you'll roll over from a 401k and then have funds available to invest either in crypto on the one hand or traditional alternative assets on the other. And if you're investing in your own deal, you're able to invite an issuer to the platform, and they upload the necessary subscription docs and other documentation that's required to complete an investment and transaction.

Starting point is 00:29:40 Or you can go over to the altoira.com slash marketplace. If you're a qualified investor, which for the most part right now is accredited, you can invest in a farmland fund, you can invest in a wine fund, we've got a whiskey fund coming. Kearney Jackson, you know, our friends, Shuram and Sunil. Co-investors in the seed round. There you go. Love those guys. There are others that I'm forgetting, but you can go look. What's the future look like for Alto? What are you guys working on? So you and I both know that I'm working on something that I think is super cool. And just as soon as you can tell your enormous audience, I will tell you to tell your enormous audience, but we can't do it just yet. Enormous by AUM. Yes.

Starting point is 00:30:26 That's great. Anything else? Like, can this because you're essentially a marketplace, you're a platform, can this be a $10 billion standalone kind of behemoth? Or is it something that's going to be a strategic asset for one of the large financial players? You know, I think the answer to both questions is yes. But you know know, my crystal ball, like it doesn't work every single day. What I can tell you, and I think you know this about me already, is I don't wake up trying to build a company made for sale. I just try to build a great company. And where that takes us is the fun part. You know, that's the journey and that's the unknown. And that's why I like getting up in the morning. If at some point someone says, hey, this would be a great tuck-in for us. We're like,

Starting point is 00:31:10 all right, well, tell me about that. What does that mean? How's that going to work? And we'll assess it. I mean, we have shareholders, we have investors, you're one. I very much want to create a huge return for those who put their faith in me and us, the company. VCs always say, when are you going to sell? And there's only one right answer, which is never. We're going to take it for 20 years. But from a pragmatic standpoint, if somebody's coming to you and saying, don't worry about the next 20 years, we're going to assume that you're going to grow over the next 20 years and give you the money today. You have to take a serious look. You also have to be rational and be a good steward also of LP capital. When you have a, yeah, you have fiduciary responsibility, right? And I don't draw hard lines.

Starting point is 00:31:47 I don't like live by a certain set of fixed rules. So long as I maintain that energy and thrill that I have for this business that we're building with the 60 other Altonians that are building it, then I'll keep doing it. Thank you for jumping on the podcast. What would you like our listenership to know about you, about Alta, about anything else you'd like to share? I don't believe that any one sort of founder, entrepreneur is the key to a company's success.

Starting point is 00:32:15 Like it's the, startups are the perfect example of it takes a village and it really takes everybody. And you really have to be aware of when it is you're getting lucky and how to take advantage of that luck that's sitting in front of you. The luck and timing is so important and often understated. And, you know, and also just working with great people. It's really about the people. Bonus question.

Starting point is 00:32:41 You said timing a couple of times. What exactly was the catalyst for Alto's growth? Wow. We were in the right place at the right time as the rest of the world was beginning to understand that alternative assets needed to play a bigger role. The rise of Alt and you were the piping to access the retirement. That's right. And we had a thesis around that, but you never know. You never know if your thesis is going to line up with the rest of the world. This time it did. As you mentioned, better to be lucky than good and good to be both. Well, thanks again, Eric, and hope to see you soon. Thanks, David.

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Investing Billions - E64: How Startups Can Access $13 Trillion in Retirement Capital - Eric Satz

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