Noob School - Episode 55: FAVOR FORTUNES THE BOLD: Exciting Opportunities In Cryptocurrency with Todd and Brooks Taylor from Trident Digital

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

In this episode of the Noob School podcast, John Sterling talks to Todd and Brooks Taylor from Trident Digital about the exciting opportunities available in the cryptocurrency space. As people with very strong finance backgrounds, Todd and Brooks come with significant experience, and provide value to investors through their ability to identify, diligence, and access superior investment opportunities. Make sure to tune in until the end to learn how you can apply for a job with Trident Digital.  HIGHLIGHTSDon't stay in one job your whole lifeIn some ways, joining big companies can be riskier than small ones Look for a job that you truly enjoy, even if it's from a small companyNot all good ideas need to be unique, you just have to execute betterFrom newsletters and print media to blockchain financing Getting into Blockchain financing and the opportunities in the spaceThe ups and downs of working with cryptocurrency What it takes to get hired as a seller for Trident Digital QUOTESTodd on the risk of joining a big company straight out of college: "People misunderstood risk. I think one of the riskiest things in the world is to join a big company of which you're never going to or very rarely climb the ranks to the CEO of a Fortune 100 company. And then those folks have to make decisions on teams that they've never met, on macroeconomic movements that you can't control."Brooks on why they started Trident Digital:  A lot of people can recognize the promise of the technology. But there's also so much noise around it, and there's a lot of fluff particularly in the up markets. So we thought we could help cut through the noise. And really what we're adding is we're gaining access to opportunities, diligence them, and then we're just... people know they can trust us and are investing with us."How Trident Digital is providing value in the crypto space, says Todd: "The technology is growing, there's a huge opportunity to ride this technological growth but number one, invest with people that have a track record in integrity matters. We think we know that we check that box. Second is access. That was something that I had hoped we could deliver upon. Our other partner Festus Turlington who's out doing access things today which really creates values." Follow Todd and Brook’s work with Trident Digital through the links below: Website: https://www.trident.digital/LinkedIn (Todd Taylor): https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-taylor1/ LinkedIn (Brooks Taylor): https://www.linkedin.com/in/brooks-taylor-140932a1/ Connect with Noob School and John by visiting the following links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsterling1/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnsterlingsalesInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnsterling_/Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnsterling_TikTok: https://twitter.com/johnsterling_Website: http://salestrainingfornoobs.com/

blockchain has only really been around for like 12 years. And so it's not, I've seen, I've seen this. I exaggerate. Yeah. But no, so how it started or how I kind of got introduced to it, it was the first year when I started working in new markets, the venture capital firm. And this is back in 2016. And so I don't know if anyone remembers, but back then it was really the first time that blockchain technology reached any kind of mainstream consciousness where it was on the news a little bit. And there was a speculative frenzy where everything was going up in price. I was just right out of college, didn't have much money, but I wanted to get involved naturally just seeing the prices go up. And I was talking to a classmate of mine from Washington Lee. And he knew a venture capitalist focused exclusively on blockchain at the time.

There was hardly anyone back then doing that. But he had an allocation to this early stage deal and said he had extra room. We should, if we want to invest in the space, we should invest in this. And so we looked, saw people involved. You know, we're good investors. And so we decided to do that. And we put some money into that. And long story short, it was one week to liquidity.

I mean, many multiples on our investment. And so I'm sitting there in my day job. We're investing in early stage companies. We're waiting, I don't know, three, four, five, six years to get an outcome. And this was happening one week. Welcome back to Noob School. This is where we interview successful business owners. And we dial it back to the beginning and figure out what they did to make their

revenue grow. All right, welcome back to Noob School. John Sterling here. Today, from Trident Digital, I have Todd Taylor and Brooks Taylor here to talk about what they do. But before we get to that, I want to talk a little bit about kind of how they both got started in particular. I wouldn't say either one of them would say they're in sales today, but they're kind of in sales, but they both probably started in sales. So I know Todd, my friend, going back from the YMCA day, playing hoops back in high school. You played basketball at Winthrop. I tried. I realized when I got to Winthrop, I was a really good high school player. Oh, come on now. Come on now. You were a great player. But you went to Winthrop, and what did you study there?

Studied finance. Again, what I knew at that time was basketball, but I figured out I better figure out a way to earn a living. So I have an accounting and a finance degree. And actually, you know, after achieving the degree, I didn't like the profession. And so I did, you know, to your point earlier, got in right out of school into a sales career. Really? Okay. Had opportunities to get into finance. I remember getting an offer, I think, at that time and what was it, 1783 or 1883 when we graduated, I had an offer with a management company of IBM. And that was kind of like a really cool gig. But I decided it was too much like. the military, and it was going to be, you know, two years at this position, two years in that

position, and more of a bureaucratic thing. Yeah. I had an offer to join a small financial printer, and elected to go that route. Interesting. Now, was that in this area? It was in Charlotte, in Charlotte, North Carolina, and really lucky, and it was a check printing company, and I started there when regional banking, particularly, you know, in the United States, L.A. NC&B at that time or North Carolina National Bank was acquiring other banks. And my

territory was growing so fast that with a $30 million company based in San Antonio, my territory within a couple of years became bigger than that. And I just really wrote a wave. Right. Yeah, that was a wave. That was a wave. It was, it was, it was, that probably won't mean much to the kids coming out of school today. But back then, as I recall, I mean, John Collins doing the same thing, right? It was this, it was helping these smaller banks get their checks, checking orders and all that stuff in play? Is that right? Yeah, yeah. It was just, you know, they had a need for banks, you know, and even today, some people still write checks, you know, not this age group, but certainly I do. And, you know, it was a check printing company

that a third party, you know, did the printing and the micro encoding and the efficacy of that for banks. And so, you know, you would have a printing plant that would produce these checks. And you had people like me that would go knock on doors of banks of trying to convince them that your checks were better than someone else's. Right. And so what was the sales training like that you got at that company? You know, it was, I would say it was much more an opportunity to grow up and, you know, a little bit of Darwinism. And that, you know, I think the people that worked harder, you know, rose through the ranks. but it was not too deep. I mean, there was a class of, I don't know,

seven to ten people that went into San Antonio for one week where the corporate office was located. And, you know, you'd learned some fundamentals, but ultimately you were just kind of thrown out into the water and you figured out what worked and what didn't. Would you have wanted something different? You know, at that time, you probably would have wanted a little bit more formal.

a little bit deeper to equip you, but looking back on it, no. I mean, you know, it worked out for you. Well, I think that it's just like anything. And you can name, you know, whether it's a coach or whether it's a mentor. I had some fabulous mentors along the way at that company that, you know, saw that, okay, if you're putting in the extra hours, let's give him some help. And so, you know, I did have great mentorship. I would say that was stellar.

The formalization of the training was probably. Well, I'll say just for the sake of the nubes that are watching, you know, we all have these decisions to make, and probably we're not going to make all the right decisions. But if you make a few good ones, that's usually enough. And you certainly made one good one to go with the smaller company versus something that kind of gave you the willies, right? Because that was one thing is you probably wouldn't have been so happy if you'd have gone to the big old company. Yeah, you know, and I think it's individualized. I mean, you've got to understand, you know, not everything that you want to do your entire career. One of the things that Brooks and I speak a lot about, and I do with my other children, is in today's age,

you're going to have seven or eight different careers, which I think is fabulous. I think the creativity is going to be good. And mine and your generation, if you had seven jobs, you were, you know, maybe couldn't keep a job. And so it's, you know, I think that's different. It's a different world now, but I would suggest if you just get up and you show up, work a little bit later, and you're going to overachieve 80% of the population. Yeah. It's just not that difficult.

Right, right. I agree with you. I agree with you. Well, Brooks, what about you, man? I know you went to an outstanding high school. Yeah, that's right, Christchurch. Same with me, right? That's right.

And then you went to Washington, Lee? Yeah, so I went to Washington Lee and studied accounting in business as well. And so I wasn't, like a lot of my friends, wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do after college. It seemed like the most common route was to go into investment banking and for my major anyway. And so I was looking at that, but then just talking to some of my older classmates who had done the same path, it wasn't that interesting to me. And so fortunately, I came across a program called Venture for America. It's a really cool. program. So in short, it's kind of like teach for America. But instead of placing fellows in schools in developing areas, it puts them in entrepreneurial type rules. How did you find that? They were just, they just came to my college. I just saw it literally on the job board. On campus. That's right. And then talk to some people who had done it. And it just made a lot of sense to me. And so I got into that program. And through that program, came across an opportunity with a venture capital firm called New Markets Venture Partners.

And so we just invested in early stage technology companies. And so it was kind of the best of both worlds because I got the finance part of it and also was working with early stage companies. And it was a situation. There were five partners and they all really smart accomplished people. They, you know, Ivy League business degrees, stuff like that. And then me just coming straight out of school with no experience. And so I got to do a lot of things I didn't deserve to do at that stage in my career,

which is serving me pretty well since then. Good. And was that mostly in the West Coast? So we were located in Washington, D.C. But a lot of our portfolio companies were in San Francisco in Denver. Okay. Our portfolio was kind of scattered across the country, but a lot of the companies we were looking at were in San Francisco. And then actually, I worked for New Markets in D.C. for two years.

And then moved out to San Francisco and stayed with them working remotely in San Francisco. where a lot of our deal flow is coming from for a year. Okay. Before I move on my next role. Well, very interesting that you both kind of held out for something that got your interest before you just went and found a job, which I think is great. I've seen, it's one of the things we counsel on Noob School, Todd, is that the worst thing you can do, maybe the worst thing, is to find a job out of school that you like just

enough to stay with your whole life. you know, where you're just kind of stuck. Yeah. You've been there too long to leave and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And I've seen people like that, friends of mine, they're just kind of like, you know, it just doesn't, don't get any juice out of their job. Yeah, very much agree. I mean, I think it's too.

It's, you know, if you're fortunate enough to, you know, sit back and say, okay, what is it not that you really want to do, but what do you enjoy? Yeah. And what's going to get you up in the morning and, you know, where is there an up end? And I think particularly in our generation, less so today, but, you know, people misunderstood risk. I think, you know, one of the riskiest things in the world is to join a big company. Yeah. Of which, you know, you're never going to or very rarely climb the ranks to the CEO of a, you know, Fortune 100 company.

And then those folks have to make decisions on teams that they've never met on macroeconomic, you know, that you can't control. And you can do everything incredibly well for four or five years and get a pink slip on a Friday morning. Whereas if you join a smaller company, certainly start something yourself. You know, you get paid if you produce. And if you're comfortable with, you know, that dynamic, I think that's the least risky thing, you know, one can do. So how long were you working at that company or in sales in general before you started your own company? Let's say I was in Charlotte for two years and then outside of Los Angeles for three years.

So roughly five years. Five years. So you started the newsletter company when you were in the late 20s? Yeah. I was probably 26. Okay. 26, something like that. And this was a highly successful company.

Todd started with your family, right? Yeah, with my brother. Yeah. And so where did the idea for that come from? It was a combination of two things. One, it was, okay, and I think this is important, maybe for some of the folks that you're in this audience that you're reaching, is leverage, you know, what you've learned over that five or six years at the check printing company. I understood print economies, how they were producing checks. At that time, my brother and father had started development companies.

and had developed some apartment communities. And, you know, I'd come home for Thanksgiving from the West Coast, and I'd say, what are you guys doing as far as marketing? What are you doing with your print? Everybody had seen like apartment finder, apartment guide those magazines, and that was already decided. But I said, what are you doing to communicate with your existing residents? And so I understood print.

My family understood apartment communities. And so how could we put together, you know, a communication piece, And at that time, it was way before the Internet. And, you know, Primp was the medium of communication mainly. And so started it out of a bedroom operation. And, you know, I think the other important thing about starting a business is you got to make the numbers work on paper before you just jump into it. And so, you know, I had some time, you know, at the check printing company. I was kind of burning the night oil of saying, okay, let's think about this next endeavor.

and put together a business model on paper that I had no idea if it would work or not, but I knew it had to work. Yeah. And so it started down that path. I love it. I love it. I won't belabor it too much to save us a little bit of time, but I do coach this with the Noob School is if at all possible, you know,

you should connect the dots, you know, business degree, accounting studies, learn how to sell, learned about the printing industry, matched up with people you trusted that knew something else, kind of put the Recy Cup together, and that makes sense. If you just said, John, I'm going to go start a hair salon in Singapore, and be like, well, you know, good luck. It might work, but probably not. Right.

You know, so, you know, when people can match things up and connect the dots, I think it makes sense. Also, I always tell people when they're starting a business, and most of these people, you know, they're in sales because they want to make a lot of money. They want to have their own business one day. Three questions I tell them to ask themselves is, number one, is this a good idea? Okay, is it a good idea? So usually the answer is yes. Usually it's a pretty good idea. Second one is, is it the right time for it? In your case, it was because it was kind of

pre-internet. Yeah. It was still time for it. But the last one's very important. Most people don't ask the last one, which is, am I the right person to do it? Right? And you were, because you had that specific knowledge. Yeah. And other people didn't. So I've had a lot of good ideas that I'm not the right person to do it, you know, where you just, how would I know how to do it? Yeah. One of the things that, you know, Brooks and I speak a lot about this and, you know, I've been asked by a lot of people, how did you come up with the idea or how did your team come up with the idea about newsletters for apartment communities? The issue was, okay, we thought it was a novel idea, but it really wasn't. There were many, many people doing that. And so one of the things that, you know,

what Brooks and I are doing now, it certainly isn't, you know, patentable and it's not that unique. It's, you just, ultimately, you have to execute better. Yeah. You know, and it comes down to it's not that glamorous. It's just you do it as well as you can, and hopefully it's better than the next guy. Yeah. And then you continue to improve your game. I mean, we were talking basketball earlier.

I mean, you know, it just evolves. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the business now. Try it in digital. It's something that you guys started. And to me, it sounds like a similar story. And that you have, you know, since selling your newsletter business, just wonderful private equity experience with some of the best people in the land.

And then you have 10 years or so of, right? A little bit less. So I guess, yeah. So I have about seven or so. Okay. In the area of blockchain financing and all that stuff. That's right. And to be clear, the entire like blockchain.

has only really been around for like 12 years. And so it's not, I've seen, I've seen this. I exaggerate. Yeah. But no, so how it started or how I kind of got introduced to it, it was the first year when I started working in new markets, the venture capital firm. And this was back in 2016.

And so I don't know if anyone remembers, but back then it was really the first time that blockchain technology reached any kind of mainstream consciousness where it was on the news a little bit. And there was a speculative frenzy where everything was going up in price. And so I was just right out of college, didn't have much money, but I wanted to get involved naturally just seeing the prices go up. And I was talking to a classmate of mine from Washington Lee. And he knew a venture capitalist focus exclusively on blockchain at the time. And there was hardly anyone back then doing that.

But he had an allocation to this early stage deal and said he had extra room. If we want to invest in the space, we should invest in this. So we looked, saw people involved, you know, were good investors. And so we decided to do that. And we put some money into that. And long story short, it was one week to liquidity, many multiples on our investment. And so I'm sitting there in my day job. We're investing in early stage companies.

We're waiting, I don't know, three, four, five, six years to get an outcome. And this was happening one week. And so it immediately drew our attention to the space. And we started spending 20, 30 hours a week outside of our day jobs. investing in trying to find as many early stage opportunities as we could and participate in those. Seeing it initially as a short-term money-making opportunity, we thought that 99.9% of what we were looking at would eventually go to zero. But as we spent more time digging into the technology looking at these projects, we realized this is a really big deal. The underlying technology was

definitely here to stay. And it was going to really the best comparison is kind of what the internet did with information, just digitizing it and democratizing it. We thought this. was going to do for finance and financial services. And it's actually much broader in that, which we can get into. But so a year and a half later, so once the market inevitably corrected and everything kind of crashed, we put our heads together and thought, okay, how can we really capture the long-term growth and adoption of the technology without being overexposed any individual opportunity? And the other big thing is just figuring out who the smartest people in the space were.

And just because there was a tightening group of investors, they were investing in the same things together and it was working out whenever they did. And so we worked really hard to identify who those people were and just followed them what they were doing. And so spent kind of in the meantime, I was, as I mentioned, spent three years at New Markets Venture Partners. Then I took a job as chief staff to the CEO at a company called Capado out in San Francisco. And we just sold DevOps software. And it was kind of a startup when I joined. We were less than 50 people. But when COVID hit comes 2020 year and a half later, we had grown to over 250 employees. We had recently raised it over a billion valuation. I didn't feel like I was adding that much value anymore. And then

COVID kind of turned San Francisco upside down, unfortunately. And so my wife and I were ready to get out of there. And this is the point when it was kind of, I mentioned in 2017, 2018, the crypto markets had started to just steeply correct. They did that and then just kind of stayed flat for about two and a half, three years. At this point, they had finally started to recover a little bit and gained some momentum and real products were actually launching that people were using. And so I thought, okay, I'd move back to South Carolina, hope you were launching a family office, was going to help you do that. I'd manage my individual portfolio of digital assets.

And then we were, you know, meeting with some different financial advisors in the area. And it's, I think that kind of convinced you. You saw the demand for people that wanted exposure to the space, but didn't know how to get it. because there was really no safe way to do that. And I think a lot of people can recognize the promise of the technology, but there's also so much noise around it. And there's a lot of fluff, particularly in up markets. And so we thought we could kind of help cut through the noise.

And really what we're adding is we're gaining access to opportunities, diligence in them. And then we're just, you know, people know they can trust us that are investing with us. So just to summarize that a little bit, for the folks at home. Trident Digital is a private equity company that you guys started specifically to invest in crypto, blockchain, smaller companies, right? They might grow big.

A lot of it's smaller companies because everything's kind of emerging right now, but just generally we're capturing exposure to the space, just the most promising. Can you give us an example of one of them that somebody might know what it is like that's in use right now? Sure, yeah. So I think one of our first investments, is in a private company called Mistin Labs. And I don't know if anyone's heard of this, but back in 2015, Facebook hired this kind of all-star group of blockchain developers to build out

what they were calling the Libra blockchain. And so it's going to be the Facebook blockchain. And, you know, they made a ton of research, developed some pretty cool things. But for regulatory reasons, they were not able to push anything out. And then so they tried to rebrand it up. couple of times and really it was kind of this five year back and forth where they were never never able to push anything out and so the team kind of the core team they left and launched um mistin labs and basically what they're their mandate is to create infrastructure for web three

and so um basically right now the tooling just isn't there for ordinary people to use blockchain technology and eventually we think this is going to catch mainstream adoption and but it's going to had to happen where people aren't even knowing they're using it. It's going to have to be just embedded in their phone. Okay. And they're launching a series of products like that. And so the first product is a general purpose blockchain called suey. And it's, I don't know people have heard of Ethereum, but it's a smart contract, general

blockchain, but it's designed specifically for internet applications, as opposed, opposed to financial applications. And you need things like really fast finality. And like I said, it needs to be easy for normal people to use. To do like a financial contract between parties. Yeah, sort of if you think of like a video game, there's so many different transactions you would do that on current blockchanges, it would be too expensive for it to be practical for anyone to use that. But this makes it possible to do that. And the big thing is the programming language, this might be getting too far in the weeds, but the programming language, it makes it easy for any Web 2 developer just to come over and build Web 3 apps.

And that's a big differentiator. But we realize how smart the team was. and then they're really one of the best teams in the space and then who the investors are. And that's what we spent so much time doing is identify who the smartest investors were. And the people investing alongside us are in Jersey and Horowitz, light speed ventures. And those are two of the best venture firms in the world. And then you have Coinbase ventures. Coinbase is the biggest crypto exchange in the world and they have millions of users.

FTCX ventures. FTCS is one of the other really big exchanges with millions of users. and they are actually writing the biggest they've ever written into anything into this round. And then Binance, actually, after we made the investment, this is kind of the third giant in the exchange space. They also just wrote a big check to it. So you have all these.

It's kind of crazy when you, you know, two and a half years ago when Brooks, well, it goes back further than that, I was saying, you know, take your money, put it in real estate, allocate it. This is a pump and dump scheme. And so, you know, when I finally dug in when some very,

trusted people that I know, started talking about the growth rate of this technology. You know, the Internet kind of flew by, and I still had my brother, Shane and I had 37 fax machines set up in our company while we could have taken all this stuff online, you know, a year earlier than we did. But nonetheless, this technology is growing at a rate. And so for clarity, try it in digital. It's similar to a private equity company, but it's a huge. fund. So what we do is we go out and we've put a lot of our own money into it, but we go out

with accredited investors. We raise a little bit of money through each of them and we pull that money and what we bring to them and what we think we bring to the market of why we're doing what we're doing is, to Brooks's point, it's number one, trust. There's a lot of people in this space that, you know, have ridden the wave, but, you know, we ran into something three or four weeks ago that you just, you can't believe it even exists because it's, it makes Madoff look like, you know, a real stellar investor. And there's just all kinds of pump and dump stuff. So the technology's growing. There's a huge opportunity to, to ride this technological growth. But number one, invest with people that have, you know, a track.

record and integrity matters. And we think we know we check that box. Second, it's access. And that was something that, you know, I had hoped that we could deliver upon our other partner, Festus Turrington, who's out doing access things today, which really creates value. These guys travel all around the country. And what Brooks told you about is Mistin Labs, you know, none of our LPs would have known that name. They wouldn't have known how to diligence it, but there's this real opportunity or a shot at the hoop with a well-allocated fund. So access, trust, and then finally, we're a capital allocator. So it comes down to allocation. And so, you know, we're not going to bore your listeners with how we allocate the capital, but investing 101 is much more about allocation

than acting like you can time it, acting like you can always pick the right horse because you can't. But in this space, we think we're convinced of the growth rate and with a well-allocated portfolio, we think every accredited investor ought to have a small allocation to the space with a trusted advisor. Yeah. Well, I think you're right. I think you guys are on to something great. I mean, this is definitely a market that's coming like a freight train. The question is, you know, you need a guide really, like you guys, a guide to figure out where to put your money and how to get in, you know, without getting taken to the cleaners. Yeah, yeah.

Do you have anything, Todd, if you were going to go out and hire a salesperson for your company, just to let me need a salesperson to go sell, raise money from investors, I guess, would be your thing or whatever. But what would you be looking for in a salesperson? You know, I think part of it is, you know, just the actualization of who you are. You know, so many people, particularly some of the younger generation, they try to get into something because the card looks cool or the title looks cool. But I think it's incredibly important to match the opportunity for them. And so I always kind of turn the tide a little bit and say, what can we do for you?

And if we can really help that person grow and you have a career path or a job, a job. description, if you will, that matches what their goals are, I think that's a win-win situation. I know it sounds a little bit canned and corny, but it really does work. And so I want someone that's curious, someone that isn't afraid to work hard. And, you know, I'll take a C student that works, you know, six to nine every night than an A student that plays office. And I just, I think a lot of it is to match what that individual really needs to do with that period of their life. I've often said that you can have it all in this life. You just can't have it all at one time.

And so I think it's very important for the young folks out there today that they pick a path that is curious to them. Well, Todd, that's a, I think a great answer. sounds like you're looking for, first of all, character of the person. That's the kind of character you'd want working at your place. And then that there's a natural match. What they're looking for is kind of what you're offering. Right. And I coach that all day long that I want people to show up at the interview.

First of all, they already should know this is the kind of place they want to work. And they should be themselves. Because the last thing I want to do is trick-taught. in hiring me and then make him fire me, you know, a month later, he figures out who I am. But just to tie things up, if somebody wanted to contact you folks to talk about investing or learning more about your business or working there one day, Brooks, what would they do? So you can reach out to us. If you just go to our website, which is trident.orgital, you'll see there's an email there where you can send any requests, and that comes directly to

us. And so please feel free to reach out. We're happy to answer any questions. And then I guess the one thing I'll say is if you are, you know, dig into this and going with an open mind, because there's so much, for lack of her, we're garbage in this space, 99% of it plus. But there is a lot of promise here, particularly for people early in their careers. There's a, there really is a ton of opportunity. And so I think just keeping of mind, you know, look into opportunities because there are a lot of them there. And that that's really what we need to move. the space forward as talented people to come build real things that people need.

And I would add, you know, it's very similar to the private equity world in the last 30 years. It's just gotten more efficient. Used to be it was a little bit like shooting fishing a barrel in that there were only 30, 40 private equity companies. Today is there's three plus thousand. And so the market is in private equity is much more efficient, not totally efficient, but much more efficient than it was. This market is incredibly inefficient.

There are opportunities within asymmetric return characteristics that, okay, you can invest in this space in a well-allocated model. And our thesis, anyway, is, okay, you might lose half your money if the sector totally blows up over a seven or eight-year period. We obviously don't think that would happen because we wouldn't be doing it if we did. But we also look at the growth rate and the adoption rate and the regulatory overhang, which from a regulator standpoint, as soon as more regulation comes into the space, the whole water is going to rise and the tide is going to rise. And so we think there's an opportunity to make an incredible return on your investment relative to maybe losing half of it. I've often said it baffles me as to why people invest in things that they can make two times their money, but they can lose all of their money. That doesn't make sense. If you can lose all of your money, you better be batting on making 100 times your money.

And so this is one of those opportunities that we feel anyway that with a well-allocated model, you're going to get some shots at the hoop that you've really got a chance to do well. And, you know, from a curiosity standpoint, this is a field that I've never seen anything like it. I mean, every day, Festus Brooks and I and the network that we've built, we're exchanging podcasts. We're exchanging data that is just the pace of growth and what is happening right now. You know, IBM, the first three pages of their website now is on different blockchain, supply chain technology. everyone's getting into it, the banks, you know, people out of school that used to be in, you know, finance, medical law or whatnot. That's still popular, but a lot of folks are joining these startups because of the, you know, just the pace of this opportunity. Well, that's great.

Well, thank you guys for coming and sharing all that with us. Again, we're talking about an opportunity like, you know, the internet before the internet was cool, you know, or even computers, you know, and software back in the early 80s when I have. Apple came out and all that stuff. So y'all are navigating that, and I encourage all listeners to at least check out the website and see if there's any matches there. But thanks for being here, and best of luck with your new venture. Thanks, John. Thank you.

Thank you.