The Derivative - Wine as an Asset Class: Demands, Dilemmas, & Distribution with Vinovest's Anthony Zhang

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

You're driving down the winding roads of Napa Valley, visiting the countless wineries, taking in the beautiful scenery, and enjoying the various pairings of meats, cheeses, and palate cleansers... But that’s not all that pairs well with wine. This week Anthony Zhang, an ambitious entrepreneur who created Vinovest, gives us the inside scoop on how wine is so much more than just those ‘soft’ descriptors, and can actually be considered an asset class. Even if Jeff asks… really? Is it really scalable and doable for large investors? It's no coincidence we're dropping this week's pod the day after National Wine Day. Grab yourself a glass of vino as Anthony aerates topics like; starting a company from a dorm room, getting paid to skip college, how wine gains value, why wine doesn't need a token for Crypto, coping with paraplegia, and his outlook ahead. Plus, he gives us an exclusive insight into finding a gem within the wine list. This episode will make you want to sip, savor, and repeat — enjoy! Chapters: 00:00-01:58 = Intro 01:59-17:46 = Side hustle turned startup, a Thiel Fellow & the Entrepreneur's Trap 17:47-30:16 = Vinovest: Wine as an Asset Class 30:17-41:12 = Supply Dilemmas, Moving the crop, Do/Don't Embrace Technology & How wine gets value 41:13-51:03 = Crypto? Why Wine doesn't need a Token 51:04-56:49 = Beating Paraplegia and how to interact with the handicapped 56:50-01:10:55 = What would you invest in: Assets vs Wine / Finding the gem in the wine list Follow Along with Anthony on Twitter @anthony_j_zhang and Vinovest @vinovest1 and check out vinovest.co for more information. Don't forget to subscribe to The Derivative, and follow us on Twitter @rcmAlts and our host Jeff at @AttainCap2, or LinkedIn, and Facebook, and sign-up for our blog digest. Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM Alternatives, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations, nor reference past or potential profits. And listeners are reminded that managed futures, commodity trading, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors. For more information, visit www.rcmalternatives.com/disclaimer

Welcome to the Derivative by RCM Alternatives, where we dive into what makes alternative investments go, analyze the strategies of unique hedge fund managers, and chat with interesting guests from across the investment world. Happy National Wine Day, everyone. Well, actually it was yesterday, but pour yourself a glass anyways, because we've got a great lineup shaping up for June. I'm actually in Vegas right now at the EQD Derivatives Conference, where we'll see the likes of Ben Eifer, Jim Carson, Veneer Bonsali, Chris Cole, Ben Hunt, Chris Cedillo, Mike Green, and many more.

It's going to be exciting two days. Mutiny's Jason Buck is here in Vegas as well. And the two of us are going to do a quick recap after each day and put it up as a few pod episodes next week. So tune in next week to hear what all those worth hearing in the volatility space had to say in Vegas. On to this episode, which was a fun chat with VinoVest founder, Anthony Zhang. I'm not a wine guy, more of a Coors Light type, but I pressed Anthony on whether wine can really be considered an asset class if a $10 billion pension can't get meaningful exposure. But Anthony's up for the challenges and interesting guys you'll meet having been paid to not go to college, started multiple businesses,

and dealing with paralysis. Send it. This episode is brought to you by RCM's Managed Futures Group and their newest white paper going through all the ins and outs of trend following. Maybe trend followers will have a certain vintage of wine in their portfolios one day. And who would know which managers trade which wines? The team at RCM. That's what they do. Check out everything RCM does at www.rcmalts.com. And now back to the show. All right. Hey, everyone. We're here with Anthony Zhang. I didn't ask you how I pronounced that last name. I get it? Yeah, you got it well. And where are you zooming in with us from today? So I'm usually based in Los Angeles, but today I'm about an hour south in Orange County. Oh, nice.

What part? Newport Beach. Newport Beach. Love it. And this isn't an actual Newport Beach wine cellar behind you? It definitely could be, though. There's a lot of nice wine cellars around this area. I bet.

You just turned 27, right? Yeah. So God bless you. You're making me feel old. Don't make me feel old and dumb, just old. So you've started and sold two companies, now running a third. So kind of take us through your entrepreneurial roots, what it's like starting a company from your dorm room. Absolutely.

I always knew I wanted to start a company, but I think like most people, I was subscribed to the idea that I needed to study hard in high school, go to a good college, then study hard in college to be able to get a good job, and then maybe go to a great MBA program, and then I'd be ready to start a business. I took a different route my freshman year at college. I started a side hustle, which was helping to deliver food on campus. I had spare time in between my classes. Students are studying all the time and need food in their dorms and libraries. And I would just do those runs. What school was this? At USC, also in LA.

Yeah. And that just really ballooned into a marketplace where a bunch of other college students wanted a flexible, easy way to earn some extra cash. And I provided the platform for it. It was called Envoy Now. And we were able to expand that business. And I was able to eventually actually take that business full time after a couple of years to grow out to over 20 markets nationwide.

We had hundreds of thousands of students using the app and delivering from it before we got acquired. And what were the students would get a cut of the delivery fee, basically? Yeah, so students would get the delivery fee they get the tips it's very similar to the doordash postmates models of today but because you're in a college campus environment all the restaurants were a lot closer enabled students to deliver faster and also because they had their ID card, they could get access to routes and buildings that a regular third party, like a Postmates probably couldn't be able to. So our food was just always there on average, you know, eight to 10 minutes faster than Postmates. And in the world of food delivery, that's everything, right? That's the difference between

a hot pizza and a cold pizza. I missed it back in uh what year was that 97 maybe i lived in aspen for a year after college uh top destination for philosophy majors yeah so i worked on the mountain to get my ski pass but then also at a company called a la car uh-huh and basically they would just do all this high-end rest athman restaurant delivery and they'd get 20 discount from the restaurant and upcharge the customers 20 um so i was doing that 97 i never the light bulb didn't go out for like hey this should be a good business model for the rest of the world yeah it's a it's definitely a problem as old as time that people are still trying to solve today so if you hadn't been there I kind of come back to like, what year is this?

This is in... This is 2013. 2013. Okay. So missed the pandemic by a bit, right? But imagine if you'd been there, right? If it had been pandemic times and the stars wouldn't have aligned, you never would have seen the need.

Yeah. There wouldn't be a college experience to even be able to start it. So timing is definitely everything here. And so do you, and you mentioned back in high school thinking you were going to start a business, but what do you rate that first experience on skill and luck scale? I mean, that one was, I think just a lot of making mistakes and banging my head against the wall. Right. It's it's not a business that I think takes a lot of innovation and technology. Food delivery is not very technologically like sort of breakthrough type of business, but it's more an execution. So it took a lot of learning about operations,

learning about how to manage different parties in a marketplace, right? The restaurants want their cut, the consumers want a low price and the delivery people want their cut too. And there needs to be something in between all of that for the business that I'm running. And I'd say between skill and luck, it would probably be about 60 on the skill side, 40 on the luck side, because if I didn't get a chance to be at USC during that time, like you mentioned, to meet some early investors that believed in me,

I think I would have just always thought of it as a side business and continued to run it part-time for my four full years of college and instead was able to get the encouragement early on to take it full-time. You had your own kind of social network moment there. Someone said, you know what's cool? Not five deliveries, 5,000 deliveries. And I'm coming at it from like, so you knew you wanted to start a business. You knew you wanted to do that as early as what age? I mean, probably like when I was in maybe late middle school, early high school, right? You start,

I think that age, Facebook was blowing up. A lot of these other sort of billionaires were being minted from you know from the internet era that early sort of like boom of like web 2.0 and i thought it was really cool right i wasn't i'm not six five i'm gonna be a professional athlete yeah right and the other thing that i thought was really cool is being uh being a business owner and that was really the the goal for me as soon as i started realizing that like all right i'm not going to be a professional tennis player or professional swimmer those are two of my passions growing up but it's like what else can i do with my life that's really cool and so do you think high schoolers and even as you get to college, like that, that's a doable dream? Like, can you compartmentalize it and say, okay, I want to, right. Can it, is it a repeatable process? So, okay. All these people coming into college, everyone sort of wants that dream. And then does it become like, do you get taught the right things? Do you get presented with the right opportunities or do you just have the drive right is it a drive thing that

makes it go over the because not how many people come into usc every year right 10 000 call it and yeah a ton what small percentage actually ends up creating their own business yeah and a lot are you know a lot are in the business school too right there's probably 2 000 people alone in the business school all wanting to you, be in that business world and eventually start a business. And I think it's really about the drive, right? There's a million good ideas out there. Like starting a food delivery app, it's not hard, you don't need to be a genius to start it. But you need to be able to, I think, have the almost like pain tolerance to go through and make a ton of mistakes and still get up and still keep going and think that that's all right. Failure is going to be more of the norm than the

success part of it. It's a low percentage business to be in. If you're starting a business, you kind of need to look at the statistics and know that most of your businesses are going to fail. And what do you wish you'd known then what you know now and wish had been taught to you either in high school or as you got to college to help you succeed there? I think it was really about not really taught in classes because at least in my college experience a lot of it was around like case studies right and these case studies are really about companies that have made it into the billions right yeah um it doesn't really talk about the early days and that zero to one phase and i think that is what i wish I could have been taught because I was figuring all this

stuff out on my own, right? From something very basic to be like, what is like the best way to incorporate a company? What's the best state, right? What's the best legal formation? Nobody teaches you that, right? They only talk about like, oh, when you have 500 employees, how do you talk about like employee management, so i think really that zero to one phase is really missing and that's why i went to a startup accelerator uh in silicon valley to learn all about which what was that accelerator it's called 500 startups got it and so we have uh 1847 what's the one here in chicago, there's a few good ones, you know, that are all around the world. And I think the main thing that those accelerators bring,

other than just the money is really the network, right? Like the alumni network of founders that have gone through that accelerator that you can get in touch with as well as the investor network right it's a strong signal if you go through the top accelerator because the investors know that the company and the founders are pre-vetted in a sense right and you kind of know the table stakes of yeah how to get the basics done so that leads me to and you worked with peter teal a little bit or had some interactions with him yeah what do you think about his model of like right because basically just said no one no college class is teaching any of this so why not just go straight to the accelerator learn all the startup stuff and start the business if you're smart enough why not skip college yeah and and that's what he enabled me to do right yeah he gave me the Teal Fellowship, which gave me both, I think, the sort

of level of confidence in being like, hey, you know, being a Teal Fellow has certain benefits, gives you the ability to have certain doors open, and also the money, right? I was able to get $100,000 of a grant money from him to fund myself, dropping out, figuring out what was next, which turned out to be the accelerator program, and then also fund my way through the accelerator program and being able to use the money from the accelerator to go fully into the business instead of into my living expenses. What number of that program were you? Was that early on in the program? That was pretty early on. I mean, the Teal Fellowship started, I think, I think like 11 years ago, and I was definitely one of maybe the first five or six cohorts that happened. And how many has he done since then? Every single year, he picks about 20 to 25 students or high school or college.

I think you have to be under 22 to be able to receive it. And the only condition is you can't be enrolled in school once you accept it. Got it. And did you ever go back and get your degree or anything? No, that was a conversation with the parents. Right. Like what? When I got it, because they're like wait this is awesome but you know the the condition about leaving college where you know I was very academic in high school you know was was there on scholarship too and putting all that away

you know I kind of positioned it more it's like hey this is just putting it on hold right my credits are still there and everything else is still there. It's not like I can't come back to college at any time. So those credits are still on hold for me at USC, still to the state, but I don't think I can go back. It's just crazy to me, right? Other people in your shoes are taking on hundreds of thousands of debt, getting into this huge hole, and you're actually getting paid to go start the business. So it's like, that was my thoughts. Exactly. I'm like, instead of spending my parents' money or being in debt,

I'm actually making money to, to, you know, kind of get, get to where I want to be anyways. And I know that's kind of a industry specific with, you know, being a wanting to start a business, right? Like you can't really get without a degree in law or, or in med school, right. That you kind of need to go through all four years. And, but a lot of other industries you might not. Yeah. Which who knows college seems to be sort of broken, right.

Take on all these dead. No one can really get into the right schools they want to get into. Yeah. It's so competitive these days like i have a younger brother he's almost seven years younger than me and i remember just helping him through the college application process was i was like oh my god i don't think i would have gotten into usc like seven years later because everyone's got president of club abc everyone's got perfect scores and you just need to do so much more to stand out these days. Yeah.

We went, my kids are younger, 13 and 10, but we went to a talk and the lady, and it's a private school here in Chicago, right? You're supposed to get into the right schools. She opened the talk with none of your kids are getting into an Ivy league

school. Oh my God. And the parents, like some of them might have started crying. Their jaws dropped. Like what? And she's just like, statistically, it's getting harder and harder. Each Ivy League school could fill their entire freshman incoming class with kids just from Shanghai.

Yeah. She was like, there's that many qualified kids around the world that could fill these classes if the schools wanted. Yeah. So maybe your next venture you can fix the college process yeah the and to me like then in the pandemic you've got a 40 billion dollar endowment and you're laying off cafeteria workers you're doing this stuff it's just like what yeah kind of like hedge funds shrouded in academia uh but i digress. So another thing I just on the entrepreneurial side here, how do you avoid, and maybe you're too young to have come across this yet, but what I call the entrepreneurial

trap, right? Like success, success, success. Maybe the third thing, maybe the fourth thing, you get this recency bias, you get this confirmation bias, like everything I touch is gold. You plow all of your earnings from the others into this next one, and then it goes bust. Yeah. So do you think about that at all? I've seen it in real time with my father. Sorry, dad. He took two companies public, one failed, tried some other companies. So he had the entrepreneurial mindset, but every third, fourth one didn't work. Yeah. Huh. I honestly have not spent too much time thinking about that, but it is something where it's

just that you're not Midas, right? Like with every single company, you do learn a lot. You can probably get from zero to one or even one to 10 a lot faster, right? You have the employees from your previous networks that believe in you, investors that have backed your previous companies that make fundraising a lot easier. And I've certainly been able to feel those tailwinds in my third company, but it's still hard. It's still so hard. The times are different. The industry is different. And I think you just have to humble yourself and be like, I know nothing, right? And this is something where, yes, I do have some advantage with my previous companies,

but it's never apples to apples, right? And I think having that learning mentality can probably help to overcome that sort of entrepreneur's trap that you mentioned. So on to the wine, on to VinoVest. Pronounce it correctly? Yeah. So the current venture is a wine investment platform which is why you're on this podcast but uh so tell us what's going on there how it works give it give us the elevator pitch yeah so vino vest helps people diversify their portfolios into wine as

an asset class and traditionally you usually think of wine collecting or wine investing as kind of a hobby for the ultra rich and that's that's pretty true not too many people outside of serious wine collectors or people with a lot of resources can profitably collect and invest in wine and it's very difficult to store right it's very difficult to also value right? It's very difficult to also value because there's a lot of information asymmetry out there. And it's very hard to transact. Today, really, it's just through brokers, auctions, if you're not in the know. And most of the transactions are still happening offline through handshake deals. So it's really just this nebulous space where I thought, hey, you've got this really old time-tested asset where wine's got some great fundamentals that

has helped it grow and in price over the years, but it's really not something that's accessible. And especially, I think, with the boom of interest in alternatives that we've seen past 10, 15 years, this should be an option for more people who you don't need to be a wine snob or you don't need to be having 10 million in net worth to be able to even get started in this thing. And so do you view it as a tech company, as an investment company, as a beverage company? What lane does it swim in there? Yeah, that's a great question. In terms of the makeup of our team, it's about a third of each. We've got people who are deep, deep, deep into the wine industry. That's been their whole life. We've got other people who come from Wall Street and come from financial services. And then the other third is people who have built

tech companies their entire life. I think at a core though, our DNA is using technology to enable greater access. So we do consider ourselves a tech company, but we are tackling an asset that can also be a beverage and many people know, many people enjoy as well. With valuations right now, you might want to get rid of the tech label, go to consumer staples. We'll get into that later. And so I can go on, I can browse different wines, or you can set up a portfolio for me. How does that piece of it work? Yeah. So both options, right? Most folks offer the setup portfolio option because they don't know what to

invest in, right. Or they want just some more hands-off, easy to manage experience. And we can do that for them with our managed portfolios. And then we've got our other sort of, you know, hands-on trader type folks who want to be able to, you know, browse the available trading pairs that we have, be able to set their own bids and offers and things and build a more actively managed portfolio. And our marketplace allows them to do that as well. And the common thread is that we have

transparent pricing. We keep all of our wine in our custody in third-party storage facilities all around the world. So that part is taken care of. And we also ensure and authenticate everything. So we really try to decrease the barrier of a lot of the things that someone would usually need before they got started and make it as seamless as possible where anybody on their phone could set up in five minutes and start trading and buying wine. And what if I'm in full disclosure, I'm not a huge wine guy. I'm more of a Bud Light guy,

but what if I want to taste the wine? I want to get the experience, right? It feels like it starts to disconnect from the investor who's like at the wine shows and right right buying the cases the wine storing it himself so it takes away a lot of that hassle but takes away some of the fun i guess for lack of a better word of of having the experience of wine investing i think for hobbyists right they um they enjoy the time it takes right they like going to the trade shows or they like, you know, kind of rummaging around for the best deal at auctions, right? And, you know, that's, I think that type of person is still going to exist. But the people that we find are attracted most to our platform are not those people, right? They're not the wine guys, right?

They're people like you who are like, hey, maybe you think it's an interesting asset class and you want to test it out to get some exposure, but you're not going to spend tens of hours at, you know, at auctions or trade shows to get your favorite bottle. Cause you don't even know, or you don't really care, right? You're just looking for the best return, not the best tasting wine. And are you starting, are you getting pushback from those hobbyists or others who, right? Cause now you have a person at the auction house, right. At those auctions, sniffing out and doing all that and buying on behalf of these other groups who might not have the same economic incentives. Right. So what does that look like? Do you now competing with those groups? Yeah. Cause we are now one of the largest wine buyers in America. So we certainly do compete with those groups um and i think um with with any change

right there's always pushback like hey like you know you're um you know you're creating this new avenue where you're taking something that i used to enjoy to drink or that i wanted to flip myself and you know opening it to a larger market um so in a way for them to buy it becomes more difficult but when they sell it also becomes a lot easier right because more potential buyers so there's always two sides of the coin where um hate it or you love it we are just creating more participants in the market and creating also more transparency into the pricing so that these these hobbyists or collectors, they don't need to spend hours price checking five different sites.

They can just look at our site and know that this is the more transparent global pricing. And what did you know about wine before you started? Were you a big wine connoisseur? I wouldn't say connoisseur. I would definitely like to drink wine. And I certainly appreciated the value of older wines, right? I always thought it was really cool that like, this bottle that was, you know, from 1980s or 1970s was still around today. And there were only, you know, maybe 100 left in circulation, because most of it's already been consumed. That sort of value

and appreciation over time was always really interesting to me, but I never really spent the time looking into the numbers behind it. I knew wine appreciates with age. I just didn't know how much until a few years ago, I was reading through a Wall Street Journal article talking about luxury assets. And, you know, top of that list was like wine, whiskey, art, luxury watches, classic cars, things like that. I think that's the same article we wrote a piece of a negative piece on saying, come on, man, but go ahead. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of it can seem pretty inconceivable because they're like, you know, broken bags have like a 30% year over year return. But like how many broken bags can you really get at scale? Right. So I totally can see the counter argument.

But that's kind of where the light bulb moment happened for me where I was like, well, this could be pretty cool to maybe track my wine collection a little bit better because I was more just being like, all right, I'll buy 10 cases, flip five in the future. And hopefully I make enough profit to, you know, to kind of subsidize my consumption. And it kind of turned out to be, you know, best. Another skill versus luck conversation, but we'll leave them. So you see the value rises over time, but besides the fact that it has, what are, do you have fundamental factors for why it does? Yeah. I think a few things is other than the supply and demand, right? There's just, you can't go back in time and make more old wine and you can't really speed up the aging process. And then on the demand side, global consumption

for wine, especially on the high end, which is usually the stuff that does have limited supply, has just been steadily increasing around four or 5% a year for the last five, 10 years and is projected to also increase at similar, even heightened rates. And most of that's Chinese millionaires, billionaires entering the space? Yeah, it's a lot of wealthier millennials from Asia. That's where we see the fastest growing segment for consumption. The United States still remains the top consuming country of luxury wines, but I think in the next few years, it'll probably be surpassed by China.

And that demand from China is all over the world or is mostly us. What's that split look like? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's right now still, um, you know,

still mostly us that we're seeing, um, on our platform at least. Um, but I think it's going to be more globally diversified. Most people just don't even know that wine investing, you know, as a service is actually, existence. Or they might even know that you can invest in wine because it's been so, I think, so really propped up as a really rich person's thing to do. fears is the wrong word, but I'm thinking of like Robinhood and democratizing investing.

And it kind of has turned out over the last year, maybe they made it too easy to invest in things that are just for sophisticated people. I think definitely when you're throwing out leverage, that's when things start to get dangerous, right? And the volatility of the stock market is certainly something that there needs to be a lot more education and preparation around. I think Robinhood has tried to kind of backtrack and create more educational resources or limits before people go into that type of investing. So I do think education is a big part of making this space more accessible. Right. We don't want to just make it easy. So I do think education is a big part of making this space more accessible, right? We don't want to just make it easy, right?

We can totally just make a Robin Hood clone and make it almost like gambling. But we want people to know what they're investing in, why they're investing in it, both the pros and cons of the asset class and the specific region or a specific winery they're investing in, and give them all that information. Of course, it's always up to the investor on if they want to consume that information or not and use it to guide their decisions, but we want to make it available. And right now it's not. And is there any sense of leverage or anything? Can I leverage up a wine investment? No, not today.

That's stage two. Yeah. I'm sure it'll happen in the future, right? With any market, as it gets more developed and larger professional traders and investors come in, they always want to see how they can do more of their money, right? So I think it's... Well, there are wine futures, but not futures like I think of futures, but what are wine futures? Those are, I'm buying a crop before it's been harvested. Yeah, exactly. So that's more of just like a pre-sale, right? It's not futures in the way that most people think of it.

But that's also, I think, going to be interesting as well, because wine is a pretty long-term forward-looking asset class where, you know, the harvest of right now, 2022, we're getting data on, you know data on the ground with satellite data. We can be able to form a pretty good opinion on what it's going to do, but that wine won't be released until 2023, 2024. So it is an asset class that does lend well to developing the futures market around. Let's do it. We know some people at the CME. Let's get that moving. Yeah.

You could create the index, right? Business happening, right? Formed right here on the podcast. Right. You'll design the index. We get the CME to do futures on that index price. And then those producers can hedge their risk. I love it.

You mentioned the satellite imagery, all that stuff. What are your thoughts? The climate change, the fires in Napa, like all that stuff, for lack of a better term. Does that just decrease supply? It almost makes the investment could be better? Or does it threaten the long-term ability of it? I would say it's both a threat and an opportunity, right? The threat is, of course, because of climate change and all the fires that we're seeing in a lot of key wine growing regions, it's becoming pretty tough to be able to have consistent

supply. pretty tough to be able to have consistent supply and it's also leading to consistently lower yields because you know you're getting frost sometimes that's destroying the crop or you're getting you know intense heat waves that are then destroying the crop and um you know with them like they're just trying to squeeze as much juice out of the grape as possible and even though there's more demand they physically can't make more. And that's leading to higher prices. But it's also leading to a lot of these wineries having to search on being like, hey, is this plot of land going to be able to still produce the same quality of grapes in 10, 15 years?

So that's where I think the opportunity starts arising is that regions that previously nobody thought of as suitable for wine growing like you know northern parts of germany or austria or even norway is starting to grow grapes and a lot of the ordeaux winemakers are actually buying up plots in Norway as kind of like, you know, their sort of development centers to be like, hey, is this a place where I could move for operations in the next 20, 25 years? So crazy. And like 20% of Norway is above the Arctic Circle, right? I know.

It's like, what? It's like, oh my God. And even Canada now is making wine. And, you know, 10, 15 years ago, Oregon was kind of put on the map with a lot of Burgundian winemakers buying up a ton of land there so places that people didn't really think of or maybe thought was too cold to grow good wine are now becoming a potential sort of areas of development. And what what do you see in terms right we do a lot in the ag space in terms of helping farmers hedge their corn and soybeans and cotton things like that um and i'm always arguing right prices you'd think the world's growing crazily we need more food we need more

all of that but the technology they're putting onto those fields right you talked about satellite imagery they have like robotic fertilizer and drone sprays and right it's just amazing every year they come up with new technology to increase that yield so right that they're all saying demand's going to be record this year prices are going to go up oh they match the demand with increased supply so i guess is is there technology like that in the wine producing or is it kind of passe to be like no we don't want to overly technologize the the growing of it and the producing of it because it loses a little bit of its luster yeah it's definitely the latter because um i think because of how like traditional

this industry is and because of the long aging process of these wines um a lot of them are against technology and instead of using fertilizer or using sort of additional water sources and things like that they're actually going back to more sustainable growing practices going back to being organic or even biodynamic in some cases. And that's also another way to be able to have a more sustainable growing future. So we're seeing a lot of the top, top estates go back, you know, maybe there was a phase in the, you know, in the nineties and two thousands where they were embracing it. Now it's kind of a drawback to go back to the way how things used to be. And I think for a couple reasons is that A, they feel like that is a more sustainable future, but B,

it also impacts the taste of the wine. And with consumers, I think being more and more conscious about how their food gets to the table, that's another consideration as well. Yeah, super interesting, right? It's like not, it's a commodity, but it's not just a commodity. It has this brand and the taste, right? So it's, you kind of have those two competing forces of like, how do we produce more of this commodity? It sounds like you're saying for the top estates, they'll just be like, well, if we don't get the yield we want, we'll just increase our price.

Exactly. Our brand can withhold that. Yeah, exactly. piece our price exactly our brand is can can withhold that yeah exactly and for for most wine though like the bulk wine you know especially most of the stuff that is is put into i think the more mass-produced brands they are to your point embracing a lot of that technology to kind of match supply or demand but the top estates like a lot of these napa valley ones during the fires of 2020 they decided not to make wine at all they're like hey the smoke touched the grapes we're not going to

compromise the brand this year and what does that do that actually increases the price of all their previous vintages of wines because the consumers still want their wine they're like oh we can't get a 2020 let's buy up all the 2019 and 2018 and 2017 so that doesn't necessarily help the vineyard right because they might have already sold it off so it helps the investors but not necessarily the secondary market um but a lot of vineyards they just hold back some of their supply anyways for for rainy days like that right they know they can inject more supply into the market whenever and and kind of command whatever the secondary market price is. So let's go back. I want to read a piece of a blog post I wrote. I think it was that

same article you're mentioning. So back in 2016, I wrote a blog post called Bloomberg Vomits Alternatives. Here's the paragraph. We get it. Looking at exotic property or ideas is a lot more fun to read about than say risk adjusted ratios. But to compare investing in wine and fast cars to private equity and hedge funds seems a bit off the mark to us. For one, there's perhaps 1 billion worth of capacity in some of the exotic investments put up on the page, while some of the hedge funds listed manage many billions. It's not quite fair to compare the return on a $400 stamp or a $1,000 bottle of wine with the trillions invested in the hedge fund and private equity space. One is attainable to a handful of people in the world, the other to millions. Sort of like comparing the Yankees win-loss record to Phil the Power Taylor's

darts record. Phil the Power Taylor, there was a link in the blog. He's like a famous, uh, English dart player. Right. So he's got like some unbelievable, he's never been beaten 50 matches in a row, but like, okay, is that the same as the Yankees winning 50 games? Um, so anyway, just what are your thoughts on that? What did I get right? What did I get wrong? I was back in 2016. Yeah. I think the main point is that it's not apples to apples, right? There is a illiquidity aspect to these alternatives that is certainly something that you can't discount. And it's a much smaller market, right? It's a market with a lot less participants. And because of that, there's both an opportunity to expand the market.

It's, you know, sometimes it's less participants because that's just how many the market can take. And in other cases, and I think for most alternatives, this does still apply. They have room to grow, but the alternative market is small because of certain limiting factors that have been put in place. For wine, it's like not everybody can own a wine cellar. Not everyone knew they could invest, or maybe not everybody has the 25K to drop on starting a portfolio, right? So if you decrease barriers, there can be more participants. But that's another thing is like, all right, well, if it becomes more and more liquid and there are more participants that also invites some additional concerns of, hey, like, does there need to be additional regulation, right? How big can

this market actually grow, right? And especially with something like wine, where you cannot actually put more supply into the market, even if you wanted to, there are certain limiting factors in the rate that which grows, which is, in my mind, can be a good thing right it does it means that there cannot be like insane hyper growth in industry that could be artificially inflated um but in other ways it it's not going to be like the sexiest like booming industry like like crypto all of a sudden right it's never going to be a path right it's almost right if you got I have two thoughts. One, if I'm like, cool, let's do an ETF together and we get 5 billion in the ETF that's investing in wine, right? Is that too much? What's too much that would flood the market and overwhelm the asset

class? Yeah. So today, when we look at the wine market, if you don't get all the primary market, if you look at all the primary sales, it's about $350 billion a year. Only the top 10, 15% of it has secondary market value. So that top $50 billion a year. So say, if we wanted to create a $5 billion ETF, it certainly would be a pretty big factor into the market. But building up over time, or if you take vintages from the previous 10 years as well and blend it in, I think that would be the strategy that we would take if we were to do something like that. Got it. So you can see a future where it's, say it's a 500 billion is invested into wine right some big pensions say they want to put five ten percent into it now it's affecting prices like at the restaurants at the right the hobbyists would almost get pushed out of the business yeah uh

or not out of the business of out of the consuming it and then do you lose the whole point of it of right it yeah because someone's got to drink it at the end of the day right someone's got to drink it to assign a value well i guess that's a great question does someone have to drink it to assign a value to it like how does it get its value so a lot of it is old vineyards that's been tasted that's been has a reputation um for the new ones how does that work it has to get a rating or what yeah so we we really do our mark to market by real-time sales. So if a wine gets sold for X price, this is the price we're going to see. Or if it doesn't have recent trade prices, we look at the bid offer spread as well. So those are two ways that we do our valuation.

But I think when we are looking at if wine does need to be consumed to have a value I think that answer is yes right because um you know someone needs to have that ending utility of it to for that wine to like be taken out of the supply so that's that's what I really believe in even. Thinking of it needs to have a utility. My mind went to crypto. Why didn't you tokenize this or do some sort of crypto wrapper around it? I don't think it needs to be. That's why. Well, that hasn't stopped the rest of the world. Yeah.'s there's blockchain everything now right i think um sure it can be it can be useful to some and i think it would help you know the the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people who have made a ton of money in crypto over these past few years make it easier for them to come into our market so i do see some benefits for for our business

and um you know it's definitely not out of the question for us. But I think the core user experience, right, we are linking a sort of digital ownership certificate of wine that you're buying on our platform with something physical that is stored, you know, in a warehouse somewhere. So that is something that if we wanted to go full trustless, if you don't believe in Binovest is telling you this, if you don't believe in our terms of service- Right. Have it on the chain. Have it on the chain. That's for the extreme skeptic, but it's-

But to me, super refreshing to hear someone actually say out loud, it doesn't really need to be a token. It's doing what it needs to do. I worked full time in crypto for three years before this. So I could be, and I still am very biased in some other ways too. So mentioning that, let's pick your brain a little bit. Did you hear SBF on the Odd Lots pod talking? He was sort of calling out crypto as a Ponzi in a nice way, which is amazing for him to hear.

And then he wants the SEC to kind of bless his exchange and everything. So I think I had a question there somewhere. But where do you see the opportunities? Where do you see the risks? Why did you leave it to do this? Yeah, I mean, I still have a lot of my personal allocations in crypto. Our company actually, the last company worked at BlockPoly actually got acquired by FTX. Yeah.

So I'm also a shareholder there. Did you get some meetings with Sam? I've never met Sam in person, no. But I have definitely met him at conferences and conference calls um prior to that that's when you're big right when they buy your company and you the founders don't ever meet yeah yeah i mean this was back in we were doing uh talking that deal in late 2019 and no one knew about ftx we're like what this like hong kong company that seems to be growing really fast and like boom like you like, you know, two years later, everyone knows about them.

I think they've done an amazing job on kind of reaching that kind of consumer tipping point as well. I think for me, right, like being in crypto also exposed me to I think a lot of the parallels between wine and crypto, right? They're both have very, very much are lacking in user experience, only like, you know, only kind of like geeks or experts or someone who's very motivated can like be a user. Certainly our custody issues, both in crypto and in wine, even though one is fully digital and one is physical. And then in the early days, there was a lot of pricing and lack of transparency. Sam made his fortune on arbitrage opportunity between Bitcoin prices in Korea and Japan and the US. And there's certainly a huge arbitrage opportunity similarly in Japan, in Korea, in all of Asia versus European prices versus American prices.

So we just saw, my co-founder and I just saw a lot of parallels. And we're like, hey, this is an awesome time to start a company in this space because we saw that sort of tailwind of alternatives. And I think crypto also helped us because we realized that if you're crazy enough to get this many people in crypto, wine is a concept that's a lot easier to understand. We can get a lot more people into it. And I think the main reason for leaving crypto is we both had an itch to start a company again. We've both been founders in the past and, you know,

we knew that that's always our, that's always the path that we're going to go back to, right. It's, it's great to be able to learn and, and build a company under another founder's vision. And I think all founders go through those phases, right. It's exhausting to build a company and then go right into building another one. But that's, that's always our path. So we knew it was going to happen sooner or later. I want to come back to some of that

founder stuff, but NFTs. So were you doing NFTs at your, what was it called again? Block? Blockfolio. Blockfolio? Yeah. So we were- That pre-daily. Pricing tracking company. So we help people price their their tokens on different exchanges and track them um i mean we were there during the first nft boom of crypto kitties i still remember i still own a few crypto kitties being like oh my god how are how are these cats worth like this my one of my crypto kitties was worth 50k at one point i'm like yeah what in the world um but i think i never really understood the application of it how it could help to i think enhance the real world until this

most recent boom right now people are linking nfts to ticket sales or nfts to real world experiences or nfts to like artist royalties or linking them to wine even, right? To me, that represents a really exciting opportunity for people to just have more transparency into who is their most engaged fan or customer. How are they linking it to wine? I think they're just doing it more so as a club membership kind of thing. Yeah, like a wine club membership. If you're an NFT holder, you get free tastings at the winery and stuff like that. And I think the cool part of that is, if you are an NFT holder of a membership, you know who those other like-minded people are. I think that's the cool thing that it's been able to really organically encourage is that sort of community feeling. If you're one of the

top thousand members, you probably want to meet other people and you can know for sure online, like, hey, we're both like-minded. We both own the same thing, right? We have common interests and as more and more people are spending their time online and tying their digital identity online, that is, I think, a really cool thing that they can help people do. Yeah. What's that that crypto kitty worth now only probably a few thousand i haven't i haven't sold it so you got that that ship has sailed for me so i'm just going to keep it as almost like a memento of like hey i was i was there during the first boom i'll tell my guy maybe it'll be like a fine wine one day like hey this is a

vintage 2018 crypto kitty aged aged crypto kitty and then my grandkids will be like what in the world is a crypto kitty uh so back to being a founder selling businesses private equity valuations like how how are you seeing in your network and running a private company or valuations? How are you seeing in your network and running a private company, are valuations getting hammered along with NASDAQ and tech stocks and all the publicly traded stuff? Have any insight on that? Yeah, I think the interest rates have definitely helped to cut down the valuation multiples. It's certainly getting pretty frothy and we've seen already a lot of the pre-IPO or later stage growth stage um private companies get their valuations cut um a lot more of an emphasis back to fundamentals right we're

not valuing our company on our revenues next year right it's our revenues now right and i think that is something that investors are certainly having a lot more discipline toward, which I think for companies that have always focused on fundamentals is great. Now there's a less frothy playing field and you can really make the metrics that actually matter shine. And then for a lot of other companies, you've got to start extending your runway, right? Maybe hire 50% less people and try to be creative. And I think our company, we're still relatively early stage, right? We're less than three years old. And I think next time we go out to fundraise later in the year, you know, we may see some difference in investor sentiment, but it's already something that we've been preparing for and

have kind of always focused on our revenues and being good stewards of our runway as well. I feel good about where our company is heading, despite, I think, a lot tougher of a funding market that's up ahead. And you do your own venture and angel investing, right? Yeah, I also angel invest on the side. So what are you seeing there? What's kind of scary about the current environment for you in that regard? I think in angel investments, I'm doing pre-seed, seed stuff. And sometimes series A, there's really no difference yet in that early stage

because it's still so... A lottery ticket, so to speak. It's really just still a lottery ticket right like you're just betting on the founder they're really doing nothing and it's something that we are you know we're just like okay well i believe whether it's a 10 million valuation or 15 million valuation this is still going to be a billion dollar company so what does it really matter you're talking like companies that are already worth hundreds of millions that's really going to matter because your your expected return multiple is a lot less moving on the uh you had a nice thread i don't know how long ago it was a couple weeks ago

or months ago um thread you put out trying to teach people how to interact with paralyzed or wheelchair bound people. Uh, for those of you listening or don't know about your accident, you were paralyzed from the neck down, correct? Yeah. So that was, uh, had a spinal cord injury that left me a logical leechic about, um, let's see now it's been six years, six years six years um but you're moving your arms around now so you've you've made great strides right i've definitely made some good progress i can now you know independently roll my own wheelchair around and you know i've been able to relearn a lot of tasks that uh you know used to be just completely subconscious to me. So, um, you know, still need,

still need help a lot of things, but, um, that's a big thing. I worked for it in my personal life is just becoming more independent and being able to get back to doing things that I love or find creative ways to, to learn new hobbies. Yeah. Well,

take us through what you put in that thread of what, what do people know? How should we, um, be better at what do we know about the handicapped people in the world how should we treat them better yeah i think um you know the main kind of um kind of point of my thread is just that i you know before i became paralyzed i never even noticed people in wheelchairs, right? I

didn't even know about all of the things that happened below the surface, which just looks like someone who can't move their legs, but it's so much more than that, right? There's, you know, there's a lot of things that you're restricted from doing, right? Just because they're, you know, the world is not meant for meant to be built uh for for people in wheelchairs right so i think really just thinking about accessibility um thinking about you know the way that you you know even talk or address someone like a lot of times when i'm with my wife at a restaurant or you know checking out a counter like they won't even talk to me they'll just like look at my wife and be, what does he want type of thing.

I'm like, hey, I'm still a little person. I can talk. I'm not brain dead, right? So it's small things like that that you just still treat them like people, like whole people, because it takes a lot more effort to even go outside into the real world again. A lot of people will deal with, you know, image issues or, you know, it's just physically tougher to, you know,

unpack your wheelchair, get in the car, then repack it, then get out, right? And, you know, just kind of noticing that and just kind of asking for help before just like offering it. A lot of times I'll just feel somebody like behind me pushing my wheelchair i'm like holy crap who the hell are you right like yeah things like that that are just like small things

that i know that it's just because of the lack of experience and education that is happening it's not people being mean right people are not just inherently like that but those are i think sort of the few things that um you know just to be a little bit more aware about. Yeah. Well, hats off to you. I would have, don't know how I would have reacted, but you just took it on, kept running the businesses, started two businesses since then. So hats off to you. And what's the outlook look like long-term? So, I mean, spinal cord injuries, especially things

that affect your nervous system are still largely unsolved. The nerves are something that either don't regrow at all or regrow very, very slowly. And I think there are a lot of promising technologies out there. You know, people are, you know elon musk right he's building narrow link that's the most high profile example of it but a lot of people are building things from exoskeletons that can help you move like an iron man suit to um you know sort of these sort of like um neurostimulators which really act as bridges because if you think of your spinal cord as like a highway right it's it's like, a highway is broken right now, there's a there's a gap in the road. So you got to build a bridge around it, if if the bridge isn't, if the highway is not going to repair itself, right. So a lot of promising studies on

implants that can be put into, you know, people with my sort of injury, to kind of help them relearn those neural pathways. So I think in the next five to 10 years, we'll have some more commercial applications for it. A lot of this stuff where we started to see really exciting results are still in the clinical stage. And, you know, it's only been able to impact, you know, a few people's lives really positively to this stage. And what are your thoughts? Have we read, thank God you're in this world versus 20 years ago or even 10 years ago, right? Like is the world making progress in terms of handicap accessible and all

that, especially in California, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think even, yeah. In the U S it's,

it's really great because we have the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act. Yeah. That doesn't really exist anywhere else. I found that, found that out the hard way, you know, I've been traveling outside of the country and realize that like, wow, right. There's either, you know, the infrastructure was just built so long ago that it can't, you know, be accessible or it would be really hard to be accessible, or there's just no sort of, uh, advocacy for that type of stuff. So, uh, in the U S it's definitely

a lot greater. Um, and then in other countries, I think it's, there's still a ways to go. All right. We're going to finish up with our, what would you invest in bit? So I had two thoughts on this either. What would you invest in just solely focused on wine? Or I like that you're in some venture and do you do some hedge funds and whatnot as well? I have not been LPs in any sort of hedge funds before. Got it.

All right. So what would you prefer? What would you invest in broadly in the whole world or just on the wine side? We can do both. We'll take both. All right. So we'll just jump into it. So you've got $1,000. Where are you putting it? If it was just $1,000, I think I would put into very liquid stuff, right? Cause I'm assuming I might need it. So probably mostly, mostly stocks are crypto right now. Got it. So you're not a, you're not a crazy crypto, you're not like thousand all Ethereum.

All in, all in on the next crypto kitty. Right. Put on a lottery ticket. I like this. We'll do assets first, then we'll circle back to it. So now you go up to a hundred K. What are you looking at there? A hundred K.

I definitely would want some like passive income stuff too. So maybe that's like 10 to 20% of the portfolio, whether it be real estate or some sort of loan. Then that can kind of have like a base for me to just be able to like invest more on. And then I, I might start diversifying a little bit more. I think with 100,000, definitely would want to put maybe 2% to 5% into wine, something long-term that

I won't be taking out for a while, and then put the rest, given that I am pretty young, I'm 27, into those things that would be able to earn higher growth, like still stocks and crypto. Robert Leonardus Okay okay on to a million oh million all right um i think i would go five to ten percent long term so wine um i would go about 20 to 30 crypto and then um i would definitely buy or have more sort of like passive income opportunities i think that you know whether it it be like buying a business that can get me passive yield or more into the sort of, you know, rental property space, something like that can just like almost subsidize a lot of my daily living costs.

So I don't really need to focus on that and then rest into equities. Do you view yield farming as yield in that regard, or is it still crypto and has all the crypto risk? Yeah, that is all the crypto risk. Cause like, you know, it could be one day you're getting, you know, 700%, the next day all the liquidity is gone and you're stuck with the bag. Right. So that's something that I think requires a much more active eye. And just for me, like I have done that before for a few months and sure, it made great returns, but it also took a toll on my health, just like being able to check that so frequently. So I think at this stage in my life, I wouldn't want to do that.

It's just too hands on for me. And now a hundred million. A hundred million. Then we're done. All right. I mean, hope to be able to get to this point one day. So you're on your way. Yeah. I think a lot of it would be around like wealth preservation at this point, right? It's about, you know, what things can I invest in that are long term for the next generation of my kids, things that would be able to yield tax benefits. And

I really don't need the rest of it that much. So putting the rest in the things that I can just donate, donor advised funds and things like that, I think that would be the bulk of it. Got it. So the risk profile would come way down. Yeah, it really would. Um, which is crazy, right?

When you see these guys who write, go from five to 50 billion or Elon Musk gets cashed out on Stripe and says, all right, I'm going to do these things, right? They've just have a screw of like, I'm going all in to get the next billion. Yeah.

The next billion. Um, all right, now we're now onto the wine. So thousand dollars wine. What am I looking at? going all in to get the next billion. Yeah. The next billion. All right. Now we're now onto the wine. So thousand dollars wine. What am I looking at? Yeah.

A thousand dollars. I think, you know, there's really no point in diversifying at that point. You just want to have a concentrated portfolio. So I would just look at a region that I believe in say right now, I definitely believe in Napa Valley just because of all the shortages we've been seeing and then champagne. So probably just like two nice bottles, $500 each. say right now i definitely believe in napa valley just because of all the shortages we've been seeing and then champagne so probably just like two nice bottles five hundred dollars each and

how does how does it work we could ask this earlier if i have a thousand dollars can i get like fractional ownership of things or no or you get the entire bottle yeah you get the entire bottle so we don't offer fractional shares got it that's another idea we're going to do derivatives options fractional shares yeah um all for more liquidity in the market that'll help yeah um all right 100k for my wine yeah that's um you know we've a lot of folks like this so i would say about um 30 into bordeaux which is i would say like your equivalent of like blue chip, you know, large cap stocks, the very stable region that has a pretty, pretty low volatility return profile. And then I would go another 30% into Burgundy, even though it is more stable. The return profile is much higher. Last two years, it's been around around 20 annualized um and it's much smaller quantities

so about 30k into burgundy and then with the rest of the 40k it'd be pretty diversified it'd be like you know 10 to 20 into champagne 10 to 20 into tuscany and then napa so those would be like the five main areas that i would invest in. And champagne is part of the wine portfolio. Yeah, we would. Cause it's still ages, right. It's still produced the same way.

And yeah, still made from grapes at the end of the day. Right. And the million. Million dollar portfolio. I wouldn't really do it too differently from the hundred K, except for there are just different bottles at different price points that would be really not feasible for someone with 100K.

There's a few bottles, even champagne bottles or burgundy bottles that are over $10,000 a bottle. I wouldn't do a 10K bottle in a 100K portfolio, but at a million, you could be able to reach pretty much any bottle of wine. So we would put some of those more like unicorn high price bottles in there because even though they are much more expensive, like the demand for those are, you know, they get traded every day on the secondary. And now a hundred million, too much?

No, not too much. I mean, not too much. We're managing that already. So that's something that we think that. For a single client or across the board? Yeah. If you want to be my a hundred million dollar client, I'll gladly take that order. But, but yeah, I think, I think, I don't think it'd be very different than the million dollar strategy, but I'd also go in the futures, right? So going into buying up large quantities of harvest that we do believe in, assuming this client also has a longer term trajectory. So buying a lot more

futures, that'll set you up because you're pretty much just getting something that's at a guaranteed discount to when it releases. And what's that? I was going to abuse Elon Musk, but he probably doesn't even have a wine cellar, right? Oh, he has a pretty baller wine cellar. Okay. Like, so what's the value of his wine cellar? I don't think they've published that, but I think like he's got, you know, 6,000 to 8,000 bottles. That was like during probably like last time I think I heard about his wine cellar was back in

2018. So probably a lot bigger now. Right. Right. But what's the, any idea on the value of that? Probably like two to $3 million. So that's that's it so it's it'd be super odd for someone to have a seller worth tens of millions of dollars yeah very like if it's if it's like the number of bottles would be yeah you've got to be like really into wine right or or you're managing you know other people's money right so yeah if you're a private collector with over five million you're probably in like the top like five percent of collectors worldwide got it um brothers for example i think they have like a 10 million dollar wine seller who's that the coke brothers or one of the yeah yeah um awesome that's all i got you got any other thoughts? No, I really enjoyed this. This was fun.

So yeah, thank you. I'll come visit next time I'm in orange County then. All right. We will open bottle of wine. Yes, definitely. I know I screwed it up. I should have, when we were talking, been like, all right, send, send a bottle to me so we can have a bottle during the pod.

Good to know. We've got to do this at nighttime. This is a little too early for. Yeah, exactly. What I'll finish it with. Leave me with three things. Being the bud,

like leave me with three things I should know about wine that I should memorize and look to lock into memory for, for my wine future. For your wine future. I think. Or that I can impress my wife with. Yeah, that's a good one that's i think a more

practical one i think um when you're looking for wine pairings right i think that's something that a lot of people have um probably have a lot of anxiety with when you look looking at a wine list you're at dinner you're like someone asks like would you like any wine and you're like i have no clue how to even pronounce half of these yeah um i think always asking for the sommelier is is a good there's always a great educational experience because like a those people don't get called out that often and like b they love talking about wine so i think that's always just like a fun experience and like they can help you spot the gems in the wine list because every single wine list has a few wines that are not like marked up three four x right they've got a few sort of like fun gems in there so that would be

like just find the gem in the wine list ask the psalm they're always glad to tell you what they think is the best deal but don't you think don't they aren't they paid on what they sell don't they have a little bit of a incentive to steer you towards the highest profitable one yeah but i feel like you could tell between like a sales song and like yeah i was really just like trying to look out for you and be the be a good person a sales song yeah and it it used to be you never wanted to buy the cheapest one or the most expensive and you'd go in the middle but then someone was telling me all the restaurants know that now so they actually make that second and third choice the highest markup yeah so that's the thing is the markups are very inconsistent right and only the psalm will be able to know or unless you're you know a walking wine pricing database you don't really know what you're being marked up the most um i

think second is like when buying wine just for yourself right it's it is like just really being able to know uh key regions that you like right and based on the wines that you like if you want to be able to explore like just ask them like hey i really like this bottle last time i came to you like what else would you recommend a lot of times i can just help break you out of the funk of just buying the same wine again and again. And I think thirdly, like if you're, yeah, if you're going to be more serious with it, right, just explore your options on, you know, starting a cellar at home versus being able to have someone else manage it. Because if you ever do want to sell wine from your cellar at home, it's extremely difficult. Yeah. Like, how do I trust you didn't mess with this or is it temperature control yeah yeah so then like you get a huge huge discount

um on on what your real value of the wine is like auctions will probably value it like 50 to 70 percent lower than what it could actually sell for and you just kind of get ripped off whereas like we store everything in like bonded facilities they're fully temperature controlled climate control 24 7 monitored and that's sort of if you take a like a sports card reference that's like the psa tens of the world right those are the ones that are like pristine condition and everybody wants those because there's very little risk of that being turning out to be a bad wine um you're gonna do sports cars next no i think we'll sporto vest yeah yeah sport of us we are moving into whiskey though so both

japanese whiskey and and scotch so that's something that we've been rolling out off off our wait list we've got nearly 10,000 people on our waitlist already awesome all right looking forward to that now you're talking my language there you go um all right anthony this was fun uh we'll talk to you soon best of luck with everything thanks you've been listening to the derivative links from this episode will be in the episode description of this channel follow us on twitter at rM Alts and visit our website to read our blog or subscribe to our newsletter at rcmalts.com. If you liked our show, introduce a friend and show them how to subscribe. And be sure to leave comments. We'd love to hear from you. This podcast is provided

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