This Week in Startups - Reacting to Tether’s CNBC interview, Netflix earnings + Vincent’s Slava Rubin on alt assets | E1250

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

In the news segment, Jason reacts to the Tether CTO & General Counsel's interview on CNBC (2:22) and digs in to Netflix's latest earnings report (37:35). Then, Vincent founder Slava Rubin joins to discuss all things alternative assets (44:26), his work founding Indiegogo, Launch’s investment, trading cards (1:17:19) & more.

Okay, we got a great show for you today. Vincent Slava Rubin is on the program. You might remember him from his time at Indiegogo. He was also the co-founder of that. And he announces that their new round of funding is happening today. And guess who the lead investor is? It's your boy, J-Cal, yum, yum. If you don't know what Vincent is,

it's a very cool site that's aggregating all of the different alternative assets in the world, including sports, memorabilia, cars, real estate, startups, crypto, NFTs, all that good stuff. I'm really excited about the investment, and we go deep into why we led the multimillion dollar round in Vincent. But before we talk about that, I cover CNBC's exclusive interview with Tether's CTO and General Counsel, and this was a train wreck of an interview. They basically botched the whole interview.

Now things look even worse. And I get into detail about how this might be a giant fraud or a giant cover-up or maybe they're trying to clean it up. I hope, I hope that it's all on the up and up. but boy, did this interview make me more nervous than ever, and I have a recommendation for anybody who's in business with Tether that I'll get into. Also, we break down Netflix's Q2 earnings, which we're okay, but I'm starting to think that Netflix is not going to be the number one or number two player

in streaming content for much longer. Stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by Our crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR, CROWD.com slash twist. Brainbase. Protecting your idea should be simple. Built by founders, for founders, BrainBase File is a clean and automated trademark filing platform that gives anyone the ability to protect their idea. File now for just 160.

$39 at Brainbase.com slash twist by using code twist. And Pipe. SaaS companies, this is for you. Pipe helps you unlock your recurring revenue as upfront capital. Sign up in minutes and start trading on Pipe for free for 12 months at pipe.com slash twist. Okay, first up, Tether's CTO and general counsel who agreed to be on this program and then decided they wouldn't come on this program, joined CNBC's Deirdrabosa. You know her from Tech Check, formerly known as Squawk Alley, a show I'm on every two or three weeks.

She got the interview with them. Congratulations on that. And it didn't disappoint. She's the one always interrupts and grills me on the show. Something we're working on. I know a bunch of you complain that we were interrupting each other too much on CNBC. So she asked first about tethers very low U.S. dollar. reserves. If you don't know what tether is, it's a stable coin, we've been talking about it here on the program.

You can do a YouTube Twitter search for the hashtag Tether or Tether investigation, and you can follow up on it, or you can look at our previous episodes. If you scroll through your player, you'll see us talking about Tether. And Tether has very low U.S. dollar reserves. They originally started supposedly having one to one, and then they moved off of that one-to-one promise, and now they have very little U.S. dollar reserves and a large amount of commercial paper. And so here is Deidre asking about that. This is a two-minute clip. I'm going to let it play through,

and then we'll talk about it on the other side. We don't disclose our commercial partners. So that is quite important. We want to, given our portfolio composition in commercial papers, we believe that is quite important to respect the privacy of the banking partners that we work with. Okay, I'm going to pause right there. you can tell Pollo is not making eye contact with the camera, and they're talking about how these partners in the commercial paper space want privacy.

I actually don't buy that. I think that was just misdirection on his part, and it didn't add up for me. Let's listen to the rest of his answer. Also, you spoke about trust and the fact that volume is not a proxy for trust. but when an asset is not trusted and Tether is trusted, but when an asset is not trusted, it gets sold at any price, and yet Tether holds perfectly the $1 price on all the crypto exchanges.

So I believe that it's important to underline how the broader community trusts us, so I wouldn't rely on, you know, you. That's fair, but isn't that trust a little bit, You have major people regulators such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen talking about the risks of stablecoin. You've got another Fed President Rosengren talking about the dangers of tether. So is this not an opportunity to come on? I'm not going to ask for names who exactly is in your reserves of commercial paper. But could you tell us a little bit more information?

For example, is any commercial paper held in Chinese companies? Do you want to take this one? Yeah, absolutely. Deirdreau, our portfolio contains international commercial paper. As you noted from our public disclosures, it is overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly rated A2 or better. And we think that's the key thing here. And we think that transparency with the market and how the market has spoken and decided here is what's really important. And what's important for your viewers to understand.

With respect to Secretary Yellen and regulation, we believe we are pioneers in this industry, which is all very new. Regulations, rules, laws are being made by the day. We are leaders in transparency and in getting information to the community and to our stakeholders, demonstrating that our issue tokens, our issued tokens are fully backed and reserved, and we want to preserve that position. We are not just keeping up with rules, but we are helping to shape them. and we're helping law enforcement and regulators globally. So this is a really great example of misdirection. They keep getting asked about this commercial paper and is it Chinese paper?

Why do people keep asking about that? Why do they keep saying they don't want to disclose it? And why do they keep steering the conversation from the commercial paper to the market is voting for us? Why would anybody buy Tether if it was a scam? This would be the equivalent of Bernie Madoff saying, why would all these famous people give me their money if it was a scam? Right?

That would be like Verano saying, why would I have all these famous people on my board of directors if it was a scam? Now, we don't know that tether's a scam, but we get from this interview, and great job, Deirdre, we get from this interview that they don't want to talk about the commercial paper. That leads me to want to know exactly what's in that commercial paper. And anybody who is going to be partners with them should look at this red flag of how they keep misdirecting and saying, listen, we're leaders in transparency.

One of the ways, if you were a fraud, to get people off the scent of the fraud is to say, how could this possibly be a fraud if all of these people are using it? Okay, that's number one. And we don't know that tell us a fraud, but I do think that they're withholding information on commercial paper for a reason. And I don't think it's the privacy of the people whose commercial paper they own. plenty of other people own commercial paper, plenty of other people share what that commercial paper is.

And when they keep going to China and he says, we own international, that's another really interesting way of reframing the argument and saying, yeah, we own international. He doesn't want to say China because he knows China is a market that is opaque. That's my reading on this. And the more they move the discussion off of the commercial paper, I think the more people who are tethered partners or users of the product,

should take into account that maybe there's a reason why they don't want to talk about it and they're misdirecting everybody. Additionally, him saying we're leaders in transparency is a way of reframing the argument by saying, hey, we're the leaders in this. Not only are we not guilty of being opaque, we're the leaders in transparency. We work with regulators all over the world. It's such a generic statement that you're not going to be able to pin them down. If they were the leaders in transparency, they would say, we have 14% China paper, 16% Canadian

paper, 18% German paper, and here are what those assets are. They would be absolutely giving that information if they were leaders in transparency. Then Deirdre follows up and asks to define the commercial paper. And she says, Chinese commercial paper is viewed a lot differently than Canadian commercial paper. So let's listen to his answer to that. As, as Paolo mentioned, we are, we guard our counterparty's relationships with great discretion. We have a lot of sensitive information inside our companies as, as retail facing entrepreneurs. And we believe we've given sufficient transparency into that. And again, the market has spoken. We're the most popular stable coin with an excess of $62 billion

worth of tethers issued and outstanding in the marketplace. Look at how quickly he redirected the conversation from the nature of their commercial paper to, hey, listen, we're the most popular. The market voted for us, therefore it cannot be a fraud. There's nothing to see over here.

Now, is it possible that he's trolling all of us and their paper is amazing? I guess. But, you know, when I saw the Theranos thing come apart or anybody watched the Bernie Madoff thing come apart with his fraud, they really redirected and attacked the critics and just move the conversation from, hey, whatever you're looking to get clarity on, let's forget about that and let's talk about something else. As retail-facing entrepreneurs, what does that mean? Did you hear him say that?

As retail-facing entrepreneurs, retail-facing would be consumers and entrepreneurs, people who build businesses, we value, and it makes no sense. You know, this posturing and this positioning that the market has voted for us is, I think, something I don't buy. Later on in the interview, Tether's General Counsel, Stuart Hoagner was asked about the attestations over audits, and here was his answer. This is another thing that people are very confused about. Releasing a pie chart is not the same as giving us the details as to what Tether owns. And so let's hear his answer. So the attestations are part of assurance services offered by independent accountants.

Audits are another form of assurance services, Deirdre. For now, we are providing those quarterly attestations, those assurance attestations attestations showing that Tether is in fact fully backed and reserved. We are working towards getting financial audits, which by the way, no one else in the stable coin sector has done yet. We are seeing who will get there first, but we are in process. We are getting that done. Audit services have not been widely available inside the crypto economy as a whole.

Everyone is still learning about this, but we are working towards getting those audits now. And in the meantime, we are providing the assurance attestation. So if they are the leaders in transparency, why can't they just have an audit? It doesn't make any sense. And you notice this like vague language, we're working towards it. the industry is working towards it, just get the audit. I mean, if it's not rocket signs here, folks,

you open your books up, you have an auditor, do they audit your books? So they're falling back to the attestation, which is somebody looks at a brief snapshot in time. At this moment, do you have these assets and do you say you have these assets? But is anybody seen the commercial paper?

Has anybody seen those documents? I don't think so. And that's why people are demanding an audit here. I think what's going to happen is they're going to quickly run into regulation at Tether and Circle and other places where they just say, here's the new rules for stable coins. You have to give us every week, every day, every month, whatever it is, audits from a legitimate auditor, not a Cayman Islands or an offshore auditor, Bahamas, whatever, just somebody who's

actually known here who has a license and could go to jail in the United States if they don't do the audit properly. Nobody has done it yet. It's a pretty crazy deflection there, I think. Nobody has done it yet doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. And if you have $62 billion in people's money and stable coins, like, why wouldn't you do it? And this is what I always get to.

If everything's on the up and up, people tend to just say, here's the goods, right? If it was a poker game and you've got the best hand, you turn over your cards as quick as possible, you say, here's the best hand. You're not going to delay. You ever been in a poker game where somebody doesn't want to turn their cards over at the end?

and people are like, oh, no, you have to turn yours over first. It's like, just turn your cards over. Like, let's see. Open kimono. Show us what you got. If you've got the goods, you would show us. If you don't have the goods, you wouldn't show us, is the general rule of them. You'd have to ask, what is the other circumstance in which they wouldn't tell us?

Hey, it's time for another R crowd deal of the week. Right now, you can join our crowd's investment in Ripple. According to the deal memo, Ripple is an established innovator in the rapidly growing multi-billion dollar dairy alternative market. Ripple offers alternatives to milk, protein shakes creamer, and more with proprietary tech that lowers impurities for superior taste and nutrition. You can get in early on Ripple and other unique opportunities by signing up for a free account at Rcrowd.com slash twist.

By the way, did you know R crowd investors were able to get in on some of the best IPOs of 2019 and 2020? They benefited from companies IPOing like Beyond Meat and Lemonade. and some of Our Crowd's companies have been acquired by buyers like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, Oracle, and Uber. With Our Crowd, accredited investors can invest easily and directly in startups early before they IPO or get bought. As you review deals, you have access to Our Crowd's investor relation team, who you can talk to directly on the phone about your personal investment goals. Again, the Our Crowd account is free. Just go to O-U-R-C-O-W-D.com slash twist.

Once again, our crowd.com slash twist and get that account for free right now. And then she asks about working with a Cayman Island-based accounting firm, More Cayman, instead of a U.S.-based one. And it's very interesting. They mention that Moore Cayman is part of a network of, you know, tens of thousands of auditors. Not that they have tens of thousands of orders. They're part of a network. So that's very weasily language.

if there's something there or not, but that would be something to look into. Let's listen to his answer about their selection of an accounting firm, Moore Cayman, instead of a U.S.-based one. For your attestation, you're using a Cayman Island accountant, Moore Cayman. And if you're aiming to build trust, though, and there are all of these questions swirling, why not use an American firm? We don't think that trust is necessarily vested in one country or another, Deirdre. more Cayman has a tremendous amount of experience in this sector, and they have been excellent partners for us. Furthermore, they are part of More global, which is one of the 10 largest accounting networks in the world with more than 30,000 employees worldwide. So we think they offer a highly

trusted and an authoritative view on the accounting field and on our attestations. At the same time, they weren't your first pick. You guys were working. the New York-based accountant, Friedman LLP. What happened there? Why did you move away from them? In your statement, you said that given the excruciatingly detailed procedures, Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame.

A lot has changed in a few years. That information is a few years old, Deidre. You're exactly right. You've hit it square in terms of the fact that we had a relationship with Friedman LLP. And in fact, Friedman offered a consulting report for us some time ago. But again, that's quite dated information. We're happy now with our relationship with more Cayman by extension, more global. And we are getting the attests and the market is getting the information and the transparency that it needs to make good, efficient decisions about what to hold.

So we're happy to continue along that path. Okay, wow. What a word salad. a ton of deflection there. He keeps referring, he doesn't want us to call it more Cayman because he knows Cayman Island is going to indicate

maybe there's something Fugese going on here, maybe something shady. So he keeps trying to say they're more global, they're more global, and that they're part of this network, which to me,

I think means more Cayman is tiny, and then they have partners and they're part of some network that shares work with other people, but it's not the same company. That's kind of what I'm getting. And then he keeps saying, I thought this was very interesting in a persuasive kind of way.

He's really trying to misdirect here by saying trust is not limited to the United States. So he's trying to say, listen, you guys are being really U.S. centric and maybe you're anti-global. That's a very weird kind of framing here. It's almost like he's trying to get you to say you're xenophobic by being only that trust isn't limited to just the United States. And then he says, oh, they've been great partners. Oh, they're great. They're great partners. And, you know, that we get to, they're a part of this global thing.

That to me is a lot of deflection and trying to get you off the scent of what's going on here. That's my interpretation of it. I could be wrong, right? I'm just asking questions as a kind of quasi-journalist myself, right? I was a journalist for a long time and this show does acts of journalism. So Deidre's trying to get some very basic information here. Why are you not just using a U.S. a firm? And he's saying, well, trust isn't limited to the United States.

and they've been great partners to us. So why would you even ask that question from MoreGlob's website? More Cayman description. Founded in 2005, our auto practice is a specialist service provider to the financial industries financial services industry. In 2015, our auto practice became an independent member of the More Global Network and rebranded to More Cayman. So this is like a shell game that's kind of confusing.

This is the big crazy question. Where is the CEO of Tether? Why is the CEO of Tether, which the New York attorney, General, banned from working with New York clients, which only has 3% of their reserves in cash and has all this commercial paper. That's international, but they won't save it's China. And they're very happy with their Cayman Island accounting firm and they don't need a US one because you are incorrect.

That trust is limited to the United States. It just happens to be. We have one of the most regulated markets and a pretty great justice system. But, okay, let's put that aside. Where the heck is the CEO, J.L. Vanderveld. And where is the CFO? Where are they? And here comes the answer.

Look, as Paolo said, J.L. and Giancarlo work very hard as part of the team behind the scenes. They don't need the limelight. It is really just a matter of style, Theodore. They don't need the limelight, but what about the people that they're trying to serve? What if they want to hear from them? Well, they do hear from them. As Paolo mentioned, our customers have a line straight to the top. They interface and deal with J.L. and Jean-Carlo all the time. And they make a point of referencing that when they talk to the media. I think Sam put that in when he talked to the Financial Times.

So they're talking to the people that matter. Not say you don't matter. We are happy to be here. And as the head of as that, how is the CTO, it gives media interferes all the time. We are a tech company fundamentally. And the chief technology officer is front and center. And we're both delighted to be here and talk to you. All right.

Again, word salad, buzzword pingo. we're delighted to talk to you. The CTO, it's a tech-driven company. I mean, Paulo is, you know, no offense, completely not compelling here. He looks like a deer in headlamps. And sure, maybe he's just not used to talking on camera or being into this level of scrutiny. But I found him incredibly uncompelling and not inspiring in terms of trust. And how on earth is the CEO and the CFO MIA for this company?

And Tether customers interface with the CEO? okay, if you're a tethered customer and you're interfacing with the CEO and the CFO all the time, please contact us. Please contact CNBC. Please contact anybody and talk about if you're okay with their commercial paper, if you're okay with their audit. What is going on here? A CEO and a CFO are MIA. And they're sending, you know, the CTO and their general counsel to go on CNBC.

But don't look over here. It has nothing to do with the EFO. attorney general settlement. The commercial paper's not an issue. Our offshore accountants are not an issue. Our MIA senior executives are not an issue. All that matters is trust is not limited to the United States and the market has voted the end. You do not need to see behind the curtain. And we are leaders. We're leaders. We're leaders in trust. We're leaders in regulation. Okie dokey. I mean, And this did not help their cause. This was a terrible decision to go on CNBC because all they did was stir up even more fear

and uncertainty and doubt about their holdings. Are they doing this on purpose? Is this like a grand troll? Why are they doing this? Is this to get attention? It seems to me like this is a really bad decision. If I was the CEO of this company, I would fire these two guys. You made us look terrible on CNBC.

And of course, Deidre, who I think did a solid job here with the interview. I'll give her kudos. She got them to come on. She, I think she played that she was not going to be very hardcore with them. And then she kind of kept at it and kept pounding on this issue of the commercial paper, which I think is the right move. Because if there is a problem here and who knows if there is, but the Attorney General of New York banned them from working with New Yorkers.

So there's something was. wrong here and the transparency is pretty bad and they're using Cayman Islands. It all feels very weird. And, you know, she sums it up at the end. And I have to say, I'm a little disappointed. We didn't get any answers to one of the biggest questions that are out there. And that is just the makeup of the commercial paper. I'll ask you one more time. Is there any more information, whether that be what kind of international commercial paper? Is there any Chinese commercial paper? and are you willing to give us any of that? I guess that that was sort of my biggest question,

a lot of folks' biggest question coming to this. And how do you feel if we don't answer that in terms of trust going forward, as we talked about, volume does not necessarily equal trust? And you do have competitors that are issuing more coins and perhaps seem more volume than Tether, just because you guys have led the way and grown to a $62 billion market cap doesn't mean it'll always be that way, right? Well, that's true.

Things may change as they may. move forward, but we have been leaders in transparency. We were the first to disclose anything about our reserves. So we're happy to see others following in our footsteps. And we will look for more ways to be transparent and more ways to push information out to our users, to our stakeholders to the public as we go forward. But as Paolo mentioned, I think Tether deserves a lot of credit for bringing this market forward. Wow. We are leaders in transparency. We were the first to disclose stuff. Just no answer. She gave them another window to say if they had Chinese paper. She's giving them every chance and they won't take it. Just say, we own, yes, 16% Chinese or a significant or a small amount,

or we own, you know, majority in the EU and the US. There's so many ways that you could give a little more information here. So I'm guessing that this group of individuals is incompetent and they created a service that was really great for, I think the service was really great for people who were operating in the shadows of regulation. And so they became very big. And maybe they played fast and loose with the rules as the New York Attorney General, you know, clearly found in their settlement. So I think it's a group of people who probably have low morals, ethics, and trust.

They played fast and loose. Now the noose is tightening. The spotlight's on them. my guess, I'm just taking a crazy guess here, is that they're in the process of trying to clean things up. Just like they probably had to clean things up with the New York Attorney General, they've probably got so many bad pieces of paper and questionable practices that there could be a grand cleanup going on here,

and they're just trying to buy time to clean things up, which is typical in frauds. I'm not saying tethers are fraud, but I do think that when the New York Attorney General bans you, your CEO is missing and you won't answer simple questions from CNBC, something's up. That's what my signaling says. Every startup needs to ensure they own their intellectual property or IP for short. And that starts with filing your trademarks.

I have two trademarks that are very, let's call it, generic, everyday words, launch and inside. People create confusing products all the time. And trademarks are critically important. so that I can maintain control of my brand. If you don't know where to start, look no further than BrainBase File. It's a clean, simple, and automated trademark filing platform that gives anyone the ability to protect their best ideas. There is no need to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers to file your trademark for you.

Now, you can do everything for yourself in a few easy steps. BrainBase File gives you goods and services recommendations using AI, so you can avoid back and forth with the U.S. patent and trademark office and you can eliminate all that human error that can happen. They offer full transparency into the USPTO process, again, patented trademark office, with step-by-step notifications and real-time updates on your trademarks approval. You want to know where your trademark is in the process, and they do a great job of keeping you up to date on that.

Let's be honest, no one likes dealing with trademarks, but BrainBase file makes it easy. So head to BrainBase.com slash twist and enter the code twist at checkout to file your first trademark now for just $169. That's a 15% discount. Thanks to my friends at Brainbase for giving us that discount. Brainbase.com slash twist.

And remember to use the offer code twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. I hope I'm wrong. I hope they turn over their cards and it's four aces. They got a royal flush. You know, I hope it's all perfect and clean and all their paper is just perfect high grade.

But, you know, there is very few explanations other than this is a fraud. This is a cleanup process that I can think of. Now, I'm not the smartest guy in the room, you know, and maybe I'm just too dumb to see it. Maybe my brain is too limited to understand why the CEO and CFO are missing, why they won't say what the commercial paper is, why the New York Attorney General got it wrong and banned them from, you know, doing business in New York. Maybe everybody's got it wrong. Maybe everybody's wrong and they just figured it all out. But let's just end on this. One bonus clip.

Deirdre asks about how nobody in the commercial space that talks with CNBC has ever heard of Tether. She mentions Jim Kramer, who's got his hook set to this as well. You know, one of my colleagues, Jim Kramer, he knows lots of major players in the commercial paper industry. And, you know, lots of other folks say that they ask whether they're doing business with you guys, especially because you're now, one of the top 10 commercial paper holders in the world. How is it, though, that none of the people we talk to as CNBC have heard of you guys? Well, Deirdre, I can't speak to how, to what someone else knows or doesn't know or sees or isn't seeing. Well, how does understand that?

Are you guys buying through an intermediary? Right. We maintain, that's exactly right. We maintain accounts in a number of banks, financial institutions. They request quotes for commercial paper offerings from their banks who in turn request those from brokers and other counterparties, both direct from issuers and on secondary markets. So I can't speak to, I'd be speculating if I talk about how people see that or aren't seeing that in the CP markets. But that is how we are operating. That's how we're buying our commercial paper, which again is rated overwhelmingly A2 or better. Okay. Good moment, Deirdre, I'll give you credit for that one. Obviously, when you ask him to help us understand, my belief is that somebody who's on the up and up would help you understand. He did not help you understand.

He said, like, I can't tell you what other people think. If you were a top 10 holder of commercial paper in the world and nobody has heard of you and you're buying through intermediaries, what? This seems very Fugazi. This seems not on the up and up. Your CEO and CFO are MIA. They don't like the limelight. Okay, maybe in isolation we could buy that.

You know, Larry and Sergey don't do a lot of press anymore, but they did in the beginning. But Sundar is out there. Okay, but maybe. Okay, maybe we'll give you that. Okay, you won't do an audit. Okay, now it's adding up, but you'll do an attestation. But you're only doing the attestation because you lost a case with the New York Attorney General and you settled.

And you're banned from doing any kind of trading with New Yorkers? Okay, wait, those three things seem really weird. Okay, you're one of the top ten owners of commercial paper and nobody knows what it is. And you won't tell us if it's in China, why not? What's wrong with owning Chinese commercial paper? Are you afraid that once you say you have Chinese commercial paper, that maybe this holding unravels? Are you trying to keep this all together so that you can clean stuff up? That's where my mind goes.

And again, it's pure speculation. But if things are tight, then people, flip over their cards and say, here it is, show us. And until they do a proper audit, until we know these answers, until their CEO goes on CNBC or talks to the New York Times or financial times, economists, whatever, I would stay as far away from this as possible. If you are in the crypto space, if you are looking for a business partner, why on earth, would anybody pick a business partner who will not answer these basic questions and the CEO and the CFO are missing, why on earth are any of you in the crypto space partnering with this company?

Are you crazy? Why would you risk your money? Working with a company that will not answer basic questions. It makes me wonder if the people who are willing to work with them are willing to work with them because they won't answer the basic questions. And who would be willing to work with somebody who's always. offshore, who won't do an audit, whose CEO and CFO or MIA,

and who's banned in York and the Attorney General's got their hooks into them, and they won't answer basic questions about where their paper exists. Who would want a partner like that? Who would want a partner? I wonder. Could it be money launderers want a partner like that? Could it be dark money? Could it be terrorists?

Could it be drug traffickers? Could it be authoritarian governments? Who would want a business partner who is not on the up-and-up? the question I'm asking. So if you have a choice between using other stable coins or fiat currency or other technologies, why would you use tether? And I think that might be why tether is going downhill now. I think that this is the end for tether. I think this is going to be a slow unraveling until it's a very quick unraveling. And if my friend or a family member own tether, I would say get out of that as quick as possible and replace it with another technology.

have no horse in this race. I don't own I don't own any stable coins. I own a little bit of Bitcoin, a little bit of Doge, which I bought the Doge as a joke. And my wife bought the Bitcoin because she's brilliant. And she heard me talking about it constantly and all of her friends were talking about it. And she bought it for under $100, I think. So we made a ton of money on Bitcoin, even at $30,000. So the case continues. And if you have any information, please let us know. I still invite the CEO, CFO, anybody from Tether, any Tether partners on this program to talk about what we just talked about,

talk about this interview and keep the conversation moving forward. And Jeremy Allaire, who is going public with Circle, which has USDC, and 60% of it is cash or cash equivalence. It looks like he's really moving quickly to be the anti-tether. And I think the slam dunk for Jeremy, if you're listening, or somebody can send this to Jeremy Allaire, who I am not friends with, but I've known over three companies

because we're both in the industry for 30 years, I guess. Hey, Jeremy, if you want to be baller and you want to dunk on these guys, why don't you just share what your commercial paper is? Show us your commercial paper. What a great move that would be by you. You've already got these guys on the ropes because you've got them, what, 20X on cash, right?

They have 3%, you have 60. So you've already dunking on them that way. why not start turning over your commercial paper? Give us the breakdown of where it is by region, who does your buying of commercial paper. You can beat them just by doing this, Jeremy. Okay, and only 9% of Circle is in commercial paper. 9% versus 40% of Tether.

That's pretty crazy when you think about that disparity. And then Circle is 60% cash in cash equivalence, and Tether was 3%. I mean, two and a half, three percent. I mean, we're looking at these numbers and, you know, it's kind of funky. So let's keep telling this story. Let's hope that Tether has done everything perfectly. And that when they do their audit, it's just magically unicorns and sunshine and everything's great.

I doubt it, but let's hope for that. I want to welcome Harry Hurst. You know him as the co-CEO and co-founder of the company Pipe. If you've been on Twitter over the past year, you've probably heard me and my besties, a number of which got their beaks wet talking about all the excitement around pipe and their fundraising and the product they're bringing to market. I thought I'd have Harry come on and explain it to y'all. Harry, welcome to the program.

Thank you, Jason. What kind of vetting do you do on the companies and what size company is it best for? So the beauty of being a trading platform is that we can serve as companies of all shapes and sizes. You know, we've got companies that are just getting started out, have 100,000 in ARR, all the way up to publicly traded companies on the platform with hundreds of millions in ARR. and every company in between. So there's a different offering in terms of trading limit size and bid price for each company's stage. In terms of vetting, the way that we work with the companies, that when you sign up for pipe,

you connect your bank account, your accounting system, and your payment processor. And within 24 hours, the next business morning, we're going to give you your trading limit, the amount that you're able to trade at any one time, and the bid price, the amount of cents on the dollar that the capital markets are willing to pay for the annualized value of your revenue streams. All right. Thanks again, Harry for coming on the pod and explaining that with pipe.com, there is no debt, no loans, and most importantly to me, as an angel investor, no dilution. If you sign up at pipe.com slash twist, they'll eliminate all your trading fees for one full year.

What a generous offer. Pipe.com slash twist so you can save up to tens of thousands of dollars. Happy piping, everybody. All right, Netflix has announced their earnings for Q2 and their growth seems to be stalling. Yes, Netflix had a slightly disappointing earnings reveal for Q2. on Tuesday. They barely beat revenue expectations of 7.34 billion versus the 7.32 that was expected. And they're out a $29 billion run rate for 2021. It's super extraordinary. Their market cap is about 10 times that $225 billion. And here's the bad news. They only added 1.5 million news

subscribers globally, which is their lowest number of net news subscribers since 2017. And this chart from CNBC basically tells the story. And they attributed this to the choppiness of COVID on streaming. So maybe. Or they're reaching their natural audience or there's headwinds from other services that have a more compelling offering. And there are so many other folks now in the game. Netflix was one of one. And now they're one of a dozen. So Netflix lost. And this is where it gets a little crazy. They lost 430,000 paid subscribers in the U.S. and Canada, bringing its total to just under 74 million, which is extraordinary, to be clear. They have 209 million worldwide paid subscribers, but Disney Plus just passed 100 million subs in May. And I've been telling folks for a long

time that these will be 250 million, 500 million subscribers services, which is mind-blowing. but I believe Disney is going to blow past Netflix. And Netflix sock is down almost 4% today. I don't think Netflix goes away. I think they're spending so heavily on content. They've got such a great archive they're building. I think they'll be one of the top two or three players, of course. And I would not discount, read Hastings and his hunger to be a competitor here.

But HBO Max, Disney, and Hulu are really compelling. And I have to tell you, in our household, Netflix is not the first service we open. For me, it's kind of HBO Max and Hulu are the ones I open most often. And then I fall back to Disney and Netflix. But that's just my personal. But the kids obviously are starting with Disney Plus. And so I think this is a lot of headwinds against Netflix.

And I don't know that they will be the number one or number two player now. I think they might wind up being the third player, second or third. and I think, you know, HBO has a good shot at this. And obviously, Hulu is doing a lot of great originals. And Disney is doing really great. And there's other competitors on the horizon. So Netflix has hit critical mass in North America clearly. So maybe there's some more tricks up their sleeves.

They've confirmed that they're going into gaming, which I think is brilliant. I'll be totally honest. We have a subscription, a family subscription to Apple Arcade. And it's fantastic for the kids. And it's super affordable. and you can share it with your whole family. So I think adding casual gaming into Netflix would be great for the offering

because maybe some kids will want to watch the animation or the unscripted, and parents might want the original films and the more adult-themed series and dramas. But gaming would make it pretty sticky because you could open up the Netflix gaming app and if you pay 12 bucks or 15 bucks a month for Netflix and you get some games with it

and you find one game or two games a year you like, man, that would reduce churn. So I think games are very sticky, and this could be a really interesting approach. Netflix poach, Facebook's vice president of augmented in virtual reality, Mike Verdu, according to CNBC, that's kind of interesting as well.

So I wonder if they have visions of maybe playing in that space as well. Their only goal is to make the core offering better, according to Reed Hastings. And Netflix believes they're big different. biggest differentiator in gaming is their large library of IP. Here's the quote, we are in the business of making these amazing worlds and great storylines and incredible characters,

and we know the fans of those stories want to go deeper, and they will engage further, said Netflix C.O.O. Greg Peters. So, they have some interesting IP, of course, Stranger Things, Umbrella Academy, Black Mirror, Narcos, Queens Gambit, Mindhunter. So are they going to make a Queens Gambit, you know, chess.com competitor? Are they going to make a Black Mirror, you know,

know, world or mind hunter, you know, serial killer world. Who knows? But they're also dipping their toe into podcasting. So I think it's interesting that they're starting to think about their IP in the way Disney does. Someday, maybe we'll all go to Netflix land and we'll get to go on the Narcos ride. Who knows? But I do think, you know, competitions is coming to the space. I think Disney wins hands down. And I think Disney's got to figure out ESPN, Hulu, and this offering and make some sort of cleaner bundle. I know they like Disney to, you know, be just family fair. And then Hulu, I guess, could have things like the Hands May Tale, which is, I don't know why I watch this show because it's so disturbing and I, you know, it's so graphic

and demented in terms of the sadistic nature of the program. But it also is so compelling when you're thinking about how things could go wrong in society. It's just, it's like one of these dystopian movies I can't not watch like The Walking Dead and its prime. But, but, you know, But yeah, I wonder if gaming is the right answer here, if that makes it stickier. I do think that Netflix has to start thinking like Disney more. And that could mean owning some rights to live television, getting more into podcasting. I think these media companies, if you're going to have Spotify get into podcasting, then maybe Netflix has to be in podcasting and Apple is big in podcasting, Apple's big in gaming,

Apple's big now. They're trying to not big. They're trying to get into original content. Amazon has some gaming assets, obviously, and Amazon has their own streaming services. So maybe this is all coming together, and there's going to just be entertainment conglomerates that do video games, narrative content, and podcasting as well. So maybe this is all going to be under one umbrella, which is really interesting. Okay, let me know what you think of the new format where we do some news up top, and then we do the interview,

basically made the show twice as long in some days. And so if you really like this, I've enjoyed doing it. Got a great research team here, Justin, Rachel, and Nick and Charles on the ones and the two's editing the show to get it out for you really quick. Let us know what you think. At TWA Startups is our Twitter handle. And if you like the show, do us a favor. Go ahead and subscribe on YouTube and put that like alert bell on or whatever it is. So you know when the new episode comes in, post a comment, maybe write a review.

Do any of that things if you like the show to help us move up the rankings and spread the word about what we're doing. If you have any information on Tether that you want to share, you can always DM me. I'm taking a Twitter break, but I do check my DMs from time to time. And next up is my interview with Slava Rubin. I'm super excited to be the lead investor in Vincent. You're going to love this interview and you're going to love this company, I think. Okay, everybody, next up on the program is Slava Rubin. He is the co-founder of Vincent, which you can go check out at with vincent.com.

This is a company in the alternative assets. space. What are alternative assets? Very simply, if you think about what's not alternative, it's real estate, your home, equities and stocks, right? Those are two words for the same thing. Stocks that you buy, you own some Disney. Maybe you own some bonds, municipal bonds or treasuries. Maybe you have some cash and some people have commodities. So if you go on wealth front and you set your perfect portfolio on a scale of one to ten, full disclosure, we are shareholders in that company, you would have your traditional, your traditional assets. Alternative assets are a category, which is everything else that could go up in value.

That could include art. You might own a Picasso or a print of a Picasso that's going up. You might own an old Corvette from 1965 with split windows and all kinds of great features. And it's appreciating in value. Baseball cards, crypto certainly falls into this. and NFTs. All kinds of alternative assets have emerged over time. And people have become very interested in these. Why have people become interested in alternative assets? Because they might appreciate at a pace, which is greater than the other assets you have. And because there are more

and more portals, websites, offerings to allow you to have access to them. In fact, one of those is the syndicate.com, my angel syndicate, which gives you access not to public equities, but to private company equities. Now, these equities tend to be, these alternative assets tend to be a little more complex, and there are different reasons why you might invest in them. You might invest in them because you get passion and joy from owning that Corvette or the first, you know, comic book of the X-Man, whatever it happens to be. You might get joy from buying NFTs. And art certainly falls into that category. Another reason might be that they are correlated differently than public market assets or other assets in your portfolio. There are so many different types that have

emerged and so many different portals that somebody had to make sense of all this. And I have been thinking, somebody will at some point make sense of this. And when Slava Rubin, who I met at his previous gig, Indieg Go-go, which I did not invest in, which has turned out to be a mistake, even though I met him back in the day and probably did have an opportunity to invest when I was just starting my angel career. When he told me that he was doing Vincent and he explained to me what it was, I was like, I've been waiting for somebody to do this. Since that happened, I said, hey, I love to invest. He said, we're raising around. I said, I'd love to lead the next round. And sure enough, my alternative asset platform, the syndicate.com, had the greatest interest in Vincent in this

startup than any other startup we've ever syndicated. And I think up until that, point, we had 175 or so deals that we syndicated. In fact, they had $6.3 million in interest, which was the most ever. We were oversubscribed by 3x. It's never happened before. 292 investors were involved, and we in fact spent, we spun up two SVPs, one for the accredited investors, one for the qualified purchasers. Long way of saying, we're very excited today to have Slavra on the program to announce the $6 million round that, in fact, I'm leading and I'm joining the board of Vincent. Welcome to the program. Slavlo. Yeah, thank you for having me. That was a great introduction. I'm trying to do a little introduction to these sometimes to kind of start us on

second base. You and I met, I think long ago at South by Southwest, you were doing Indigo. Go, I was just starting to be an angel investor, and I kind of didn't understand exactly what you were doing. Because at the time, you weren't, correct me if I'm wrong, Indiegogo was not for equity. It was not equity crowdfunding. It was just back a project and maybe get a T-shirt or one of the early versions of the product, correct? That's exactly right. It was very early Indiegogo, very early crowdfunding. We met a long time ago probably, I would say a decade, if not more than a decade.

Maybe 2009, 2008, something. That could feel right. Indiegogo launched early 2008. We had traded a couple notes via email. We were both a South Buy. And, you know, I already thought. that you had interesting perspective and a broad distribution platform in terms of voice. I thought could be very helpful as part of what Indigo was trying to accomplish.

Equity crowdfunding was a hope, a twinkle in our eye. The Jobs Act had not passed yet. And here we are now. Fast forward. All term investments are becoming very, very much a reality with all of these, you know, fragmented platforms across the entire market. How has Indigo been doing? I know Kickstarter never, ever joined the equity crowdfunding space, correct?

They stayed pure to you're just pre-ordering products, right? That's correct. So Kickstarter stayed just in the perks model. Obviously, you have the GoFundMees of the world who have gone more cause and donation model. You have the Patrions who have carved out a nice space in the creator economy. For Indiegogo, we really then focused on the entrepreneur with the perks and really donation model. really helping them from pre-orders inception of idea all the way through validation to manufacturing their product or people are actually selling their products as an alternative

distribution channel to other options. Indigo is doing quite well. We're profitable, very sustainable, creating cash, which is crazy. I like that. Decade two, correcting generating cash. It's a fascinating concept. Indigo has been around for 13 years, so we're geriatric, but we're sustainable and still figuring out what we want to be when we grow up and helping many entrepreneurs that we distributed billions of dollars around the world. And you mentioned in there that regulations have changed, and that did change the entire ecosystem.

And over the last decade, IndigoGoGo Kickstarter, Seed Invest, Republic, AngelList, the Syndicate. com, all of these things have heightened interest in alternative assets and in risk-taking to back new ideas in the world. In terms of the legal framework, what's important that changed here in the United States? And then my second piece, before we get into your approach with Vincent, is just to set the stage here, what has changed? And in your mind, what still needs to evolve here in the United States with investing in alternative assets and startups?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of questions there. just to try to back up, you know, 1933, the securities acts come out, we really create the accredited investor, creates kind of the IPO markets of people needing to create their products to be public before grandma and, you know, random folks are allowed to invest. There was a lot of fraud that was happening through public solicitation. Someone would knock on your door and say, I could sell you some oil in Oklahoma, and they would believe them, but there weren't actually giving the money to anybody

and they weren't investing with it. They were just running away. So the folks just decided a long time ago back in 33 in the time that you need to be sophisticated and you need to be accredited and they created these thresholds, $250,000 of income or net worth over a million dollars today outside of your primary home. They really limited who can have access to these private investments. And a lot of this changed come the Jobs Act. So when we launched Indiegogo, it was still the same. You know, as a matter of fact, a lot of people don't know this. V-1 of Indiegogo back when we came up the idea of 2006 was we want to create a small

marketplace of investments, a mini New York Stock Exchange. And we just thought it was a good idea. And then we ran up, oh, yeah, probably other people thought it was a good idea, but there's regulations that just don't allow it. So there was actually a meta campaign, which is a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to crowdfund the legal submission to try to change the laws around crowdfunding. So that was submitted. And then fast forward, 2012, the Jobs Act was passed.

And the Jobs Act was a huge change. In 2012, there was Reggae Plus, which moved from $5 million to a $50 million cap. You went from the Facebook rule of only allowing 500 investors on your cap table before you have to go public to 2000. And really the big one, there was an IPO ramp on rule that passed, which allows you to have your financials be a little bit more hidden before you have to go public to 2,000. before you have to go public, kind of how Groupon used to get, you know, pulled apart and everything. Now you're allowed to hide a little bit more before you go public. But the rule that really was big for us was the equity crowdfunding one,

where you were actually able to now as an unaccredited investor be a part of these investment rounds. And only up to a million bucks, which was a big deal because before it was zero. And fast forward, it actually went live. It took four years for the SEC and FINRA to approve all these things and for the portals to be approved and to figure out how to do it. And then in 2016, finally these things went live in America. And I had Indiegogo spearheaded the effort to actually create one of these origination platforms, these equity crowdfunding origination platforms at our company.

We did 150 deals, 97% of them funded. And we saw what it was like to try to originate these deals and help people get investments. Yeah. And general, it was a multi-part act. And for people who don't understand what the reason this act, was created was we were very concerned after the great recession that, you know, there wouldn't be enough economic activity. So that crisis then caused Obama to sign into law, this bipartisan act called the Jobs Act, which was Jump Start Startup's Act. And it also included many different

ideas. One of them was general solicitation, which we're now seeing that people can go and tweet, I'm raising money for my rolling fund. I'm raising money for my startup and be able to raise with limits. It was originally a million dollar limit from non-accredit investors, and it just went to $5 million as well. And we had two people on the program who benefited from that. Arlen, Hamilton, with backstage capital, raised $5 million in like under two weeks to fund backstage capital

and promised a percentage of revenue share and carry share, and then Sahel, LaVinia, I hope I'm pronouncing it's Sahel, sorry, with Gumroad raised $5 million in 24 hours. I think both of those occurred on Republic. And so it's really amazing how this has changed. It was slow, and then obviously now it's had a big impact. Let's talk about Vincent. Tell us the origin story of Vincent. Yeah, so it goes back to Indiegogo.

We had that experience with origination. We decided at the Indigo level to really focus. on the path to profitability, really stick to our core, so we decided to shut down the equity crowdfunding platform. But then I was still thinking about it as to what's possible. There were a lot of different platforms that were in the market that were reaching out to me to potentially become an investor, an advisor, board member, etc., with my experience from Indigo, and I was thinking to myself, I'm not so excited to create another origination platform.

You know, there's already hundreds that are out there. it's not a massively scalable business. It's a scalable business, but it's not a massively scalable business because it's not a pure software play. And I was trying to think of what is possible to help more people to get access and democratize these opportunities. So I was speaking with my peers from Indigo, they're helping build my equity crowdfunding platform. And we decided, you know, what if we weren't just trying to compete with all these other platforms? What if we were trying to help all these other platforms and aggregate this market, which right now is, still very fragmented and still lacks a lot of trust in education. And very few people are out

there, very few companies are out there saying, you know what? I objectively, I'm just trying to help you the investor to navigate what is best for you of how to add alternatives to your portfolio. And that was missing. And often people are saying, you know, I have an extra, you know, $100. I just got an extra $10,000 bonus. I happen to be sitting on too much cash or over allocated already into my public equities. How can I diversify a little bit further? The family offices and the ultra high net worth individuals, they already know that you need to be diversified into these higher alpha assets that are higher risk, but can have massive return, which you obviously personally know very well with your investments. And this hasn't really been democratized.

The normal person has done a great job of learning that they should have cash, their savings accounts, their checking accounts, some Roth IRA, the retirement accounts, get into a nice mix of 6040 equities bonds, but it's still new to them to get into alternatives. And we want to be come to that on ramp across the entire market. So like you mentioned, go ahead. Oh, I was going to say, and I know you have Masterworks, which we've had the founder on this podcast before. You've got Raleigh Road.

We've had the founder on the podcast before. And funders club, other platforms. What is the business model there? Because it is, in one way, a search engine. You showed me that early on. And I was like, well, this is fantastic. I can see all the assets. And there is an educational component.

But, you know, a search engine. an educational component for this is not a business in and of itself. I don't see much of a business model there. What is the business of Vincent going to be? And for people who don't know, you can go to with vincent.com to go ahead and start searching all these different assets that are on there. And that is a delightful experience. I will say that.

But what, and it does keep you up to date and sort of familiarize yourself with that. But that's not a giant business. What is the big business idea here in terms of business model? Yeah, I mean, and I'll answer that question in just, So we have over 100,000 investors that have already used it, over a million searches, over 75 platforms that we're already partnered with. And we have something that's unique that no one else has is we know what people are looking at across the various assets.

Very rarely can you compare? Are you interested in collectibles versus crypto? And we have those percentages. And it's very interesting to use that because we're able to create an experience by having our design that people can go from one asset to another. in seconds, as opposed to logging into a new tab, having to do AML, KYC, and figuring this all out. So the average user is looking at 25 deals across seven platforms in three asset classes in a matter of minutes.

And that experience was not possible before Vincent. And what we believe is if we can still become the trusted partner to the investors, there's a lot of monetization opportunities. The obvious ones are potentially a SaaS play off of the supply side, which is the originators, being able to get paid per click or being able to get paid per lead for the originators, there's an investor pro model that it's possible. There's a lot of investors are asking us to do more and provide more feedback and more diligence and more support. And the holy grail is that we're able to leverage the data that we're getting to create potentially

some proprietary products, which we're navigating all of that. We also already have some large banks that are reaching out to us that want to have access to our alternative investment data. Their PWM teams or their high network teams are trying to source unique deals for their clients or they want to be able to see this quickly or understand the trends. And we have that trends and we have access to the data quickly at our platform. So we're young. We just launched on November 1st. So I wouldn't say the monetization is our number one thing.

I would call this year a building year. But if we're able to become the destination of where you think about alts, so start with Vincent, we think there's a lot of opportunities of how to monetize. I think just normalizing the data is also like a really interesting component of this. you will, you can sort, hey, I want real estate deals. Hey, I want deals that are high alpha or, you know, a lower return profile or potential return profile. You can sort them by what the minimum investment is, right?

Because some of the minimums are $500. Other ones are $50,000. So depending on what your goals are, and, you know, you may want to see different types of offering. So in a way, it's kind of like Zillow or Redfin where if you're searching, you say, you know, I really need four bedrooms because I got three. kids and I need a home office and I don't even look at anything under four bedrooms. And there's some normalization that occurs here. I wonder about the community aspect to this. Have you thought

about people discussing deals and, you know, handicapping them, et cetera? I know on AngelList, when I started, we had message boards on each of the deals, but over time, they removed those. And the back channel I got was it was just when, you know, most startups fail. So when they fail, there was just a ton of bickering and back and forth and finger pointing. And, you know, I think Naval and the team at Angelus was just like, it's easier to not have community disgusting stuff. And in fact, we created a Slack channel for our top members of our syndicate. And it's been a little bit of a process to think, do we want people actually coveting

and debating and, you know, complaining about a founder who doesn't send updates, etc. And it's been a lot of work for me to keep it in a positive direction. So I kind of understand why there weren't comments, etc. But what are your thoughts on that and the community building aspect? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, our product queue and our product prioritization process is very active right now. We don't even have a share button yet where you can even share the deal. So we're very early in our features.

Obviously, you know, MVP, trying to get it out quickly and get feedback. Definitely people are asking for those opportunities to, communicate. And I think what you've mentioned in terms of the confection is something you need to manage against and figure out how you want to, you know, get ahead of it. So yes, we've talked about discords or slacks or, you know, able to have discussions right there. We've also been having some of that dialogue on Twitter or do we push that into other forums. You know, that's still TBD. I can tell you that there definitely is a market of folks that want to learn. They want to talk to each other. They want to share with each other because we're seeing that even with our Pulse newsletter,

the simplicity of pulling together the most interesting 15 articles in all, across all of all and sending it out for free once a week is something that we're getting love notes back about, oh, this is so helpful, you saved me three hours of research that I just wouldn't want to have to do that work or I would do it. And the fact that you did this for me in one email in a second is great. And back what you were saying about the house, the four bedrooms, a perfect example of that is, you know, trading cards are very hot right now. And whether you're going to Rally, whether you're going to collectible,

whether you're going to Otis, whether you're going to Dibs, whether you're going to these other platforms, you know, you kind of want to know what are all my option. And it's not as if Rally is going to tell you what's on Otis. And Otis is not going to tell you what's on collectible. But you know that you're looking for a certain price deal, but you want to see all of them. You can just put that search in Vincent, save it, and we just send it to you.

You know, and there you have it. So that's kind of like, you know, your real estate broker might tell you about certain homes, but they might leave out a couple because, oh, they're getting, you know, they're reppping this home and they're selling it. They get the double commission, whatever it is. They don't want competition. And, you know, then you go to one of these sites and you find other homes that were, I noticed on Zillow or one of the sites, they're like other homes for sale. And those were homes that were for sale by owner. But they kind of like put them in a little ghetto. Like you have to click twice to get to them. And you're right. Like, people do not want the competition. It's pretty clear. What about rating the deals and rating the platforms? This has been something that is, I know my LPs are always asking me, hey, what's your performance?

Tell me about the previous deals and how they did. How do I compare to other Angelist syndicates? You know, obviously we left Angelist to create our own at the syndicate.com. But, you know, people do want to know, what is the performance of these? and then maybe even rating the process. For example, with our syndicate, we require monthly updates from the founders and we make sure the founders are willing

to take questions directly from syndicate members, i.e. you agreed to that as well. Bit of a pain in the neck, potentially, was what we were told. It turns out most founders found it delightful. But this idea of rating the quality of the platforms, are you going to do that? Or is that another thing that could be incredibly divisive?

Yeah, I mean, again, this is right in the product queue. And the tricky part about that is, yes, we're getting a lot of requests and questions. So part of it is people know that the platform is a good platform, but they also appreciate who the founders are. So they're almost asking us like, oh, would you invest into this? Like should I invest in this? Yeah. And the balancing act there is outside of those bits and bytes of the actual software. where we have to make sure we're navigating, you know, the SEC rules around advisory and what

are we allowed to say and what are we not allowed to say? And is this an accredited deal that we're marketing potentially to folks or is this an undercredit where anybody can have access to it? So we definitely want to find our solution there. There's the potential for a kind of Vincent Pro offering. Yes. Where you'll be able to sign up for a certain amount of money a month that you will get access to more proprietary diligence where you'll be able to.

You'll have analysts be giving you feedback per deal, per vertical, what's hot, where's it trending. And that's the sort of thing that we'll know once you're behind the wall, we'll know you signed up. And, you know, we just need to make sure we're doing it correctly from a regulatory perspective. But again, off the foundation of the search engine and off the foundation of having objective information and not having to push our own stuff is a really unique place in the market. And that's why we think we could be the on-ramp for alternatives. That, to me, the good housekeeping seal of approval, the consumer reports, the wirecutter, you know, best pick.

If you were to tell me, hey, listen, we looked at all the major baseball cards, all the major collectible cars, artwork, whatever it is. And this is the one that we're most interested in or we think is the most, you know, the most well-constructed deal. I'm trying to think about a way to phrase it. that doesn't guarantee returns, but we think this is the highest quality offering that we saw this month in art. It's this Masterworks, Spasquiat, and here's why we came to that conclusion.

Exactly. And here's what they said. That to me seems like something well worth paying for. And that exists in the real world. You have people who are analysts who say, here's our price target for Uber and Amazon and Disney, and here's how we came to that conclusion. And obviously, things can change, but, you know, I don't think the, yeah. I love that you just brought up the Disney.

example. So that's exactly right. The market for research and the analysts on the public markets is huge. And all the time you have CNBC where they're talking about, hey, earnings just came out. What does it mean? What do we do? Is it buy, sell, hold, yada, yada, yada. There is no real research market that's established at scale in the alternative space. And we think there's a huge opportunity. Now, again, can it live by itself? It can live by itself. But if we become the the place that has all the data, has all the information, and is objectively able to compare and contrast, we think that could be really interesting to combo that as the next layer. It's also extremely time-consuming. You have to look at all these deals, sign up, etc.

If I wanted to put a quarter million dollars to work and my net worth was 10 million and it wanted to put 2.5% of it into, you know, alternatives or let's say 10% a million, would it not make sense for me to just give Vincent the million bucks and say, hey, you manage, since you're already using analysts to pick, why don't you create a mutual fund of, you know, the 10 assets each month you pick, then you got 120 assets a year, over two years, 240. I give you a million, you put 4K on average into each of those 250. Would that not be a potential huge win for family offices, et cetera, who don't want to do this work? I mean, you're literally hitting each question.

is our product queue. I mean, it's all a matter of like wearing the product queue. You know, this is something that we've had an excessive amount of demand coming in because it doesn't exist on our website. So nowhere on our website does it say give Vincent money, we'll put it to work for you. And we've been just getting a bunch of feedback saying, hey, this platform is done really nicely. I feel much more empowered, but I just don't know I want to do all the work. Like, can I give it to you? Because I don't know who to give it to. And yeah, I mean, that is definitely something to think about because where can you get a diversified basket across alts?

Nowhere. Now where doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. So, I mean, you would have to find who do you give money to for NFTs? Who do you give money to for venture? Who do you give money to for real estate? Who do you give money to for debt? Who do you give money to for collectibles?

Who do you give money to for crypto? And a lot of the good funds or a lot of good opportunities have expensive minimums. And are you even going to be able to get into those minimums? So I think there is a really exciting opportunity on exactly what you're talking about. and, you know, we're taking one step at a time, but that's something we're looking at. Well, I mean, think about it with our relationship. If you said to me, hey, you're going to, we want to have access, we want a guaranteed allotment of 50K in the next 50 deals you do at the syndicate.com or the 100 deals you do.

We're willing to put $5 million to work. We obviously want to be able to pick and choose, but generally speaking, it's going to be, you know, we're betting on you as a fund manager as that. and then you go to, you know, rally road and to, you know, something like, you know, Masterworks, and you do the same exact thing. Now you could have startups art collectibles, you know, and some family office could give you 10 million and say, hey, you do it. And there is a corollary to this.

There are something called funds of funds, which are people who raise two or three billion dollars like Horsley Bridge or there's other people in the industry, Green Spring, which is an LP and my fund. They just got bought. Just got bought by a bigger firm. And they will look at new fund managers, which I am one of under 10 years running funds would be new fund managers. And they just make bets because who has the time to go find all these new fund managers,

all these new platforms and do it? It seems like that might be your best business model. Yeah. Definitely seems interesting. Obviously, there's the wealth fronts and the betterments. And then more recently you see the Titans. and others, you're really seeing this democratization of access into these various types of deals or more the empowerment of the investor to take more ownership over it.

And this decade, I really do think, will be the decade of Alts. We started seeing this with crypto and trading cards and obviously all the angel investing and everything's so hot right now. Even if the market doesn't stay this hot, I still think at the end of this decade in 2030, we're going to see a massive secular move into alts by everybody. So you've raised a series A, we're part of it. What does the next year look like for you? Who do you have to hire?

What are the next couple of steps here? And if somebody was looking to come work with you, what positions are open? Yeah. So we raised $6 million, which was a little bit more than we expected to raise just because demand was so high. Really excited. We got incredible investors. Joe Lonsdale came in and then we got great partners coming in as well like very silver or

who founded second market. That's right. And then Grayscale and several of the CEOs from our platforms, Meltem or Enzahil both came in who are both awesome influencers out in the market. And for us, we have a lot of building to do. We want to make sure the product's working and really the things that you mentioned, I mean, we've got to navigate that product here. And as part of that, we need to hire engineers. We need more designers. We need to really own data. And, you know, if you want to be

a consumer-facing business, you need to be good at marketing and customer acquisition. And I think we're already doing a great job, which is how we've gotten here, but we need to add more to those muscles. For me, I think just, I'm putting aside the fact that, you know, I led this round, you know, with the syndicate.com, we're a bit too big right now. We have 8,000 members. But you've got 100,000 accredited members. We're kind of not adding too many more people because we add to 300 a month and we're oversubscribed constantly, which leads to frustration. So I'm trying to have more quality deals on the platform.

Putting that aside, there was a time where I would have paid to add a thousand accredited investors to our list. And I think I probably would have paid 50 bucks or 100 bucks for each of them. How do you think about that? If a platform came to you and said, hey, we would like. like to get more accredited investors to join our platform or at least, you know, come to a webinar, can I feature my last deal? In other words, if I was doing Vincent, it's kind of circular here, but if I previously had done, let's pick another company, com.com. Could I say, hey, can I put my

com.com deal on the top level or Jason Calacanus is doing a deal in the meditation space? Clicker to unlock or, and then I got that person, you know, to join my platform. I could just pay you 50 bucks per lead? Is that a possible business model? Yeah, I mean, people are already paying us per lead. Oh, it exists already. That's great. Yeah, platforms are already paying us per lead. This is still an experimentation. So the value there is quite strong. We also get the benefit of being able to fish with wide nets. And what I mean by that is most of these platforms have to be very homogeneous with who they're going after because they have homogeneous supply. So they have to find the demand specifically for what they want.

And if it's not specifically that, it's hard for them to cross sell because they usually don't have those other offerings to cross sell them against. For us, when we're acquiring customers, we can bring them in through any vertical and be able to just move them over. So sometimes there's a really nice arbitrage opportunity. And in the early days, we're really providing great deals to our supply side in terms of potential for paper clicked, et cetera. But yeah, I mean, right now we're still doing a lot of it organically.

We really believe in an SEO play for the long term and also a content play for education. We're putting out blogs out every other day. We're putting out, you know, social. We're doing our proprietary newsletter. We're coming out with our own proprietary monthly report where we show what are the trends in alts. How does it compare? Is demand for crypto going up or down?

Is demand for collectibles going up or down? How does it compare in terms of the trends of crypto versus R? And believe it or not, it's really interesting. So when we just launched, crypto was pretty small as an example in November. And not surprisingly, because in retrospect, this is obvious. But in the early part of this year, crypto, digital assets, NFTs took off. And you saw a little bit of a drop in the real estate and the debts because they were boring, lower yield, no interest coming through.

And now all of a sudden, in the last couple months, where you see the interest rate starting to go up, things becoming a little riskier with crypto, obviously the balloon kind of deflating a little bit out of the 60,000. Bitcoin going from 60 to 30. Exactly. Going down to 30. All of a sudden, you see the real estate and the debt number, research is starting to go up. Interesting.

The venture numbers that are still quite high. So not a surprise, Angel investing is hot as ever. You know, Robin Hood's about to go IPO. If they don't go IPO today, this, you know, announces. And it's, you know, we can show those trends, right? So it's just fascinating. That's fascinating. Yes.

You could tell people, hey, listen, crypto. and NFTs, they were hot, now it's real estate, and people can infer what they want from it. Is there a category that you personally, putting aside your role as, you know, the founder here, or the co-founder of Vincent, is there a category that you think personally is super fascinating and has some great ability to accelerate or that you, if you were talking to a close family member or friend and they said, hey, where should I think about, you know, spending some time? where would you tell them? If you were to,

would you tell them NFTs, we'd tell them real estate, would you tell them startups? Where would you point a close friend who said, I really only have the ability to focus on one thing? So,

first I just want to give a shout-out to my three co-founders. So Eric and Evan and Ross, who are awesome, and that's how we've gotten to this great product. You know, I'm biased. And first,

I would say that the way you should play alts is not pick one because I think that's too risky and too volatile. I would try to peanut butter across and try to get a little bit across everywhere, which is hard, but that's the way I would think about it. Now, if I was going to go into one, I've been collecting trading cards since I was a kid. So what got me into alts as it is today was not anything that I knew was an alt. It was just David Robinson rookie card from 1989 hoops. And next thing you know, I'm buying the old school Jordans and then the Oscar

a Robertson rookie, which is like one of my prized possessions, but I'm biased, but I really do think trading cards still have a huge opportunity because there's a lot of trends there. One, sports are only becoming bigger in terms of content. They're becoming much more of a business. You're starting to see the gambling, the fantasy, the trading cards, all becoming the sportspreneur. So more people trying to figure out how to make money off of sports. Plus, it's such proprietary content.

and people love being fans and the business model in more recent years, trading cards has done a great job of creating exclusive product. You know, in the 80s, you had this proliferation of cards, which really diluted the product. But now there's these exclusive contracts across the top player. And regularly, you're seeing the most expensive cards sold. Probably like the top 15 most expensive cards have all been sold in the last year and a half. Wow.

And even the most expensive contemporary card, I think, happened last week, which is the Steph Curry for like a little over $5 million. Bonkers, yeah. Yeah, yeah. For Steph Curry, one of one, one out of one population, but usually you talk about the old cards, the Mickey Manals, the Babe Bruce, the et cetera, is the expensive ones.

You know, it used to be that you hit a million dollars on a trading card. That was a lot. Now, five million is a lot. I wouldn't be surprised by the end of the year, if we're talking 10 million. And I think it's going to be like paintings. These exclusive trading cards, low populations,

it's going to be like art. You're just going to say, look at my piece of art, like you said, with Masterworks, which obviously art is an amazing category. I think NFTs can be huge, but massive uncertainty there. I'm super biased on trading cards. Yeah, so that's fascinating to me because now we're getting to the level where an individual can't afford to own one of these.

They must be owned in a fractional basis. And like Masterworks is saying, hey, listen, we know you can't afford a Picasso or a Basquiat or a Warhol, we'll buy it and we'll let you buy a share in it. So you could put $10,000 into it as opposed to $10 million or a million. That's where this is headed, right? Somebody's going to. Absolutely. And then where it's headed is because it's fractionalized, now you create the secondary

markets and now you've got liquidity. And instead of having to say, hey, I need to buy a Mickey Mantle, it's going to be hard to unload my $5 million for $7 million or $15 million. Well, you could actually just have this endless liquid market of exactly what's going to happen with Robin Hood, you know, in a few days or in a few weeks. and that becomes super interesting because now you have a lot more opportunity to exit and you can get a lot more people involved. In other words, you have Barry Silbert as an investor.

He created second market sold it to NASDAQ. A secondary market for these is another possibility for Vincent where people could be trading their percentage ownership in that Steph Curry card. If somebody put 100,000 into it, it's now worth 500,000. That person could say, hey, I'm going to put it up for sale in the classifieds on Vincent as opposed to, you know, the platform where it originated, you could have an open market for those. Right.

Well, to be clear, the platforms today are already starting to explore secondary. So the Otis is, the collectibles, the masterworks in art, the rallies, they're already all starting to explore secondaries. But again, we can aggregate all of this and help people see all of your options. And maybe the transaction isn't happening on our site, which is fine. but we're pushing to where your options are. And if there's two different Steph Currys on two different sites at two different prices, or nevertheless the same card, maybe trading at different prices,

it's nice to see that in one place. That's what I'm thinking of doing with my roadster. I have the 16th Roadster ever made by Tesla. And it's in my garage. I don't drive it. It's too valuable to drive. And I've been talking to Rowley Road. It's probably worth a quarter million dollars or something like that.

And I was like, you know what? I want to own it. I still want to own it. But I kind of think it would be fun for other people to own it. So I was like, well, maybe we'll put it up for 250K. I'll keep $125. I sell $125. What's that?

Like own 51%? Or whatever it is, $49, 50, 51, whatever it is. And then they can trade the other half. And then over time, if I want to sell my shares on Rally Road, I could or I could buy more shares in my own car. But I could get the car out of my garage and have somebody storing it properly. Not that I'm not storing it properly, but it's taking up space. And like at any point in time, the roof could collapse or somebody could drop a bowling ball on it

or something, earthquake, and I'd rather have them taking care of it for me. I think that's literally what just happened with the Babe Ruth card that just sold a few weeks ago, so sold like just under $6 million. They sold a portion of it on collectible, but the owner still owns it, but they sold a slice off. Yeah, and the owner's probably like, I don't want to have this in my house. Like somebody is going to, I mean, nobody's going to come to my house to rob the car. Unwise move, but, but you know,

certainly if you, if you had a $6 million dollar Babe Ruth card or a $10 million dollar LeBron card, it's quite possible somebody could hop your fence and want to rob your house for it. And then what do you, now all of a sudden you're running like a bank and you have to have a vault for your cards.

It's better those cards be in some vault that somebody else maintains, I think. Yeah, that literally just happened yesterday. So the All-Star game, they were highlighting some awesome stuff. So they created a little museum at the All-Star game. And one of the things they brought was a Mickey Mantle, one of the main, like the most prestigious Mickey Mantle cars that some people were saying is worth like $15 million because it's only like one of two population.

And it's like a perfect like mint whatever. And they literally came with one of those like rinkers, you know, bank trucks with six guards and all the nonsense. I mean, this is where this is headed. It's definitely where it's added. And gambling now is also becoming legalized here and wagering in the United States. state. So that's, I would think that's also driving the interest in sports. Absolutely. It's just another vector. Exactly. Really, these trends, I wish these trends happened

when I was a kid. I could have been monetizing off of this when I was, you know, younger. But the sportspreneur is not going away. It's really here to stay and only getting stronger. I wouldn't be surprised if more people get quote unquote jobs as sportspreneurs. Like, I'm just, I know sports. I could get a good job. And that will become more valuable every day. When we young, we knew sports, great. We got to talk trash about how our favorite team was doing great. Yeah, you can work in a sports collector store. You can work at a comic book store for minimum wage or less. Now you could literally work at Marvel writing the timeline for, you know, their 75th movie or 87 series. It's like literally our childhoods have, I guess since we're in charge

now, our childhoods have now become mainstreamed. We literally have every single character. in the Marvel universe is, and the Disney and the DC universe is being realized. I'm like, really, you guys are doing Teen Titans. Oh, you've got five different versions of Teen Titans. There's like a live action Teen Titans. There's like, there's four different comic book. There's four different animated Teen Titans. I'm like, what is it going to be a Teen Titans movie?

And they're like, oh, yeah, that's in the works. Now the Nintendo cartridges that, you know, you have to blow in to make sure they they worked when they went in are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's hilarious. I did see Alexis O'Hanian showing his cartridges with the plastic covers on them. And I was like, really? Okay, here, I guess that's where we are. Well, listen, it's great to invest in the company.

It's great to be in business together. I'm very excited about your future and delighted that we were able to participate in the round. And for people who are thinking of joining or maybe applying to work at Vincent, any place they can visit, a URL or an email? Just go to with vincent.com. They can see there. Or if anybody wants to send me an email, it's just Slava, my first name,

at with vincent.com. Happy to respond to any questions. SLAVAVA at with vincent.com. You got it. All right, Slava, congratulations on the raise today and announcing it here on this weekend startups and across a couple of other news outlets. Continued success.

And we'll see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye-bye.