We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP364: How to Invest in Alternative Assets w/ Michael Weisz

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. On today's episode, I sit down with Michael Wise, the founder and president of Yield Street, which is a platform that serves up offerings in alternative asset classes. In this episode, we cover why you should consider diversifying into alternative assets, how these investments have long been inaccessible for retail investors and how Yield Street is changing that, deep dives into legal, aviation, commercial, real estate, and much, much more. But be sure to stick around for the last piece where Michael breaks down how he grew Yield Street into a company with over 100 employees and his advice for aspiring

Starting point is 00:00:34 entrepreneurs. It is brilliant. This was an extremely educational conversation for me. I learned a ton and I think you will as well. So without further ado, please enjoy this discussion with Michael Wise. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Welcome to the Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerby, and today I am pleased to have with me Michael Wise from Yield Street. Welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me, Trey. I'm so excited to have you on the show because I just learned about Yield Street very recently, and it really caught my attention, mainly because I've had a real interest in alternative investments as of late, and I have noticed that it's very hard to source them. So before we get into all of that, I just want to take a moment and hear a little bit more about your journey, which seems to be mostly in finance, a lot in real estate and hedge funds and now this, which is obviously an entrepreneurial endeavor. So there's a lot, I'm sure, going on there. But just kind of what culminated in founding Yield Street for you. What drove you to create a platform focused solely on alternative assets?

Starting point is 00:02:01 That's a great question. So listen, I have a personal story as very much behind the founding of Yield Street. that I don't lose sight of it. I think it's important to you and say, I feel the same as for my co-founder, Melend, we really both went on this journey to build Yield Street because we felt that there was the same problem coming from our own experiences, right? And what it really comes down to is that access to and distribution of institutional quality alternatives is fundamentally broken. And the reason that was important to us is because we couldn't access them and our families and friends couldn't access the right investment portfolio. And so you can't get ahead in And so what we got really passionate about was, hey, if we could fractionalize access to

Starting point is 00:02:43 institutional quality investments, that we can help narrow the income and opportunity gap. What are those assets that you're speaking about? I think you got to really take a step back and you got to say, hey, what are you trying to achieve? Why is it important? What are the bigger tailwinds in the market that are sort of driving this idea? And I think that's really the right lens to look at what we do through. because as a business and as an early stage high growth business, we're rapidly evolving.

Starting point is 00:03:12 And so our conversation today can be different in six months or in a year if you don't understand what's really under the hood and what we're doing and why. So if you want, I'm happy to jump into a bigger story and it's not to sort of drive back in. Looks like you founded Yield Street back in 2014. So I'm kind of curious to hear about what the original idea was, how it's evolved since then. You said it kind of can change on a dime depending on the... time of day or week. So yeah, definitely give us as much detail on that as possible. So listen, let's do now, right? Why are we building Yule Street? Our mission is to help millions of

Starting point is 00:03:45 people get in a road to financial independence. And the reason we're doing that is because, like I just mentioned, the access to and distribution of all is broken. Why is that important? Like, what's really behind it? So let's look at a couple of things going on in the market. One, if you follow smart money, so you look at like endowments and pensions, et cetera, of, they have up to 60% of their allocation in ALTS. You look at retail investors, we're still at about 6%. And so, like, you need to look in the mirror and allow yourself to be vulnerable and say, hold up.

Starting point is 00:04:15 So you got smart money, paid the most, has the biggest pocket of cash, like smart people, targeting real returns, where are they going? Wait, they're moving this much of their portfolio into ALTS? Why? And wait, why am I not following them? And so that triggers an initial question that's really important. When you really understand it, there's two parts of the answer. One is why are they doing it?

Starting point is 00:04:35 And two, why can I? Why are they doing it? It's because the 60-40 model is broken. Bonds, debt yields are in the ground. You're not generating your fixed income allocation that our parents taught us to or that our school taught us to. Equities are highly volatile. It's a totally different experience.

Starting point is 00:04:50 There are less companies public. So that 60-40 model that we were used to isn't working. And so we need to modernize our portfolios. Smart money got there first. And it's time for us to really wake up and say like, hey, how do I get ahead? I'm living longer. I'm trying to have more of a better quality of life. Like, where does the rubber meet the road? How am I going to, how am I going to be able to generate enough income and growth to support that? Okay, so now I'm Michael. I'm ready to go in. I want to

Starting point is 00:05:15 follow the alt's movement. Okay, how do I get it? You couldn't, right? So there was structural limitations to accessing these investments. If you wanted to invest, say, in a partnership that, you know, was buying a $100 million piece of property or a company, like, where are you putting your $10,000 dollars like no one's taking us out for dinner for 10 grand and so the question became like how do we sell for this right like there's a much bigger thing going on here now looking from a different lens we're watching this massive shift a generational shift of wealth from baby boomers to the next generation and you have to question like do we behave the same way our parents do like do i want to go out golfing with a financial advisor like emphatically no like i'm not interested i don't want to do

Starting point is 00:06:00 So the experience that I want to have with my money and the investments that I want to be able to access are fundamentally different than what the industry has been doing for all too long. And so Yield Street's question that we started with in 2015 and that we ultimately want to solve for is what is that experience going to look like? How do we create the billionaire digital private bank experience and deliver that to the masses through technology? The first step is by helping you make money, is by driving value to your pocket.

Starting point is 00:06:29 So it's by saying, hey, the first leg we're going to focus on is the invest leg. Let's get the right investments. Let's get the right axles. Let's get into curated and institutional quality investments and bring them to millions of people and change the trajectory of their financial future. And that's sort of how we got to where we are in thinking through how you build that business. That sounds like quite an undertaking. So what was the first step for you? So that's a great conversation around like, hey, how do you take a dream and a vision and build a business, right? And it's about execution, it's about sort of allowing your mind on one side to think outside the system, outside your own limitations that you've created, to envision and imagine something huge, but then go back into your corner and say, okay, let's start to execute. And so how that started for us was in two sectors.

Starting point is 00:07:20 It was in real estate and it was in legal finance. And there were two areas that we knew we had expertise in, that we felt comfortable we could generate significant origination in volume in, and we could deliver strong returns and a total experience to the investors. And so that's where we started. Since then, we've distributed almost $2 billion of investments across asset classes like real estate, single family rentals. We bought the largest art finance business from Carlisle to fractionalize like art lending, shipping, legal finance,

Starting point is 00:07:50 consumer finance, small business financing. We took a theme on like rebuilding America coming out of COVID, like how do we support those small businesses and third party hedge funds

Starting point is 00:08:00 and private equity funds like hey, how do we access not just good investment opportunities but how do we access like the most coveted managers in the world? So when you look back now,

Starting point is 00:08:07 you can have a portfolio that's really healthy from a diversification perspective, return perspective, duration perspective, across the whole spectrum of alternative investments. Okay, so you came

Starting point is 00:08:18 from the, finance world, though. Was it as easy as, hey, I have this idea. I'm going to call up my buddy. He's going to give me 20 million bucks to get started? Or what was the origination like getting the business off the ground for you? Was it as easy as that? I would say it was probably the exact converse outcome, right? So yeah, it was definitely not easy. Nothing is. But I think that's the joy you take and the fun you take. I think the key is you got to keep your head buried and just focused on your goal. And then one day you wake up and you realize how hard you had to fight through it. And so I think that it's about building trust and credibility, both with your partners on the

Starting point is 00:08:52 origination side and your customers on the investor side. That's really at the essence of how you want to interact with any company. And even more so in an organization like Yield Street, that's driving, you know, how do I take dollars from your pocket to put into investments? And so what we needed to do was establish a level of trust with both sides of the house. And we had to be able to show that we're going to execute and that we had a force behind us and that we had a force behind us and that we're prepared to do it. I think that was one. Two is on the origination side of the business,

Starting point is 00:09:22 people wanted to say to make sure that, hey, these aren't like two pine and sky founders. They actually have a deep understanding of our needs, of our business, of the finance side, of the risk side of the investment side, and they're building this thing for the right reasons. And so I think that when you look back at our partnership with Melinda and I, my background is really all on the investment side,

Starting point is 00:09:40 and Malin's background is more on, hey, how do I use technology and data to solve huge problems? And so when you put the two of us together, it became a really, really powerful duo to go to both sides and say, we understand, we know we're doing it for the right reasons. But more importantly, like, here's exactly how we're going to get there. You kind of mentioned that your MVP, right, your minimum viable product was around real estate and legal. And the legal side, I'm really curious about. I saw this on your website, these offerings. Can you give us an example of what a deal like that in that space looks like?

Starting point is 00:10:14 So fun fact, that was one of the first people in the U.S. to really institutionally invest in litigation finance starting back in probably around 2009. I think it was like maybe three or four of us institutionally. We're out there. And so I have a long and passionate history in putting out nearly a billion dollars in litigation finance. There are different types of ways to invest in the legal industry. And I'll give you a couple of them high level. So one is there are contingency law firms, which essentially are law firms that take on cases. And the way they would get paid is based on the success that they have. So they can try a case for 10 years, a person got hit by a car and make no money until they get a settlement for a client. So that's number one. In those situations,

Starting point is 00:10:57 these people need to find a way to manage the cash flow of their law firms because otherwise they're going to run out of money if they take on too many cases and they can't manage that at different times. That's number one. Number two is the individual that that lawyer is representing. So if God forbid someone you know got hit by a car, he or she is out of work, they can't get paid, they can't function, et cetera, they need some cash flow. And so it's hard for them to go to a bank and borrow it because they don't have any assets. And most people would say, well, hey, your lawsuit's not like an asset. How do we value it? Like we're not going to lend against you. So that's the second. The third is a company. So a company says, my partner and I have

Starting point is 00:11:40 a dispute and, you know, I think this lawsuit's worth $50 million. I need to borrow five to pay my lawyers. I need a borrowed to live. I need a bar to grow my business, whatever the case is. Essentially, do you want to help me bring my case forward and ultimately get to that resolution? And the fourth is settlements or judgments or sort of different types of situations like that where you could think about, you know, Visa MasterCard cases were big in the news for a while.

Starting point is 00:12:07 There were all these different cases all around the world where merchant. Orchants wanted to get some money back from Mesa and MasterCard. So there's an opportunity to buy those claims at scale. There's many different ways that you could participate in sort of litigation risk that has really evolved into being an asset class ended of its own. And because in some ways it's new and there's less capital chasing it than there is maybe in real estate, the return profiles continue to be really interesting. And so that's what we brought to market for the first time really to retail investors.

Starting point is 00:12:38 give us an idea of what those returns look like. And I'm curious about the product itself. Are you packaging together a lot of these cases into one vehicle? Or is it case by case that someone like me would be funding that? Each product that we went through poses in many ways a different level of risk. So let's go with like the highest risk. The one that we spoke about where there's like an individual who got hurt and needs to borrow money. Like the outcome there is very binary. It's one person. It's one case. And so the way we have historically offered those is by aggregating like hundreds of those examples into one fund. And so like the average funding, and don't quote me, because I haven't looked at it in a while, but I think the average funding was like $47, $4,800 to a person in that

Starting point is 00:13:20 situation. And so you'll have five, six, seven hundred of those opportunities in a particular fund. And so your risk of loss is really attractive because you're highly diversified. And historically, I think by now you probably have almost 20 years of data since this business started that you could really understand how you're going to perform. So that's like a portfolio. The other side of the risk is like settled case financing. So a person settles their case and the city of New York has 90 days to pay them from the settlement. And so at that point, you're really simply taking New York City credit risk for 90 days. The person, it's pre holidays. They want to get, you know, they settle their big case for 10 million. They want to get 2 million now for whatever reasons. So yeah, you would invest in a

Starting point is 00:14:03 single offering there with a pretty low risk, probably make around, you know, 8, 9%, and you'd feel really good about it. In between is like the single cases, the company cases, where you want to put together like a, you know, a portfolio of maybe 10, 20 claims from different companies so that you have some diversification, but you still have some upside. Maybe you want to try to achieve high teens, low 20s type of returns on a portfolio basis. And so you'll see those different types of offerings available. You'll see a legal finance fund. You'll see a consumer fund. You'll see a single case settled fund. And so there's different types of products that we curate to help people access a nice, healthy portfolio across the litigation spectrum. Is Yield Street underwriting these

Starting point is 00:14:42 in-house, or how are you evaluating these deals? So that's a great question. For us across the board, the way we think about Yield Street is not about building a digital hedge fund, but it's about connecting what we believe are some really great opportunities and great managers to a larger audience of people are seeking to invest. And so the difference is instead of us going out and finding Sally who got injured and trying to get 500 of them to put in a deal, we look for some of the leading consumer litigation finance companies and say, hey, here's our criteria. Here's what we care about. Here's the risk profile. You're going to have to go through a rigorous approval process. but if you could deliver this, we're going to fund it.

Starting point is 00:15:26 And then we sit with about $300 plus million of access to cash as a warehouse. We actually fund the transaction before we ever sell it. And then we go to our audience and say, hey, this is the criteria. This is vetted by this company. This is what we're offering. And so for me, it's really about using technology and data on the platform to create a curated experience where you can access all different types of investments from leading managers. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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Starting point is 00:20:13 or are you just taking a fee on whatever the final outcome is? We're generally taking a management fee on the assets under management. That's generally our model. But if you go to any particular investment, you'll see specifically exactly the fees by that investment. Got it. You know, I recently read that Yield Street just raised something like $100 million, which is incredible. I think it was your series C? How much money has been raised to date?

Starting point is 00:20:40 And is it going to what you just described as far as funding these deals off your balance sheet or operational costs or, What does a typical funding look like for you? What does the money typically go towards? Great question. Listen, it's a huge milestone for us and it's super exciting. So thank you for calling that out and recognizing that. For us, this particular race is like super specific on sort of use of proceeds and exactly what we want to do with it. If you couldn't tell, we're pretty relentless and focused. And so for us, over the last number of years, we've really focused on building out this is just incredible technology and distribution engine. And on the other hand, really solving

Starting point is 00:21:18 for a need that this audience has in how do we find a better experience with our money? And so when you look at that, we've built the foundation for that experience by providing multiple types of investment opportunities, but we've never really focused on huge scale. I think like at our peak, we were spending, you know, I don't know, $700,000 a month in marketing for an organization of our size, we should really step that up. And so for us here, Yield Street, it's really about increasing the user growth so that we can actually live to our mission, which is helping millions of people really get into a better place financially. That's one.

Starting point is 00:21:54 Two is really identifying the best talent that we can for Yulth Street. If you have the ambitions that myself and Melinda and the management team have, you need to be surrounded by some amazing people. So let's continue to hire great people. Three is similarly focusing on the origination side. Let's continue to develop investment products and expand our investment in ULSTM. universe. And lastly, it's thinking about strategic M&A and really focusing on bringing the right components into the broader Yield Street family to make sure that we could honor the promise of

Starting point is 00:22:24 really building out sort of the future of how you interact with your money, that digital private bank experience. Got it. So one of the reasons I got so interested in alternative assets is Ray Dalio is famous for saying that the holy grail of investing is finding basically 15 uncorrelated bets. And we had someone from Bridgewater on the show fairly recently, and they said that that was pretty much impossible for the retail investor. Really for the retail investor, currently, there's only about four. So if you talk about equities, bonds, short, and long term, and something like gold, maybe. Those are the most easily accessible. So that's only about four. I'm seeing eight asset classes on your website. So you mentioned art, aviation, commercial, consumer, legal, marine, multi-asset funds, and

Starting point is 00:23:11 real estate. So that gets you, you know, say to 12, and we're getting a lot closer. Maybe talk to us a little bit about those eight that you guys represent and focus on and the correlation between them and something like the stock market. I think what you heard from Ray and your conversation with Bridgewater are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I think there are other books that talk about similar types of investing. So if you think about like a hundred bagger or the philosophy of money or some of the other really great books. They touch on like two major themes. One is patience, right?

Starting point is 00:23:47 And so being a trader and being an investor are two very, very different functions. And you need to be cognizant of that. And so, you know, they'll refer to examples like Amazon dropped, you know, a half a dozen or more times more than 60% before it started really taken off. And the point is that if you fundamentally believe in a company or you fundamentally believe in a strategy. So for example, like we could talk about. housing in the U.S. as an investment strategy and like why I fundamentally believe in that

Starting point is 00:24:14 irrespective of our home prices might go on a year over year basis, more like as a decade, what that means to us. I think like that's the theme that Ray is talking about is like understanding and identifying particular themes that you want to go long on and stay disciplined on. The reason that the second person probably said, or one of the reasons the second person probably said that's impossible is because most of us have jobs. And so like where are we going to actually find the time to identify what those opportunities are and stick to them. And so the question that I always think about is like, hey, on a very basic level, you go to a hotel and there's housekeeping service, you go to a restaurant, there's a waiter.

Starting point is 00:24:51 So like we've gotten really good at least in America at employing people to do things that we don't want to do, whether it's as simple as babysitting or housekeeping or anything else. And so just like I would pay someone to watch my kid if I wanted to go out on a date one night, I would pay someone to find those opportunities that like the rays of the world talk about. And in many ways, like, that's how I think about Yield Street. What Yield Street is not is eBay. Like, it's not a million companies just like throwing their different opportunities on this platform.

Starting point is 00:25:22 And it's like, buyer beware, go figure it out. It's on you. Like, we just provide technology. And there's a place for that in this world for the people that want to go pick that. That's not what I think is important to me. What Yield Street is saying is like, hey, we understand how complex that world is. We think what's a better experience is where you get to pick thematically or a narrative of where you want to be. And I'll explain that in a second, but you want someone to do the curation for you and say, hey, like, here are three opportunities. So for example,

Starting point is 00:25:53 if you wanted to be invested in venture, the ideal would be like, hey, can I get access to Sequoia and recent DST and like, you know, pick your next one. It's not like, can you show me 700 new startups that might be cool? Like that, no, I'm not, I don't have time. I'm not interested. I don't even know how to underwrite them, right? But like, I know that if you look at the last decade of wealth creation, tremendous amount has come from startups. I know that technology is a huge disruptor. So I believe that there's value there. I know, I know. And for those reasons, I want to be here. And so when you think of Yield Stream, you look at the asset classes that we're in, And we're saying like, hey, as a CIO, my job is to recognize that I have an audience of hundreds

Starting point is 00:26:32 of thousands of people and growing that are looking to really invest their portfolio in a smart and diversified way. And so like Michael and Yield Street team, can you bring me a few options in each different part of the risk bucket? Like, give me a little real estate, show me some art, show me some shipping, et cetera. Can you help find the right prospects for me? And then, yes, I'll make the decision on what I want to invest in. And so that's really how I think of Yield Street.

Starting point is 00:26:56 And I think like in your point about like Ray and this other person, like maybe that's where we sort of thread the needle in the middle there. Seems like it. Speaking of art that you just mentioned, I'm really curious about that. We had Scott Lynn on from Masterworks recently as well. And he was introducing us to this idea of fractionalized shares in art. But it sounded almost like, you know, it's basically monetizing it by almost like an IPO in some cases, right? on their platform. Does Yield Street work in a similar way where they're basically fractionalizing shares on the website? And are you pre-funding the art as well off your balance sheet?

Starting point is 00:27:33 Yeah. I mean, that's exactly what we started. I think in many ways where the pioneers of that. We funded $2 billion in investments before we've ever sold them. So we stand behind them in that sense. And we're fractionalizing access to essentially every asset that we provide access to. Athena is the largest privately held art finance company in the world. And what Athena's business model is to provide a financing solution for blue chip fine art. So if you are an individual or a dealer or an auction house and you had a $10 million piece of art, it hasn't been treated like a true financial asset by anybody else. And so we said, why can't you borrow $5 million against it?

Starting point is 00:28:17 just like you would if it was a home or a building. And so Athena really pioneered that outside of, you know, Sotheby's and Christie's offer some financing solutions, like if you promise them and, you know, or sort of like agree to sell your art through them. But what about if like you don't want to sell it, you just want to buy two pieces instead of one, or you want to use $5 million to, you know, invest in your business.

Starting point is 00:28:37 And so really creating an asset class and liquidity at a fine art is what Athena started their business for. And we ultimately, as after they grow after a number of years, we bought it for about $170 million from Carlisle. And we grew that over at Yield Street. What was exciting to me was, hey, for the first time, we can help retail investors get access to this product that only Carlisle and other types of major institutions

Starting point is 00:29:02 that had had before. Another asset class on your website, I'm really curious about it's the aviation piece. Give us an example of how that works. So that's actually much more common than people know. It was also very much a post-COVID play and sort of betting on America and betting on, you know, people coming back, which is actually worked out far faster than we expected. I think, you know, the industry sort of felt that the median comeback would be 2023. I think if you walk into an airport today, you probably will forget that COVID existed. That's how packed it is, right? Play is very simple. So airlines, commercial airlines, people think they own all the planes. They don't. They often have investors own the planes at private equity. funds and then they lease them back from you. So similar to taking like a lease on a building, like, hey, Michael, you own 100,000 feet. I'll ground lease the building back from you for 20 years.

Starting point is 00:29:53 And so they'll often do it in like seven to 10 years stints where American Airlines will say like, hey, I need this many planes of this type. I don't want to clutter up my balance sheet by owning too many. You own them and I'll pay you a lease rate on those planes. And so what became even more interesting now in COVID was they still owned about 50% of the fleet. That's kind of how it breaks out like 50-50 because they want to own some of it. And they're like, I need some cash. Like, COVID just hit, everything's changing. I need to sell planes. I need to raise cash. But the securitization market was closed. And so it became a really interesting opportunity to quickly invest and be a liquidity solution for the major airlines and to provide sort of that sale lease back strategy.

Starting point is 00:30:32 And again, like your biggest players of the world, you name like, you know, $500 billion asset manager and up, they probably have an aviation strategy. And so giving people access to this is super cool. Plains have like multiple components that make them super valuable, which is a whole another discussion. Like the engines have sort of their own life to them. So you, you move engines around planes all the time. It's not, it's not like a car where like you try to keep your engine. So you need like engine maintenance. They won't take a plane out of service. Take the engine out. You get another engine. You put it on that plane while the, while the other one's being serviced. And so the engines actually have tremendous, tremendous value, especially when they're maintained

Starting point is 00:31:07 the right way. So that's like component number one. Component number two is like the plane itself has a ton of value, and as its age more, the value of the plane declines, which is separate from the engine cases. Then the last piece is like the raw material, the aluminum has its own value. And so there's never going to be a $1 value because the raw material to just literally go get money for the aluminum is always going to be something. And so like that's your last stop. But what's interesting about planes is that in the strategy around planes, it's well, in many

Starting point is 00:31:39 ways it's like a private equity strategy. It also has cash flow because you're getting lease payments right away. So it has a current coupon component to it with a pop over time. And then when you think about COVID, when cash was tight in the beginning, so the value of the plane goes down because the aren't as many people ready to pay for it, right? So it's a situational distress, not an asset level distress. So you're buying a $10 million plane for, let's say, seven or whatever, eight. Now the plane's back to being worth 10 or 11. And so you have your cash flow coming in, but you bought it right. you're going to get a pop one day. And because it's not depreciating as fast as it otherwise would have when you bought it

Starting point is 00:32:15 at a higher price. So what is the yield kind of expectation for something like that from Yield Street? So my feeling, and this is like literally a personal feeling, so you can't hold me to this, I think that the yields that are projected for aviation strategies by sort of the major players are pretty conservative. Like I think a lot of people are like, hey, we're going to do like 11, 20, Well, my guess is, with the recovery moving this fast, they're going to do much better than that, much better. I'm curious, is the consumer piece just focused on supply chain and APAR financing?

Starting point is 00:32:51 Talk us a little bit about what's available on Yield Street on the consumer section. So supply chain financing, I would say, is more on like the commercial finance section. So like, hey, you know, you have these different issues in a supply chain at any time, especially now. So there's always interesting financing opportunities. The consumer stuff that we find ourselves in are usually like specialized consumer products that are brought to us by specific consumer lenders. So one that comes to mind is like we did a point of sale financing solution for motorcycle dealerships. So there's a whole sort of historical trend that goes back, you know, decades around loyalty that people have to their bikes. And it's sort of like getting car financing, but it's just less prevalent in bikes.

Starting point is 00:33:32 So that would be one. Another one is we did like exotic car leasing. So, you know, different people have different priorities. And some people love having a nice exotic car, but they may not have the best credit for it. And so I guess getting approved for a Lambo or a Ferrari is harder than they think. And so there's solutions there. And then there's like the opposite side of the spectrum, which is like more in the subprime space where people need access to emergency cash that in many ways has dried up over the years as like sort of the local bank model of providing like, you know, the single mom with two jobs and extra. loan just doesn't kind of exist. And so Yield Street steps in when it can find the right partner

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Starting point is 00:37:42 All right. Back to the show. Given your background in commercial real estate especially, what's your take now that we're recovering through COVID? There was a period there at least where I think people were pretty bearish on commercial real estate, generally speaking because no one knew when tenants were coming back where people were going back to their offices, if you even need offices, et cetera. What's the general take on commercial real estate today, in your opinion? Listen, I was never bearish on real estate.

Starting point is 00:38:09 I was in purgatory, meaning you can't make a credit decision if you don't have the right information to make that decision, then you're making a bet. Bet I think is different than an investment decision in some cases. And so depending on how you invest, but like, for me, I'm making decisions that are ultimately likely to impact many, many, many people as they choose to then invest in those deals. And so I said to the team, like, we're not making a real decision for a couple weeks here. We need to see how this thing shakes out. I think we kind of purge our pipeline for maybe six weeks, maybe more, maybe eight,

Starting point is 00:38:43 just as we got information. Listen, I think people have different reactions, especially in a moment of crisis. And the new cycle always needs to keep moving. so people have to find a narrative to talk about or a bite to produce. So I think where we were is a lot of unknowns, especially with the election coming in and sort of how things we're going to shake out. Today, I think we have a much better understanding of where the market is. The government stimulus really helped a lot. Most importantly, it kept people in balance or in workout with loans as opposed to 08 when everything froze up. And so as lending is continuing to be active and in many

Starting point is 00:39:20 ways even more aggressive, people are able to buy assets at the right values and to do well with them. Second is billions, billions of dollars raised for distress and the level of distress didn't show. It's keeping asset values propped up. So I think that broadly around the investing world. When it comes to real estate, I think maybe one trend that was shifting in the opposite direction that had reversed again might be like this huge view of moving into inner cities. I think that in many ways, the remote work or like the we work type of model was really moving heavily into big cities and providing a solution for major companies to have hubs all around major cities.

Starting point is 00:40:04 I think that model is actually going to be more successful now, but not necessarily just in big cities. I think you're seeing people moving out to single family homes. You're seeing people move 30, 40 miles out of the major city. And they may want to have an office near their home. And so I think we all got a little over our skis at how much we want to like a abandoned suburban lifestyle. Like, you know, everyone's like, oh, mom, dad, why the white pick a fence when you could have a studio in a shared kitchen and a shared movie theater like 72 people? So I'm pretty bullish on real estate generally. I think the office model is going to be interesting.

Starting point is 00:40:35 And I question it a little bit only because from my experience, at least in a city like New York, you make your money on the 90 to 100 percent occupancy. Everything below that is really where you're covering your costs. And so like, are we really going to get back to a place where every company is going to be there full time for everyone. I'm not sure about that. In some ways, I believe yes. In other ways, I think about it. And I think about the decisions that we made at Yield Street, which is much more of a hybrid model. So three days mandatory in office. And the other two days, you know, you can work around and more flexibility around traveling and holidays and vacations and things like that, just taking into account like, hey, we grew 250% year over a year

Starting point is 00:41:14 in COVID. It can't be that we can't function outside. You know, we need to sort of recognize that. I think the office model is interesting. I think industrial is going to keep crushing it pretty much for as long as I can see because last mile of delivery and, you know, Amazon, online, all that moving. I think that single family rental, like I'm very, very long housing in the U.S. I think you're not going to build enough homes over the next five to seven years to give into the demand that people are looking for. And so, you know, get your hands on investing around homes. I think that owning homes and owning real estate is your best bet to inflationary hedge. We used to do that by like mortgage bonds, but then you took rate risk. So now that there's this whole model of fractional ownership

Starting point is 00:41:55 in real estate, you could actually be inflation hedge. To me, I think the biggest question might just be inner city office. Like, you know, is there an oversupply over time? And I think we'll need about, you know, 12, 12 months to really see where companies land on that policy. So does Yield Street actually offer vehicles around residential real estate? And how does that work with the fractional shares. We are pretty active in something called single family rentals, which is SFR. And what we do there is we partner with different folks around the single family rental ecosystem. So for example, we could partner with developers so someone can have, you know, land for a thousand lots of land that we're going to partner with them to build those lots

Starting point is 00:42:35 and either sell off those homes or turn those homes into a rental community. Or we could partner with people who already own existing homes to generate the cash flow from the renters. We partner with people who build sort of spec houses, like luxury spec houses too. And so again, my view is when you're reading headlines countless times that say there's more real estate brokers than real estate available, like you ought to be on the other side of that trade quickly, right? And so you can definitely partake in being, you know, a partner in these offerings that we have around the residential real estate. So going back to the problem that Yield Street was setting out to solve, it was the access to and distribution of alternative assets.

Starting point is 00:43:15 that were mostly reserved for people in something like a hedge fund. And to get into a hedge fund, you have to be pretty wealthy, typically, right? And so the accreditation piece comes to mind. And I noticed this as part of the initial step on Yield Street. Are you an accredited investor? So first of all, how much does Yield Street vet the customers they're taking on? And what is your general take on accreditation and where it might be heading? Are the regulations loosening up over time?

Starting point is 00:43:43 Are they getting, is it getting even harder to access these types of funds outside of Yield Street? So we've built a pretty seamless process around what we call accreditation verification. And so if you're an investor and you want to come, you know, join Yield Street and be part of some of those investments, you really want to try and have the most seamless experience, especially when it goes through like, you know, getting improved and setting up an account and verified as accredited. And so I think that I feel pretty confident that we've done a really good job at making that a seamless process, and I would say that our success hopefully demonstrates that people feel that that process is easy enough to get through. How do I think about regulation? I think regulation is super important

Starting point is 00:44:23 and necessary. At the end of the day, we want to find a way to protect consumers in America. I think that regulation is often reactionary. So something really bad, like 08 happens, and someone, you know, advocates for hyperregulation, and we get overregulated broadly. And then as the years go by, people are like, wait, that wasn't actually as good for me as I thought it was because I could invest in pink sheet stocks, but I can't invest in like a hundred million dollar institutional deal. And so how did this help me? But when you put your mind in the in the mind of the regulator, you're more about like, that's okay as long as I protected you from the 99 other things. So I think regulation is important. I think regulation over time could

Starting point is 00:45:07 benefit from being less reactionary and more proactive. I think businesses are always at the forefront of innovation and regulations are a couple of years behind. And so like, there's this catch up game that the regulators find themselves playing in many ways. That being said, I will say very comfortably that I feel that, especially as it relates to the SEC, that they have recognized a number of years ago, to me, it starts with the Jobs Act, that we could do better and that times are different. Technology allows us to regulate things the way we need to be comfortable, but not in the same way that we had to. So, for example, like, we could have 20,000 investors in an opportunity

Starting point is 00:45:47 now and we get the same level of reporting that we would if there were only 50. And so how do we modify the law to, like, not cap it at 99 investors and have more because we could solve for what we needed. So I would say that regulation is trending more reasonable, I think is the right word to use and to be modernized. I think the Jobs Act was big. I think in March, the recent accreditation definition expansion is important. I think, for example, the Department of Labor talking about allowing people to invest 15% of their IRAs into ALTS. We're moving in the right direction. We're trending in the right direction. I think that if I was speaking to myself and like other founders, we as a group could do better about dedicating a little more of our time to

Starting point is 00:46:29 be with regulators, even though it means that we're not focused on actually growing the business, but really a longer term play because the incumbents are not going to be the ones to educate the regulators on the innovation that's happening in the ecosystem. It's going to be guys like us. And if we're not willing to dedicate the time, then it's fine for other founders to sort of complain and bitch and moan about regulation, but like someone needs to have a dialogue and explain what we're doing and why it's important to modernize themes. But for the investor and the consumer, I think that, you know, the government is very much

Starting point is 00:47:01 trying to look out for you. but I also think that there is clearly a trend to loosening regulation and making things more available to you the investor. Well, I notice on the website that you do offer deals to unaccredited investors that are probably on the smaller side and that there are other investments if you're an accredited investor. So I'm curious if when I'm filling out the survey, let's say you have a high salary and you click that option, but you don't have, let's say, the $5 million family office. What are the levels of accreditation? Are you serving up different products based on that

Starting point is 00:47:36 survey and the level of accreditation? Are the deals different depending on the profile of the customer? There's going to be multiple segments that the SEC uses to define different levels, right? There's non-accredited, there's accredited, there's, let's say, QP, qualified purchaser, there's qualified investor, there's a quib, which is like a $100 million network. And so the regulators are going to limit what you can sell to whom or maybe said differently, how you can sell something to whom. And so, for example, there are offerings for accredited and non-accredited investors alike. And that's more around a certain regulatory construct of how investment is sold. And so in that particular offering, what you'll find is it's a diversified

Starting point is 00:48:23 fund structure, like a diversified vehicle, where the objective is, hey, if you want to be a passive investor, but you want access to sort of like a Yield Street ETF, almost like here's everything we do, then whatever we can put in, subject to the limitations, we will put in and really give you the opportunity to have an allocation in a vehicle that's going to have exposure to our real estate shipping, commercial consumer, all the stuff we spoke about. And so I would say it's more about how you invest in a particular product than what you could have exposure to, if that makes sense. So that's really interesting to me. I was curious about the funds piece of this and what you offer because, like you said, people are busy. They don't have a lot of time. It's really great.

Starting point is 00:49:05 You're offering this spectrum of alts. But let's say I just want to put money and say, listen, Michael, I just want you to do this for me. I trust you guys. Let me just put this allocation into this fund and leave it alone for a while. What do you offer in that way? So we think about it a little bit, a little bit differently, but along similar lines, which is there are different types of people and people have different desires or different goals and want to invest in different ways. Okay. So let's break down like four user journeys. So one is, hey, I'm really interested and I have the time and I want to be hyperactive in my portfolio. So I enjoy picking a bunch of single offerings to create my own portfolio. Person two says, I really like to be a thematic investor. So I like single family rentals and sort of the growth that's seeing and I believe in it long term or I don't have a way to access legal finance or art or these other things.

Starting point is 00:50:04 So I like them all. But I don't have the time or necessarily the interest or expertise to pick individual deals. So what would be greatest for me is if you could have a thematic fund. Yield Street says, great, we have like the art fund, the legal fund, the real estate fund. And so that gives you the opportunity to be more passive, but be thematic in how you invest. The third type of person is someone who says like, hey, this is all really interesting. But where I want to be as an investor is to be able to invest alongside some really great managers and funds and investors like the Harbor Group or Avenue Capital or the aviation one or

Starting point is 00:50:42 some of the other stuff that's coming out. like, is there a way for me to invest with Yield Street in potentially exposure to other big managers? So those are like the ones we just mentioned, right? The aviation, et cetera. And the fourth and final one is the person who's like, this is all great. I don't want to do any of what I just said, but I want exposure to the basket of opportunities that Yield Street has fundamentally approved and put on the platform. And so that's going to be that last fund for accredited and non-accredit investors.

Starting point is 00:51:10 It's a 40 Act fund where you could make one investment and increase it over time. and just keep getting that broad exposure and diversification across the platform to Yel Street. And to me, what's even super interesting about that product is because of the structure of it, it actually has quarterly liquidity. So you can choose, you know, how you want to go in and out of that vehicle and not be married to it necessarily as long term, but still get the exposure that you're looking for in a passive fashion and diversify. Well, that was my next question was around liquidity. So does the term end every quarter and you're getting paid out your principal and your interest every quarter and then it's up to you to reinvest in that fund on a quarterly basis or are the terms

Starting point is 00:51:47 longer? No. No. So the term is much longer, but you have an option to seek liquidity on a quarterly basis subject to, you know, whatever the limitations are, which you'd have to go online and really get educated. But essentially what it means is, is that if I made an investment for X dollars today, that I would be able theoretically to access quarterly liquidity by asking for it, by clicking a button. And is there any certain like tax-advert? with any of those products with the funds over the individual? Is it all fairly the same, just capital gains? Short answer is yes. There are different advantages for different strategies. I think that's like super technical to get into here, like which ones have depreciations,

Starting point is 00:52:28 which ones don't, K1 versus 1099, how it's passed through, like all that. Those are much more like specific. But I think the overarching point that I would say is what Yield Street is trying to provide is the experience of the private bank to you, which is we know who you are because you're our client. We care about you. We're going to go out and try to find great opportunities that fit what you're looking for or that at least give you a chance in a curated fashion to pick what you think is best for you. We're going to do our best to drive value to your pocket with good at risk reward opportunities. And we're going to keep doing that every day in a digitally native experience with transparency and ease of use. That's the focus and all the things that you would expect to come

Starting point is 00:53:13 with it should come with it. So the reporting, the transparency, the tax advantages, the distributions, having a digital wallet, like all that stuff that you and I haven't really spoken about. That's the totality of the experience that we want to create for you and that we have. I'm glad you mentioned the transparency because I was really impressed with the language on the website and how transparent it seems to be. There were some, like, there was some nomenclature on that I was curious about with some of the investments like you would be paid out a target quote unquote interest payment or that the fund expects to pay you back your principal at the end. Is this just regulatory jargon or is it just alluding to inherent risk that may be

Starting point is 00:53:51 less obvious to the unsophisticated investor? I think that we live in a world that's highly regulated with a very high bar of compliance. And so different organizations take a different approach into a different. how they feel about communicating some of these things. And so, for example, if we invest in a loan that's paying 12%, you know, we should just be able to say, hey, you'll get 12%. Reality is like, you might not. There might be a default.

Starting point is 00:54:20 There might be another issue. It may not perform. And so some platforms will say like, hey, we're not going to get so technical. And if it's 12%, it's 12%, it's not guaranteed. So like, that's on you. I would say our perspective has always been far more cautious. It's just we're much more, I think we behave much more institutional than I think you would see other platforms.

Starting point is 00:54:40 I think some other platforms are all about the sell and we're all about the buy, meaning we don't push products on our customers. We push content. We push education. We push transparency and we push high value product and then we stop. And now it's on you, Trey, to read it and say like, hey, I feel that this is right for me and can I make that decision? I think that in some ways that manifests itself and sounding like a little overly complex or like a little weird English that I don't particularly love, but it's trying to live within those lines.

Starting point is 00:55:11 It's like target return. Like, yeah, the rest of the whole presentation says it's 12%. But like we're hedging that risk and being super transparent or like you could expect payments quarterly, hopefully. Like it pays quarterly, you should be fine. And so I think we're trying to solve for a how do we use nomenclature language in a way that you like say, this sounds normal and like I understand it versus like how do we be really thoughtful around how we are talking about different attributes of a transaction without making it feel like we're promising or committing to certain things. Where do you see the tech of Yield Street going?

Starting point is 00:55:48 It's obviously an amazing web platform. Is there going to be an app where these deals are just as easy as something like some of these brokerage exchanges that you have on your phone? I think we're actually one of the first platforms to have an app. We've had it for a couple of years Now, the coolest thing is the first investment made on the app was actually in the middle of Lake Michigan. We thought it was like fraud. So we reached out to the guy and we're like, hey, did you make an investment? He's like, yeah, why? We're like, well, we're seeing it in the middle of Lake Michigan.

Starting point is 00:56:16 He's like, yeah, it's amazing. I'm out with my grandson fishing. And I was like, this is everything I ever dreamt of. Right. And so, yes, we have an app. The app is amazing. I use the app all the time. That's primarily how I'm investing on Yield Street is through the app.

Starting point is 00:56:30 The app is everything that you would expect it to be and more to your first part of the question, which is like, where are we going? I think the best way to give you a view into where we're going is to say, go to Yield Streets website, look at the resources. Melinda and I published a founder's blog, a brief letter, post-series C about, hey, why do we raise this money? Where are we going? What's this all about?

Starting point is 00:56:55 And in conjunction with that, we put together a video that would really share. show you a day in the life in Yield Street in two or three years. So we had a video created with all the functionality that we got excited about, real liquidity secondary market, international, technology transcends borders and currency, advice, goal setting, like, hey, I want to invest for my kids' college. Like, what is that? How do I do that? And so really changing the way you think about money, I think if you go click on that video, you'll see a day in the life of Yield Street user in two or three years. Do you ever foresee the all offerings incorporating something like NFTs or even crypto or other currencies.

Starting point is 00:57:34 Yeah, absolutely. So crypto's on the pipeline. I think you're going to see that a lot sooner than than you think. So that's certain. I think for us, we're five years into a 15 year journey, right? I think it's going to be a lifelong journey, but I would say until like I have the totality experience and the markets are always evolving. So like stepping back to one of the things we spoke about earlier, as a CIO, my role is to say, hey, I have this ever-growing community who wants to build a holistic portfolio. I need to constantly be looking at the market and understand by them so that they could do a better job at creating the portfolio that's best for them in a diversified fashion. And so we're always going to be introducing new products over time. The Yield Street's value

Starting point is 00:58:18 is not a function of what we sell. Rather, it's how we sell to whom we sell and our ability to sell. It's leveraging the most efficient technology in the world with this incredible audience and bringing those together to create that flywheel. To us, that's the holy grail of what we're building, is creating that experience for you, the customer. And so in some ways, any asset that has a right risk return profile and that's right for our investor base is in play. Five years, that is really impressive.

Starting point is 00:58:51 How big is Yield Street now? How many employees are you now? We're about 110 employees. I think we have 30 jobs open looking for awesome people that are passionate about really democratizing access to these types of products, looking for people that get passionate about as crazy as it sounds, like changing people's lives, like giving them a better financial future. It's like just jacks me up like crazy and just want people that are excited about that mission,

Starting point is 00:59:17 looking for people that get invigorated by a big mission, that are smart, that are excited about building and about being impactful in a smaller company, that's where we are. Where does Michael invest on Yield Street? I mean, you've got, they've built this machine. It's almost a scratch your own itch endeavor. You have certain interests in commercial, real estate, and legal. Like, what products pop up for you that you're like, I'm in on this? Let's see. So, I mean, the first answer while my investments are coming up is I'm looking for a diversified portfolio, right? So I'm investing across the board at, at Yield Street. So I have 29 active investments right now at Yield Street. And that'll range from

Starting point is 00:59:59 short-term notes, if I'm not sure exactly, you know, where I want to put certain cash or if I'm waiting for more diversification or more product to the different funds that we spoke. I mean, at 29 investments, I'm pretty heavily diversified. You're seeing me in everything from R to shipping to structured notes, single-family rentals to legal supply chain. My goal is, to be as diversified as possible and to be thematic in nature and to build a rolling portfolio. So if you look at like my durations, I have things that are like maturing in a month or two to, let's say the aviation fund that's like, you know, long duration private equity fund. And so until we build a full blown secondary market where there's always real time liquidity,

Starting point is 01:00:43 I want to know that across my portfolio, there's going to be moments of liquidity over time. And, you know, hopefully each of those moments, I'm like, okay, I'm good. I don't need the liquidity, boom, I reinvest. And so I'm constantly reengaging with Yield Street. And as Yield Street continues to expand what it offers, then I keep investing more. And so where we started this entire conversation about an hour ago, I told you that the reason I started Yield Street in other words is for super selfish reasons because I needed this, right? And my friends needed it.

Starting point is 01:01:16 And so here I am continuing to build Yield Street for the things that the people I love in care about need. And that universe just expanded to millions of people who share the same pain. And so you're going to see me doing the same things that, you know, I think most other people are going to do at Yield Street. How did those 29 investments relate to your overall portfolio allocation? Are you getting up into that 50% in alts kind of range like some of the headphones you mentioned earlier? Is it a smaller allocation and the rest is over in something like equities? So given my background and given sort of where I traffic as a career, I would say that I've been fortunate to have a lot more access than most, which is kind of how I figured out that, hey,

Starting point is 01:01:59 like so one story goes, I asked, you know, my old buddy is like we have like five of us who are being close since I go, I'm into high school. And I'm like, guys, like this is amazing. What are you investing in? It's like circa 2010. And like they gave me like the typical answers. And I literally looked at them and I'm like, you guys are missing the boat. Like I'm crushing it. on legal finance or on this, like, you guys should come in. And they're like, oh, okay, like, we'll give you five grand. And I was like, wait, what? I can't do that. And I sort of forgot that in many ways, like, doctors and lawyers like doing their thing. And I'm working for a number of years and got super lucky and fortunate to have the experience that I had. And so I started to

Starting point is 01:02:31 really realize sort of where the access issue was. So for me, I've been really heavily invested in all for a long time because I understand it really well. Because I feel comfortable that I impact many of my investments. What's changed over the years for me, is a migration of investing with others to putting more and more on Yield Street because Yield Street's offering more of those solutions. And so I think you're seeing that happen across the board where people are saying, hey, if it's just real estate and art and shipping, like, it's X percent of my portfolio. Wait, now I could do like other managers. Okay, that's like another five or 10 percent of my portfolio because I get diversification by them. Wait, now it's structured notes, so I don't

Starting point is 01:03:10 have to buy it through some intermediary. Okay, like there's another 5%. And so what Yule Street's message is very different than what most sort of people, advisors have been telling you always, which is like, their message is like, give me more money. Our message is like, we're giving you more products. You decide if you want to invest more. And naturally they do. They're like, hey, I keep getting more diversified. And so the short answer is as we keep in bringing more products to the site, you're seeing someone like my portfolio move higher and higher on concentration to putting it at Yield Street because it's not Yield Street that I'm taking risk in. It's understanding that Yield Street's bringing all these other platforms we're bringing your product. And so I feel

Starting point is 01:03:51 really comfortable continuing to expand the share of wallet that I'm bringing to Yield Street. And given that you're now a successful entrepreneur, we have a lot of entrepreneurs in our audience. I'm curious, any takeaway you can leave for them on the fundraising side, on having 100 plus employee side? What's been your biggest learning that you think our audience could take away from? You're putting me on the spot. So I'm going to say three things that are top of mind to me. I think like that's an awesome, awesome conversation to have.

Starting point is 01:04:20 The three things I would say is you asked me essentially two and a half questions. One was like, you know, some tips on fundraising and the others was, you know, about scaling to a business with this many employees and more. On fundraising, I think the best advice you can think about is how do I shorten my story and make it more crisp? Better the storyteller, the more capital you'll get every day. Look at the people who you think are the best. If it's Steve Jobs, if it's Jeff Bezos. Their art was telling the world a story and a vision and keeping it really simple.

Starting point is 01:04:56 And it allowed them to build businesses losing money for very, very, very long periods of time. Right. And so the value of your business should not be projected in how complex or how different it is. It should be projected and how simple it is to understand what you're trying to build. That's one. Two is as you grow a business, you individually need to grow with it. And so as an individual, I'm constantly a growth seeker looking to improve and looking to grow because I understand that the organization needs more from me and needs differently from me. What I provided the organization, what I did to the organization day to day in 2016 or 17, is completely different than what I do for the organization today. And so understanding that we individually are on a journey ourselves and we need to keep up with the pace of the business. Many ways you hear people saying like, oh, John was great for us from Series A to B, but not from B to C.

Starting point is 01:05:52 Yeah, well, what about Michael? Like, are you stepping up to? And so you need to be really relentlessly self-aware of where you are vis-a-vis what the organization needs and get yourself a coach or read or find a way to constantly be growing. And the third is, as you grow, in order to build something amazing, you need to bring in a lot of different people with different skill sets. Different people with different skill sets mean different working styles. If you seek to duplicate yourself over and over, only so far could you ever get.

Starting point is 01:06:22 What that means is that now you have this new person coming in with a whole different way of working and a whole different attitude. The goal isn't for you or that person to change and become amenable to the other because I do best working the way I work and you do best working the way you. And so you can't change just to bend to me because I'm the founder and I can't change just to bend to you because I need you to manage a group. So the question that we have to sit down and talk about is like, what are my core competencies and characteristics and how I work and what are yours? where do we butt heads and let's understand like how we work together best. Like what's the mode of communication that we need to make sure we're constantly focused on so that we as a team are most effective.

Starting point is 01:07:03 I think if you if you keep those three things in mind being super crisp on your vision, recognizing that you have to always be growing as an individual and always being mindful that different people operate at peak efficiency in a different way and we need to figure out how to work together, that to me is maybe three good takeaways for this webinar. I think that's brilliant. Michael, thank you so much for your time. Before I let you go, I just want to give you an opportunity to hand off to our audience where they can learn more about Yield Street, where they can follow you and your other endeavors. You can follow my professional endeavors on LinkedIn and maybe from time to time some passionate spew of something.

Starting point is 01:07:49 Twitter, I'm still trying to get the hang of. And these days, it seems like competition is fierce. People have completely figured out how to be brilliant in so few words. But I'm working on my game. So definitely following me there. Some of my more personal moments are going to be found on Instagram. But I would definitely tell you LinkedIn and Twitter are your places to spend time with me. Yield Street app is amazing.

Starting point is 01:08:12 It's going to do a lot of what we spoke about. And follow Yield Street on social. It's a super fun and creative. sometimes I can't believe the things they post and be super informative. Michael, this is fantastic. I learned so much. I can't wait to do this again sometime. Thank you again for coming on the show.

Starting point is 01:08:29 Thanks so much for having me and have a great day. Appreciate it. All right, everybody, that's all we had for you this week. If you're loving the show, please go ahead and follow us on your favorite podcast app. Make sure you're getting these episodes automatically downloading every week. While you're at it, be sure to leave us a review so we know how much you love the show. You can also reach me on Twitter at Trey Lockerby, and you can always go to the Investorspodcast.com for a lot more information for courses, for tools, and other episodes that we offer.

Starting point is 01:08:58 And with that, we'll see you again next time. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to Millennial Investing by the Investors Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision consult a professional, this show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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