Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
VENTURE CAPITAL & PRIVATE INVESTING
Recorded: July 17, 2025 Duration: 1:02:27Space Recording
Short Summary
In a pivotal week for the crypto and venture capital landscape, significant developments emerged as the Trump administration prepares to allow 401k plans to invest in private equity and cryptocurrencies, potentially unlocking billions in new capital. Additionally, SpaceX's $2 billion investment in XAI signals a strategic partnership aimed at advancing AI technologies, while A16Z's relocation to Nevada reflects a trend of companies seeking more favorable regulatory conditions.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. What is up, everyone? Welcome in. It is 5 p.m. Eastern on Thursday afternoon, which of course
means one thing and one thing only here on Wolf Financial. We talk venture capital. We talk
private investing. We talk about investing. We talk about founders.
We talk about all kinds of stuff.
We usually slip a hot take or two in today.
Maybe we get a couple of those in today.
And it's some big news around the VC world.
It's always a great conversation.
Joe, I see you down there in the audience.
Went ahead and shot you an invite to jump up on panel.
Got my two co-hosts joining up here, shot both of you,
the co-hosts, and I'm ready to dive into it a little bit here today. I know we have a little
bit smaller panel today. If you're already in the audience out there and you're interested in the
show or interested in the space as well, drop some questions in there. Of course, we'll take a look
at those today. I'm interested. What is going on in the VC world? Do you have a connection to the
VC world? Let us know what you're doing, where you're from. And with that said, I'm interested. What is going on in the VC world? Do you have a connection to the VC world?
Let us know what you're doing, where you're from. And with that said, I'm going to welcome in my two co-hosts here, Kyle and Jared, Mr. Self-taught Success. How are we, friends?
What up, what up, what up? Welcome, everybody, back to our venture capital,
private investing spaces here on X. We are crushing it, cruising through another day.
It's obviously summer now. So in the venture capital world, summer is a little bit of the
off season. You see less deals happening this time of the year as people are on vacations and
with their families and enjoying that time before we really start to see things kick up in September.
So I think that it's only fitting that that's how our space is today. But despite that, we are going
to be bringing all the energy, talking about some amazing news. Major shout out to Jared, my co-host,
for doing some awesome research on some really cool things we're going to be able to talk about
today. And my name is Kyle. If you've heard of me before, if you've listened to this space,
I've talked quite a bit about the fact that I am just purely a capitalist. I like to invest in
businesses as a family office, as well as as a general partner and a few investment funds.
I also am a syndicator, meaning I put together investments between other investors, in which
case I lead that round or lead
that offering amongst a group of individuals. And I'm also a founder and I've raised five to
$10 million in venture capital and equities for my companies over the years across my portfolio.
I've done a little bit of everything. I really deeply care about this ecosystem, about capital
markets and the deals that get done. And I cannot wait to dive into yet another amazing week talking about everything under the sun.
But before we do any of that, I'd like to introduce my co-host with the most.
That, of course, is Jared's self-taught success.
Jared, if you'd please introduce yourself to the listeners.
Appreciate it, Kyle.
Hey, everybody.
Thanks for joining us again today.
Excited to get into the show. Just got some new breaking news right at 3.59.
So excited to hop into it and have the conversation.
My background to the VC space is more on the marketing side.
I help founders and startups anywhere from pre-seed all the way up to publicly traded companies.
I help them grow
their brands on X. So we've done over 3 million followers, a billion and a half impressions.
Basically, the goal of that is help people grow their brands on X so they can market to more
people and make more money. So that's kind of my background to the space. And so with that,
I work with a lot of founders and startup companies. That kind of ties me into the space.
So that's kind of my connection. Kyle
has the more traditional background that he shared, but definitely excited to jump into the show
today. Andy and Zoo, I think I sent you guys requests. It's a little glitchy on my end. So
if you guys want to hop on, you guys are more than welcome to as well. But if you have any questions,
feel free to leave them in that purple pill button at the bottom of the space.
Leave a comment on the space and we'd be happy to answer to it.
I know there's a question down there already, so I'm excited to get after it here.
Well, I lost you a little bit there, Jared, but I do want to kick it over to Joe.
I see Joe's here up on the panel.
So, Joe, if you wanted to introduce yourself, that'd be great.
Let's start there.
What's up, guys?
I'm Joe Pecoraro, CEO and founder of Teal Night LLC, which is a small supplement company,
along with my main focus right now, which is Danark Technologies Incorporated,
right now which is Danark Technologies Incorporated which is a AI
foundational company where we're gonna focus on materials science machine
learning applications into aerospace and defense biotech pretty interesting
breakthroughs coming out on the machine learning side of the inference side of
things you're gonna have to apologize because I'm in the car right now.
Enjoying the nice Thursday.
What's up with you guys?
Really happy to be here and appreciate you coming up, Joe.
And feel free to share any of your thoughts on some of the great topics that we have.
We also have another speaker that's joined us here on stage. Riddhi,
I want to give you the chance to introduce yourself as well before we dive into some
of the cool topics for today. Hello, this is Priti Last Moment. I'm joining in from India.
It is 2.38 a.m. as we speak and my melatonin isn't working but then so I have recently started to build a fund
I have one year of experience in private equity which was a fund accounting role but then it was
great exposure working for Crestview Partners and I'm transitioning out of that position
and just started to build my fund so setting up an outreach team to raise lps
and i'm just curious to hear from like i just accidentally came across this space but
it'll be helpful to know more from your insights it'll be great
no problem we really appreciate you being here and feel free to either jump in or raise your
hand if you have any ideas maybe i can prioritize you with a question or two um since i know it's
late for you so we don't have to tag you in by the end of the show but um the way that we do it
here for anybody that's new or listening is that we have we generally start with kind of uh what
we say the tech pulse or or whatever you'd to call it, which is just general news headlines, some cool things going on in the market and seeing if there's any interest from our panelists on what's going on.
I certainly love to share my thoughts, too, if the crowd isn't tired of hearing my voice after so many months of us doing the show.
So with that, Jared, I don't know if you want to lead it off with something that caught your eye this week to get us chewing. Yeah, absolutely. I think the first piece that I want to start with ties into the breaking news that I saw right at the top of the hour here.
So to start, there's two pieces to this. The first piece is a tweet from an unusual whales.
A tweet from an unusual whales. And if you're able to pin that, that would be awesome.
And if you're able to pin that, that would be awesome.
But basically, the news says the Trump administration is finalizing an executive order to allow 401k retirement savings plans to invest in private equity.
So that's the first piece of that. And the second piece that broke right at the top of the hour was they're also looking to include different cryptocurrency investments in that.
was they were also looking to include different cryptocurrency investments in that.
So right now, as far as I understand, you're not able to buy spot crypto in those funds.
You can buy the ETFs like Grayscale or BlackRock's ETFs funds or Bitmine or BitDigital or anything like that to get the exposure,
or BitDigital or anything like that to get the exposure, but you're not able to buy spot.
but you're not able to buy spot.
So it sounds like that new advancement that came out 11 minutes ago could potentially allow people
to buy spot crypto for the retirement plans. But what more closely relates to this show would be
obviously the private equity aspect and the retirement plans. So I want to pass this to the
panel. I'll start with Kyle to get your thoughts on what you think. And I kind of want to frame it
a little bit this way. And we've talked about tokenizing private equity on the blockchain
maybe last week or a couple of weeks ago. And we talked some pros and cons about that. So I want to hear your pros
and cons about adding private equity into 401ks. And my initial thoughts that I'd like to get your
guys's feedback on is this does kind of secure the long timetable of private equity because
people aren't able to withdraw from the 401ks until 59 and a half, 59 and a half years old. But how does that change
on just, you know, companies falling flat, companies succeeding, secondary shares overall?
Just wanted to frame it that way and get your thoughts. So I'll start with Kyle,
Kyle, and then maybe we can pass it to Joe and the rest of the panel. Yeah, yeah, no, it's an
and then maybe we can pass it to Joe and the rest of the panel.
interesting one. I definitely think that there are pros and cons here. My gut, I think, stands on a
fewfold. From a pros perspective, obviously, it opens up the amount of things that you can invest
in with your retirement accounts. And one of the things
I believe about, certainly about some forms of IRAs and perhaps 401ks as well, admittedly,
I don't have a 401k as I've really never worked a corporate job that would incentivize that type
of plan. I've been an entrepreneur and an investor for my career. I believe that they have some level of tax efficiencies that come from the 401k accounts.
So there is some really potential exciting upsides if you could have some level of tax difference on investing in something that has a much higher return profile.
file, right? Typically, venture capital, even private equity has a much higher expected rate
of return than public market investments in the traditional context. And that doesn't always ring
true, right? You can buy NVIDIA and be up 100x or whatever, or you could buy some tech stocks that
have done really, really well and have those be thriving. But I think generally across the board,
you're looking at 10%, 12% returns year over year from the S&P 500 or from NASDAQ. And so
private equity then has to compete with that. And the whole point of these deals is that they're a
little bit more speculative. But in exchange for the risk that you're taking as an investor,
bit more speculative, but in exchange for the risk that you're taking as an investor,
you are getting a higher return. And so naturally, if you're able to protect some of the taxation
of those higher returns, being able to put this in one of those accounts makes a lot of sense
and allows you to stand to gain.
To do these outside of a tax deferred account. So I think some of those things make a lot of sense and are exciting. That being said, I do think that there are some pretty significant cons with,
at the very least, the private equity side. Crypto is its own beast, and perhaps we can
dive into that separately. But if we look at the on the private equity side, those lockup periods are real. And so, Jared, while I think what you're
saying, actually, I didn't even quite think about that, which makes a ton of sense. You know,
generally, retail investors really like having liquidity because retail investors generally
are those that want access to their funds. And they're generally much, much more flippant with
their management strategy. And so that's why retail kind of has always been very questionably
interested in private equity and venture capital opportunities historically. And so I think that
that's still going to be a pretty big question here on the private equity front is, does retail actually want to invest in these things? more okay with those lockup periods. It's just historically not something that we've seen in
crowdfunding, even in general solicitation of 506Cs on tokenized securities and stocks and stuff.
You just don't see a ton of retail investment. And I think a lot of that is because generally
retail has a much shorter time horizon. They want to gamble and they want to buy in and out and day trade things, even if that's not necessarily the best strategy for long term wealth creation.
It's fun. It's entertaining. And at least it's it's pseudo safe in the sense that I know even if I make a bad trade, I can get out of that pretty quickly.
That's just simply not the case in a lot of private equity opportunities and venture capital opportunities.
You need to have a seven to 10 year timeline for redemption.
And I just don't know if that's something that investors want.
And so it would really stink if your, you know, 501k account auto reinvests or you deploy
a big chunk of that capital into a private equity deal at 56 years old.
By 59 and a half, when you really want to pull it out because you need it,
you're unable to because it's locked up in some of these private equity deals.
And I could see that being something that, you know, an investor might be attracted to the rates,
but then realize they kind of get
screwed over from a user experience perspective because of those lockups that they didn't quite
time out the way they were expecting. At 58, they thought they were fine, but then 60 comes around,
they really needed the capital for a variety of reasons, but they're unable to do so. So,
so I think that that's kind of a big question mark that I would look at.
The one other question mark is that, you know, in venture capital and private equity, you know,
there are a lot of things that just you don't quite, it's not quite as simple as just buying
something and watching it go up. There's a lot of kind of activism that happens in the private
markets that I think a general retail investor would have a lot less control over. And so I'm just not sure how I feel about this one, to be honest. I know that a ton
of pension funds and things like that already act as huge LPs into venture capital and private
equity funds. So I do think to some degree, a lot of those funds are already potentially
a little over leveraged in this sector because it's sexy, because it sounds cool.
But but from a risk mitigation perspective, I'm not sure that I'm aligned.
And so I think that there you could eventually see something happening in the same vein for 401ks.
So I don't know if anybody else in the panel has any thoughts here.
I don't want to ramble too much, but I'm actually not a huge fan of this, even though, you know, theoretically,
I could be a big beneficiary by raising more LP capital this way.
If anybody has any thoughts, feel free to chime in. One thing I think that I could add or maybe ask as a follow up there, Kyle, I think the aspect that you mentioned of liquidity and people needing that liquidity, you know, at 58 instead of, you know, if they need it at 58 and they need the money, how do they cash out an investment that typically you really can't cash out or it's much more challenging. So maybe instead of from, you know, that perspective,
I think the fund perspective could be a more reasonable possibility where people are just
investing in a fund and then that fund is able to give out that liquidity. But then it's almost
like you're again, that almost goes back to tokenizing shares. And so if you're tokenizing
private shares, I feel like that would maybe be a little bit more accessible or easy to do. And I think that's the whole point
of tokenizing shares on the blockchain. But obviously, you know, there's other downsides
to that as well. So that's kind of my thoughts, Joe or anybody else. My phone's glitching,
And so I can't necessarily see who the speakers are.
so I can't necessarily see who the speakers are. So if you want to jump in, just jump in.
So if you want to jump in, just jump in.
Otherwise, we can move on to the next topic.
Joe, what are your thoughts on retail participation in the private equity space?
Well, I just wanted to comment real quick the fact that I do agree with a lot of what you said there,
that crypto is a lot of its regulation is still up and coming.
And I would personally find a lot more security in
promoting someone to invest into futures especially like Palladium with the all the
the new technology that's going to be coming out especially for these GPUs these server systems
and databases just simple futures you know I think you get a better return, especially someone who
is in their later years with the leapfrog that I think we're going to see in the next under five
years, I believe. So, yeah, I agree with a lot of what you said there, Kyle.
Yeah, it's just it's interesting. You know, Jared, I think what you said makes sense. And if
if the private equity funds are willing to redeem or have in-kind redemptions or something
like that, then I think I'd feel a little bit better about this.
My point about the 58 thing was that, of course, they wouldn't be able to pull out until 59
and a half.
But theoretically, somebody might make an investment decision locking themselves up for
five years, maybe because they feel like they're doing good at 58.
But then if something happens at 60 and they really need it, now they really don't have access to that capital. And that
would be something I think would be unfortunate. Kyle, wouldn't if there's tokenization involved,
what does the lockup look like? Are you able if somebody else is willing to buy your tokens,
for example, off of you? Would you be able, would it just create like your,
basically would it create a tradable version of private equity instead of just full on lockup
like we currently have? Great question. The answer is theoretically yes. There are potentially
resale restrictions on even tokenized offerings. Just because it theoretically could be tokenized
doesn't mean that a company has to allow it to trade. But you do make a good point. If it is
tokenized, it could in theory trade. The other barrier would just be the fact that there's
only so much liquidity in those tokenized markets, especially for smaller private funds. I think we sometimes
take for granted how liquid the public stock market is in the US. And that doesn't necessarily
mean that if you have a stock market, then it's liquid. And I think that if you look at most
stock markets in the world, they're much less liquid than the U.S. public stock market.
And that would only be amplified in a tokenized market, especially for a small fund.
If you're an LP that has shares in a $50 million fund, there may just not be that many people that are looking to buy those shares off of you.
There may just not be that many people that are looking to buy those shares off of you.
And so even though you can trade it in the tokenized markets today, when I advise clients, because I do a lot of work in that space.
Generally, you know, when we talk about the promises of the secondary market trading, often the way that I describe it to investors is that today selling shares on a secondary market is really, really tough because the paper shares
require a lot of compliance. And tokenizing the stock or the shares dramatically reduces the
overhead and the burden of managing that transfer. But what we have not seen the tokenized markets do today, especially for
securities, is create a new market of buyers. So generally, if you have a tokenized share of an
equity or a fund product today, you still need to find your buyer. Now, once you've found your buyer,
it's much, much, much easier to sell and transfer the shares in the tokenized world.
But we haven't seen today that just because something's tokenized that it will have really any market whatsoever.
So I think the way you're describing makes a lot of sense.
If it's a really large fund that has, you know, either a lot of potential buyers that like maybe they have
like, oh, they only allow people to get in occasionally. So there's like excess demand
that's not able to just buy into the fund. But the problem is if you're an open-ended fund,
that's pretty much allowing anyone to invest at any time, then there's not really much of a reason
to buy the token on the secondary market, because at any time they're just going to be accepting all of that buy side demand in the fund on organically. Right. And so
then on the secondary market, who's buying on the secondary market, unless you can buy it on the
secondary market cheaper than what you had originally bought it for. And so, um, so naturally
in these type of open ended funds structures, it presents somewhat of a forced discount on the
secondary market, which a forced discount is certainly much better than, you know, no trading
at all, where, you know, you're not even able to sell it even if you wanted to, but it still isn't
like, you know, for the market value of the share. And so I think that there's a little bit more complexity than what it may seem like on the
surface with respect to tokenization, creating these benefits, unless, you know, maybe the
fund itself offers a buyback program or something like that.
But again, they probably would only do that if they could buy their shares back at a discount.
They probably wouldn't buy their own shares at a premium to what they're worth or what they evaluate them being worth. So I think that that's the one complexity
around the fund structure is that open-ended funds generally are going to be really tough
to trade and even close-end funds where they need to have a lot of oversubscribed interest
to kind of justify that secondary market where somebody might be willing to buy the LP equity for, let's say, at par or even potentially at a premium to what the
original person bought it for. Not to harp on this topic for too long, but it is very interesting
as an investor when you think about it. if 401ks are now, you know, basically available for private equity markets, and we've seen what Vlad and Robinhood, we've talked about it on the show.
I mean, what happens to SPACs? You know, what happens to IPOs? Do companies even really want to IPO? I mean, they probably may wait on that much longer.
that much longer. And then the accredited, you have the reg A, you have accredited investors.
Does this open up just more money to be able to flow and invest into these things? It seems the
latter. It seems like this is like open a door for more liquidity. Now the tradable thing,
that was a separate question, separate topic. But as far as just the amount of liquidity now
that would be available, it seems like it's going to 10x.
Yeah, no, I like where your head's at. The one clarification that I would offer from my
perspective, and I don't necessarily know if I'm right or wrong, I'm just a guy at the end of the
day. But one thing that I would say is that the tokenization thing, I think, and going IPO or
public, they actually benefit two different types of people. So I'm not sure that one necessarily, you know, makes makes solves the other person's
problem, if you will.
And so the main reason why companies IPO or go public is because when you're on the public
capital markets, it is much easier to raise capital.
markets, it is much easier to raise capital. It is much easier to get a lot more money,
whether that's through debt issuances or whether that's through selling more shares as your price
appreciates to acquire funding for your company. And so that's why a company's IPO. It's obviously
it's a, you know, there's a lot of disclosures. There's a lot of compliance. It's not zero cost.
It's expensive to go public.
And so a company wouldn't do that unless they saw the light at the end of the tunnel.
And I don't want to necessarily suggest that tokenization solves that problem.
Now, what tokenization does solve is the problem for LPs.
So if you're an investor in a company that is private, it is difficult for you to get
your money out. And so if you're, let's say, we've talked about this before, I think the really cool
idea or thought about to organization could be like, let's say you're an angel investor,
and you're somebody that loves being the first check-in on a startup. You love the idea of betting on an idea and backing
game-changing world-class founders. And this really is something that makes you excited.
The problem is that it could take you so long to get your money out that it's hard to, it's hard to tranch out your
money properly because it could take you seven to 10 years before you're going to get an exit.
And so you need to like essentially take, if you want to invest a million dollars in startups,
if you want to be investing every year, you basically need to invest one 10th of your money
every year for the next 10 years just to potentially
have an exit in year 10.
And that's if you invest enough money to pick a winner.
And I would probably argue that investing 100K per year is probably not enough money
to invest in enough companies to have a winner.
And so there really, it is this kind of awkward dynamic.
And so let's use an example of someone we had on the show a lot, Jared, your friend Martin.
And so Martin is a prolific early stage investor.
He invests in the earliest of early companies that have incredible founders and a fantastic business opportunity.
Martin may want to only be an investor through that early stage and might decide, you know what, I'm going to sell my shares in this company once the business becomes somewhat successful.
Let's say once they close their seed funding, once they close their second round, that's what I'm going to decide that that's good enough for me. That's what
tokenization could provide. Because theoretically, once the business has done something successful,
they could potentially say, all right, now it's got traction. Now Andreessen Horowitz is in on the
deal. Now they have a real business and a product that people like. Now there's probably some demand
on the market for my shares. I'm going to decide that, yeah, you know what? I'm going to sell some
shares now. And even though that means that I'm maybe missing out on this company's eventual
road to IPO, I'm going to recognize that from a stats perspective, 30% of companies that go
series A get to public IPO. And I don't know what those stats are,
but it's probably lower than that. And so I'm not willing to take that risk. I'd rather take my
3x or 5x valuation up now and then sell my shares so that I can reinvest in pre-seed companies again
and kind of create a farming system where I can just specialize in identifying amazing ideas
that are going to get to that
series A level so that I don't have to necessarily find the perfect idea and bet that they're the
perfect business to go public. Because those are two different value propositions, right?
And maybe there are investors that do the opposite. Maybe there are investors that say,
look, I'm not in the business of picking ideas. But once an idea gets to product and revenue, I think I'm better than average at
figuring out if that business that's doing a million to 5 million in revenue, if they're
actually going to get public or not. And so I'm willing to be the guy that buys it a little bit
more expensive than what I could have gotten in the pre-seed round, but I'm going to buy it at
the series A round and run that through into later rounds or
IPO. And typically, the only way you could do that second phase of investing would be if you
had access into the company's funding round. And that's generally what is really difficult,
especially for angels, especially for investors, is getting access into the funding round itself.
Because a lot of these are very
exclusive rounds, especially as the deals get hotter and the companies are more exciting.
It can be hard, actually, to get allocation. Even if you want to give a million dollars to
OpenAI's next funding round, you might not be able to get access because a lot of other people want
to as well. And so tokenization could create the opportunity for early investors to get out quicker,
which might put less pressure
on the company because they're able to have investors that actually want to be a part of this.
But also, I think it doesn't quite solve the problem that you described, Emp, on companies
not wanting to IPO, whether they do or don't. I think that tokenization benefits investors,
and IPOs benefit the companies as well as the
investors, obviously, because the investor then can have liquid shares. But that's kind of how I
see the differences between the two. One thing that I'll add on there, Kyle, in relation to the
401k is I think a lot of people just won't have access to this
because you know it. And if you're unfamiliar in the audience, a lot of times when you're doing
private deals, there's usually some kind of investor minimum threshold. Whether you're an
accredited investor, you have to have like a million dollar net worth. But even the companies
have like a company, one of the founders I was working with recently, they're doing a round right now and their minimum investments, a quarter million dollars.
And so most people aren't going to have that kind of money.
And those retirement accounts have a cap every year.
You can only put so much money in.
money in. And so for most people, if they're putting in 5,000, 6,000, and I think, I don't
know the exact number, 65 or $7,500 a year that you can put into those retirement accounts,
they're not even going to be close to getting into those private investments. And so for most
of those people, if they want to get in on those private investments, it's going to have to be a
crowdfund, it's going to have to be a reg A, or it's going to have to be a tokenization of shares to even make it borderline possible for them. So I do think
there's a little bit of a threshold of pay to play. And I think a lot of the people who
can pay to play probably aren't doing it in their 401k unless they want to do it for the tax benefits
aspect. But for people that are 29, 30, 35,
you know, to wait 30 years before they can cash that out, I don't know how attractive that is.
But some of the guys like you mentioned, Martin, for example, I don't know exactly how old he is,
but for somebody who's, you know, 50, 55, if they can invest into one of those tax deferred accounts
for a company, they might be thinking at a five
to 10 year timeline, then it might be more attractive to them. And a guy like that,
they've probably built up that portfolio where they do have cash in there, where maybe they
can invest $100,000 into a different private company. But I do think that that yearly cap
on how much you can allocate into those retirement accounts is going to play a pretty big factor in this.
And one more stat that I just saw, again, this news broke at the top of the hour.
The 401k market is $9 trillion market.
And then I just saw Evan, thanks for joining us on stage.
He had a tweet out.
And this also includes metals.
So it's beyond private equity
it's beyond crypto it's also gold and silver and i believe again you can do gold and silver etfs
but this would allow for spot so a little bit of a difference there
joe do you want to chime in anything you want to touch on
oh sorry about that no it sounds like we're pretty much on the same page with that i think that the
the it adds a layer of abstraction essentially the with the tokenization of um of shares to
the company i think that it does essentially force a lot of these new startups to crowdfund
like you were saying these investments with with these thresholds. I find that if you do
crowdsource this information and your startup MVP, essentially, it does take a better,
I don't want to compare it to Cluey, but it does have a better traction and it's a good formula
and it does work. But I wouldn't try to put makeup on a pig like they did, essentially.
But it's a good approach with this social media thing. It's not like things are changing.
Essentially, I would like to end on that. Kyle, anything you want to chime in on?
Otherwise, I got a similar topic I'd like to touch on here today, too.
Yeah, keep it going. What's the next topic?
Yeah, so I think some big news that kind of ties into the crypto, but also the VC world that's relatively new for this last week, just Tom Lee and his treasury management strategy.
Obviously, we've seen this for a while with BitDigital, Samir Tabar, and obviously MicroStrategy with
Michael Saylor as far as allocating treasury assets to crypto assets and different assets
other than just cash.
Obviously, the more cash you have, the easier it is to do.
But I also know a lot of startups are raising a ton of money.
They got millions and millions of dollars in cash sitting in their bank earning nothing. So I wanted to get your perspective from a founder's perspective, Joe. How do you go about
cash management? What do you see as the future of cash management? Are more and more companies
going to be buying assets like ETH and then staking it and then earning yield on that?
I do know there are some cash management companies. One of them's Crescent.
I think it's Crescent app.
And basically they'll sweep your cash overnight into basically market rate 4%.
You know what?
And, you know, they take some points off that.
But basically they'll sweep it.
You earn the 4%.
You need it.
They'll sweep it back overnight.
But, you know, that 12, 16 hour time difference that you're you know clothes
clothes essentially you're earning interest on that so just kind of wanted to get your perspective
on how our company is approaching cash management now how do you see that changing and then anything
that you want to add and suggest on that. Sorry, my phone's a little glitchy. Well, I was actually just watching
Eric Schmidt talk about how he's going pretty in depth on a couple of topics on our podcast,
but it'd be pretty interesting to see these AI companies leverage.
AI companies leverage
GP, okay, well if we're going to have to
keep track of the GPUs that are being used for AI for national
security purposes, which it seems like we're going to have to do, attach these like hash
numbers to each GPU to keep track of where they are, what they're doing
for security, of course. If that's the case
you can essentially buy a tokenized version of that in a secure sense, like not renting a GPU, but kind of bidding on it as an asset, essentially, if you see what I'm saying. interesting to see these specifically AI companies leverage such foundational
processes, new processes
to disperse their
assets.
This is a very new field, very
ever-evolving field, and
that seems pretty interesting to me.
I think we had a little connection issue there.
There we go.
Let's see.
Kyle and Jerry both.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah, no, I think you make a great point there, Joe.
I mean, on the treasury question, treasury management question, it really does depend not only on the
startup, but at what phase they're in, right? I think many big companies love the idea of just
being able to, you know, even just sticking a big chunk of cash in a treasury account, for example,
and getting four to five percent yield on it and then using that
as kind of the capital that they need to grow.
I know there are a lot of crypto companies, for example, that actually were able to do
that in the previous bull run back when money was free in the zero interest rate environment.
There were a lot of companies that just kind of took the money that they raised, which at the time, these companies were able to raise way more than they probably needed.
And they were able to just take that huge chunk of funds and then invest it and almost become an asset management company just as much as they were a business that did whatever they raised for.
And that was, I think, you know, I think an
anomalous time, but, but a lot of companies will do strategies like that. If you're looking at
early stage companies, there's, there's very little in the way of, of treasury management,
just because they are kind of in that fundraising mode. A lot of these startups get on the treadmill of fundraising where they're every 12 to 18 months trying to probably early in that, every six to 12 months trying to have a funding round.
And so, you know, they're not really thinking as much in the way of treasury management as much as they are trying to.
Sorry, I lost my train of thought there for a second.
They're trying, like, they're not doing that much in terms of really investing their money
as much as they are just trying to maintain their run rate, right?
So like, all right, we've got 12 months of runway or we've got 18 months of runway.
What's your burn rate?
And then calculating burn rate minus cash on hand or burn rate divided
by cash on hand to calculate how many months you have. For early stage startups, that's
generally how they're doing it. I think you bring up good questions around if that's the right
strategy, but like many things as a founder for the first year or two, you can't let perfect
get in the way of good enough. And sometimes having money and cash in the bank as opposed
to putting it in speculative stuff that could go up, but could also go down is something
that I don't think a lot of founders have interest in until they're really a mature
business where asset management is actually a revenue
vertical for their business maturity. See, I kind of, I view it a little different.
Now, I'll be honest, you know, I'm not managing that kind of money for a company or anything like
that. So it might be a little different situation for a company that raises 100 million and has investors that they have to respond to and all that with their cash.
But I look at it as companies. And I mentioned the Crescent app. I saw a comment here. Is this a sponsored space?
No, this is just guys talking about venture capital and private investing. But I just know the founder.
about venture capital and private investing, but I just know the founder. And basically,
to me, it would almost be a no-brainer. If you have cash at really any amount and you can earn
money on that money, basically essentially risk-free with your FDIC insurance, why would
you not earn cash on it? So that's kind of my stance on it. Maybe
I'm wrong and maybe I just don't know because I'm not managing, you know, $100 million of, you know,
investor money. But that's kind of how I view it. But I think we can move on to our next topic,
Imp, if you want to pin that first Elon tweet that Evan had that I sent in the group. If you were here last week, we talked about one of our hot
takes was Elon was basically he bought Twitter at a crazy valuation, built it a little bit,
started XAI, which is basically Grok, raised a bunch of money there, increased the valuation,
merged X and XAI. So the valuation was even higher. Then
he raised money again. So the valuation was higher. And then the thought was he was going to merge XAI,
which they've already confirmed that Grok was going to come into Tesla's here, I think within
the end of the month or something like that, end of the quarter or something like that.
And then he was going to merge XAI with Tesla. And the reason that he would do that is because for a long time, Elon
has wanted 25% stake in Tesla just for controlling equity, voter share rights. And so basically by
starting these companies, raising a ton of money, raising the valuations,
it allows him to basically raise his net worth enough where he can acquire 25% of Tesla,
where otherwise just to buy it in cash would have just been too far of a long shot.
Um, so that was kind of the conspiracy theory.
Elon came out and said, no, he does not support it.
Um, and that he doesn't want to do that merger.
Why?
He didn't clarify, but did think
that was interesting because we literally talked about that last week and three days ago he had
that tweet. But if you can pin that other tweet, Elon tweet, that'd be great. But we did see this
week that SpaceX was investing, I think, $2 billion into XAI. And so it looks like there could
possibly be a merger there. So maybe the merger is first, he's going to do it with, you know,
he's going to add SpaceX into the mix and increase the valuation even more before doing the Tesla
merger. So interesting there. I just thought that was something that, you know,
was pretty prevalent to what we talked about last week.
So Joe, Kyle, any thoughts on that?
Yeah, I'm going to drop the, you know,
the Will Ferrell anchorman drinking the beer
with the feet on the table meme of,
I don't believe you,
which is that I don't believe that Elon isn't trying
to bring all these companies together. I do know for a fact that Tesla is a public company. And so
the CEO of a public company has to be very, very, very, very, very, very careful about what he says
about his business. And Elon has been reminded that by the SEC on a variety of occasions,
business. And Elon has been reminded that by the SEC on a variety of occasions,
that you can't talk about shareholder or material information relevant to a company that is public
on the stock market without filing an 8K announcement or without announcing it on
official channels and making sure that all the steps are taken to make sure that the public is informed of these decisions.
I think Elon is very wary of that.
He hasn't always followed that.
And so the counterpoint could be, oh, well, he hasn't done that in the past.
But I think you have to be very careful about this.
He has been facing a lot of heat around being the CEO of Tesla.
I don't think any of it is actually real signal in terms of him not being the CEO of Tesla. I don't think any of it is actually real signal in terms of him not being the CEO of Tesla.
But I don't think that now is actually a great time for him to really cause a lot of issues
with the Tesla stock.
I think that he loves having the private businesses that he can kind of do whatever he wants with.
And if the timing is right and if there is an opportunity to do so, I absolutely think that he will try to conglomerize this operation. But now is not that
time. And if now is not that time, he's going to do everything he can to, you know, create a
firewall there just from a protection perspective for the company of Tesla, as well as for the
person Elon Musk and his administrative
duties with respect to that company. So I think that's where my position is.
I wanted to add, first, the Grok is available in Tesla cars as of the 12th, just a few days ago.
in Tesla cars as of the 12th, just a few days ago. But I'm completely in agreeance with Kyle's
point there. Elon, we know he's a very smart man. He has maybe a loose lip, as they say,
on some things as far as just his personal opinions and this and that. But when it comes to
the SEC stuff and all this, he has to.
And the scenario is also because the entire thing that happened in Delaware with his pay
package, with his voting control and all these different things, he 100% has to play this
side of the coin.
Whether we want to take his word for it or not, I tend to speculate the same as what
Kyle was saying, but he has to play it this way either way but i am
more in the camp of what kyle was saying that he uh he's playing the cards as he has to play them
but i do believe that i this is the trajectory and it's what makes sense as well i mean tesla is
becoming an ai and robotics company it makes sense that the other huge piece of this AI would, you know,
Grok XAI would be all in one, right? It'd be,
it'd be the all in one solution.
The one thing I would, I would add to that M is I agree with that,
but he also doesn't have to respond to the tweet. You know,
it's not like he's like under oath you know testifying
before congress like he's literally just scrolling on x and and sees the post of of somebody just
basically making you know asking a question and he just happens to reply to it like he doesn't
have to do that either so that's but he does that he does that with so many topics, though. He's the type of like he likes to stir the pot, I feel like.
And just my read on the scenario. Right.
He loves the I think he likes the attention. Honestly, he likes to stir the pot a little bit.
He knows a lot of people are wanting that and seeing that.
And he recently I mean, you all saw this famous tweet the other day to shut up, Dan, you know, with to Dan Ives.
Like it's,
he likes to stir the pot and let his opinion be known. But at the same time, I see your point. I'm not just discrediting your point, but at the same time,
that's just kind of his personality. I feel like.
Yeah, he, he is definitely the, the ultimate reply guy on X.
Maybe you could say the original reply guy. So there's definitely a point to be made on
that. Emp, you did mention Delaware in your statement as far as Elon having some issues
with Delaware as far as he could and couldn't do certain things. Another interesting news that came out this week is A16Z, which is the country's largest private equity firm, is moving their headquarters from Delaware to Nevada, citing the different regulations.
And they're also urging other companies to follow suit.
So Joe, Kyle, I wanted to get your guys' thoughts on that as far as where to incorporate
different reasons for that. And also, this is not like a slight move. For somebody like me,
my business is online. If my documentation says I'm based in one place or the other,
moving my quote unquote headquarters is not like a huge, huge deal. Now, for a company like that, where they have a huge office
space, they have a ton of workers, there's a lot of legal stuff that goes into that and a lot of
cost to move. So it's not a decision that they've taken lightly. So I wanted to get your guys'
thoughts and opinions on that. Well, I'm pretty much in that ballpark as well.
It's not that difficult to reincorporate, especially with everything being online, especially
with everything for me being mostly research based.
So no real development yet on my part, no labs or anything.
And even in that case, you're still going to, if anything, outsource your lab.
So probably easy to do I think this is a good a good step in the right direction the first step in
the right direction I don't think that investor I think investors are starting
to get tired of seeing Delaware I think it's getting a little oversaturated, if you will. Nevada offers very similar benefits with minimal costs.
What benefits do they offer?
Well, I mean, there's an entire state for development.
It's minimal population, so voting is going to be,
I don't want to say easy, but predictable.
You know, say, I mean, Delaware is similar, but I think that the political landscape of the country is changing as well.
But that's just, you know, that's a more nuanced aspect of it.
I did want to comment real quick.
I thought it was funny that last week I was saying that XAI and Tesla were going to merge.
A few days later elon did it um i just wanted to say real quick that this spacex thing kind of
looks like him like funneling dod funding to xai which is pretty much the foundation of all this
companies like with optimus tesla you know all the rest maybe even boring who knows
but i think that all he's unintentionally made it so that all
his chips are in xai i think he's realizing that but comments yeah my my thoughts on the at least
the first part are uh and you know it's obviously a thought personal and i love your perspective
i think the delaware the moving from delaware thing is a total fad and is not going to hold
up over time.
I think the number one reason why companies incorporate in Delaware is because there is
the most, by far, the most legal precedent in the Delaware jurisdiction from a court
case perspective.
And if anybody's run a serious business, you know that you
get flooded with court cases all of the time. And so the Delaware regulators and jurisdiction
is very well suited to handle this across every industry, across every type of business,
and probably every type of corporate legal suits. And that is why Delaware, I think, is probably here to stay for middle market.
Maybe if you're so big, if you're Elon or with Tesla, I think they moved from Delaware because
of the feuds he had with theoia being number one. And so,
like, I think for those guys, sure, they have enough power and enough legal legs that
they'll be able to handle that. But the additional administrative costs and the risks associated
with being in a non, you know, I think that your point, Joe, about predictable voting also,
in my opinion, applies on the legal side in terms of precedent that, you know, the predictability
of how you can structure and the things that you can do as long as you follow how everybody
else has done it presents a much lower risk associated cost that I don't see changing anytime soon.
Right. And I think that it is, I agree with the word that you use fad, but sometimes fads become,
you know, mainstream and, you know, you never know. I'm just saying I like to keep,
same way with, I like to look at different IPOs and different stocks that are coming out.
It could be next big thing.
Who knows?
Especially with most of these companies, especially with XAI,
it's possible to deal with Saudi Arabia.
I haven't looked much into it yet,
but it seems like these things may not even be in this country.
It seems like a lot of these large, large data centers
are going to be outsourced, you know, maybe in the Maldives.
Maybe we're going to build some islands. Who knows? We have no idea.
Yeah, all great points and totally fair perspective.
That's why I said I definitely like I'm just a guy and, you know, everybody's entitled to their opinions.
And I certainly back a lot of innovative and interesting ideas.
And this certainly could a lot of innovative and interesting ideas.
And this certainly could be one of them.
There's just, I think,
a lot of uphill battles on some of the things that I brought up that that would, would make it.
So the other thing is just the question of like, you know,
the privacy thing is interesting.
I know Wyoming has, has always kind of, you know,
ridden that, that line of, of, you know,
much more private business structures.
So I think that that's interesting, especially for trusts and wealth management, private equity.
I guess the question will be, will that translate to corporate entity structures that really are more about transparency?
Some of these things are some of those benefits, ones that are maybe diminished for those markets.
So that's to be seen.
But I certainly think that it'll work well for the companies that do it. The question is, will everybody else follow
suit? Awesome. A lot of good discussion there. And if you're new here to the show,
in the audience for the first time. We do have this show every Thursday, same time,
in the audience for the first time, we do have this show every Thursday, same time,
5 p.m. Eastern. We talk different topics on venture capital, private equity, just what's
going on in that space. Over the last week, we also do some hot takes, some things that are
maybe controversial in this space, but that's kind of the beauty of the show is we get new
speakers on every week and we have some of the same speakers on every week and we just get a variance of
opinions. Sometimes I feel like, especially here on X, you know, you only follow the same people.
You kind of get caught in the echo chamber. You only know what you know. So kind of, you know,
what we do is we help bring more information to you, more people, so you can get different
perspectives and learn different ways. So I really think that's a cool thing about what we do.
But but yeah, I appreciate everybody here for joining us.
We'll go ahead and close out the show here.
But if you're new, we'd love to have you back.
And if you have any topics or questions, I know I answered some in the comments, but
always feel free to send us a DM.
We'd be happy to cover anything you want to learn about,
anything you want to hear us get our opinions on. We'd be happy to do that as well. Or any guests that you would like to have up as panelists, we'd be happy to talk to them as well. So again,
thanks everybody for joining us. Go ahead and make sure to give our speakers a follow. They post a
lot of great content every day, every week. So you can stay up to date with
what they're working on and continue to learn there. So with that, I'll pass it to Kyle and
let you wrap it up here. All right. Another amazing episode. We had at one point 130,
150 listeners here live. You guys are an amazing audience. That means that there were probably
almost a thousand people that listened throughout the hour as the turnover goes live. You guys are an amazing audience. That means that there were probably almost 1,000 people
that listened throughout the hour as the turnover goes on the analytics side. So we're always doing
about 1,000 listeners throughout each episode. So it's really, really awesome to be a part of this.
I just want to deeply thank everybody that's listening, supporting, dropping in emotes and
emojis, throwing the hundreds up there, throwing the thumbs up, throwing the claps.
I saw Enzo throw me some claps there.
I appreciate that, brother.
And shout out to everybody that's listening.
We also had a guest appearance from someone from the crowd, Riddhi, that requested to
join.
And I said, screw it.
Let's throw her an invite to come up here and say hello.
So we always are welcome to new members of the community participating specifically if you have
expertise in the venture capital scene we want to hear from you so make sure you tag some friends or
tag people in the industry that you think might be relevant for this if you work with a friend
that's in venture capital if you've raised money from an investor and you want to bring them up, or if you're trying to close an investor and you want to give them a value add within the industry to
maybe seal the deal for you to raise your money, make sure to tag them in the threads or send me
a DM or send Wolf Financial or Jared a DM with any recommendations. We'd love to bring on more
diverse voices. I just think it's so fantastic. And so, you know,
that's really the key here. Shout out to our panelists. Joe, really appreciate you being here.
Zoo saw you in the audience. Love having you up here when you can make it up. And everybody else
that's tuning in, really, really appreciate it. Jared, I thought you did an awesome job.
Thanks for the amazing topics to talk about today.
And if you're a new listener or if you're a returning listener and you love these types of spaces, Wolf Financial as well as Wolf Trading, Wolf Sports, Wolf Web 3, there are a lot of channels doing 12 plus hours of conversations per day on a variety of topics.
Some of which are in the venture space.
Some of them are in crypto.
Most of them are in trading in one way or another. and certainly some on sports and gambling and all that good stuff so make sure you tune into the wolf
financial channel and all of their associated properties shoot them a
follow and and we'll tune in from there so with that thank you everybody I'll
turn it over to M to close
Turn it over to Em.
Appreciate that, Kyle.
Big shout out to the crew.
Big shout out to Joe up here on the panel this evening.
Appreciate your inputs.
Thanks for participating with us.
If you are in the crowd, make sure you give all these great guys up here on stage a follow.
Check out all their content, all the different things that they're doing across the space.
We do appreciate everyone that tuned in.
Like Kyle was saying, each and every Thursday, 5 p.m. Eastern,
right here on Wolf Financial,
we do this venture capital and private investing show.
You can see our full list and full schedule of spaces right there
on the pinned tweet on the Wolf Financial homepage.
And we've got all kinds of conversations going these days.
We're growing it each and every week.
And it's a big shout out to all you guys.
We love doing this and bringing you all kinds of different information from live
trading to macro, to earnings, to markets, to venture capital and investing and everything
in between. Take care, everyone. Have a great rest of your Thursday afternoon, evening, night,
maybe morning, wherever you're at. Maybe it's Friday morning for you if you're over
in the Asia Island area. We appreciate you joining in wherever you're at. We it's Friday morning for you if you're over in the Asia Island area. We appreciate you
joining in wherever you're at. We'll see you guys on the next space. Take care. .
