Rocket Your Dollar Ep. 47: Is culture a financial asset? — with Henry Yoshida & Michael Sidgmore

In this special episode of Rocket Your Dollar, CEO Henry Yoshida hosts Michael Sigmore, Partner & Co-founder of Broadhaven Ventures where they discuss how culture as an asset brings the "alt alts" into mainstream investing with the help of growing infrastructure in niche trading platforms.

Speakers:

Henry Yoshida      

Michael Sidgmore      

Shownotes:

• Broadhaven Ventures   
• Alt Goes Mainstream
• Rally
• Otis

Transcript:

Henry Yoshida:

Welcome to the Rocket Your Dollar podcast. I am the CEO and co-founder, Henry Yoshida. I periodically come in and today is a real special episode because I think for the benefit of everyone who's a fan of our podcast we get a chance to hear from someone who I have a lot of respect for. He's been in and around the FinTech space and actually the person I kind of look up to. And I specifically asked him to come on to tell us a little bit about his background, some of the investments that he's making and in particular, he's spearheading a thesis that is really, really relevant to our audience, which is this alternatives go mainstream. And just take it from me, I'll let Michael give a quick introduction of himself and we'll go in and let him talk about how this came to be. And I think you guys are really going to benefit from his knowledge, expertise and just really broad base of investment knowledge and thesis and everything he's done. Without further ado, Michael, thank you very much for joining us today.

Michael Sidgmore:

Henry, yeah, thanks for having me on the podcast. It's an honor to be here. And I actually look up to you as a FinTech founder. You've been doing this for a very long time and it's really impressive what you've done. I appreciate being on the podcast and sharing some thoughts about the alt space in particular, which you all play a role in and an important role in to enable people to invest into this space. Yeah, there's a lot going on in the alt space and it's definitely something worth spending time on, in part because we're really interested and intrigued by what's going on and the access that being provided to people and democratization of access that's happening, but also much of our background has just been in the alt space as well.

I'm a co-founder and partner at Broadhaven Ventures. Early stage FinTech VC that invests globally, mainly in seed stage companies. We've invested a little later at times as well. And we're really kind of unique and how we're set up because we're affiliated with a business that my partner founded back in 2010, called Broadhaven Capital Partners. It's a market leading FinTech investment bank that's done about 65 billion of M and A transaction volume, really across all areas of FinTech and financial services. We have 13 partners on that side of the business and a number of ex-Goldman partners who were senior bankers there, the vice chairman of Morgan Stanley's investment bank, vice chairman of Wasserstein Perella's investment bank. We're really able to leverage that knowledge network and expertise to help our early stage FinTech companies that we work with, really from kind of inception at times, all the way through to even when they end up exiting, whether through a trade sale or going public. We're able to kind of leverage that whole platform to help out and try to bring our perspective to FinTechs around the world.

Have at this point, over 20 early stage FinTech companies. A number of them are in the US but we also have six portfolio companies in Latin America, three in Asia, one in the UK. And then we've been lucky enough to be early investors in a number of FinTech companies that have kind of shaped the FinTech ecosystem over the last few years. Companies like Moneylion, where we were early investors, which actually just announced that it's going public today via spec. Carta, where we were series A investors, BioCatch, which recently raised a $145 million from Bain Capital Tech Opportunities fund and a number of others globally. We've been lucky to be kind of early investors in Credijusto in Mexico, which has received pretty large funding from Goldman and Point72, Kaszek and QED and then a number of others in LatAm who I think are on the rise. We've been excited about being able to partner with entrepreneurs and help them build their businesses because we ourselves have been in FinTech our entire lives as well.

Henry Yoshida:

Yeah. And when we came to meet, that was one of the things that in particular, our audience, of course our customers, are using tax advantaged accounts. And you were actually one of the early investors in one of the pioneers in this particular space, in addition to also being an early employee at an alternatives marketplace platform. You've always been in and around this sort of accessibility to the retail investor in the alternative space.

Michael Sidgmore:

Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. I started my career at Goldman Sachs on the principal strategic investments team and investing into FinTech companies. And that team actually is now an investor in some of those companies that are helping to make alts go mainstream. They're an investor in Carta, they're an investor in iCapital amongst others. And really my time there, I spent a lot of time actually thinking about how FinTech platforms or marketplaces at the time as Lending Club and Zopa were starting to kind of grow their businesses, could really potentially disrupt incumbents, whether it was through technology innovation or through business model innovation. Spent a lot of time thinking about that and then actually got a call from one of the alternative investment platforms called Mosaic. Ended up joining Mosaic as the first sales hire to help them build out their investor network to help investors access solar projects by investing in solar loans.

Spent a lot of time thinking about how to kind of structure and distribute a fixed income product that was affiliated with solar projects to the retail investor community and then got a call from a former Goldman partner who was joining iCapital network and they were building out a platform to democratize access to private equity funds and other alternative asset funds to the high net worth community. I decided to join iCapital as one of the early employees there. Pre-product employee, helped build the investor network, really kind of family offices, wealth managers and RIAs. And I helped grow that platform for over three years. We got to about two and a half billion of assets. BlackRock became a large investor in the business and now the platform has about 70 billion of assets and has raised over 200 million bucks of equity from everything from BlackRock, to Blackstone, to Carlisle, to Goldman, to Westcap.

And really kind of through that whole process, I've seen a lot about kind of how to think about building an alt investment platform and then also just the desire and demand for the retail or individual investors, whether they're unaccredited or accredited investors to be able to access alternatives. And I think it's great that these platforms are building these businesses that enable investors to invest into a private equity fund just like CalPERS or Texas teacher who'd be able to invest into, albeit much smaller size. I think it's been great to see the innovation in this space. And that's why I think this is really the time, post digital banks, post retail brokerage, it feels like alts are really next for the individual investor.

Henry Yoshida:

Well, and it's interesting because you're talking about the history of companies that came about years ago and maybe it could be argued because we kind of view it that maybe our audience kind of views themselves, hey, we're a little bit a niche of a niche. People using these kind of very ubiquitous known tax advantaged accounts as an example and the alternatives that we're going into for the most part, aren't always mainstream. Yet even now you talk about this history from years ago, but you're referencing and you guys are starting a thought leadership piece. I'd love for you to be able to tell people how this came to be one, at Broadhaven, and then two, why now? And was it really the case then or was it also small and a little bit niche, but it's been building up and maybe there's an asset class, like a digital currencies, for example, that's really making people think differently. I know there's a lot to unpack there but just for one to talk.

Michael Sidgmore:

Those are all great points and all things that we've thought about. I'll address first kind of what we created and then I'll address some of your questions. We decided to create a content platform called Alt Goes Mainstream for a few reasons. One is we feel that really now is the time that alternatives are truly going mainstream due to a number of forces, whether it's technology innovation, like some of the aforementioned platforms have helped build a low rate environment where people are searching for yield, regulatory changes, which have ushered in some changes from the perspective of investors being able to invest into startups and the amount that they can invest into those startups. And then just I think the other piece of this is really the ability to marry interest with investment. I'm wearing actually a Rally Rd sweatshirt and it's a Michael Jordan rookie card was just sold for $738,000 in auction. That's 13 months after selling for $32,000 in auction. There's a 23X return in 13 months.

And I think just speaks to various types of alternative assets being really popular and kind of taking hold within all sorts of investor communities, whether it's retail individual investors, family offices, wealth managers. And eventually I think we'll get to institutions, but really we just decided to create this platform because we thought so much going on, we wanted the company community to understand what's going on in this space. And we felt that we had some kind of knowledge from trying to build some of these platforms over the last seven, eight years. I bang my head against the wall quite a lot, trying to build out the investor networks at Mosaic and iCapital. And there were some very hard pieces to building those investor networks, whether it was investor education, figuring out how these products kind of fit into investors' portfolios. And it was still very early in these people weren't necessarily comfortable investing into technology platforms. Investing online felt different for some people when they were used to believe it or not, more paper based processes.

Yeah, there's been kind of a lot of evolution that's happened over the past few years and we just wanted to kind of share these thoughts with the companies and then also with the investor community as well and help them understand and see kind of some of the interesting innovation that's going on in this space. And I think a large part of that is the wealth manager RIA space, where we want to help educate them. And went through that a lot at iCapital in terms of helping them understand why and how they should have alternatives in their portfolio and why and how a 60/40 stocks bonds portfolio maybe is not the portfolio of the future. And many institutions don't have that so how can they have that too? That was a big part of what we spent doing at iCapital. And I think we wanted to kind of bring that to bear here with this platform, Alt Goes Mainstream where I've been writing about everything from traditional alts to alt alts.

And I think that's really another piece of this too, is that you have kind of two different types of alts. When you talked a little bit about, some of these are more kind of alternatives that are on the frontier that might be a little bit esoteric or different institutions may not invest in them. That's one bucket. There's also more traditional alts. Private equity funds, even startups have very much in the domain of institutional investors, there's a lot of innovation happening in that area in terms of crowdfunding platforms like Republic that are enabling people to access the same startups that a Silicon Valley VC may be able to access or iCapital, which is enabling people to access a private equity fund that only an institution or an endowment may be able to access. Traditional alts are really something that has been the domain of institutional investors and now you're opening up access.

Alt alts is the other bucket, that's what we call it, which is things like trading cards, collectibles, wine, all sorts of kind of more esoteric alts that have really never been the domain of the institutional investor because they're either so new or there's no institutional track record, but that the retail investor has really taken hold of. And I think in part that's just because there's a cohort of people, millennials and gen Zs in particular can view culture as a financial asset. They think about things differently, look at things differently and we believe that things like trading cards have the potential to be financialized and there's going to be a whole financial market structure built around that. And as a result of that, we're very excited about that space developing its own market structure, just since we've seen equities, fixed income, each go under their own market structure evolution. That's why we're kind of spending time in both spaces and trying to help people understand what's going on in each space and the merits of both as an investment opportunity.

Henry Yoshida:

Yeah. That's a really, really great delineation. I'd never thought about it that way, that there's the alt space that's been familiar to the traditional institutional world. And then a lot of that's been figuring out a way to chop down some sort of previously unattainable asset, but then you're talking about the alt alt space where there might be these highly valuable items that matter to let's say a burgeoning group of new retail investors who say, "Hey look, why can't I have a piece of this?" The Michael Jordan trading card from Chris Bruno and the guys over there at Rally Rd, or Republic allowing me to go invest in the next great startup that might become the next Facebook or Uber or something like that.

And then maybe you kind of mentioned and I'm trying in my head to say, and not to put you on the spot a little bit, but when I look at something like, let's say a Bitcoin, which really developed on that alts alts side, being individually driven and in this case actually individually created, but then what's really been driving the price as we record this today is institutions as in the form of Fortune 500 companies are allocating parts of their treasury into this and now you've got this massive confluence of both institutional and retail coming in. That's maybe a little bit different, but what are your thoughts? Or just what comes to mind?

Michael Sidgmore:

Yeah. I think a few thoughts. One is, I think crypto has actually kind of paved the way for some of these alt alts to be accepted as investment opportunities. If you think about Bitcoin and crypto, that was an asset that was truly the domain of the retailer individual investor first and it was really the first time where individual investors had the opportunity to have as big of a wealth creation moment as institutions have had right from the start. And if you were an individual investor, you would have had the chance to return orders of magnitude what an institutional investor investing into Bitcoin or crypto now would likely to be able to return. I think there's definitely some similarity between crypto and some of these alt alts, which are really starting with kind of retail demand to start to kind of get interest going in the space. And then over time, hopefully things start to institutionalize.

But it's kind of interesting you mention kind of the arc of how crypto has undergone institutionalization. That was actually my most recent post from yesterday on the Alt Goes Mainstream subset, which was it was titled, “The Arc of Institutionalization,” where with alt alts, we believe that that arc is going to go from retailer individual investor then to kind of early adopter institutional investors, family offices, high net worth individuals who are quasi-institutional in terms of their demands, what they expect in terms of track record, but are willing to take a little more risk. Then you start to have the fiduciaries on the kind of other end of the spectrum. RIAs, wealth managers who are, they are fiduciaries, they have a responsibility to their clients in terms of how they evaluate funds or assets, what type of track record they need to see, et cetera and then same with institutional investors.

I think we're just in the early innings of these alt alts undergoing institutionalization, but I think it's actually incredibly important to undergo that because that's how you get to real size and scale. And eventually I think then it actually arcs back around to the retailer individual investor in that case, because once institutions come into the asset class, you're going to get a lot more retail investors feel confident that there's enough AUM or dollars put into the asset class to support institutionalization, evolutions in market infrastructure, which I think we'll see whether it's cards, collectibles, et cetera. The Rally Rds, Otis collectibles of the world all have platforms that are enabling people to access fractionalized shares of high quality collectables or trading card assets. But they're also building trading platforms off the back of that so there's liquidity. They're really building some of that critical market infrastructure.

I think coming forward, you'll see things like market data, you'll see things like portfolio management. If you think about kind of the life cycle of a trader, an investment from pre-investment to post-investment and all the things that are required, I think you'll see a lot of that infrastructure that gets built because A, investors will need that. B, if you want to institutionalize and involve kind of larger groups and larger pools of assets. In the US alone, there's $10 trillion of wealth within kind of the wealth advisory, high net worth community. If you can tap into a portion of that and bring that into this space, these assets will likely continue to appreciate in value as the space gains more asset inflow. Yeah, it looks a little bit like early days of ETFs, which now a $4 trillion plus asset class. It looks a little bit like early days of crypto, which is now almost a trillion dollar. Bitcoin itself is almost a trillion dollar asset. I think we'll see a lot of those similar evolutions over time, but the infrastructure really does need to be built.

Henry Yoshida:

Oh, so that's what you're kind of saying is that look, some of these companies that are pioneering this space, they themselves are not only going to grow, but they're going to spawn like an entire infrastructure system around them to support that, much like you've seen in other asset classes. What you're talking about is the, hey, we could still potentially be in very early innings. I know you're a soccer player, but to use a baseball analogy, that's what you're talking about then.

Michael Sidgmore:

Yeah. I really think we are. Just take the trading card space as an example. There's a few billion dollars every year. Mainly it actually is bought and sold on eBay. And then there's obviously higher end items that are sold in auction houses, but even on eBay, there's items listed at five, six, $700,000 in some cases, but there's a 100,000 or so, or hundreds of thousands of people who are buying and selling trading cards and thinking of it as an investible asset. Imagine when you get to millions of people doing that. And then imagine when you get to other sports, think of games that have global reach like soccer, other sports that may not just be contained to the US as much where like NBA or NFL are really popular. I think there's a ton of room to run now.

Obviously the infrastructure needs to get built around it, but I think when you kind of break it down and one of the things that we're so excited about is when you think about culture as a financial asset, you think about how social media is such a powerful tool. Just to put it in perspective, LeBron James has 77 million plus Instagram followers, that's three times more than Apple's Instagram follower account. Russell Wilson has almost five million Instagram and Twitter followers on each platform. And that's on Instagram I think he has over 2X the number of followers as two other relatively famous Seattle companies, Microsoft and Amazon. I think when you think about the power that culture can play in this role where people, they don't just want to bet on a team like they can in fantasy sports, but they want to bet on a player, cards are natural expression or a way to do that. And I think as a result of that, we'll see people shift some of their assets into things like cards or collectibles as a result of that.

And then I think from there, that's where you'll see the value of fractionalization or fractional investing platforms like a Rally, like an Otis, like a collectible that are enabling people to say, "Well, I love Michael Jordan. I can't buy a $738,000 rookie card, but I can buy $500 or a $1,000 dollars of it. And if I believe it's going to be a multimillion dollar card, multi-billion," that's probably we're a little ways off from that, but a multimillion dollar card, then why wouldn't I want to own a piece of a Michael Jordan trading card, just like I'd buy a share or two of Apple or Microsoft or Amazon, which I also consume, but I understand who Michael Jordan is, why I'm buying an asset that's affiliated with him.

Henry Yoshida:

Wow. That's fascinating. And then that's just a really different way to think about it. I imagine for all of our listeners that it's the first time they might've thought about it, that, hey, now there's platforms out there where you can buy a fractional share of one of these cards and there's an actual marketplace and an organization you can go to, to do that.

Now real quick, this is kind of going back. And this is mainly based on just, I know that you probably have a take on this and I think that the people that listen to our show would be interested, but there's now also been a confluence, and you mentioned earlier that through the Broadhaven that you guys were early investors in Moneyline, which just as we're recording this, went public via spec. This is like a private company, venture backed that just all of a sudden became that. This is this confluence of public and private market. And maybe you can give your thoughts about how this dynamic is changing because SPACs actually are not a new type of entity, but for a lot of people that might be listening to our podcast, it's something that's come up more and more and it's kind of immediately flipped the switch for a private company to become public, become accessible. And I don't know if you have thoughts in your sort of purchase as a venture investor and someone as a thought leader in this alternative going mainstream space, what's going on there?

Michael Sidgmore:

Yeah, no, it's a great point. I think we are seeing a kind of convergence or blending of public and private markets for a number of reasons. I think one is private companies have been staying private longer. That means that the value capture is really happening in the private markets, not the public markets. If you had invested in Microsoft at the IPO, you would have returned thousands of times your money from the time it went public to where it is today in terms of its market cap and stock price. If you had invested in Facebook at IPO, you would have returned a meaningful amount of money, but it wouldn't be anywhere near where you would've returned had you invested in either Microsoft in the public markets at IPO or in Facebook in the private markets. And that's because private companies are staying private longer, valuations are increasing in private markets so that's really where a lot of the value capture is.

Now I think there's a lot of really interesting innovations that are happening in the private market secondary space. Companies like Carta, which recently launched CartaX, the exchange that will be for private companies to trade their shares. Companies like Forge, also a private company stock exchange, effectively enabling people to invest into these late stage private company's securities before they go public. And many of these platforms are doing extremely well and moving significant volume from both individual investors but also at this point, Forge, for example, has BNP Paribas, TD Ameritrade, to which of course has investors. And they're working with many of those platforms to enable their investors, their high net worth investors at BNP to access these private companies because that's where a lot of the value capture is. I think there's a ton of innovation happening in that space. And it's really not surprising that these markets are blending.

I think the other trend that you're seeing that is certainly noted within the venture community is the trend of crossover funds. Hedge funds that have traditionally operated in public markets are now moving to private markets, either through existing vehicles or setting up new private investment funds that are investing into private companies, not public companies. They see this as a way to capture value before companies go public. And there's countless companies that have raised money from the likes of Tiger or D1, Alkeon, Vulcan, which is a family office but has kind of historically done privates and publics. And we're seeing a number of these firms kind of play in the private markets because I think that's where they think a lot of the value is given some of those trends. And I think it's made people try to understand how can they get access to private markets in addition to public markets.

Henry Yoshida:

That makes a lot of sense. And then maybe for the audience, as kind of we get to the end and I didn't mention this at the beginning and you're too modest to introduce yourself and say this, but you've done all of this and all the history and you're 32 years old. And I think you even took time off to try to go into soccer as well. You spent a lot of time. Athlete, venture investor, thought leader, pretty impressive.

Michael Sidgmore:

Oh, I appreciate that. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah. I was a little old for my grade because I didn't try to go play soccer in the UK for a year. I ended up getting a few hip surgeries in the middle of that. Soccer was not the career that was meant to be, but I've ended up in venture. And I think, honestly, I think about company building and venture in some very similar respects to being on a team and playing a sport. It's very much venture and company building are both team sports. There's a lot of overlaps between kind of some of the things you might learn or do in sports with what it might take to build a company, build a team, build culture and why often teams with great cultures end up winning as a result of that.

Henry Yoshida:

Makes sense. Well, and then maybe for all of us here, just given the background and all the things that you do just in your professional day job, we talk about this a lot on our podcast, but that the traditional 60/40 portfolio that might've held for a really long time is maybe no longer relevant. And then given your position in the alts go mainstream, that for you if we were just to ask, if you were to give a simple tidbit of advice as a parting for our audience, that how do you view this new portfolio? It's now you got to have a one third, one third, one third, or how should people be viewing their overall investible asset base? I'm assuming that you won't say that you should just completely abandon public, but it's clearly your answer's not going to say 60/40 public and fixed.

Michael Sidgmore:

Yeah, it's a good question. I don't purport to give investment advice and I think I'm a better private markets investor than public markets investor. Jury's still out on the private markets, but public markets, there are people far, far better than me. But yeah, I think certainly the 60/40 portfolio is changing. I think one of those reasons is due to a low rate environment and you need to search for yield and you're not going to get it in your fixed income portfolio. You're not necessarily going to get in your equities portfolio unless you're investing in some of the right names. I think you look at some of the names in public markets. Certainly the ones that were accelerated by COVID, Zoom, Peloton, et cetera, you can actually have very good returns in public markets. Heck if you'd invest them in Shopify at the IPO, you'd have gotten, I think, as of last year, that was a 2015 IPO. As of last year, you would have had something like a 40X or something, which is better than VC's returns in many cases.

There's ways to actually invest into public markets and do extremely well. I don't think it means don't invest in public markets and there's certainly plenty of value to be captured. But I do think it means to diversify into either alt assets that can yield higher returns in some cases or in uncorrelated ways. I think when I think about alts, I think again about traditional arts and the alt alts. Traditional alts, like private equity funds. Private equity and public equities are generally somewhat correlated so you're not getting zero or little correlation, but you are potentially getting outsized returns and performance. I do think that when it comes to private market investing, I think curation matters.

A lot of what these platforms are doing, whether it's iCapital, Forge or Republic, et cetera, it's really important to have curated investment opportunities because we know this in private markets and used to talk about this all the time at iCapital, but the inter quartile spread between private funds was even more protracted at venture. The difference between investing in a first quartile fund and a fourth quartile fund is massive when it comes to things like investing in venture funds. You want to be in the top venture funds and that's it because that spread is so different. Whereas investing in buyout funds, the inter quartile spread is much thinner because there's, maybe you do as two to 3x but there's going to be a lot of funds that will be able to give you that two or 3X. Whereas in venture, you're really looking for the outliers, that 100, 200X and some funds who have great access, great brand, et cetera will be able to get into that and a number of other funds for whatever reason, won't be able to invest in those companies.

I think curation really matters. We thought about that a lot when putting certain funds on the iCapital platform, whether they be private equity funds, hedge funds, private debt funds. And I think the same goes for startups or platforms that have any sort of asset on them. It's important that these platforms, they really have a big responsibility to do high quality diligence, to curate those investment opportunities so that they're high quality ones and they're investment opportunities that investors would want to invest into and benefit from investing in rather than foregoing returns that they could get into more liquid markets like crypto or certainly equities markets.

And then I think on the alt alts side, there's some really good cases for why that could be an investment portfolio, whether it's a combination of uncorrelated assets. I think there's some shades of early crypto days in some of those markets and the cards and collectibles markets where there's chance to generate pretty meaningful returns given where the market is now. And if there's truly more demand to come in. And then I think there is some element of investing things that you like or care about or follow. And I think people will do that. There's that element of things as well.

And people invest into art as high net worth. People invest into wine. Those are now markets that are also being made accessible in fractional ways. Whether it's art or wine, which tend to be part of a high net worth's investor portfolio in some way, shape or form and probably carve out a piece of alts bucket, I don't see why other types of assets in that alt alt space can't carve out at least some portion of that to the extent that it's something that somebody is willing or able to lose, if they lose it all.

Henry Yoshida:

Well, I really love that part. And I wanted to highlight again that I really like the culture as an asset theme that you brought up. I'm pretty certain that if we go across all the episodes we've ever done, no one's ever verbalized it that way. And there is a sense because I feel like when I was growing up, investing in a stock was a way to establish an ownership stake in that company and then maybe more recently now that people do options trading or the stock market itself, isn't the way that it used to be. That the way you recapture this culture as an asset is exactly what you're talking about.

Looking at these alts alts platforms, for maybe a certain sub segment of our audience, Michael Jordan is the reason they play basketball right now or they had played it in the past. And now there's a chance to go find these alts alts platforms that have a legitimate chance, as you talked about the returns from 32,000 to 738,000, they can make financial returns, but then invest in something that they believe in. I think that's just, that's a really, really powerful message and people can speak now with their dollars.

Michael Sidgmore:

No, it absolutely is. I titled the piece called, “Put Your Money Where the Movement Is.” And I think it's people really want to invest into movements and to invest into things that they care about and can identify with. And now you're seeing the infrastructure get built. Whether it's companies like Rally, there's companies like ALT, which are enabling people to manage their trading card portfolios. It appeals to both those who want to just invest for pure financial reasons, as well as people who want to invest for reasons that they really are excited about owning a piece of a player or a sport or something they follow or love, which I think those two, the collision of those two things, the collision of culture and capital I think will really change the way that people think about investing and potentially bring meaningful amounts of assets to those types of investment opportunities because you kind of expand your TAM in a sense.

Henry Yoshida:

Yeah, no, that's a great way to look at it. Well look, for us then, we'd reference this before, but why don't you take us out and tell us, where can we find these pieces as they come out on the Alts Go Mainstream? Tell us where it is. Is it at the Broadhaven site? Or I'll let you do it.

Michael Sidgmore:

Yeah, so we have a sub stack. Like many other VCs at this point, it's called altgoesmainstream.substack.com. I also am trying to tweet about this a little bit and share kind of interesting articles, news, things that are coming out. I'll also be launching a podcast as well, which Henry, I think you should be on as well, because what you're doing at Rocket Dollar is going to be a critical infrastructure layer for this piece. And I think for this space to truly go mainstream, the infrastructure layer is going to need to be built, whether it's portfolio management solutions, whether it's on ramps to investing in alternative assets and making it easy. Because honestly, we thought about this a lot at iCapital, we had partnerships with the incumbents at the time, the Millennium Trusts, the Penscos. IRAs are a perfect vehicle to put alternative assets into because they are long dated vehicles, there's tax advantages.

And generally speaking, alternative investments tend to be longer dated investments where you should not be touching them unless you really have to. And you should let them run because if you have an investment that's at five or 10X and it goes up another 2X, that's going from five to 10X or 10 to 20X. That's a meaningful difference. We almost don't want to employ a public market strategy of trying to get out too early, unless you need to or have to, because those are where you can really drive returns in your portfolio. I think, yeah, this whole space is going to start to get built. And again, we're only in the early innings of it. Yeah, that's why I've been writing about it at Alt Goes Mainstream and want to share the great things that really all the founders and investors in this space are doing.

Henry Yoshida:

Okay. It's altgoesmainstream.substack.com. And then what's your Twitter handle?

Michael Sidgmore:

My Twitter handle is just @michaelsidgmore.

Henry Yoshida:

Perfect. That's great. Well look, hey, I really appreciate having you on. And I think that just if people got a sense of the background and then the way you're seeing this space and you're someone who's been in the sort of alternative space before I would even say that alts was a term. I think that we'll be sure to put in the show notes that all the companies that you kind of mentioned, because you talked about a lot of people that are just people that we know personally, friends of mine and they've all been on the pioneering end of making these great new alternative investments possible that allow people to make money. But like you said, also allow them to invest in something that they may know and love. Culture as an asset. Remember that everyone. And then we'll put it in the show notes and we'll get people reading your stuff and we're going to follow this thought leadership and see it through to fruition. Early innings so only up from here.

Michael Sidgmore:

We hope so. Yeah. Excited to see what innovation that the companies are going to create and then how investors think about this and hopefully we can get up the curve and all sorts of investors, as we get to the kind of investors more institutional in nature, start to see this as an emerging asset class and get excited about investing in it.

Henry Yoshida:

Thank you very much, Michael. Appreciate you being on.

Michael Sidgmore:

Awesome. Thanks for having me on, Henry. Really enjoyed it.

Henry Yoshida:

All right. Thanks a lot.