The Last Trade E079: Onramp X Google Fiber in Nashville

Welcome back to the last trade. This week we're excited to bring you a special edition of the show. The following round table discussion was recorded on December 2nd in Nashville, TN during an Onramp Private Client event Co hosted by Google Fiber at the Gibson Garage event space. Moderated by Onramp's Brian Cabela's, the panel features Michael Tanguma, CEO and Co founder of Onramp and partner at Early Riders, Emily Trapani, head of sales at Google Fiber, and Cam Duty, founder of Brickyard Venture, based in Chattanooga. The conversation explores the intersection of technology investment in the evolving landscape of Bitcoin, with a focus on Nashville as a burgeoning hub for innovation. Panelists discuss their experiences in the tech industry, the importance of information asymmetries and driving value creation, and the implications of Bitcoin as a digital protocol for value. The discussion also highlights the cultural and economic factors that position Nashville and Chattanooga as key players in the tech ecosystem, while examining the challenges of traditional venture capital and the objective properties that make Bitcoin a superior form of money. Now time for the show. What you're telling me is that music is about stock, and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of Gutless 9074 198792972000 and whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we sell. Hey, OK. I say when we sell. And it's my great pleasure to moderate today's discussion featuring esteemed panelists across the technological landscape, each with their own unique disciplines and ties to the great city of Nashville. So without further ado, let's begin with some brief intros. We can just go down the line here. Please introduce yourselves to the folks and speak a bit about what you're focused on at your respective phones. Awesome. So Michael, thank you. CEO of on rampant partner also and early writers really excited to have you guys here. I was trying to, we're walking over from our office. I was thinking about how do we get in the frame of mind we've been talking about Bitcoin for so long, thinking about like, how do we make this exciting and engaging. And I went back to, I wasn't really by any means to, to the space, but early enough in 2018 in New York, I went to one of the 1st events like this and I was super excited. I left work and there was four people in that room. There was 3 panelists like this or you know, something like this, but only four people in the room. And the price of Bitcoin at the time was like $3500. And at the time, like I felt like I wanted to pinch myself, like, Oh my God, I know about this. The world doesn't know. And I promise you today, risk adjusted, whether somebody's building and allocating to the asset or companies in the space is a much better time. There's been no shortage of regulation risk and everything that we'll talk about today. So really pumped to have this conversation. I'm Emily Chapani. I'm the head of sales at Google Fiber and I've been in Nashville a little over 10 years at Google Fiber. There'll be 10 years this year. Our 10 year anniversary of announcing that we are building in Nashville is coming up in February. So really exciting time for us. It feels like a nostalgic moment a little bit, but also have seen all this happen in the last 10 years. Saying Guma was on the team with me when we first started. We were both the sales team, but excited to talk today about Nashville being a place that you can build, where you can raise funds, raise your family. I had four kids in that time and that 10th 10 year period also here in town. So I think my perspective today will be about Google Fiber in this building and growing. But also when we started our business, it was really anchored here. This is one of the first cities that we built, so continuing to expand and grow from from here. What we've learned in Nashville, I think it's really exciting. My name is Cam Duty and I am, I guess I'm now a venture capitalist. I started, I started my career building company called Bellhops and we started back in 2012 and then moving the relocation space and then we sold part of our company right before COVID and my Co founder and I just had seen part of venture capital. We really didn't like something we thought was really missing. One of the we thought we were going to start another company. We ended up starting a venture firm called Brickyard. And so we invest in early stage companies and and technology and you know, preceding seed was really worth we focus. But my affliction, my personal affliction is just holy with Bitcoin, which is really funny because venture capital and Bitcoin are almost diametrically opposed things and go through life not feeling kind of feeling unsettled. But hopefully we we can kind of get into to some of the reason why they're. But I think that that what we'll talk about tonight, hopefully we can, we can shed some light on how Bitcoin is going to start permeate through capital allocators and how that is really going to change, actually change the world And not, you know, you know, from a perspective of how everybody talks about, you know, where we invest in world changing companies. You can't change you, you can't back or fund enough world changing companies if we maintain a positive inflation rate. And so Bitcoin is the key to all of that. So hopefully we can get into that tonight, yeah. Very well said. Thank you guys for that. So maybe to start, you know, the sort of for underlying thematic between all three of you is, is, you know, working in the technology space, emerging technology. So when when people talk about emerging or disruptive technology, you know, in my mind really what they're talking about is some form of information asymmetry. So if we think about technological adoption curves, it's really the innovators and the early movers to those, you know, new forms of technology that actually accrue the most value by building out key infrastructure and also backing founders that allow those new technologies to flourish. So this ability to really see around foreigners and see how new technologies will impact and influence society, culture and and the economy is really what drives value creation and ultimately asymmetric returns over time. So this question is really for all of you. Maybe Pam, we'll start with you. Can you just share some perspectives on, you know, how your firm navigates and capitalizes on information asymmetries to really Dr. innovation and value creation? Well, I'd say Brickyard's pretty. We're investing so early, 70% of our, our investments are pre seed investments, which is really the earliest that you can possibly invest in, in a, in a company. And normally a company is you know, before we'll consider investment. We've backed a few pre revenue companies, but normally the companies that we back are like post revenue in some small way, like 5 or 7K in, in monthly revenue kind of thing where they they have customers and and they're now you know, cross executing towards product market fit. But like we know that we're not category investors. We were curious about pretty much everything. We we aren't. Evaluating business models, so to speak, like when you're investing this early in companies, we know that almost 100% of our companies are going to be wildly tweaked and adjusted over the next, you know, 12 to 18 months post investment. And So what we really look for is that sort of intrinsic Dr. that that that real founders have like our our taking Brickyard is deserve era really broke a lot of space in that there was too much money, not enough deals to venture had to market itself as this like sexy pop culture thing with Forbes 30 under 30 and celebrity investors. And like you guys have heard said this trope so much, but it's like the the the space had to attract founders in which the beginning of venture capital was the opposite of that. Like venture capital was just a, a financing option, the only option that you have for a company that didn't cash flow. And, and so founders have changed a lot and you have a lot of like probably 80 or 90% of founders there that are in the space today are in it for the wrong reasons. And so we created, you know, Brickyard business thing where if you, we get to a charm sheet with, with you as a company, you have to move to the middle of nowhere Chattanooga, TN throughout the tech and put your head down for 18 to 24 months and just put the blinders on. And founders that are chasing the status of the acclaim or all the other kind of tangential reasons for why you would get into venture capital that, you know, a lot of that happens kind of everywhere in some of the large tech hubs. You know, you're not going to move to Chattanooga and, and put your head down for eight months if you're in that category. So our edge is like, how do you find the founders that are ready to go to battle in the trenches for a decade? Because that's that's really what. You know, venture is Michael, how about for you? Obviously Bitcoin, there's certain information asymmetries just with the asset itself, but also with the business that we're building in terms of, you know, financial services on a Bitcoin standard. What does that look like? What are the information asymmetries that you're focused on? Yeah, I think so. A couple things going back to to Cam and I'm always pointing the question. This reminds me of like when I was cutting my teeth outside of school, I worked randomly and all tied back to this at a high end auction house and had to learn about like value, a value of like most things. And the reality is value of most things, there is no value. Like you find old boxes of stuff, you bring it in. And the thing we would say is the definition of values you don't have or definition of scarcity is like you don't have it right. Because it's like very, it'd be very rare somebody would come in with a coin, you know, jewelry that did an AD melted, things like that. And so when I think about what we discussed here in the definition of value and especially specifically value investing as it's not widely known because if it was widely known, there wouldn't be value there. So today we're sitting at, you know, whether it's in. So this ties back into this conversation. Everyone here has had some vision of a future that probably was most likely right in their own professional experience with Cam. It may not fully share what he does, but like to to signal what he's doing special today is because of 0 interest rates and the cost of capital relatively low if not 0. For a very long time, what was a cottage industry and required experts turned into a just manifested as like effectively a beast that nobody recognizes and it's money chasing anything that under the sun. Kim had the asymmetry of building Brickyard with blood, sweat and tears and recognizable wait, there's actually value to understand not only the pain an entrepreneur goes through, but then ultimately what's the heuristic to know if they're real or not? It was setting them up with having them come out to Chattanooga. Chattanooga in my mind, and maybe this isn't doing a justice, but it could have been like any random place in the United States. It was showing that a founder was serious about building. And then so for Emily, I don't know a full story, but we to tie this back to going together is that we work together at Google about 10 years ago. And there was a vision of Emily taking leading her career at a well known company, Sprint, I believe, and effectively building out infrastructure in at the time, 2nd and 3rd tier cities, which again goes back to being right about things because now this is not a second or third tier city. I would make the case that this is a first tier city because people have woken up from the asymmetries that most markets globally still haven't recognized. Is that like people don't need to sit in front of a computer at a desk in an office space anywhere. They can work anywhere. And those who understand that best will benefit from a like a musical perspective. So all these things tie into effectively what we'll talk about today with Bitcoin. It's the same setup, individuals with background having time, looking at the space, understanding whether the the thing that's hard about Bitcoin and we'll tie it into, you know, Google infrastructure and technology is Bitcoin has two different properties. It's the technology. So there's a bunch of things being built similar to like fiber building out into a networking, the things that will be built on a city, but it also has monetary value. And so it has this weird hybrid of almost like there's a lot of real estate investors in here. That's like getting a piece of real estate super early because the underlying is valuable, but then everything that goes up and everything around it becomes really valuable. And that's really, it's an interesting paradox. And when during the Q&A come into it is like real estate investors historically, my experience, and they do this for kind of a while now for my age, about half a decade, talking to people about it professionally is real estate investors are generally the last. And it's scary to me because when we look at global real estate when it comes to commercial and I was at we work by the way. So I I was lighting money on fire with with Adam. You man, I was sitting. We've seen in documentary. So it's around that hour is like, it's like a door that's just like closing on individuals and people are waking up. The thing that there there's two tropes that have come to mind about Real Estate 1 is Bitcoin doesn't call you at 2:00 AM to complain about the leaky pipe. Jeff, who's in in the room who I lease a place here in Nashville and I won't call him at 2:00 AM, but if there's a leaky pipe, he's going to get a call. And then the other thing that's. Less. Than $500 does it have to be lost if I were you? The other thing about real estate is have a good friend, his dad was in real estate, he said. You know, the thing about real estate is even though it's not very liquid, it's always there. And he deeply understands Bitcoin, he says, well, you know, the thing about Bitcoin is even though it's not really there, it's highly liquid, right? And most people looked at real estate and then COVID happened in 2020. And individuals recognize, well, wait, I should have underwritten risk in a different way when it comes to, you know, city hubs and the flea and the town and all the things we know about it. And Emily, how about for you, just in terms of sort of what you alluded to earlier around Google being very early mover to Nashville and sort of, you know, seeing what could become of a city like this, Yeah. You know, what kind of information asymmetries have you honed in on and that sticky? The information asymmetry, whether it be symmetrical speeds, everybody get their information as quickly as possible. Obviously we're talking about like getting information as fast you can. There's a currency to that. So I think that our part in that is enabling that for people access to information speed. It's funny you said his company could happen anywhere because it probably couldn't. I think when you think about China, go the first gig city, like the sensibilities that go into a municipality starting a gig network, there's a sense of of culture that has to be shared to to even kind of prioritize something like that. So I think the thinkers and the doers and the dreamers that are in Chattanooga when that was happening all come share that that sensibility. And so for Nashville, I think something that makes it so special and this is, you know, 10 years later is you have a culture in a city where you've got like the top three healthcare companies globally, right? So you got like a lot of smart people here, right? Well, 15 universities, I think people who graduate from a school here, stay here, build their families here, build their businesses here. But then you've also got music from and people just are like, I'm going to come here and like play the guitar on the corner and become the next Chris Stapleton. So you've got crazy people, very talented people who are like a little bit crazy, right? So our culture is like very smart, really intelligent, then very creative, but then also a little crazy. And I think that that is the recipe for a successful entrepreneur, a startup and in business. But also, I think that's probably the Bitcoin recipe, yeah. Right. Very well said and and a great transition to my next question, which is more specifically around Nashville as an innovative hub. So if we think about, you know, the early days of the Internet, call it sort of 90s and early 2000s, local communities were very critical in cultivating innovation hubs. So really the hub of the Internet was effectively Silicon Valley. And if we Fast forward to today, you know, I think you could make the argument that the technological Nexus of the United States at least has really shifted and become almost more decentralized. So you'll, you're seeing founders and startups, you know, relocate to places like Austin, Denver, and of course, Nashville. So question for everyone, you know, why is Nashville and by extension Chattanooga very well positioned to be one of these modern hubs of tech innovation and what has drawn your respective firms to focus on this this region? So so as a native Texan, it kind of pains me to say this question. Nashville probably the best city in America in my opinion from what you just referenced. From innovation to culture to conserve the conservative ideals, like what Emily's referencing goes back to like the founding, founding of America. We kind of forget. I was thinking a lot about this independent of who anybody was signing for in the election of like America, why it's so innovative. We do a lot of business in the Middle East and there's this natural friction because we're progressive here, which they're they're naturally conservative, but they also really like the innovation that comes from the progressive nature. So they're always trying to import people out there. And the reality is America's the best run startup that's ever existed. When you think about it from just all the things you said, everything you described on National is what America was founded on. Like you have to have entrepreneur divers, you have to get on a ship, all the things associated. And you kind of like lost that a little bit. When you think about incumbents, incumbents in all the large sectors of a world naturally get stifled with bureaucracy and all the things that everybody probably knows about. And so there's this resurgence with technology, and one of them is an open decentralized Internet and that allows for the dissemination of information companies to be built, all the things associated, but you need the infrastructure in place. And so Nashville having that or Google having the vision to go to these markets in Nashville just emerging. I kind of joke that everyone's afraid to go down to Texas. They ended up in Nashville, but it's just like some truth. And I ended up here. And so anyway, it's a fantastic place. And I think that's where Nashville embodies a lot of the spirits of like the conservative nature, but also the ethos of entrepreneurship that a lot in in the friendliness of it. Because when I was in New York City, I moved back to Texas at the time because there's like, I saw a lot of the bureaucracy in building and it was like, well, if you want to run a business, you're trying to give yourself the best chance to succeed and you you go to places that allow for that. Yeah, there's some stat, there's a lot of like e-commerce the space in Nashville. I think you can get to like 50% of the the US population within six hours of Nashville. So there's a lot of like kind of logistics from here. But there's also this connectiveness. Not just like you're, you know, not too far from your mom, you can like drive home and see or whatever for holidays. But there's also just like this connectivity, I think in our culture and our community and some of that for the same reasons we were talking about like you're really intelligent, you're really creative, you're a little crazy. But there's also this like cooperation, not competition. And when you look at healthcare, like any successful surgery, there's everyone's working together in pursuit of a goal. You can have to put your ego aside even like surgeons, right to like violate on on this, this collaboration that's happening in the music industry. It's the same thing. And you would think it'd be more cutthroat and competitive, but it's actually everyone is working together. Look at any, any recent top song, you know, TikTok song, there's like 10 Co writes. There's a lot of people in the same room, like working on the same thing. So our culture in. Nashville comes from that. Even the sports team here, you know, everything is very much who how can we work together to the point that if you're not like that, it's it's weird. You know, it's like you see Reba when you're out at dinner and you strip from autographs, like that's weird. You would feel like you're not from Nashville. And if someone's like, hey, can you on LinkedIn? Hey, my recent job, let's get lunch and chat about like if you say no to something like that, that's weird. Like it's good that we have a culture where like when you're not behaving in the right way like that, that stands out more so than like it's kind of expected that everybody would cooperate. So building a business here, whatever it is, you have the assumption that people are going to show up and be helpful and be collaborative and cooperate versus compete. So I think that's something that's very special, also fosters any kind of like startup or a new company, but then also when you're trying to scale, you have to be able to do that to do that as well. This was Emily's nice way of saying she's not really sure about Bitcoin, but she's down to yeah. Right, yeah, I was like, I don't want to. What is it when you go with those like timeshare things? We're having lunch. She's like telling me this presentation, like, are you going to sell me some knives with? Bitcoin salesman that's. A lot you haven't sold me, No. Kim, how about you? Any any Chattanooga specific thoughts? I'm. Thinking about cities like that, thinking about startups, So like Nashville is great, it's awesome, but it's kind of like a pre IPO city, you know, like your best days are kind of mine, you know, like I'm AI am like a heroin addict of the early days, like kind of the early where's. The falling with this. So I, I, I like the acceleration, like, you know, building Bellhouse, for example, going from zero to 200 employees, it was super exhilarating. Going from like 200 to 500 sucked. Like it wasn't fun. And I think, you know what I'm drawn to. I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, shout out for Chattanooga because I think it's the greatest place in the world, but it's not Nashville. It'll never be Nashville. We're we're like a seed stage city, you know, where like every day, you know, when we get a new great restaurant town, like that's awesome. It's like we feel that it's that actually moves the needle for us. And so building a city like Chattanooga for us, being able to do what we do with Brickyard. Is it it we've kind of figured out how to stay in a city like Chattanooga and also do what we do. I mean, it's conducive to to early stage company builders to be in a place where you don't have a lot of distraction. And that's like a lot of value that we provide at brickyards. Like we're pulling, you know, teams out of SF, out of New York, out of, you know, out of Boston, Austin, you know, London, etcetera, putting them in this like mid sized city that's totally relevant to technology. But like in that through of sorrow in the early days, none of that stuff matters. It's like talking to customers and shipping code and you know, one week to the next, you can like really move the needle. And I, I kind of feel the same way about Chattanooga is we're still small enough to where year to year you can kind of look back and see you can feel the acceleration of the city and, and that's what I love about it. You're building this multi $1,000,000 asset. You should put Google Fiber in it. And our job 10 years ago was to explain why. And this is a brand new company that everyone was just hearing about for the first time. Why should this developer put our infrastructure in, which was kind of painted the time because you're like under construction. We don't want to get in the way or you just built this beautiful asset and we're like, yeah, we're going to do some construction after they just painted. So we were trying to find ways for them to say yes to this. And one of them was like with your Lisa, we'll do free moving. We hired them. Do you remember we put 2 little fiber shirts on your wet on your fell hop guys? Yes. In the same. Like I did deal with Uber a couple years ago, same, same idea, but I was also laughing 'cause your whole thing is like, let's get these founders not distracted with them in a room for 18 months. Like have them focus and like my preferred leadership style, it's like no walls, no focus, The more the merrier. Everybody overhearing everybody's other conversation because so much sparks and you like slam into each other and that I think it's very much it's a Google thing, but it's also a Nashville thing. Everyone here, probably this whole audience, there's like a slash like when my husband got, we moved here 10 years ago, 11 years ago, most he was just in medical school, just graduated his first year outside of medical school and then got a record deal. So his backup plan was to be a doctor, which by the way, it's not the worst bathroom plan in Nashville. But the idea is like, you move here, you're pursuing this music career, but you have something else. You may be doing something else at the same time. This year was the first year that he stopped working in the hospital. That's doing. We have a music studio now full time and it took 10 years to kind of get the cluster's kids, you know, so we get that get everything in order to like make that leap. But sure, everybody has like a slash in their bio. You're like finance person, but slash, you know, you're singing karaoke on Friday trying to get your your vector deal or whatever it is, or you're doing a podcast while also working your 9:00 to 5:00 or you've got like your 5 to 9, your 9:00 to 5:00 and then you're you're 5:00 to 9:00. So I like that about Nashville because there's like this baby that's part of what drives people to be helping each other, but not kind of catering to like the focus and rather having that that distraction. There's like magic that kind of comes from those different parts of people kind of bumping into each other, I think. Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah. Change your business policy. Well, to be fair to Cam, I think part of his format, what he's built is exactly to spark what you're leveraging is because all of his teams that he funds are in the same same room effectively. And so they are bouncing ideas off of each other. And so you do get collaborative and if I go? Back to the apples and workers, because like what you're describing is like conducive part of Nashville as a part of like remote work. Like there was a study that just recently came out. I was like, no, it's like 33% of people have two jobs that work remotely, right, Because it's just like the most functioning, the side where cams coming from and they both sides make sense. It's like if you are in the fight for your life, like that's what effectively is when you're starting a business and especially you're taking on external capital because now you're fighting for other people's lives too, right? Yeah, they're investing. Yeah. You don't want any of what you're describing. You want them literally, like he references a brand of ships. And I love it because like, you're just like saying like, I'm taking my stand. I'm going to try to make my impact in the world, and it's the only thing that can. Yeah. Well, you don't want a backup plan, right? You eliminate the option for a Plan B. Like extraordinary different. It's like they know that their sacrifices that can be made and so there's just a natural balance and then post that they don't like. Maybe some people stay in Chattanooga when others go to these cities and go get to indulge and they become successful, but they're there's always that sacrifice in it. That's why I look back at like, what Cam's doing a special because as special as Chattanooga it is, it's still for most people, just a random place in the middle of the Tennessee. I mean, most of our teams are not going to stay in Chattanooga and they should. I hope a lot of our teams come to Nashville because Nashville has the talent density it has. Like, you know, it's a city that you can recruit to really well and I think that's going to happen. We've already had a couple teams open offices in both in Chattanooga and and are looking open offices. Usually it's like has to do customer service or product, but Nashville's is, I'm hoping we can funnel a ton of teams here. There's a couple of real estate investors in here. They were talking about, you know, some of this like stuff that's been the news about infusing, you know, a lot of alone on real estate with some Bitcoin and, you know, maybe canvas that picks up. We'll, you know, owners gonna need officers. Collab and. Then we'll get some 8 gig Google Fiber and. You mentioned like people working from home. I thought it was like during the pandemic, everybody kind of had to work from home where they, you know, shifted how people work. And so if given the chance to work anywhere, a lot of people chose Nashville. There was a ton of Googlers. Like there's we had like a listserv of how many people chose to move to Nashville. And it was shocking where when given the choice and nothing else, this is where people chose to be. So now with the return back to office and a lot of companies are mandating it or going to a hybrid schedule. It used to be that you would recruit companies to move to Nashville. You go to the C-Suite and like get them to kind of invest here, create a headquarters here. Now it's kind of like this opposite is happening where people who chose to move here don't want to move back to wherever. So now those companies are like, oh, the talent is there. They already live there. Now we're going to build a second office there or satellite office. So it's kind of being led by the the will of the employer or the choice of the employee, which I think is fascinating. I haven't heard of that happening in any other cities. Probably not many besides Nashville. I mean, I think this ties into the theme you're talking about is like the market's changed and the market gets to decide what the incumbents will do and some larger will be able to hold off longer. But your point, I mean, would you to be fair like this happens in Austin and Land and others just in their different scales? People from Austin Financial or during the pandemic. I mean. You did. I mean, I have, I'm still over there, but. Let's talk about there so. Well, what I do, what I didn't want to share is that people little time. So people leave the people leave the cities because they can work anywhere. They're not going to come back and other talent will take them in the same way people have fallen capital flight. So you see this, whether it's it's prevalent on a net like nation state perspective, and the UAE has been big for this, where you know, they'll welcome from a tax perspective, Singapore, where the countries start to operate like, you know, companies and they have to create the most advantageous environment for be employee. It's not like somebody who just tax and you have to this is what we're still seeing like legacy for both states or cities like a San Francisco, New York, not get and that's where you have this like fleeing of capital. The point being is used to be very hard to move your money because you have real estate and you had all this physical infrastructure, you know, all these different like assets that you have to move. And going with Bitcoin, well, there's no shortage of value problems. But one of them is that point about it's, it's not always there. It's not there. It's not tangible, but it's highly liquid and it's easily movable. And so it goes to what Emily's describing is as the market wakes up, they just realize they have to compete for talent from not only a job, a real estate perspective, but then also how do you actually treat from taxes and all the other things that you would want in a place to live more? The money will just leave because you don't have the legacy ways of, oh, you're going to just sell all this all. I mean, obviously family, there's some still things that hold us down, but it's changing drastically. And most places don't really pick the crock that Yeah, I think. That's very well said. And I'm going to pull us back. I'm going to pull us back. I'm going to pull us back to the, the thread of the Internet analogy, you know, with respect to Bitcoin. So, you know, similar to the Internet, which emerged via a set of open protocols, Bitcoin is, is very simply just an open protocol for value. So if if the Internet, you know, if you look at the Internet as the digitization of information, Bitcoin really represents the digitization of value. And the key difference here is that, you know, between, you know, the early 90s and now is that owning a piece of the underlying infrastructure is actually possible with Bitcoin. So, you know, owning Bitcoin today, buying Bitcoin today is as if you were able to purchase a piece of the Internet back then. So, Michael, maybe we can start with you, but can you speak to, you know, at a high level the innovation that is Bitcoin and, and specifically why now more than ever, it's important to understand what's happening and really why Bitcoin is currently having, you know, sort of its mainstream moment with, you know, the likes of of various corporations and also now nation states considering adopting Bitcoin as a reserve asset. Yeah, So it's mainstream for us. It's still, it's so insanely really, we talked to so many people about all this stuff and it's just like you really have to get know your audience and and be careful how you describe these things. There's two components of this. So the nation state adoption, personal account adoption, there's only 21 million Bitcoin that will ever exist. And if you can come to that conclusion and why that's credible, well then you start to underwrite, well, what's the value of it? So there's the monetary aspect of it and we can go into that or we can have separate conversations about that. We are our firm helps with the education. There's the other aspect that Brian's referencing is that it's a piece of technology and allows for transfer value. So there's a lot of folks that will think about gold or like we'll go back to like interchange with Amex and credit cards. Like all those things in an Internet world when your Tesla's going across tolls or you need to do microtransactions just cannot be done because the intermediary problem. That's the problem. If you have an intermediary that has to facilitate the transaction and it's not economical to move. This goes back to how browsers were set up. I forget, I'll butcher it, but there's like the four O 2 or whatever the error code is that you actually get. There's an error code where you were they were going to put micro payments, but you just couldn't figure it out. The way you figure it out is why I started with there's only 21 million because if you can derive, there's only 21 million and some value will be from it and then all the value stems from it. Now you can actually associate when you're online. While you would want more of that, you can't do the other version. You can't create a technology and make people value it. You have to have the underlying properties make sense. And so very often, again, you've been doing this for a long time that we get on the defensive and this is to Emily because she doesn't know what's happening. It's very often people will go back, we've done this for years and they'll go, it's 3020 thousand, 60,000, go back to 20. All the numbers and individuals will come up and say, well, why is it explain Bitcoin? Why is it going? Why is it 100? Why is it going to be a million? Why isn't it zero? And all is it's like, look, if you want to have a conversation about value, what gives things value? Because there's objective things that give things value when it comes to we all know why scarcity. That's why we like these guitars behind us and other things like that. And then it needs to be divisible because you need to be able to transfer it up, needs to be able to teleport across time, right? Because and space because if you can't send it to you, then what's the value of it? So we can have that conversation. But the way I like to frame it now, because it's just, it's been working for 15 years and it only goes one thing up and to the right is why isn't it? It's a $2 trillion asset today. Why isn't a $10 trillion asset? And the reason why it's not a $10 trillion asset is because there hasn't been historically a good way to store it. So everybody here, no matter what they know about Bitcoin, they know two things. Either it ends up in a landfill in like the UK and some like hard drive or some North Korean takes it and you wake up and you're, you're, you're all your bitcoins are gone. That's what you know, grandma's now. And so this notion of wool, OK, so somebody has exposure, a couple people I know in here, probably the exposure, everybody has like some exposure, if not like maybe 0 or a little bit. But they're drastically under allocated because the gravity of what we're talking about, whether it's from there's 450 roughly trillion dollars in assets that are all like what Bitcoin's competing with. And it all competes with them head on and just completely crushes it when you really break it down. And so there's that aspect. But then there's a secondary part on the technology side, and that's the easy part to anchor to because it's looks like when Brian was referencing technology companies adopted every technology companies going to hold Bitcoin, every business going to hold Bitcoin, every individual's going to hold Bitcoin in the same way everybody uses the Internet. And at the time everybody like, are you going to be an Internet company? And yeah, the.com and all those things happen in the same way today. Everybody's like, are you a Bitcoin company? It's just if it's money and it's a form of value that people hold, everyone will just be utilizing it, whether it's part of their technology technology stack or part of their sadies. They're not mutually exclusive, and that ultimately leads it to be intertwined in everything. So, yeah, yeah, there's no such thing as a Internet company today, right? You're just a company and obviously you're leveraging the Internet. Is that. For mine, you know, that's all we do. Google Farmers Internet Company built the Internet. Maybe an exception, that's all. But the point being like, you know, there was, you know, companies in the early 2000s that that was their whole thing. They just add to their name. And we saw this even with with Bitcoin and blockchain to some extent in our cycles where it's, you know, a company adds blockchain to their name and stock price jumps. It's like, well, that won't exist in a world where to Michael's point, Bitcoin is just globally recognized as a form of money. Well, then obviously, if you're a company and you're operating with money, which most companies do, then you're going to be leveraging Bitcoin in some way. Ken, did you have any thoughts along these lines, sort of the Internet analogy? I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to like block and bridge. I have a very. I have a pretty like narrow beat. On Bitcoin. It's not what I do for a living like what I do for a living. Yes, I'm a capital allocator, but because I'm the capital allocator and I also understand Bitcoin, the, the thing that I feel like compelled to, to, to say if, if I, I tweeted something out recently, I was like this one Bitcoin was going from like 60 to 90. And I tweeted something like, you know, if, if, if I've spent, you know, last the, you know, if I've spent 5 minutes with you in the last two years, like you are in my iMessage thread right now. People are just texting me constantly. Like, holy shit, what's happening? Like, thank you so much for getting me into Bitcoin. Like for me, the, the thing that matters most for, for folks in the crowd that don't fully understand what Bitcoin is, is you have AI, which is Moore's law. Just it's the training that will not stop. There's nothing we can stop this thing. Our productivity is right at the precipice of a, of the J curve where we're going to get way more productive faster than we've ever been, you know, faster than than has ever happened in human history. You know, we're 4% more productive every year in the US. That's about to go to 10. It's about to go to 15. It's better to go to 20% a year, OK, over the next 2025 years, Like this is we're at the point where stuff is going to be moving so fast, no one can keep up. All right? That's the power production side of the economy. These are like these nuclear power plants that do everything better for less inputs, like more outputs, less inputs. And that's what productivity is. And these companies, they're building on top of this modern technology, you know, AKA AI, you know, the cost of all things should be dropping, but it's not. Why is it not? Like how are we in a position here where we're better at everything and accelerated pace and yet all our shit cost more every single year? Like everything should be costing less and less and less. The what's happening is the US has 36 1/2 trillion dollars in debt, OK. And the Fed has one job, and that job is don't default, OK. And with technology accelerating its pace of productivity, we're ramming more economic energy into the same number of units. OK, so if the Fed never printed another dollar, we would default because paying back that 36 1/2 trillion would be way harder because each unit is buys more. So if each unit buys more, you have to do more work to pay off each unit. OK. And so for every game that we have on on productivity side, the Fed has to offset by printing money just to avoid default, OK. And that what that is how that is manifesting in all of our lives is our eggs that should be getting 4 to 6% cheaper every year are getting 2 to 3% more expensive every year. And so what's actually happening is, is the Fed is stealing the 45% production gains that we have earned plus 3 or 4%, All right. So inflation is not stuff getting 4% more expensive is it should be getting 5% cheaper, but it's actually 4% more. So that's. And so what's going to happen over the next decade is AI is about to accelerate the pace of deflation, all right? And the Fed is going to have to print like, like no tomorrow to offset it just to avoid default, All right? So we're going to go from 4% to 5% to 7% to 10%. Stuff should be getting 10% cheaper for us every year. But really it's going to, all they have to do is maintain a 2% inflation rate. But now they're stealing 12%, right, The 10% of gains that we've earned in the economy plus 2% on the other side. And so AI and Bitcoin are two sides of the same coin. You have the power production side that's ramming energy into our money. And then you have our batteries that are storing monetary energy that we produce. And I'll just wrap it all up to say money always converges on the best money. And so USD is the best Fiat money in the world. And what we're about to experience over the next 15 years, people are going to realize there is a better money than the best money on earth. And people are going to start jumping ship and the entire world is going to be repriced in Bitcoin. And you know, the thing that's going to offset that is, is you guys are going to be, you know, talking about, you know, does this change the dynamic of the world reserve currency? You know, if we implement a strategic Bitcoin reserve and if we start actually hedging, you know, the debt that we have, not trying to grow our way out of try to grow our way out of our debt, but also allocate our capital and resources into something that's going to to hedge the debt that we carry. We will we will retain the world reserve currency. Bitcoin will bolster the US dollar. We will save in Bitcoin and we will spend in U.S. dollars. And because more monetary energy is being stored in this pristine asset, the prices of all things are going to fall. the Fed is likely to go away like the world gets repriced in a fixed monetary policy where we all benefit from the gains of the hard work and innovation that that, you know, that we produce every single year. So that's that's what big point is. It's the perfect battery. There's no intrinsic value to Bitcoin. You know, Bitcoin without AI would never live up to what it was capable of. AI without Bitcoin would never live up to what it is capable of, you know, in terms of benefiting humanity. So that's my beef. I mean, we haven't changed our price and our one gig products in 10 years. Eggs are more expensive, everything's more expensive. Our price is the same 10 years. Ago is the money franker? No. No, no, no. I think. One of the maybe problem or opportunity you have is that reminds me of 10 years ago is when we were first out trying to tell people you need a gig or you should have said, why? What am I going to do with that? We didn't really have, we didn't know, we didn't have the best answer for it. So at the time we went to the creators, the doers, the people that crazed people I keep referencing and we're like, here, we're going to give you this resource and then you tell us what you do with it. And it was like the most exciting time because we've heard from our users what this meant. And there's, there's one story in Nashville that I wouldn't have been able to think up until after it happened, which was we went to Music Row. It was like RCA studio AI think this is who we sold. And they, they finally had a gig in the studio. And before that you're, you're building a song, right? So you do your parts, your stems, whatever it is. Maybe you're playing a track with some guitars. OK, what they would do is record it, download it to an external hard drive, get the Courier on a bicycle, come pick this thing up, which by the way, jostle around. It's a little risky. OK, so you've got like your your precious cargo. And they would drive it to the next studio, plug it in and lay the next track, drums or whatever. And this would happen over a period of weeks, months, whatever. To build a song. It was like a physical thing that you had to move around once you have a gig. Now all of a sudden, and this is a music producer that told me the story, he's laying a track recording with another person collaborating with him who is in Paris. And now we're doing this in real time. This was 10 years ago. So you can imagine this takes somebody who's like a Music Row producer, so obviously very successful and suddenly are they are now a global business collaborating internationally and can finish a song quickly the in real time. So imagine like having that to building you go into the pandemic, it gives you like a superpower. So now we were talking about this recently. We just launched a couple weeks ago, 8 gig in Nashville. I'm having the same conversations and it feels so nostalgic because I'm like, I don't know what you're going to do with this. And I can't even imagine to dream it up. But I'm going to find the people who are the dreamers who are going to figure it out and then they'll tell me. So we're going to the podcasters and the creatives and music are the same. It's the same people we went to 10 years ago, often the same person and saying like we not have this resource like to sit out. You tell us what this means to your business. And I feel like you have a similar opportunity with bit fling where you're saying like there's a a million things. We can't even imagine what this is going to unlock or the potential that it has, but it's getting it into the hands of the people who are able to think that way in the abstract and they can start to build. And this is probably a lot of the entrepreneurs that you work with, but once you that's the early, the early phases, it's like finding those people, giving them the resource and then just kind of waiting for the what feels like the magic to kind of happen. Yeah, it's a, it's a fantastic way to title and I didn't know if you were going to be able to do with the Cam referencing the dollar to. Me, I could do it. I want to. I want to. Brexit, the early like so, so the capital allocation piece. The thing that that is really interesting to me about Bitcoin is when you denominate your world in Bitcoin, your capital allocation strategy totally changes because you realize the hurdle is not the S&P, OK, 7% of your, that's not the hurdle rate to be the hurdle rate is a 60% for your CAGR asset called Bitcoin. And so how you allocate capital, Do I hire this person for $100,000 a year? Well, do I think, would I rather have this person or would I rather have Bitcoin, right? And so talk about early riders like how you're thinking about how companies should be thinking about allocating capital. At Onramp, we believe that Bitcoin is the most important asset of the 21st century. The hard part is securing it right. There are shortcomings with keeping your coins on an exchange, but also with setting up your own self custody arrangement. Onramp solves for these concerns. Our multi institution custody solution maximizes security and minimizes counterparty risk, ensuring that your Bitcoin remains securely in your possession and provides built in inheritance planning to ensure your family is protected as well. Onramp provides Peace of Mind for your Bitcoin journey, whether for your whole stack or for part of it as a compliment to your existing self custody setup. For more information, check us out at onrampbitcoin.com. Yeah, there's a few threads to tie in. So Cam was referencing the, the dollar Bitcoin and Emily was referencing the, you know, state of viewers. And like that there's so much room, right? A lot of this stuff is open to interpretation. So there's like 2 points. What do you build is open to the smartest people? And then in, in this room, how do you think about why it matters to you? Everybody's different. It's such a, it's multidisciplinary. That's why it's so hard. And there's no, like there's no marketing effort. So everybody comes in at their own kind of conclusion on like a they need it. But what Cam was alluding to and what Em was alluding to is it's very asymmetric. And we keep using this term. But generally when people think about asymmetric and the only thing about the upside, the problem is technology is asymmetric in the truest sense. It's upside and downside risk. If you adopt it early, you get to benefit the upside. If you don't adopt it at all, you get to experience with the downside. On the monetary side, you basically get the lifeblood sucked out of you, as Cam was referencing from a number of reasons we can talk about. And then from the technology side, to Emily's point, well, if you don't have those rails that you needed, well then you're just naturally behind the competitor that has it. To go to Cam's point, to make it very like easy, not polarizing. It's like Bitcoin just allows individuals to buy more eggs every week than less. And the dollar lets you buy less. It's a, it's a battery to consume the dollars. There's only 20 million. So if you have all these scarce assets that exist and they all go up year over year, Bitcoin it just is the most scarce asset. So it goes up the fastest. And will it continue? That's like, no, that's the nice version without saying that we're going to lose as well. But so now to go to Emily's Cam's question about. So when you come to that conclusion, well then you naturally like everything you look at to what Cam was referencing. Well, why would I buy the water? Why would I buy invest in this business if this asset just goes up X year over year? And it's not to say you don't spend your money because money is meant to be spent. You're just naturally looking at things in a more discerning way. And we all grew up where a lot of people are older, grew up with their parents sound of money doesn't grow on trees. I think we probably all recognize like it doesn't physically grow on trees, but it might as well grow on trees because it just continues to get spun out. Like no matter what you try on the news, we're printing the next, you know, 100 billion, sending it wherever. And so you look at that through a lens of an entrepreneurial, from an entrepreneurial perspective was what we did at Onrint. You start to realize, wait, I can actually build much more efficiently if I look in a more discerning way of how do I allocate capital? Because you're the old, the ultimate form of capital allocation is run out of business because you like have to move the money or go out of business if you don't do it correctly. And the easy examples of this is like flexible work in contract in an age of going back to, you know, working remotely, a lot of people again are interested to work in the space. There's only so many businesses that will happily work for a percentage of what they would in a full time job in kind of quote UN quote Moonlight, especially high performers because high performers that everybody knows, you know, earmuffs. But like at Google, the best performer work 20% of the time. And this is just like I'm speaking as I was there. It's like I didn't work that much 'cause like I'm juicy. Are you like? Speak for yourself. I was talking about myself, but I was also, I mean, was that OK? So. No, Yeah, no. Like hire the person that's gonna like, you know, try to do more in the less time or hire that's a lazy person. But sometimes they phrase it like hire the diva, like the person that's gonna like, I'm not doing that, but they have to get it. So figure the shortcut, or figure out the way to make it to make it work. That's the most efficient, not lazy. Basically getting that is that like there's a lot of talent charges that the rest of the market doesn't know. And so normally it can notice this in order to hope, you know, advise the end state. But like when businesses raise capital, especially venture capital, like there's a whole it gives the question there's there's misalignment of incentives across the board. So you have misalignment from the person that's giving the dollars, which is a limited partner because they're looking at everything through the melting ice cube that Cam was referencing that it's inflating away. So you're just less discerned about where do I put this money? Do I put it in the S&P? Do I put it in this like Lamborghini know a few people in here on this one that has one of those. And so the order I put in that real estate. And so then they're just less discerning about the venture capital that you give the money to. And then the venture capitalist is to nominate everything in dollars. Their goal generally is to raise larger funds, take management fees. And so they're looking and to mark up their portfolio companies. So they're naturally always telling the person, the second they give the dollar to them, he's like, run, run as fast. And they're like where it's like, I don't know, just keep running and keep growing. And so the first thing he says, go hire a bunch of people. And so when you hire, everyone knows that's one of the only the two hardest things in life are, well, maybe 3, building a business, allocating capital to businesses and hiring people in any order you can. You either probably like order of operations, but it's hard to hire. So if you just have to get told to go hire a bunch of people, you're literally just cutting your burn. And if not by 50% to 75% because most people we've all worked in places and hired every at best came back 50%. And so the approach we took at early writers is we denominate everything in Bitcoin. And so this ties back to the the ultimate allocator being the entrepreneur. If you're allocating to somebody that looks at the world through this lens of the prices, appreciating Bitcoin at X year over year, well, you want them to spend the money. You just want them to spend it with the highest level of discernment and scrutiny because that's I mean, they have to have other, you know, expertise as founder market fit, all the things you would naturally hear in the common tropes. But it's this notion that Cam alluded to is that it gets harder and harder year over year to invest in companies or build if you're losing X purchasing power because you're effectively trying to build with one hand time when you're behind your back now two hands, the next thing you know, you're just like stuck in mud. And this is where businesses and the deflation comes into because the harder and harder it gets to build a business means that unit economic margins are decreasing because you have to raise prices, which means that you have less users, which lowers the likelihood to be successful. And so we've kind of taken on the very far fringes of, you know, we're still early to explain why Bitcoin has value, but on the very bleeding edges of that, we're investing in companies and they're across the spectrum. We have a gentleman here, we'll call him out publicly, but he ran a successful software company with venture backed and then realized that Bitcoin was the thing and he basically was able to allocate to Bitcoin. And I want to say 21 has experienced significant appreciation and had to re underwrite everything he does because majority of the markets on a rat race, just like humans are on a rat race. Like if you talk to anybody that gets to this point of speaking about Bitcoin, they'll all come down to or majority will say 2020 was the biggest time for them to recognize this because this isn't really an IQ test. It's a common sense test. It's like, do I want something that can be infinite or do I want the thing that only has 21 million? The problem is the only way you get to that is with a certain amount of time off the rat racing during 2020. We all know how much time we had to think and look into these things. And so that's ultimately where this asymmetry goes. Look, the more time people have to hear about these pods and get to meet with us is where you have that. What? Y'all what what Michael is doing with early riders is insane. Like it's totally insane. So insane, like Brickyard, for our next fund, we're going to allocate 10% of the fund Bitcoin because I will not raise another fund and not have an allocation Bitcoin. I'm burning the bullets on the line. You're going to hear what? Will not be a top decile fund if you don't in this next decade. But like what he's doing is absolutely insane. What he is promising his LP's is I'm going to return you more Bitcoin than you gave me. His hurdle rate is a 60% CAGR asset. Like, let me just go back to the, you know, the 50th percentile venture capital firm returns Goosek. Half of venture firms do not return. Capital any cap, All right. You have to get to the 70th percentile to like 1X, right? I mean, these numbers are insane. And so my take is I'm going to take 10% of our next fund and I'm going to allocate a Bitcoin. And that one allocation, you know, even if it grows at a 20% CAGR over the next 10 years, I'm a top desil fund and on that allocation alone. And so I'm starting at like a 3X fund when everybody else is starting at a 0X fund because LP's live in in like a nominal multiple mindset. Like we're all in this world of like what, you know, what was your fund? What was your last funds return, right? But we're a 5X fund. All right, let me tell you something. This decade there will be a ton of venture firms that are 5X funds that return less purchasing power to LP's than they took from them 10 minutes ago. Like, think about that. That's crazy. That's absolutely crazy. Yeah, Yeah. I think what Cam reference about the returning like the reality is this like this isn't really debate even though someone is the 50% in our return capital like majority more than 50% of venture capital firms should not exist. It's a function of the amount of capital that's been infused in this system. You cannot allocate capital effectively if you never built anything. It's just it's just impossible. I like to go back 100 years. If you went to Henry Ford, who was, you know, Randy's in the most efficient way, If you told him or any anybody that's ever run something insanely successful, you're going to give this money to an academic or somebody that went to school and learned about finance, never built anything, never hired anybody, but you're going to give the money to even laughing out the room. But that's what we do today. So that's why there's 50% return. I mean, that's part of it. I would also say venture capital operates under power law, which which means 95% of your returns are going to come from 5% of your investments. Well, that's where we kind of defer on. So when we there's a, there's a conflation on we have to out compete 60% the K or whatever the reference reference rate. I think the term venture capital is kind of like a misnomer in the sense of the power law. And again, that's like in my mind of fallacy itself that 9 out of 10 businesses go to 0. It's a product of like bad money because why would anybody allocate to anything? We're 90% go to 0. So when we do this, well, it seems insane, just like everything that anybody's done, anything that's against consensus looks completely rational, look insane not to do it. And the way we came to this conclusion was not looking at cagers and all this like versions of what Bitcoin does was we built the business. We weren't insanely early, but we are early enough A, to to holding a Bitcoin to take a chance and B watch everybody like money on fire. So without naming names in the existing Bitcoin space, I'll reference the traditional venture space that everybody knows and we work was that example. I saw liquidity drawn up, all unit economics. I saw all soundness in businesses. If anybody in a room today started a business tomorrow with us and you give us $1,000,000 or $100 million, I can guarantee you on a long enough time horizon and build a much Better Business with less money. That's just the nature of humans. And so when we built the business, we realized because we just feel like we're not taking money because again, the definition of having something, you don't give it away. So it's like the first thing, like maybe the initial tranche, you need a little capital to get out of bed. But you hear about open AI and these companies raising all this money, it's like, well, who would do that? If you could make a bunch of money, why would you keep giving 10% year over year? So we thought we were on to something. We still think we're on to something. But the other part of that was, well, so you know, why would you get away if you're going to make more money in the future? We like, there's a longer story about Grayscale. We're just seeing a company that printed about 10,000 bitcoins a year and they have product market fit and we're like, well, if we can get anywhere near that, any equity we give up today means we're giving up Bitcoin in the future. Well, if we value Bitcoin, why would we do that? We would spend the Bitcoin today. That's how you get to the level of spending the asset that's finite and scarce. But it wasn't looking at it for we got to throw an extra right. Maybe you can underwrite it that way. It was just looking at it at what's called a 10 bit when you start the business. I'm going to make more than 10 Bitcoin back from the business and the downside is going to protect of being a cash flow nice positive business, something raise a family, have some people run a good be a contributing member of society and the upside, Well, the upside's as big as you can dream, and that's how businesses should be run. Nobody goes in a business 9 out of 10 times thinking about. So that's the whole notion about venture capital. Like this whole thing gets re underwritten because the way we understand venture capital is absolutely like not true, is like nobody in their right mind would go into a bet 9 out of 10. It's something we've sold to people. And when you re underwrite that the money is scarce and you want to return it. Now when you get out of bed to allocate your time and capital, it's to return the base level, all the money back to yourself or your investors. And then the upside is just making more Bitcoin than you do and paying out the dividends. And you're now not always going for an exit. So we like to underwrite from returning the Bitcoin plus some to investors and then you get, and so that's via dividends and then you get the upside and somebody exits, right? If somebody goes for it and they turn it in Michael Jordan, then you get your return times 10X or whatever, or 100, whatever the number is. So it's just a different way to look at this whole space. It's a similar idea to what Cam was saying earlier around, you know the the venture firm today that decides to put 10% in Bitcoin is going to be a top to sell reform over the next decade. Call it the same idea is true of company XYZ that decides to hold X amount of Bitcoin on their balance sheet. The the frame of reference that you're mentioning around 9 out of 10 bets go to 0 that that #9 going to 0 is actually decreased overtime if they're, you know, storing value in a better form of money, right. So that's that's part of the thesis as well is like we are actually de risking the business venture by having them, you know, sold some amount of their value and increasingly have their cash flows flow into a better form of money that is more resilient and grow their purchasing power over time. So it actually D risk the the number that will go to 0. So we think that, you know, in our fund it'll be less than 9 out of 10 or going to 0. Let's see what. What you guys are doing, like what we do at Brickyard is we're like kind of guaranteeing that none of our teams are treating this like a project, right? What you guys are guaranteeing is that every one of your entrepreneurs that you back is allocating capital with bitcoins the hurdle, right, right. And like how many founders have you been over the years coming from we were, I mean, it just comes back to human nature. If you didn't earn the money, it takes a really special person to allocate that capital as if it's there, right? And like every venture back founder, you know, they're taking other people's money and they are, you know, in in most cases, the venture firms are actually like pushing them to spend it faster than they would man, because the the general partnerships incentives are they want markups. Right, Yeah, there's an apples of mortgage thing like it's in the sense of like Kim said, I was insane like he's kind of right in the sense of like from the the sentiment and status quo into what Cam's doing is very innovative and will be very successful in the sense of if you're underwriting and you're able to underwrite knowing what Bitcoins CAGR is, then you can adopt that. The the way we ended up on the other side is we're building a private Bitcoin bank. And so the people we work with generally crock a big points appreciation B, they don't want dollars. I think y'all are going to be more successful than us like. Like. Shane and we're Shane. Shane are coming away over here like your model is the model. Yeah, we're just in the, we're just on the other side of it. And there's like everyone to your point, because we've talked to a lot of traditional venture capitalists, but I'll send institutions or other individuals with looking for exposure, like to individuals like Cam and others, because I definitely recognize that like what we're talking about here is meant for somebody that like deeply understands Bitcoin and now understands that they want exposure to companies that are going to make more Bitcoin and that's how they underwrite. But that's this tiniest small, like it's, it's whatever the smallest percentage of people like rock Bitcoin, it's one 100th of that and want exposure to that. So that's the, to Ken's point, like it's just a different person. I was just saying like you guys, you guys are planning on hard mode with the right model. Like if I go to RLPS and I say, hey, we're going to denominate Bitcoin, All our companies are going to carry Bitcoin. All our companies are going to make all our capital allocation decisions against Bitcoin as a hurdle. They're going to be like. Give me one event. Yeah, take a what? And like this really, Bitcoin is like this ego test in that if I really told my own piece what I felt, what do you think I would tell them? They might see this and. That's. Fine, but the fact is they won't do this. OK. But what they should do is they should take the entire allocation and they should put it in Bitcoin. This might you, you were talking about Henry Ford, which by the way, like at that time there were probably a bunch of people who thought he was like a looney tune, like anybody selling wooden axles or horses. But talking like that guy does not have it all together. What's he doing? You look crazy when you're early, right? Like isn't that like, but there's like some kind of phrase about that. Like when you're first to it, you look a little, you're only crazy until everybody kind of catches on. But what it might do you, you made the comment earlier, like do you spend 100K on like human brain in the room or just buy more big with that sensibility, it might make purpose driven investments matter more because it's not just about the return that you're going to get. Now businesses that have a purpose or a value or something else that they're adding to society that's not just your return becomes more important. Like what's the mission behind whatever company it is or what, what are we getting out of this? Otherwise there aren't none of those companies and it's just buy more Bitcoin and sit back and wait, right like you and maybe it democratizes a little bit the the purpose behind some of these businesses that you're able to invest in. Yeah. I mean, I think you're, I think you're spot on. I mean, I think, yeah. I mean, as it it, it would be a speculative thing if I were saying this and Bitcoin had like a a four year history. Bitcoin has a 15 year history of growing at the rate it's the best performing asset in the last one year, in the last five years, in the last 10 years, in the last 15 years, it's the best performing asset, right. And so yeah, I think all of us, we you just reached this point where you just want to shake people and it's like, what are you missing here, right? This is this is not. You know this is this simple but. Maybe that's maybe that's a good place to wrap. I know I'm cognizant of time and and want to save some time for some question and answer. So thank you guys for participating. And Jasmine, any questions from the audience? Let's let's open it up. We have no, we have time for maybe two to three questions. So could. Be on anything discussed. Yes, and Bernie from. Monetary policy to Bitcoin to five shout. At it, and we'll repeat it. What is Bitcoin? What is Bitcoin? Michael, you want to take that? I mean it's the best form of money humanities ever seen Gold Is that for thousands of years in bitcoins? Just gold perfected. Can you give me a better descriptive of what it is? So like you guys talked about value and as a real estate investor, you all love this country music venue that we have here in Nashville. We've all heard the song by here. They're not making any more dirt. And that's where I can see the similarity with 21. I mean, they're not making any more Bitcoin, but I know what the dirt is. I know what the dirt is, but I don't know what the Bitcoin is. Do I own Bitcoin? Yeah, but I don't know what it is and I don't know how to use it. And yet my Bitcoin goes up. How can I take the Bitcoin to buy eggs? And am I going to have less Bitcoin because I bought the eggs? It's like stock for me. When I think it's stock, I sell the stock to to buy the eggs. And I don't have any more shares of stock because the stock's going to go up, but the bitcoin's going to go up in value. And I get that side of it. But I've also seen Bitcoin go from one round in volatile, drop halfway and then come back to where it is now, which is a beautiful thing. And you and I, I told you I've been watching all for the past two years because you told me in life it's going to hit 100 and I believe and I still do and I'm. Waiting and then he texted me. So the question just I don't know if it's going to go through on the pod, but the question was like what is Bitcoin and value, you know, being able to touch things and then other things not being able to touch. And when Jeff had texted me about 100, I didn't even give him a like and he was like millions next. That was it. So the reality is this is going to sound like, you know, it's going to sound like it's not true or whatever. I can't remember what I'm trying to say, but value is objective. It's not or value subjective. Money is the things that give money properties, properties that make a good form of money are objective. They're they're indisputable. So value subjective, we can all have our own preference, but what makes a good form of money and why gold is money for 1000 years. That is objective. It has certain properties, scarcities, one of them, right? It just, we all know again, it goes back to the guitar, if there was one that was hand signed by somebody that's going to be more valuable than the others. But that's not enough. It also needs to be divisible because you got to be able to break it down. If you're going to be able to transfer for whether it's the water or the eggs that you want or you want to, you know, net settle escrow for a large real estate or anything, the oil tank for billions of dollars. So it needs to be able to be divisible because again, house is a great example where if you have a big house, you can cut it in half, but the value isn't there. You can cut a Bitcoin in half and it's still 50% of a Bitcoin. It doesn't diminish the value. It needs to be transferred, be able to be transferred over time and space. Gold failed at this because gold ultimately had the centralization problem because it's physical and you need lots of armed cards. This is where Bitcoin shines because it can transfer wherever. So these are the things that make a good form of money. This is how we ended up because money is just a technology and technologies we all know upgrade. And so gold was at for a long time, gold had this issue of centralization because of the, you know, physical nature. So you had to have more, you had to you put claims on it. Think about the dollar as like a next level. And then Amex is another because they don't net settle when you spend your Amex card, right? They didn't settle on a nightly or monthly, whatever it is from banks and interchange. So point being is Bitcoin just has objective properties that make it a better form of money and that's what people wake up every day and allocate more capital to it. Now to your point, all it is is a Ledger, like all banks are ledgers. All The Cave is that you store the gold as a Ledger and you have guards that are hoping to protect that Ledger, which is your gold or the bank that's protecting your balance. And most ledgers if you something happens, your account gets hacked, you just reverse the Ledger because it's not a digital finite asset. That's why Bitcoin has its hard property to understand because it was all Bitcoin. That's what our business focuses on is custody of it. We've been building for about half a decade now in this space, so deeply understanding how to like secure it because that's the only real way we build products for ourselves because we have a lot of money in it. And you can only put all your money in it if you understand from a first principle way how it'll be there tomorrow and it won't end up in North Korean hackers hands or won't also end up in a landfill. So it's all it is, it's just money. It should. And all money is it's just a Ledger on who owns what. And again, just to go a little deeper is gold was a bearer asset. So who had gold had the gold in Bitcoin? It's addresses like a physical, like an e-mail address. And whoever has the password to your e-mail can read all your emails in the same way who has the password to to move the Bitcoin from that address has the Bitcoin. Well, historically people, the only way to keep it safe is they have to keep it in their homes on these little plastic devices. But that obviously becomes a problem when people break in your house and all the things associated or you lose it. Because historically in Bitcoin, you can't leave it on what would be like a custodial relationship like a Coinbase. Because for every Coinbase, there's like 10 other places that have lost all the Bitcoin. This is what caused the crashes. So it goes back to 21 in the asymmetries is that people conflate what happens with the volatility to Bitcoin. It's just the world pricing in and that new asset. Again, going back to like history, if you have thought about gold, so the gold infinities had experience in the tryouts or a bar when you picked up that bar, that gold, it's beautiful, it's nice, it's refined. Everybody knows the Kruger and you know, Golden Eagle, I think that's what it's called the United States. But when you when it came about, it looked like that. It was like a nasty rock with a bunch of dirt and somebody was giving you something else that didn't have that objective value. And over time we're coalescing as humans. I'm like, what is objective value? What can I shave off? What like can go to the bottom of the ocean or somebody passed away and I can pick up 150 years and it's still exactly that. Like that's what gold does. That's what Bitcoin does. And so when you go through that, then we're all just re pricing like what is this asset to Cam's point, Like how does this store my value? How do like somebody will give me more cows for this thing? And then people were trading the, you know, the, the, whatever the lock was or platinum or whatever. And thinking about this analogy, it's very similar to crypto. So this is also a big conflation of the spaces. People will hear digital assets or crypto and they assume Bitcoin either they're the most fundamental different thing. It's the similar the same way as describing aluminum and gold. You would never trade any of your gold for aluminum. And that's the same thing that people are trying to talk about here. And one can be speculative and you can make some money. And if we want to be diplomatic, I'm thinking that it's like an adventure met. We're 9 out of 10 go to 0. Bickering is just a completely different asset. And now the rest of the mainstream is waking up to that. So everything CEO of black fuck, we just had Microsoft and largest companies in the world just had a pitch putting on their corporate treasury. It's it's just a different asset or it's a different asset to be treated. But in while it's happening, the monetization, we've never in our lives had an asset monetized in real time. So we don't understand it. We're just like looking around seeing this thing and it's going up and down. Well, that makes complete sense because there's $450 trillion of total value in the whole world and this asset is just barely at 100K2 trillion. So of course it's going to go every time somebody had a conversation with somebody, market buys the UAE, put it on their, you know, balance sheet for their sovereign nation, Like all these things will move that price and then somebody else will lose the asset. Somebody else will have a Ponzi and it'll crash and it'll look like it's doing the same thing. But the noticing point while you're interested is it always finds a higher high. So. I would, I would add it to that and I would just say real estate should be priced for its utility value. Real estate's value is based on what someone's ready and willing to pay, sure, but beside the same thing with Bitcoin. If they're ready, but. But today, but today you have people that are buying real estate as a store of value and not as a utility of I need a roof over my head or I need a place to put a restaurant or I need a right. Like real estate should be priced as with its utility value in mind. But because we've broken the money, because our money loses, you know, 7% a year, people are not holding cash. Like my parents when I was in high school, we had like, savings accounts, right? We like held cash in a savings. No one holds cash. Anymore. Does anybody have any money in a savings? Account You're a venture capitalist. Yeah, well, we have the money market, but I'm talking about it when it my first year at a college, I was one step above a teller at a bank in a mall parking lot in Birmingham and we sold savings accounts at .5% interest. OK. And a lot of people had that today. None like this is probably not going to So you you have people that you're not holding your your value in cash anymore. And so people are, that's why we have such a, a huge rise in asset prices in housing. People are, are not, they're not pricing housing for its utility value. They're pricing it for its utility value plus for its, its, you know, it's a better store value than cash, right? And so, you know, what Bitcoin does is it's a money that doesn't lose value. And so you no longer have to, right? The irony is that we're buying it with our Love U.S. dollars, which is fine. It's just like I'd be buying gold like you talked about. And my question isn't to discredit what you're saying. My question is for everybody to hear what I want to hear. Sure, you guys. So I appreciate your answer. Yeah, for the on. On around guys, you mentioned your business is returning your own Bitcoin and just curious if you could elaborate on your on your bottle and what your focus is. So there's two businesses there's honoring, which is thinking about like a private Bitcoin bank for individuals all the way to institutions. We worked with some of the IT was public about two weeks ago, the first UK pensions we helped get an allocation to Bitcoin. And then what Cam was referencing in the the Bitcoin denominated. It's a early riders is a venture firm. So I think it was like almost like the investment bank on its side. So we hope whether it's our clients or external, you don't have to be a client to to be an investor and early riders. We allocate capital in the ecosystem and of course not only in just Bitcoin, but in companies that are producing cash flows that are sweeping that excess into BTC, looking to out compete competitors that are, you know, playing on, you know, the hand tied behind their back. Yeah, at a very high level, just to add to that, the whole idea in denominating the fund in Bitcoin is we we get Bitcoin from our LP's, we then invest that Bitcoin into businesses for those founders then, you know, have the same reverence for the Bitcoin in terms of their opportunity cost. So what they're going to go out and spend on. And then ultimately at the end of the day, our goal is to return more Bitcoin back to our LP's than they gave us. And and you know that that's sort of at a very high level of the model. But the way you can sort of abstract the way you know what I just said and just think about it like this is, you know, we're taking the Bitcoin, we're going out and producing value in the real world with XYZ business that we think is able to produce basically. Whether it's OK if they're producing, you know, dollars, as long as we're sweeping those dollars into Bitcoin over time so that we end up with more Bitcoin than we put in effectively. So that's at a very high level the model. And maybe just because I don't know if you got to introduce yourself, like I think we're not all Cowboys out here. I think, you know, Kim and myself, Kim had a great story about being that teller and we were listening to a podcast where he was doing it. And just like, I don't know if he laughed in the middle of the job, this I'd like to remember, but he just basically laughed. He's like, I can't do this my whole life, you know, and I've had those experiences. But Brian? Yeah, but I guess before before starting the Bitcoin private bank, I worked at a natural private bank, Brown Brothers Harriman for about nine years on the allocation side. And then after that, sort of, you know, personally catching the Bitcoin bug in 1718, worked at Flame Base for a year and in 2022 before joining Michael and building on ramp. So come from the traditional finance space and and sort of the allocation side in general. This will be our last question of the evening, but there will be time to ask. I was just going to say, can you talk about the mindset shift or difference that we see in the founders you get a Bitcoin to versus the ones that you get dollars? What are they? How do they operate? It's funny you, you have said, because it's like anything you come from your frame of references and like there was a lot of doing things the wrong way and sometimes the right way that built into like what you're referencing. And it goes back to the incentives all the way down. So like to it was kind of tongue in cheek, but like a venture capitalist takes the money and they do capital calls and depending on how they structure it, that money sits in a money market fund that's still losing in real terms, right? That's put you on the spot like it is. And so you do that and then so your incentive is to get that money out because you want to raise more money and you want to raise it in the next 12 and 18. You want to have a larger fund. The need one that really looks at stuff like critically knows that larger funds are harder to churn Capital like you like smaller and tiger is always better and like, and so like by aligning all that, sometimes you get to do all of it. You get to play the most. So again, Cam says it's hard mode. I think of it as easy mode because going back to like to allocate capital, if you look at the best investors, the best value investors in the world, they like sat on their hands. They don't do much. They like find this the right pitch and then they swing, but they don't they don't swing much. And when you're in traditional venture capital, like you have a nail, you have a hammer and everything needs to look like a nail. So you're looking for everyone to make it make sense versus you put the thing in Bitcoin, you do your capital, you leverage, you know, good form of custody. So you know it'll be there are sitting on our hands as we're building all day long. And by building, you get to spot spot all the gaps, all the inefficiencies in the market. You get to come in If you have too many ideas, Well, you start to figure out like what do we need to see? And then to your point where this gets really exciting is that because I'm a product of this, so I kind of live this, but the best entrepreneurs and best founders we all know go to the best technology. This is just like how things happen to go to the best cities. They go, they just leave. They're the first people by definition. They look crazy until they're not. And so I've seen this from hiring from that past half decade, The best people need to get out of the space because once they recognize This is why I love talking about canvas. Canvas is in trouble struggle right now, but it's just a reality. I just had some of these conversations and I realized like the best people hiring all the things, it's like you find the person that's like, look, I can't like I found I had a frame of reference. I had this version of the world and it's kind of changed. I have to re underwrite it. And that person, they have to jump out of that job and they're the best people to bring on your team, like Brian. And and so to your point on the founder side, it's very similar because in traditional investing, you need like founder market fit, you need to grit, you need to hustle, you need all the things that you would need for somebody for the whole world to tell them like, you're insane. Still say like, no, I know what I'm doing, I'm going to do it. But the last part is they you, you like de risk that by saying, Oh, and I'm going to hold the best for more money. And to like Emily's point earlier, it's not that you don't spend it, it's just that you're thinking more critically about how you spend it. Because we've all been in the position where you have too many dollars and you're just like moving around. This is if you have this asset, you know, it's going to appreciate, you're just going to be thinking more critically. So you layer all those things on top and now you're really cooking with like jet fuel because you're working with the best founder. That's thinking in the clearest way because once you see what Cam's described with the money, you start to look at the world in a completely new lens. And you're just basically running in a cheap mode at that point because everyone else is like running into the building that, you know, it's on fire and you're just like running out with the crew and being like, we're going to go build in another building. I don't know. And this is what's happening at companies because companies are by definition like especially large ones. They have the bureaucracy, they have a lot of the things that like like ties are being behind their back to games point on the AI side. They're not able to have like a certain level of thing. Every company has a certain amount of fact because if you have any money that's not sound, then you're naturally you're always going to suspend it in an unsound way. And it's just at what level? And so that those entrepreneurs are seeing at that broth what we're talking about here. And they say, oh, I'm going to leave because they first try to go like hell. Again, this is from experience. They first try to go ho and they try to say, we need to put Bitcoin on balance sheet. We need to like get more efficient. You need to start sweeping. But the reality is it's too hard to like. This is why in Bitcoin being very emergent, individuals adopt it first and institutions are slowly coming because these concepts are really hard, but individuals can get them pretty simply if they ought to take the time. But imagine from a board level to drive you consensus, it becomes nearly impossible. So those individuals at the same level trying to get their company to adopt any of this, it's whether they know it or not. I like to call it the carrot or stick. They're going to leave by the carrot because they're going to realize I can have a better opportunity to go out compete by leveraging all these deflationary tools for the stick is by their unfortunate circumstance of having to try to spend 2 years to convince them and then wake up one day and realize there was all the fools there and I should just go out and now compete them because I know how to leverage the tools and I have a better form of money. And so while they were having to complete compete with inflation, I have a better form of money. I don't have to raise my prices. Let's, let's, let's, let's them out compete them. So hopefully that high. You have a final thought for this evening and. Google Fiber, what is my final thought? Well, thank you guys for having this conversation, inviting me to be a part of it. I do own some Bitcoin by the way. I'm not a complete noob. I think these conversations that we, we talked about the beginning, Google Fiber just launched what we call our lifestyle products. You had one gig for the last 10 years that we've got 8. And I'm having conversations like I did two years ago, going to the creators, the dreamers, the doers and things like what are you going to do with with eight? It's not just Bitcoin, it's not just entrepreneurs, it's really anybody that's in that mindset. It's I think who we're after. And I think the take home message, I hope about Google Fiber is you are the why and the what in your business. Anybody watching this has their own why and their what. And Google Fiber just wants to be the how all of that happened. So we can be the stage. Everyone else can kind of perform on top of it, whether this is a national or any other city that we're in, we just want to be able to to provide and be the, the how that stuff gets done. Very well said. Thank you guys. Thanks for having us. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that On Ramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit on rampbitcoin.com/contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private Client advisors.