Lincoln: Welcome to Funds That Won, where we dive into some of the world's most renowned investment funds. We'll interview investment managers across the alternative landscape and learn how they built their million and even billion dollar asset management empires. We'll explore teams, structures, strategies, and best practices in launching and running alternative investment funds. John, you have managed billions of dollars in your career. You're a legend in the fund space.

John Pennington: Legend, yeah.

Lincoln: A legend. So grateful to have you here with us today. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to come on the show.

John Pennington: Thank you, Lincoln. I appreciate being here.

Lincoln: So I just want to hear about, you know, the early stages of how you got into funds and the process of you starting your first fund.

John Pennington: Yeah. OK. All right. Well, I think I'll just start with The story in 1999, okay, I was exiting my former business that I had for we'll talk maybe talk about that later. And I watched this news report from this New York reporter complaining about hedge fund managers in New York paying really low taxes and making tons of money. And I scratched my head and the piece was like a hit piece on him. And I said, I want to be one of those guys or gals. I don't I'm not mad at them. I just, if that's the system. And so as I got to studying what a fund was, hedge fund or private equity fund or anything like that, I just said, I'm, I'm set a goal I'm going to do. And now I didn't tell anyone that I wanted to be, cause I think they would laugh. I think you are gonna be a hedge fund manager, right? And so 1999, and so I got my Series 7. Just right off the bat. Yeah, I started with Series 7, became a stockbroker at a broker dealer, and I had a proprietary trading firm, a window, and I start doing that as a stockbroker. And then I was like in six months, I was manager of the, I had 14 stockbrokers under me, Series 7 guys under me, that I had to watch over and made, you know, Decisions on and risk stuff like that. And then I you know, I knew I knew real estate was a great and so I started selling Mortgages because I never I understood how mortgages work, but I never really understood until you start selling them and Then you understand the back end and how it all works and then later, you know, not right then but later I got my series 65 license, so I just wanted to Figure it out. And then we started doing, me and my first partner, we started doing a short-term real estate loans. You know, someone needs a fast loan. They can't wait for the bank for 90 days to get approval. They need a loan in three weeks. And we would underwrite properties, investment properties and such like that, or late stage land entitlements. And we would do loans on that. And they were doing, that was syndication deals. And then finally what happened was that and I had been planning this whole thing for five years now This is this is now 2003 on into 2004. So I've been doing this for five years Trying to figure out how I could become a fund manager. All right I didn't tell anyone this because they'd laughed at me like I said, but even five years and I'm learning I'm reading PPMs I'm reading LPAs PPMs LPAs people I'm learning what a fund can do what it can't do and All this whole time with the goal in the back of my head one day. I'm gonna be a fund manager And so 2004 comes around, and we have a huge deal we're going to do on a Friday afternoon. And the people we were going to fund had a big land deal, and they were going to lose some deposits. I think five syndicated investors that wire money into the title company. And then we close the deal. You know, we work on it for three to four weeks, just 24 seven, because these fast loans take a ton of work and you have to focus and get a drive down to the, you know, you got to leave the state or not or go to a different town. And so we went down there and we came back and we're about to close. And one dude couldn't wire his money in on time. So it was like, I don't remember the number. I think it was a three or $4 million deal. So let's say $1 million did not arrive. I can't close. I'm a million short. And so five o'clock on Friday came and the whole deal just blew up. I was so mad. I was just like. All that work. All that work. Gone. So I was so mad. So me and my partner, this is how mad I was. We're getting out of town. We're going to go. We're going to Ecuador and we're going to go scuba diving. That was how mad I was, right? So we get on a plane, I take my partner, we get on a plane and we fly to Ecuador. We go scuba diving off the west coast of Ecuador for a few days. And we come back and we come back through Miami and our planes got messed up. We had a 14 hour layover in Miami. And so we went to a resort for, you know, we sat by the pool for half the day and I went over this whole thing and we just discussed about a fund. If we were a fund, we would never have this happen to us again. We have the money in the bank, right? It's not we're waiting for someone to wire money in. If we miss the wire, it's our fault, not someone else's fault. And that just forced us to go into the fund market. And it took us about, I thought at that time, like everything, I thought I could have a fund up and running because I'd studied for five years, about three to four months. It took us nine months to get the PPMs right, the LPAs right. It just took a lot.

Lincoln: Is that including raising the money or?

John Pennington: Oh, we had a lot. Yeah, we had no, no, that was just launching the fund, getting out of syndication and launching the fund. And we didn't actually launch fully. We still had to do like we do it. We do we do a property the first three or four or five months. We did a property. The fund would put in 50 percent and then we would have syndication partners put in. So we're still doing syndication a little bit after the fund was launched because we didn't have enough money. And so as we kept raising, raising our money, once we got to a certain level, then we just said, listen, all of our syndicated partners, we're not doing syndication anymore. If you want our talent, you got to put the money in the fund. I cannot run around anymore and, and raise money for every single deal, every single time, every single deal, every single time. It's just too much work. And so we had been doing syndications for a year or.

Lincoln: Did you get resistance when?

John Pennington: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some people did not come. We had a few investors that said, I just, I'm not investing in fund. I said, fine, we're done. We're done with the fund. We're done with the syndication model. And that's how we made the jump. And we made the jump and it was the best thing we ever did because it just saved so much time. We could just focus on great deals. Great investments, great, great, great, rather than running around half the time just trying to find the money every single deal, repitching the deal, repitching a deal, repitching a deal. And so that was the emphasis of our first fund that we launched in 2004.

Lincoln: Hey guys, thanks for listening. As you know, we don't run ads on this channel. So if you could really help me out, if this podcast has added any value to you or your business, please subscribe. Great interview. I would appreciate that greatly. Thank you. Did you lose a lot of investors in that transition?

John Pennington: No, two. We lost two or three investors that we just wouldn't make the jump. Yeah.

Lincoln: And then did you lose out on a lot of deals? Because I feel like that's what, that's the hardest part about that transition is, you know, there's deals still coming.

John Pennington: We did a hybrid, right? Let's just say, and I don't remember the numbers. Let's just say we had raised $5 million in the fund. Yeah. And I had, I had a, you know, a $2 million deal somewhere. Well, I can't, that's too much. risk for a $5 million fund to put $2 million into one deal. I can't do that to my investors. That's just too much risk for my fund investors because now I'm a fiduciary as a fund manager. So I would say, listen, we're going to put $1 million into this deal and we're going to syndicate with our old syndication partners. They're going to put the other million in and we'd close that deal. But as we got much, much more money under our fund, then putting $1 million or $2 million into one deal in one area wasn't as much risk fund-wise, allocation-wise. And so it was more of keeping the allocation, because you can't put your 100% of your fund into one deal. You just can't do it because that wouldn't be a prudent fund manager doing your risk matrix and risk parameters. So that's how we did it.

Lincoln: Gotcha. So you went on and you raised their first fund. Yeah. And you started deploying capital.

John Pennington: How big was that first fund? I can't remember the exact numbers, but we did fund two. The first fund was called Bridge Loan Capital Fund One, and that was 2004. And the second fund was called Bridge Loan Capital Fund Two in 2007. And I think together with everything AUM, I think 60, 80 million, somewhere like that, that we were rolling over and over and over. Gotcha. Somewhere right around there. We rolled that much money over a year time, you know, so it was fantastic.

Lincoln: And then when did you think about introducing, you know, different products or strategies into your, you know, empire?

John Pennington: Yeah. So this is what happened. One of the guys that we hired, we hired as an employee, He was, you know, we knew he's going to become partner pretty soon. It was like we hire him, he's going to become a partner because he was that smart. Anyway, he had predicted the he was a bank analyst and we hired him to make us more institutional. So we were high net worth investors, high net worth investors, high net worth investors, and we knew we wanted to go much higher. We wanted to go up the chain. And so we knew we had to build a company that was attractive to a family office and then institutions. And so we had to bring in people that could do that. I didn't know how to do that. So I brought in this guy and he was fantastic. And he was like the CEO at the time. And within a year, he's a partner. Right. But anyway, he had previously worked in Asia and he was a bank analyst and he had predicted on paper in a white paper, the Asian debt crisis that happened was the biggest debt crisis that ever happened. It was the 19. I got the years mixed up. I think it predicted 1997. 98 maybe I got the years mixed up. Anyway, he wrote this white paper and little pamphlet about hey If your money's in Asia, you need to get it out It's gonna crash and then like that, you know, I think I think if I remember the story a couple of countries revoked his visa because he was putting their currencies at risk with this paper and and he worked for a big company. And so he had great analytical skills and he was now working with us. And so he pulled us in the office one day and he says, you know, we've got a problem. I said, we have a problem. No, no, America has a problem because I thought I would only predict one of these things once and once in a lifetime. I thought I had a great prediction. And when he predicted the Asian debt crisis, nine months later, it crashed, the Asian debt crisis. And then he actually helped a fund come back to America. They raised money in the United States to bail out some of the bank assets in Asia over that period of time. And he was, I remember seeing him once on CNBC, like he was an expert in you know, debt crises, right? Yeah. He became that popular because he was the guy who predicted it. Wow. Anyway, this guy's now working for me. And so and me and my partner partners and we're like, wow. So he says, look, this is going to happen again. America is going to go through. You know, it's going to go through a bigger one. And this was somewhere in in 2007 ish. So we started reducing the loans that we were doing and we got we got out of a lot of loans. I think we still had 13 loans out when the banks froze up in August 2007. And so we did pretty well. I had competitors that were much, much larger than we were, actually went out of business in 2008. And so I said, what are we going to do? And so he said, we've got to start buying. Lending you're going to go through an 80-year debt, you know, since 1929, this is going to be bigger than 1929 or almost as big. And so what do you do? Well, you stop lending to people on real estate because if you lend the money, you're going to foreclose on it anyway. He goes, we got to get ready to buy. So we started a third fund and we launched in 2008. And by that time, obviously he's a partner, right? And we launched in 2008, late 2008 to buy real estate, right? And then that was really the emphasis I keep saying the wrong word there, but the takeoff, the launch pad where we took off and just went ballistic because I had people late 2008, early 2009 calling me saying, John, how are you doing? I'm doing great. What's going on? Well, we know you're in real estate and we just worried about you. And I was like, are you guys out of your mind? If you lost your mind, 2008 and nine is the best time in 80 years to be in real estate. And they're like, what are you talking about? So after talking with these guys for a while, these, my friends who are calling me feeling sorry for me, Most of those guys became my investors after I told them what we were doing, right? And they were going, you're right. 2008-09 isn't the bad time to be in real estate. It's the best time to jump in. And so that just kind of took us off. And then we kind of launched it in late 2008 and we relaunched it in 2009 as other members Brilliant. Look, I have my partners. I'm telling you, I've just been blessed with great partners. They are brilliant with a capital B. They are absolutely brilliant. Anyway, that group of guys came together and we rewrote the PPM for early 2009. And that group went from zero AUM until I retired in 2021. We were managing twenty eight billion dollars. AUM and we had properties all over the place and it was fantastic. And then that company, when I retired, went on the New York Stock Exchange. That's right. You went and rang the bell. Yes. We're out there. We're out there and we got on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. It was fun, fun, fun. Right. And anyway, it was a long, long history. But I'm saying the being jumping into real estate in 2008 and nine, got us a springboard to be incredibly, you know, known around the United States as we were, because we were doing such, we were doing so many great things.

Lincoln: Right. John, you mentioned one core thing there in that story is kind of the pivotal moment is when you switch from high net worth investors to, you know, more of an institutional grade firm. Yeah. Can you talk to me more about that? What that entails to become a institutional grade firm?

John Pennington: It's a big deal. Yeah. So we never, we never went away from high net worths even today. You know, what we've found over the years is, you know, once you look, okay, let me get back up. So 2004, you know, we started high net worths and right about 2006, seven, we wanted, we knew we wanted to go higher up the ladder. Uh, and so I didn't get, or we didn't get, I shouldn't say we, we didn't get our first institutional investor until 2010. So I was in the fund business for six years trying to get institutional investor and took me six years to become that worthy of an institution flying out to seeing me and investing or not me. I keep saying me again. It was me and my first partner the first couple of years. Then it was four of us. Then it was five of us. And then in 2008, it became 13 of us. And those I'm telling you, I have brilliant business partners.

Lincoln: Absolutely brilliant. Let me interrupt here. Do you classify family offices as institutional grade? No. Okay. So any sort of pensions, endowments? Institutional grade. Institutional grade.

John Pennington: That's institutional grade. Yeah. Institutional grade is like this. If they want to invest in you, they fly a team out on Monday and that team stays with you four days and they're the real estate team. And they go around, they fly around to five States and they look at all your real estate and then the next Monday they fly a another team out from a different city and that teams three or four people and they look at your operations and they go through all your books, right and then the next week they find another team that goes through all of your Accounting and your fun. They have three that's institutional grade. Yeah, they have Mike they have teams of different experts that come out and find you and and grind you and grind you and grind you and grind you. These are institutional grade. It's a total different level as opposed to high net worth or a family office. The amount of due diligence on institutional grade is extensive. And if you pass, then for the next year, That institution is just going to push money to you.

Lincoln: So what are your thoughts? Because, you know, we talked to a lot of managers today that, you know, have the Wall Street pedigree. They have the right backgrounds, you know, and they maybe want to launch an institutional grade firm off the bat. Yeah. What's what's your advice there? Would you recommend like start with high net worth?

John Pennington: We didn't we didn't do it that way. We couldn't do it that way. There are people that can do it if they have a Ivy League degree and they've been on Wall Street for a lot of years Yeah, and they have the connections already that I've seen people go right in and just go right after institutions They just skip the only offices they skip high net worth But they have a team that's got all the Ivy League degrees on that team they have the team that's got all the lawyer on the they have a you've got a stellar team and they have the ability to walk in and talk to institutions. What I found is over the years, and what we found is over the years, when you have partners that go out and capital raise, there are actually three different types of partners that can go capital raise, or people, right? There's a person who can talk to high net worths. There's a person that can talk to family offices and banks, really. And there's a person who can talk to institutions. And I found that people that can talk to institutions aren't necessarily great at talking to high net worth people. And the people, the salesman that can talk to, the capital raise that could talk to high net worth people aren't really great at talking to institutions. And so it's a different lingo. It's a different everything. And to have that, to have that success. And one other thing to say also about raising capital, we never have left the high net worth world. We still, so this is what usually happens at institution. You know, you say, I'm watching my fund, January 1. And they say, great, send me over the paperwork, you know, all the PPM, LPA, let me do diligence, you know, all your background, all this stuff. They start doing research on you, January, February, March, April, May, June, and about July. they're ready to talk to you again. Because it takes them that long just to decide, right? And so during that time, you have went after high net worths and you've gotten a bunch of high net worths in about, you know. And so let's say, I'm just going to round numbers. Let's say you're raising 500 million, okay? And by April or May, you've raised 70 million from high net worths. And the institution calls you back up and says, hey, how's it going? Well, yeah, we're about 70, 80 million. We've got another 10 million coming in. They're going, oh crap, I got to hurry up. You guys are going to close this fund on me too quick. And so if they call back and you say, we haven't raised zero, we were still waiting for institutions to get their stuff together. They're like, okay, well, we're looking around. So what happens is the high net worth, what I found is the high net worth is a catalyst to getting the institutions on board. And so if you tell your high net worth, listen, you need to come in the first three or four, four months, because if you wait until the end of the year, cause we're going to, we're going to raise capital for one year. The institutions are going to squeeze you out. You're not getting in. If you try to call me up in October and say, I want in, no, I've got institutions give me $50 million and a 75 and a hundred million dollars. And I've got 10 of them. Right. Uh, so really happens is the first three or four months high net worth come in. Then the institutions call, and they've got the due diligence almost done, and then they're ready to go, and it's a catalyst to springboard. So they work together. It's not separate for us anyway. Now, I know firms that only go institution. 18 investors and they're all institutional grade and they close the fund, right? And that's nowhere near what my experience has been. My experience has been you go after them all. You go after family office, you go after high net worth, you go after banks, you go after institutions, you go after anybody possible and you try to get a little bit of all of them.

Lincoln: What would you say, what size of fund is appropriate to start pursuing institutional money?

John Pennington: I think you have to be over 100 million. I really do. I know there's people that don't believe that they can do a $50 million. But I think if you have a $100 million capital raise, that's your goal. I think you're in the ballpark. Institutions, they don't want to deploy $3 million. They don't even fly out to see you unless they believe you can take $30 million. And they don't want to be more than 10% or 15% of your fund. So I'm going to give you 30 million, but I don't want to be more than 10%. That means you need a $300 million fund because they don't want that big of a chunk.

Lincoln: They don't want that much risk in one fund. Why not? Why, why do they not want that much risk?

John Pennington: They have a charter and they have a bunch of, they have a bunch of investors and they have a huge fund. And, and, and another thing that the institutions don't usually do, they don't usually invest in first time funds. And I, I didn't understand it when I first started. I was like, why? We're a bunch of great guys. We know what we're doing. And there's a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is, is because a lot of first time partnerships break apart. And if you come to them with a second fund or a third fund, and you still have relatively 90% of the guys and gals that started it are still together. Think about it from their point of view. They're like, wait a minute, these guys and gals have been together for three, it's their third fund. That means they've learned how to argue, they've learned how to be upset with each other, they've learned how to push through, and they're still together. Everyone has problems, they know this. And if you're still together after three funds, that means you now have a team. And they don't wanna invest just in Lincoln, If you're a one-man team, well, what if you die in a bus accident halfway through the fund's life? But if you have a team of six people, seven people, 10 people, like me, we had 13 or 14 people in my third fund. If you have that team, well, one guy dies in a bus accident. As an investor, we're still fine because you have 12 other people. Eliminates key man risk. That's right. That's right. Well, it mitigates. Mitigates. Right. Mitigates. Yeah. You never say eliminate. When you're doing insurance, you never say eliminate. You always say mitigate. Mitigate. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. So that is the viewpoint from large institutional investors. They're trying to lower their risk, obviously, and increase their income for their investors. And that's one way they do it. Yeah.

Lincoln: Yeah. Gotcha. Well, let's take a let's take a step back from funds here for a second. You recently just well, you're coming out with a book right now. Yes. Yes. I have a book. I would love to hear and have the audience about that.

John Pennington: Tell us. Tell us what you're writing. All right. All right. All right. So my myself and my two boys, John S. Pennington, the sixth and Bridger Olsen-Pennington, my youngest son. They both helped contribute to the book. But I got on stage a year and a half ago after I retired and started doing these three-day business seminars. And I'd have a slideshow on stage. And I'm a good speaker, but I'm not a great speaker. but I kept getting voted the number one speaker for that. And I, and I, I look back and I think I just have really good content. And I thought, well, if I've got great content, then maybe I, there's a book in me. And so I just started typing, typing, typing, typing, and it took a year or so. And, uh, I came out with, I had 88,000 words and I found, you know, uh, an editor and a publisher and lover and, and went through and paid them. And they'd shot from 88,000 words down to 60,000 words. They just, No, this paragraph needs to be moved up five pages and this paragraph over here. And then we need to change this sentence. You know, they, but I seriously typed out 88,000 words. And it's really, when you write a book, I don't know if you've written a book. But it's, I wouldn't think I'd wish on my worst enemy. It's hard. It is just painful. When you spend a month typing out one chapter and trying to figure out how to tell the story in this paragraph, and you're driving around your car going, oh, wait a minute, I could change that. Okay, I'm going to change that story. And you come home and type it and then retype and retype it. And then someone says, John, this is a great chapter. It just doesn't fit in the book. We got to chop it out. And you go, it's like, it's like, it's like losing one of your, you know, your best dog or something. Right. Your best hound dog. You know, you're like, I just lost my best dog and you want to cry. That's how it is. That's how it is. So the book is called dollars, gold, and Bitcoin, the Fed's hidden agenda and how to profit from it. And it has three sections. The first section is three parts. The first part of the book talks about a lot about the U.S. dollar, the BRICS dollar, China, macroeconomics. The middle part of the book talks about how I started right out of college and I started a business with two other great partners. We started selling used Levi 501 jeans in 1989 to kids in Eastern Europe. Because when Ronald Reagan asked President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union back then to take down the wall that was dividing Berlin. Once that wall came down, kids in in uh eastern europe wanted to buy american goods and the most american thing on tv and on the movies were was the denim jeans that mr levi straus from san francisco california made you know a decade a century ago and everyone wanted these this iconic look and so in the western united states I'd been wearing these 501 jeans since I was a kid. They were work jeans. You'd buy them and go work concrete jobs, right? And so they were everywhere. So we just started buying used ones all over the Western United States, 13 Western states, shipping them to Salt Lake City. We'd wash them, repair them, sew them, over dye them. If we couldn't get the stains off, we'd over dye them black and ship them over. Anyway, Then eventually, after a few years, my two partners moved to Germany because we were selling so much. We had to sell, sell, sell. And so they moved to Germany, selling all through Europe and Eastern Europe. And I was in the supply chain, supply side. And then I flew, I went over to Spain and opened another office with another guy. and had distribution through Spain. And I also held, I also did all the Asian sales. But most of the bulk of it was going through the German office, my two partners over there and shipping all the jeans over there. I had, I think we had at one particular time, I had, we, I keep saying I, it's not correct, it's we, it's always been we. I love being in a partnership and having a team of people. We had, I think 13 or 14 full-time seamstresses Eight hours a day repairing used Levi's 501 jeans so we could ship over and sell them. Yeah, just doing repair, but you know, belt loops and little holes and patches. And you know, it was just, it was a really fun. And we ran that business for nine years. And then the US dollar got really strong in 1997. And as the US dollar goes strong, which Ronald Reagan kept it low for a long time. If the US dollar goes strong, that hurts exports and we were exporting and we couldn't transfer the price. And it kind of killed the whole, there's a few other things that killed it, but 97, late, early 98, that killed it. And so in 1999, I was looking for other things to do. I was between careers, would you say? And I saw that newscast about fund managers and I said, I think that's what I want to do. That's where you got it. Yeah.

Lincoln: Anyhow, so the book talks about all this stuff.

John Pennington: Yeah, so I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Sorry. Yeah, that's the middle part of the book. Yeah. Talks about, you know, how the U.S. dollar, how I learned about the U.S. dollar. And it's the number one product that's ever been invented. And people don't think of the U.S. dollar as a product, but it really is a product. And I believe my theory is the number one job of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury and the U.S. Navy and the President of the United States and the IRS. If they do one thing, protect and promote the U.S. dollar. And then they have other jobs. The Fed has a job like keeping inflation in check and also keeping unemployment down. Those are other jobs. I'm not saying that's not their job, but I think that the underlying job is to make sure that the U.S. dollar is accepted as many places around the world as possible. And that's kind of how I first started studying how the Federal Reserve has created the number one product in all history. It sells better than hotcakes. You know, they say, it's selling like hotcakes. No, no, no. It's selling like greenbacks. Because look, Lincoln, they produce a trillion of these things, right? And then you want them, I want them. Then they make a trillion more and you want them, I want them, right? It's better than hotcakes, right? And so, and Americans have an insatiable appetite for pancakes. You know, you go down to, you go down to your thing on your place on Saturday morning, you stand in line for 30 minutes for what? Pancakes. 30 minute wait and you still stand there, right? Because you want them so bad. And the same thing is for U.S. dollars, right? You stand there and, you know, it's just it's just an incredible price. So that's that's how I started learning and studying. And I wanted one day in my lifetime to do something supersized. So I have in my lifetime started 14 businesses. 13, the first 13, some I made, like my jeans company, made incredible money. It was fantastic. Some I've lost money on. And in my book, I actually tell you some of my losses. It's all great and dandy to tell you all about my successes. But if I don't tell you about my losses, because those are some things I learned some valuable information when I had losers. And so in the middle part of the book, I tell you about some of the losers in the jeans business and winning it. But studying the greatest product of all time, how it became the greatest product of all time, what the Federal Reserve does worldwide to position it. And I thought, I'm going to learn from the greatest product of all time. And then one day, I'm going to start a supersized idea. And so I was 40 years old in 2004 when I launched my first fund. 40. 40. And you know, I know you and my son Bridger and my son John and Mason, you guys have figured life out way before I ever did. But most people, listen, most people on the planet don't figure out life until they're 40. You figure out how a mortgage works really when you're 40. You figure out how the PTA works politically when you're 40. You figure out life about you're 40 years old. And so I was, you know, just like I think the normal person. But anyway, I figured out what I want to do at 36. or 30, 35. And I was able to do what I wanted to do at 40. And so if it takes you, you know, a long time to get what you, you know, where you want to go, that's fine. But I just kept getting up and trying every day. And I thought, you know, even I had some businesses that lost money and had some businesses that made a lot of great money, but I wanted to shoot for the stars. I wanted to do once in my life, all my other businesses were good. They all got to a certain size. and they wouldn't scale very well, but they made great money. I was doing fantastic. We were doing for these other businesses and some of them didn't do so good, but it was great, right? But the scaling of a business, most entrepreneurs in the United States have a great business. They're running it. They're running it. They're running. It's going good. And to scale it is hard to do. But when I started funds, It was like, you couldn't stop it from scaling. It's the most crazy thing I've ever seen. Because you try for all these years, all these years, all these years. And so when I sat there and I said, John, are you going to go for it? Are you going to go for it? Are you going to go for it? Because it's going to take a lot of effort. It's going to take a lot of effort. And I thought about Amazon, Amazon the book company. They lost money for, I think, eight to 10 years before they made any money. Their stock went up and down to $3 and all over the place. And I thought, John, if you go for a supersized idea, you're not going to know if it's going to work or not for about five to six years. You've got to play it this way, play it that way. So what if Jeff Bezos would have quit in year five? He doesn't know it's really going to work until maybe year six. It didn't really work until year eight or 10 or something like that. So I was like, John, if you're really going to go for a supersized idea, you've got to be prepared. that you're going to be in at six years and it still might fail in six years. So I played my life chessboard out. And I said, John, if you wait till you're 50 and then you launch this supersized idea and then you won't know if it doesn't work until 56 and then you're going to start all over again because you're going to lose all your money. You're just going to lose it because it goes bad. And now you're 56 broke-ish, right? And that's not a lot of time to restart and retire at 70. Okay. But John, if you start your supersized idea at 40 and you go for it one time in your life, you just go big, you go crazy, you just go for everything. You just, you burn, you know, it's like, uh, you know, those, those, uh, conquistadors that burn the ships, you know, you burn the ships and you're going for it. It's going to take you to 46 to make sure, you know, it's really going to work or not. But if it fails at 46, you have plenty of time. to retire at 65 or 70, right? So I said it, you know, when I was, you know, 35, I want to do this fund and by 40, when that guy, we went to Ecuador and we came back, we just decided, let's go for the fund. And that was, you know, I was almost 40 then. And I just went for it. And because I knew, because if I knew I'm a conservative guy, I knew if I waited till 50, I wouldn't do it. I was like, John, you're too old to risk that much to go supersize. You'll just start another so, so big company, right? You won't try to start a big idea. You'll start a pretty big idea, but not a big idea. And so I play my chessboard out. And I said, I got to go for it at 40 or I'll probably never get the chance in my life to go. Now, other people will do it. Other people could go for it at 55, 60, 65, 70. I've seen them do it and they've been successful. I'm just a really conservative person and I would have talked myself out of it if I waited to 50. So it was like launch, launch the rocket now, light the firecracker now, or maybe never be able to launch it. It's kind of like, you know, I always envisioned a train going by, let's say here's a train and each train car has a window on it. Okay. And they keep coming by. And a lot of people, a window comes by, you have to jump through that window to get in there. And a window goes by and you think, well, I could catch the train later and jump through. And I was always like, no, that doesn't work that way. Usually when a window comes by, you only have a specific amount of time. You've got two, five months, maybe a year. If you don't jump through it, that window is gone forever. But a lot of people think they can catch the train and some people can. I just have not experienced that. I've experienced windows come by and if you miss them, Like it's like, um, you know, in 1999, 2000, there was the.com bubble and there was the internet coming, you know, the internet just started in 1995. I missed that. I kept watching it and watching and watching, trying to get involved, figuring out how, how the world just changed. And I just, I missed it. Right. And so I said, I'm not going to miss the next one, you know? And so that's why, you know, funds were the, were the way to go. So I love it. I love it.

Lincoln: Hey guys, so if you want to learn more about investment funds, how they work, how they're structured, if you want to become a fund manager, how I became a fund manager, visit our YouTube channel for more free value. The link is in the show notes. Thank you.

John Pennington: The last part of the book, there's three parts. OK, the first part is economics and macro and brick. The next part is building the wealth machine. And then the third part is to your audience is how a fund works. I use the last several chapters of how the intricacies of a fund I get into some weeds there. So if you if you've lasted for the two first two sections of the book with me, then, you know, you'll be OK. You'll be OK when you get to the weeds. Right. I didn't put the weeds in the front because the weeds are kind of sometimes But it's basically the intricacies of how a fund operates. And some of the things we've discussed here about like, you know, raising capital from institutions versus high net worth versus family offices.

Lincoln: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love it. I love it. Look forward to reading it. Yeah. Yeah. So the name of this podcast is called Funds That Won. Yes. Right. So a lot of funds win. A lot of funds lose. If I were to ask you the question, I'd love to hear your take on this. What makes a fund win?

John Pennington: Two things I would say off the top of my head, you have to have a great financial, a great thesis, a business thesis, one that you know or believe highly that this thesis can work. But that's still not good enough. A lot of people have great ideas. But as you know, as an entrepreneur, great ideas worth nothing unless you execute. And it's the team, like I was telling you before, I have brilliant business partners with Capital B. I've always had in my jeans business and in the business. I've just been blessed with all my life. And I think that that's the thing, the team effort, having experts in different fields come together and gel culturally and are able to go into a room that, let's say it's an investment committee room, and you're deciding on which investments to do and which investments to not do. And all of you are in this room and you argue. You don't argue personally, but you argue and say, your idea of buying this property or this asset is flawed. And I argue with you and I make you defend it. That shows and the team still comes out of that room as a united front and they go after it. Right. They don't break apart. And I think that's the number one thing that has helped me understand how to build a company and how to be part of a company. is the ability to allow dissent, not dissent, that's not the right word, allow disagreement, but allow the time and effort, and it's laborious. It takes hours and hours and days and days and weeks and weeks sometimes to come to consensuses that everyone is enough, you know, they agree enough to go forward in that certain direction. And this is the key. People say sometimes, well, I'm a team player. I play by the team. I'm a team player. Really? Are you? Okay. Let me give you, ask you a couple of questions, you know, I ask them. Okay. So if we argue really hard into a, conference room, and we argue for hours, and you don't agree with what we decide, but the team decides to do something in the conference room. When we break that conference room, do you go back to your office and bring some employees in and talk bad about the decision? Do you stand by the water cooler and just say, I don't like this, I'm not gonna try to make that happen? That's not a team player. You're playing golf, you're playing tennis, you're not playing a team sport. But if you come out, and this is the thing about teams, You argue and argue and argue. Let's just say there's 20 people in the room and four of you are not liking the decision. But 16 of you decide over 16 hours of arguing, whatever, that this is the way the company is going. The company decided we're going down path number three. When you go back to your office, you have to support Path number three, that's a team. You can't go to the water cooler and talk all bad about it to other employees and tell them you're not going to help that path. That's a team. So the biggest part of being a team and being a team player is, uh, is, is when the team decides something to be grown up enough to Go support that whole team. And that I think in all of the businesses that I've ever been involved with, the team that I've been, my partners I've been involved with, that's the one thing that we have always, it seems like, not always, as you know, you know, most of the time been able to do. Argue, argue, or disagree. But when you break it and you make a decision, you break that conference room. The dissenters have to try harder to make that path number three, not path number two, path number three work. They have to be tried because they're the ones that dissented. And that's part of what a team is. And I think those two things, I think are the two things that I would say that makes funds or businesses win. I love it. I love it.

Lincoln: Yeah. So I think that's a very common thread, right? You have to be able to choose good team members. Yes. What would you say, like some tips on how to choose good partners?

John Pennington: Test them. You've got to date them, right? So you do syndication deals, you know, start doing syndication deals with a couple of people that are potential partners. You learn a lot about people, right? Because you're going to go through ups and downs doing syndication. They're not all going to go smooth. And you really find when they don't go smooth, how do they react? How do they solve problems? Do they solve problems like you solve problems, right? And do they have kind of a different opinion on things? But they still become, they still are great team members. And I think you date people just like you date spouses. And so you get used to them and then you figure out over time, not too long a time, but you figure out over time, this person has the potential. We have the potential of staying together for fund one, fund two, fund three, because the big money is in fund three and four and five. There's some money in fund one, there's some money in fund two, but once you get to three or four and five, your legacy, it snowballs, the amount of investors come in, and I need someone, I'm looking for someone who's going to be conducive. Now, along the way, they're going to people get divorced, they're going to people that have health problems, there's going to be some things that happen. But if all that stays together, Is this the team I want three to five years from now? And that's how you judge, I think. You're looking for long-term type of partners, not short-term. Think long-term, and I think that is a better way than the short-term, you know, quick buck kind of thing. And I think institutions and family offices reward you for being long-term. That's when it snowballs, and that's when it really scales. It scales, scales, scales, and then it just scales, scales, scales.

Lincoln: And how many partners did you have at the time when you retired?

John Pennington: Oh, I think 32. And I think we have thousands of employees in 33 states, thousands of employees, and it's a massive company. How does a 32-person partnership function? Well, they all have separate segments or verticals of the business, right? So you have partners. Let's just say it. I'm not giving an example. Let's just say you're a hedge fund that does venture capital. Well, you'd have some partners that know the biotech industry really, really well. And you'd have some partners that know the computer programming coding businesses, startups really well. Those are all considered partners. However, they are in their silos because they're different experts. That's what I was trying to say earlier, right? You're a different expert. You can't be an expert in everything. So you have to find great partners. So the one partner I told you about who's a bank analyst, tell you if a bank's gonna go bankrupt or not. I can't tell you that, but he can. He's been doing it. He went to Ivy League. He came, worked on Wall Street. He came, he'd been analyzing banks for like 17 years, right? I need that talent. And that's what a fund can do. A fund, what I found, the general partnership of a fund allowed me and my other few partners at the time to offer, hey, we're gonna offer you not to be an employee anymore, but to be an equity owner in the GP. You're no longer an employee. You are now the American dream. You have equity. Would you like that? There's costs to that. You know, you might have to have a lower salary for a while because until we get it up and going. And so that's how we, you know, he was really our first employee and then became a partner. That's how we attracted him, that there was a partnership. And so he was a bank analyst and then he, You know, he really helped us in 2007 to understand, like I told you, we had, I had partners, I had competitors that were 10 times bigger than we were. They went out of business in 2008 and nine doing loans, right? Cause they got stuck with a ton of loans. And we didn't get stuck with too many loans because of this one brilliant partner. And so that's kind of the secret sauce to a fund, what a fund can do that maybe other business models can't do. The one thing a fund model can do that I, the reason I chose funds and I, after I said that it was early in 1999, I studied this. Take Steve Jobs. We know Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. He took his company public as an ink, as a corporation. You know what happens every year in a corporation? The shareholders, the money, they get together once a year and they have a shareholder vote. And they vote every year who runs the company. And Steve Jobs eventually got voted out of his own company. Now, take Steve Schwarzman, right? Blackstone. They went public and they went public as a general partner, limited partnership structure. A GPLP, the money is all the LPs. They don't get together once a year and vote who's the GP is. It doesn't happen that way. Unless the GP commits fraud, which you're not going to do, I'm not going to do, I can never get voted out. So I never, I didn't want to build a huge, huge, huge, huge, super-sized company and have the money vote me out. And the big money say, you know what? Let's say there's 10 billionaires over here in the LP. And they say, you know what we want to do? John, thank you for all your service. This year, we're going to vote you out. Their kids are going to run the GP from now on. I never wanted that to happen. And that's why the GPLP situation is a much better, if you're going to go huge, it's a much better because you can never get voted out. It doesn't work that way. But in the Inc, it's actually opposite. Every single year, they can vote you out.

Lincoln: But you, I believe, you know, you had the partners can vote each other out, right? Do you have clawback provisions in your partnership agreements?

John Pennington: Early on. So what a clawback is, is where you offer someone a percentage of the GP, and if they don't perform over the first year, then you can claw them back. Let's just say you offered someone 10% of the GP, and let's say they're a capital raiser, and you say, I'll give you 10% of the GP today, but this next year you have to raise $20 million. At the end of the year, if you've only raised $5 million, we're gonna call you back from 10% to 2%, okay? Or you could do like most people do, and you could say, you know what we're gonna do? When you raise $2 million, we'll give you 2%. Once you raise $20 million, we'll give you 10%. Now think about the mentality of a salesman, okay? And raising capital is kind of sales. It's marketing and sales. The clawback, the person, man or woman, and really I've seen women in our firm, they raise capital, they're great capital raisers if they're good, and men. So what does a salesman do? What does a marketing salesman do? They go home and tell their spouse. You know what happened today? I'm a 20% owner of this. You're a 20. The salesman never tells their spouse about the clawback. You know why they don't tell them? Because they're a great salesman. The great salesman, the great saleswoman, they know they're going to raise it. It's irrelevant. The clawback is irrelevant. So the next day what happens is they walk and talk and act like an equity owner because they are. And the only way they can get chuffed out if they don't perform, right? And so when you're choosing partners, I think a clawback, as opposed to the opposite way, they walk home, they never tell, well, yeah, I'm a, I'm a 2% owner of this company now. She's, oh, that's not right. He, the spouse. Oh, that's great. You know, blah, blah, blah. And they kind of, they don't have the attitude. I just think it's better for the clawback. So yes, we, we have, we have done clawbacks for new people and partners, early partners come in, but they have to perform something to keep what they've been given day one. Right. Right. And I didn't agree with it when it first happened with the partnership. I thought it was backwards to me. But after my partnership did it, the first time we did it was I think 2009. It worked so fantastically and I realized what it did. Like I told you, the next day they walk and act and talk like they are a partner. And it changes the attitude of everything. And I have a chapter in my book or maybe a section that talks about how, and that's in the third part of the book, how you can do two types of clawback. And the one type that I just explained, I think is the better. But again, when we first did it, I didn't really agree with it, but after it was implemented and it worked, I went, wow, that's a great business It's just a little tweak. It's just a little tweak. It's just a little experience, a little tweak. And I didn't come up with them. I had my other partners came up with that idea. And I was kind of dissenting vote. I said, I don't think we should do it this way. But we broke, left the conference room and I supported it. Cause I'm a team player. I don't play golf. I don't play tennis. I'm a team player and we supported it. And just within only a few more months, I realized the brilliance of it. Cause I have brilliant business partners.

Lincoln: Yeah. John, if you were just starting out, what advice would you have to somebody who's kind of at square one right now, thinking about getting started into this business?

John Pennington: In the fund business, what I can say to you is it took me five years to start my first fund and I can tell you if it takes you five years or seven years it's worth it. I think if you know how to do something in life that makes money and if you know it well enough where I ask you the question okay so you make widgets or you make you have hot dog stands let's just say you have you have 10 hot dog stands in Salt Lake City and I say Lincoln how's hot oh it's going great and I say Lincoln why don't do you ever think you could have 10,000 hot dog stands all over the United States you're like Yeah, I could probably do that. I think I could do that. I understand how to do it. I would say, Lincoln, what is stopping you from doing 10,000? And if you say, John, the only thing stopping me is money, then you are probably the right person to run a fund. Because, and you've already figured it out. If I have 10,000, I can buy, you know, buns way cheaper. Yeah. I can buy better quality hot dogs. I can get condiments way cheaper. I can, uh, you know, the little square devices for, we can have credit card devices on every hot dog stand, which I can't have now. I'm not, I don't have the volume. Right. And I can negotiate credit card and I can have satellite. I can make hot dogs. I can just do way better. Right. And so that is the so even so if I come to you and I say, what do you do? And you say, well, I buy and sell biotech companies. Wow, how many even we bought one three years ago and we're trying to going to buy one for next year. And I say, what's stopping you from buying like three at one a year? And you say money, a fund might be the thing for you that it's, it's, it's that. But if you say, yeah, I can't handle it anymore. There's no, then a fund's not right for you. So, but what I'm saying to you is at the 13 businesses I started, All of them, some of them lost money, but they all had problems scaling at a certain point. And the fund is the opposite. I couldn't stop it from scaling. It was like, if I wanted to stop it, it wouldn't stop. It just kept going. I love it. So if it takes you five years, It took me five years. Yeah. You know, I was 40. Right. And so, you know, America is the great look. I don't know if America is the greatest country in everything like math. But for entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs, America is the greatest country in the world. They have, it's like fertile soil. It's like someone that moves from, you know, a different country and they're a farmer and they've got, I don't know, so-so soil and so-so rain. And they move to like Missouri and it's like the most nutrient dirt you've ever seen in your life. And you plant something just grows. That's what it is for entrepreneurs. So the day Didn't make that I'm not I don't know who I heard this once but I don't know who told it to me but the day that you were born in United States America as an entrepreneur is your lottery ticket the day you moved here and you're an entrepreneur that's your lottery ticket because you are in the greatest most fertile place in the world for entrepreneurs and I'm just saying don't waste your lottery ticket if you're an entrepreneur. If you're an entrepreneur, this is the place to be. It's got all the mechanisms that you need to put together, have your antennas up looking for signals of what is the area you want to go into. And again, that area might not work out like some of my businesses that didn't work out. But when I first When I first started, when I was a teenager, I'll tell you this, uh, this is my book too. And people love this. When I get on stage and say this, um, when I was a teenager, I looked into the mirror. I seriously looked in the mirror. I remember saying this to myself. And I said, I looked in the mirror, I had eye in the mirror. And I said, uh, John, you're not afraid of being poor. You're not afraid of being old. You're just afraid of being old and poor at the same time. right that's right that's right and i got up every day after i was like 18 years old i said that to myself over and over and over over over my whole life and that's why i kept starting businesses some of those businesses didn't work and some nights i went to bed crying on my big pillow that i had to meet payroll by friday and i didn't know how i was going to do it you know i had employees depending on me i got to figure out and we always met it we always met it but i was crying some it was things were just not working yeah and so The fact that I had a goal to be a successful entrepreneur and owner of my own business, that's the goal. And so some of those business didn't work. But if I never stopped trying, and I live by these three things. OK, it's one, two, three. It's one plus two equals three. Here we go. Number one, stay healthy. Number two, wake up every day and try. And number three, you will eventually succeed in the United States of America. It's academic. One plus two equals three. And if I woke up in the morning and I'd been crying the night before, I got up the next morning, I gotta find how to make payroll on Friday. And so, look, I have friends that are not healthy and they're vastly successful. I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm saying my way is academic. It's a mathematical equation. Stay healthy, wake up every day and try, one plus two, you will eventually succeed. And even though you might have a business fail, wake up next day and try again. And if another business, wake up next day and try again and just try, try, try. And so that's kind of, those are my two motivating things that I've drilled into my kids over the years. Those one plus two equals three. And I don't, you're afraid, you should be afraid of being old and poor at the same time, especially when you lived in America for 40 years, And you ended up now, some things can happen to you. You can have health and cancer. I get that. Right. Yeah. But if you stay healthy all the time and you figure it out, you don't want to wake up when you're 65 old and poor because you lived in the United States of America for 40 years. You had a lot of things in front of you that you could have made work if you just stayed healthy, woke up every day and tried. Eventually, I believe you'll succeed in the United States of America.

Lincoln: Well, I was going to ask you what habits you have that have contributed to your success, but those are, I mean, that's, that's right there. I mean, but do you have any other, uh, any other habits or maybe business practices or, uh, you know, just methodologies that you, you feel like have attributed to your success?

John Pennington: Yeah. So the one, one chapter chapter in my book, the section of the book is called blue jeans to billions. So I started selling blue jeans, use blue jeans for my career. And I ended up managing billions of dollars. And so that's a habit in just itself to show you here. And now, I didn't have an Ivy League degree. In fact, I had to work my last two years of college. I had an economics degree at University of Utah. But I dug trenches 40 hours a week, putting in lawn sprinkling systems, because I had a baby at home and a wife at home. So my last two years of school, I went to school nights. I worked from eight in the morning till 430. And I went to school nights from seven till 10, 15 at night, you know, and I had to study and then the whole thing. And so what I'm trying to say to people is. I figured out a way to succeed even though I don't, I was always a slow reader. I was always not a great, the greatest student. Uh, I didn't have money that people could, I didn't, I didn't have, I had nothing except I thought I could outwork anyone. That came up against me. I wasn't smarter than my partners. I didn't have pedigrees like they did I'd have education that they had I wasn't I didn't have anything but I thought I could get up earlier and go to bed later Day in and day out. That was my superpower. I could work. I just work work work work work and I And eventually, after a long period of time, that the experiences of opening and closing businesses and running businesses just helped me over time to figure out how a business could work and might work. And it gave me the confidence to go supersized one time in my life. Love it.

Lincoln: So, yeah. On the flip side of that question, as we wrap up here, any business or personal pet peeves? Things that just drive you crazy that people do sometimes?

John Pennington: Yeah, yeah, I and I don't look, I don't want to sound like I'm talking from the top of a mountain down, but I drill this into my kids when they were younger. I said, guys, I have friends that were born in Nigeria or born in Thailand, and they grew up, grew up, grew up, grew up. And they moved here and they moved here with less than a thousand dollars in their pocket. And within three to four years, they own three businesses. They didn't even speak the language and they came here. Right. And I there are people here in the United States that grow up here and can't figure out how to, you know, balance a checkbook. Yeah. Right. And they have everyone has an excuse of, well, my parents didn't do this or my teachers didn't do this or whatever. And I sit there and I go, especially now with Google. You can learn anything you want to learn. If you wanna learn how a mortgage works, I taught my kids driving in the car, talking to them in the backseat when they were 13, 14 years old. Hey guys, I'm looking in the rear view mirror, how does a mortgage work? And I would teach them. Or how does a bank make money? I would teach them. I'd teach my boys in the backseat. And they couldn't listen to headphones, because I had them in the car. They were buckled in, they couldn't leave, right? And we had this conversation over and over and over. So they're 13, 14, and by the time they're 18, they know how mortgages work. And so, but now there's Google. And I remember I had to drive 25, 30 minutes, park, walk through a parking lot, walk down some stairs, put it, sit in a desk, wait for the guy or the lady to get to the and start teaching me for 45 minutes to learn something. And I had to walk back up to the car and drive 35 minutes home. The amount of time to learn that. And now I'm on, I'm on Google and I want to learn about how mortgage worked or how a fund works or let's go click. And someone great teaches me things. And so when someone says, I don't know how to, I'm saying that guy in Thailand, that lady that came from Nigeria that are my friends, and they have three or four businesses for three or four years after they arrive here. That's my pet peeve. What I'm saying is people sit in the United States and I think they just waste the opportunity. And I don't know exactly why I have my theories on why they waste the time, but they know it's coming. They know they're going to be old. They know they're going to be poor one day maybe. And I don't know what they're hoping for, but I just think it's a pet peeve for me a little bit that I see some people just wasting the time. The years keep clicking away and I don't know what it is. I don't have a really good, but I know it exists, but I just want them to do the best thing for them, the best thing for their families. And I think investing in yourself every single day and just trying, I think eventually you will succeed. And I said, it's America. That's really my, if you stay healthy, that's my mantra kind of thing. I know there's exceptions. I'm not saying there's no exceptions. And I know, and I believe in charities. I give a lot of money to charities. And I know people have, there are people in this world that have things that happen to them that are outside of their control. And I want to help those people, charities and stuff like that. But the people that have things in their control, many of them think that they don't have it in their control. and they actually do have it in their control. They just got to focus. I guess it's their focus, but anyway.

Lincoln: John, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day, out of your life to come and talk about funds. Your book coming out, really excited to read that. Yeah, it comes out in December. So we'll be looking out for that.

John Pennington: Thank you again. Thank you for having me and congratulations on your success here, Lincoln. I've seen you on stage many times. Especially when you're on stage and you're doing the detail workshops, you're like a drill sergeant, man. You got a whole group. The last one was, not the last one, but the best one, you had 300 people in the audience, and you're going through, you're not talking fluffy stuff, you're going through, this is boot camp. you guys got to know this A, B, C, D, next slide, A, B, C, repeat after me. And it was impressive to watch. And I was glad to be in the audience and I've seen you speak on stage several times and a lot of your colleagues. And it's just fun to be associated and knowing the group that you guys put together here. And I think you guys have a bright, bright future and the people. And I just, I don't think that I know it because at these events people come to me and and they tell me they brag about you and Bridger and Mason and my other son they brag about you guys to me and so I know that means you're giving them quality quality a content and things they can use to be successful in United States of America. And I appreciate you for doing that. And, uh, but I don't just appreciate you. There are thousands of people right now in this country. They're so glad they met you. And they soak so glad they're associated with you because of the, of the stuff that you're providing, that they can improve their situation, their lives, their funds, whatever they're doing. So yeah, congratulations.

Lincoln: All information shared are the sole thoughts and opinions of the author. Do not take any information as legal or financial advice. You should seek a certified accountant and a professional legal team before taking any further action. We are not selling or soliciting a security in any way, shape or form. This content is for educational purposes only and is not to be construed as financial or legal advice. Clients of FundLaunch or Black Card Capital Partners may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast.