00:00 Lincoln: There's blood all over the streets right now. And it's actually we that makes us so excited, though, like we are grabbing positions at such

00:06 Bridger: distance. Welcome to Funds That One, 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. All right. I had an awesome conversation with really good friend, business partner, Bridger Pennington, who I love and admire. You know, we dove deep into fund structures, how he got started, his strategies, you know, just his entire journey, really, in fund development and the roles that he's played and has attributed to his success. So I think you guys are really going to like this conversation. All right, Bridger, tell us 30 seconds, one minute, why people want to listen to you today.

00:53 Lincoln: So I am the founder of Fundlaunch, co-founder of Fundlaunch. We've we us together have helped over fifty five thousand students around the world. We throw big events. It's just fun to be on the show, by the way, with you. It's so fun. I actually am the founder of three investment funds. I currently have two funds previously Exited and Cycle, which has been awesome. We talk about those as well. And currently I run a hedge fund that's in the crypto currency space, eight figure fund. We've done pretty well. We've run that for just over a year right now. And so some pretty funds. We have those funds we now and then we're me and you actually are partners on, I think, eight funds looking at 10 funds here soon. We have multiple students, I think 12 student funds over 100 million, 54 student funds, over 10 million dollars out of our group. So we've helped a ton of fund managers. I'm kind of seeing this as we because we love it. Yeah, I know it's great. So which is cool. It's fun to be on.

01:36 Bridger: Well, today I want to talk specifically about your current fund, your crypto fund. Right. Like I'd love to just jump in there and talk about some of these other things. But I mean, why crypto, man? Like what led you to a crypto fund?

01:49 Lincoln: Yeah, it's funny. So my first two funds were debt funds. We were doing lending, which is, by the way, I think is an awesome way to start for anybody like getting in. I don't there's a lot of different funds you could do like venture capital. You could do a private equity fund, a hedge fund, a debt fund where you're doing maybe hard money loans or short term loans, in my opinion, is a really good way to start and just get returned and get easy. It's a lot easier. It's a lot makes just sense. Like, hey, we're going to give you a loan. If you don't pay us back, we're going to take an asset from you that's worth more than the loan. It's just it's very collateralized loans. Not that hard to understand as long as you can ensure that that collateral is actually coming to you. It's pretty much a win win. Additionally, these are typically short term. So a lot of our loans we're doing were two months, three months. And so we get returns very quickly and I could pay back my investors. So what happened the first two or three years, these investors that kind of just gave me giving me a chance like Bridger, I'm going to give you some money. Good luck. I was paying them two thousand five thousand eight thousand dollars a month every month. And they're like, whoa, this is working. OK, I'll give you some more. I'll tell my friends and it built my this little name for myself as a at the beginning syndicate and then a fund manager that was managing, you know, doing millions of dollars deals a year and built me this tracker in over four and a half years. And then we had a competitor come and actually buy out our entire fund, which is pretty cool. Yeah. So I did.

03:03 Bridger: Let me ask you about that, because I love that you brought it up, because it really wasn't a lot of money when you were starting. And a lot of people think that, you know, you have to have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, which is just utterly false. I mean, how much did you start with his first fund was forty nine thousand, I think, seven hundred dollars. Yeah, like I mean, nothing. Yeah, like literally anyone could put together 50 grand. Right. And get started. And I think it teaches people about how to be a CIO. So let me ask you this. Did you ever lose money on that one?

03:33 Lincoln: You never lose anyone's money? No. As a conglomerate, we had a couple of loans go bad. Yeah. But we were doing lots of loans. Our average loan size was like three thousand dollars. They were short term, small loans. I think our default rate was about two percent. So in over three, three or four years, we did over two to three hundred deals. Yeah, I think total maybe five went bad. But overall, our first fund, we had a 64 percent return cash and cash turned to investors. Next year, we got a 62. We then got a 49 and then a 37, I believe cash on cash return to investors. Then you sold it. And then we had a competitor come and buy us and we sold us. We exited that fund. Why do you sell it? A couple of reasons. It was hard to scale. We were managing just about well, it was kind of fluctuated. It was up and down because it's open and a fund. But it wasn't that big. Like we couldn't. I just knew this would never be a 50 million dollar fund or a hundred million dollar fund because we were so constrained by deal flow. Now, it made good returns, but it was pretty small. Additionally, I wanted to I was I started my first fund at 22. By the time I sold, I was 26. And I wanted to actually cycle a fund. I wanted to have someone come in, buy us out. Actually, I wanted to learn the process of what it's like to sell a fund. And I also wanted to pay back all my investors, all their principal as well, because I was paying distributions, but I hadn't paid back their principal because it was an open and a fund. So to actually fully cycle, hey, I paid you back your principal plus a 62, 49 and 37 percent over three, three years or three and a half years. This was an awesome full circle. I wanted to have the full life cycle of this fund. That makes sense. Yeah. And because at the same time, we had started this group where we were actually coaching people to launch funds. And I wanted to personally, I want to go through the learning process of doing

05:15 Bridger: and cycling through a full fund. Do you have a big team on that one? Is it pretty small? About five people. Yeah.

05:21 Lincoln: And they all stayed. And then you left, I think, two or three stayed. The buying company was a competitor, so they had a team as well. They didn't need everybody. And I was fully exited out within, I think, a month or two.

05:33 Bridger: Yeah. A lot of people don't realize that you can actually sell your fund, right? Your general part. So your general partnership is a business that has revenues, right? And it has associated enterprise value. So, I mean, was that was that the plan from the beginning or did it just kind of fall upon you for those that are thinking about selling funds? Like, how did that?

05:50 Lincoln: For me, it wasn't the plan from the beginning. My plan from the beginning, just everyone's aware, was and you're not going to be a billionaire running a fifty thousand dollar fund or at our time we're running. We're doing I think we did two to four million dollars of loans. Yeah. Over every year. I think it was our turn, something like that. So I was I was making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in college, which was cool. That's sweet. Six figure income myself. But the biggest reason I did it was for the for the track record. Yeah. For the process, for the systems, for getting investors to trust me with money and. Yeah, cool. I made a couple hundred thousand dollars a year at in college, which is that's like you're like a billionaire in college. You're making it. You know, it's all it's all relative. But anyways, I wanted to have the process and structure because I knew long term I wanted to do funds and I needed to start somewhere.

06:38 Bridger: So that's where I wanted to start. I love that. Well, what I know about you is you then you basically tried several different, you know, strategies, investment strategies after that, and then ultimately landed on your now crypto fund. Yes. So, I mean, talk us through that kind of phase in between where you were exploring

06:56 Lincoln: different, you know, investment strategies until you found one you like. Yeah, this is I actually gave a speech of this at FunLapse Live in front of 2000 people to show them, hey, I had already done two funds. I then we actually had an idea where we're going to do a secondary fund to this great awesome. And I followed what we teach is the fun launch formula. So I found this great deal. It was a secondary fund. We could buy a position. It was in a bigger, huge real estate fund. It was about a 40 million dollar position. This investor needed liquidity. They wanted out in the next 60 days. They were willing to sell their position for thirty four million dollars. So it was about a six million dollars spread, just face value. And then this fund was already three and a half years into the fund. So which typically in a closed end and real estate fund year six, seven and eight of the most fruitful of those years. So we would we were posting maybe this position would be worth, you know, a forty eight to fifty million dollar position. But at the time it was marked at the forty million dollar position. So anyways, we were trying to put money together. We tried to put all this together right during covid. So they need liquidity bad. Anyways, during that, there was 60 days we had this tight window. We were getting money together and we didn't get the money in time. Someone else had already gotten money and beat us to that deal. And then we thought maybe we could do this in a bigger sense. We go find via secondary fund and go take out secondary positions. We actually interviewed a bunch of fund managers, by the way, really cool model. Oh, yeah. Secondaries is awesome. Secondaries. I talked to a fund manager just here locally. They managed about 30 to 40 million on their second fund. Their average IRR was over 100 percent.

08:21 Bridger: Well, you're buying things at such a discount. Right. And like just right off the bat, plus appreciation. So it's a really sexy business model.

08:29 Lincoln: And that's yeah. And their model, they would go to venture backed companies. So they'd go to a company that just raised their series a there's a marketing manager that's got a million dollars of stock options and maybe doesn't want to exercise them or just wants liquidity. And they'd come in and say, hey, you got a million dollars of stock here. We'll offer you 700000 today cash if you just give us your position. And often more often than not, they'd find people in companies that want to some liquidity in their positions. So they would buy these into these companies at a discount, not into a fund, but into a venture backed company. That was their plan. And they were they were already well over 100 percent IRRs in their fund, which is pretty cool. So that was our first idea. Ended up not panning out. We didn't have the right team for it. So I think about funds. I'm pretty good at like managing a fund as a fund manager. Compliance, the extra structure, working with the SEC, all the operations. I'm pretty good at that. I would call myself a pretty average investor. I don't I don't claim to be an above average, crazy, smart investor in any category. What I like to do is partner with people who are very good at experts in their fields. So I like to call them. So you like to partner with the CIO? Yes, I love to partner with the CIO that's that sits in their basement and trades options 12 hours a day or understands crypto or real estate, whatever. And I just do that because I understand my age and experience. And I just I thought, hey, if I can get really good at being a fund manager, understanding mechanics of funds, I can do very well. And also, I'm a pretty good capital raiser as well. So if I can bring capital and fund management to the table, I'd love to partner with operators. So we then explored a an idea with a different.

10:00 Bridger: When you say we, is it just it's really just well, you and prospective partners. Exactly. Yeah, more like me. I explored.

10:06 Lincoln: I was exploring this with different prospective partners. So then we had another person that came to us that was like, hey, we're going to buy up. This is during Covid big box stores, retails dying. We got these big box stores. Let's go buy them up. Let's turn them into a couple of different things. It could be office space. It could be self storage. They could be a bunch of different things that you could do with these big box, just empty boxes that are going to sell for cheap. So that was a cool idea. We then started to explore this management team. So and then this is me testing out and kind of dating these managers over about four to five months. We went and tried to I was like, hey, I need a process. Let's underwrite a deal right now. Let's go through the process. And I and I made them build me a pro forma. How would you approach this deal? And after four to five months, it was apparently the people I was working with. They had some ideas, but they weren't as competent as I would like to see for if we're going to build a hundred million dollar fund. We needed someone or other people that were more competent around that sector of the business. She killed it. So I kind of just said, hey, I don't if I'm going to raise money and I'm going to put all my horses behind the thing, it's got to be it's got to be lights out. Amazing. Yeah, I don't want to just kind of, oh, yeah, we hope it works out. We got to be lights out as a team. And it's just the guys I talked to, they just wasn't the right team. So then I then it back to I went back and, OK, what are other things? And what are businesses that I want to get into? So I was again, I was shopping all these kind of the other other deals. But then I found a partner, Dan Young, who ended up partnering with who is incredible in crypto. So he has been doing he had the largest mining facility in Utah in 2014, had a full warehouse. So think about 2014 mining mining for bitcoins, doge coins. Actually, doge coins is the biggest thing. Wow. Now, at the time, he didn't know that he actually would just transfer them straight to bitcoins or whatever. If you would have kept doge coins, he'd probably be a, you know, deca billionaire at this point. But so he's been doing crypto for a long period of time, independently himself and his other companies, Inc. 500 winner is an over 600 million in sales has sat on the board of Intel for 15 years. Very qualified individual and loves crypto and trades and does very well in crypto. And he's got a ton of billionaire friends and clients that actually are trying to give him money in crypto. Please just manage it for us. And he always just told them, no, I don't want to do it. I don't want to manage. I'll just do it myself or I'll just I'll hop on a Zoom call and teach you how to do it. But I'm going to do it myself. And then finally, we came together and said, you know, could we do a fund around this? And I personally said, I really believe in block chain. I think it's inevitable. I think it's the future. I think and if you look at the stats, we can dive more into it. I believe 18 countries have announced a central bank digital currency that they are moving to China already has a central bank, digital currency. Thirty six countries are in development of a central bank, digital currency, including the United States, by the way. We talk all about that and what they're doing with they just the New York Fed just did a 12 week test with digital dollar. They're launching the FedNow protocol right now. There's a bunch of stuff going on in crypto. And so I thought, man, this is an emerging space I want to be in. Dan, he was like, dude, I'd love to do a fund. I just don't know how a fund works. I don't even know the first thing about it. I said, hey, I got you. I'll throw out the funds. We ended up it ended up being a great partnership. So I built out all the fun mechanics, all the legal, all the structure, all the audits, the third party administrators, the compliance. I worked with Dan to raise money together. We both raised money together and we launched that fund just over a year ago. We raised $10 million in our initial launch. It's an open-ended funds. We're still raising money. We're a 506C, by the way, so we can actually I can publicly talk about this on a podcast, as people are wondering. And it's been phenomenal. So sorry, I'll stop there if you had another question.

13:30 Bridger: That's kind of how we started. Well, that's great. Let me ask a little bit about this actual partnership intricacy. So did you actually pitch Dan on the fund? Or did he come to you and say, hey, we should do this? And, you know, how did you guys actually determine that? Because you both have other businesses and you have other, you know, commitments. Like, I think that's a piece of the equation that a lot of people have a hard time with when they're first getting their fun off the ground.

13:53 Lincoln: So like, how did that come together? Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, me and Dan are both. He's a high powered entrepreneur. He's doing lots of revenue and we have fun lots. We're growing like crazy and other stuff. And so I don't remember how exactly the conversation, but we both mutually came together and just we were like, dude, a fund on this would be amazing. And I was like, Dan, we I think no, I don't know anybody else in the space that's as qualified as you that's running a crypto fund. Yeah, there's some scammer people out there like, yeah, we're going to have fun, but no one's done this for a decade. And also Dan's, you know, got some gray hairs. He's ran a business and I bring a lot of experience from the fund space. I don't know anybody that does this. Yeah. I was like, Dan, I think we could I think we could run a billion dollar fund here in the next five years doing this. So we mutually came together. I said, Dan, if we're going to do this, we got to run a test portfolio. So we went out and we actually set aside money. He ran a test portfolio for about four to six months. And we he had a few analysts and other people he was working with that he's like, I want to test them out to on trades and how they're going to do things. We both mutually said we don't want to day trade crypto. People we I don't personally, I don't know a single day trader that has lasted more than five or six years. Yeah. Most people that literally truly day trade, they almost always blow out their account at one point. And so we said we don't want to day trade. We want to get into good positions that potentially yield and have yield farming strategy or a liquidity pool strategy where you're producing yield, you're in good positions. We do a lot of research around. So we went out, we did a test portfolio for about four to six months. Wow. Running these other businesses. And I said, Dan, after that test period, if it goes well, let's go gangbusters and do this. And this is at the kind of during the last bull run with crypto. This is twenty twenty one. Is that right? People are excited about crypto, too. So people are begging us. We have potential investors like we want to put money in, please. Like and we're like, hold on, we got to run our test. But we got to make sure this works. We got to make sure it's a really good portfolio. Getting that track record. Yeah. So we ran that test before it went well. We actually ended up, you know, a couple of those analysts we didn't end up working out with. They just weren't as qualified as we thought. We brought in a couple of other different people to be a part of the team. We then went through, we built the whole docs, we then started soft raising money and pulling money together. This is into, let's see, 20 early Q1, Q2 of 2022. Now, if you remember that time period, that is when the market turned. Yeah. Crypto fell, I think we had about 36 to 38 million dollars verbally committed to us in about a month, month and a half, just from people we talked to, pitch calls, all that kind of stuff. So we had a decent amount of capital ready to come in. That month, the S&P fell. Well, over the, it was about three months, S&P fell about 20 percent, 15 to 20 percent. Dow fell a similar amount. NASDAQ fell even more. Crypto fell about 40 percent in that period. And so people got beat up. Wow. Same time, interest rates start rising. And we are literally like, OK, launch date is happening. We have like our capital call we're doing. So we are calling investors and everybody is like, hey. At the bottom. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, it is it is just it's going down every day. It's getting worse because investors like, well, yeah, I was in for a million. But now, you know, I'm in for 100000. Yeah. Like a tenth of what they were. Well, are you sure? You know, well, I got you know, I got a real estate thing now. I'm getting squeezed. My business, we don't do. And so we said, well, whatever you know, it's an open and fun. Just come on in. We'll just we'll knock your socks off. So come on in. So we ended launching our fund June 1st, 2022. We pulled in over a route around 10 million. So from 36 to 10, that's a good lesson there right there. Yeah. From verbal. When people tell me I have this much soft committed, I've got 20 million soft committed. I go, OK, well, let's see what it actually turns out to be. A lot of a lot of funds I talk to, it's usually about half for us. It was about a third just because of how far it fell. Now, after about a couple of months later, a lot of those people then ended up coming in the fund later. But it was just it was and I'll just say that blatantly on the podcast like this. It was, you know, an interesting just launch of a fund. I was calling people trying to get money anyways. We got money in June 1st. Literally the next week, crypto falls another 20 percent. Wow. So it just falls off a cliff. After you called capital. Yes, we've called capital. Now, thankfully, we were we were we we kind of saw some things coming. This is right when Luna Terra blew up, which we actually called. We knew it was happening the week before, which is really cool because of Dan. This is and then this is going through the summer is very choppy. So during that period, crypto fell from its peak about 77 percent. Wow. Just crazy. Now, our whole portfolio, we built it around risk mitigation. Which a lot of investors didn't like actually at the time, because crypto was up and it's like upside. We're going to know it's up and to the right. Let's just go along everything. We said, hey, we need to mitigate risk. We need to watch because it's guess what? It's the elevator. It's the elevator down. And it's usually the stairs on the way back up. Yeah. And we are at a point where we think of the elevator is going to drop. And so we need to mitigate risk. So last year we launched our fund crypto fell 77 percent. Broad market. Our fund fell 17 percent. It was really good. We outperformed Bitcoin, Ethereum, literally by 30 or 40 percent somewhere in that range. Don't quote me on that, but it was pretty good for the end of the year. And then we've rebounded really well. So this year, crypto has come up where I think as of today, we're sitting just over a 30,000 dollar Bitcoin. Our fund is up 25 percent for the year. We are and I haven't got the most, but per our last report, we were beating Ethereum by 15 percent, something like that, and beating Bitcoin by 17 percent somewhere in those ranges. Double digit beating both those exchanges. We were beating the S&P, we're beating the Nasdaq. And I think we're just like one percent behind the Dow or something like that. And every we get reports every 15 days, but we've historically been beating all five of those indexes since inception, which has been really cool.

19:13 Bridger: Yeah. Well, so I want to dive into this risk mitigation thing. You know, Warren Buffett always says, you know, the number one rule of investment management is just don't lose money. Right. And the second rule is never break rule number one. Yeah. So, you know, talk us through. I think it's an important element that a lot of people overlook when they're, you know, starting funds is, you know, these precautions. So tell us about some of the risk mitigation strategies you use.

19:35 Lincoln: Well, and just, yeah, just to do the math, if you lost 50 percent, you have to get 100 percent return to break even. Yeah. If you lose 20 percent in your position, you've got to get a 20. It's like a 25 and a half, 26 percent return to break even. A lot of people don't like realize that just face value. That's how it works. And so if you can mitigate these falls and make these falls, especially in a volatile market like crypto over the long period of time, over a decade, you can perform very, very well. So some of our risk mitigation strategies we put into buckets and I can draw the whole pie chart for you. But about half of our portfolio is in a I would call it a risk mitigated format where we are. We do a lot with liquidity pools. So what these are, if you've ever traded crypto before, just make things simple. Whenever you trade crypto, they typically charge you a gas fee. So you trade a Bitcoin to Ethereum. They charge you what's called a gas fee. It's like it can be a couple hundred bucks sometimes, depending on how much you're trading or a thousand bucks, depending how much you trade, it's actually sometimes can be very high. And what that is, is because someone is providing liquidity. You're acting kind of like the Federal Reserve or a central bank where you provide liquidity that I hold Bitcoin and I hold Ethereum. And when you transfer those, I actually facilitate that transaction. And because of that, I earn a fee for doing so on a decentralized. So on its centralized exchanges like Coinbase or script.com, they actually keep all those fees. So you can go to Coinbase and like, right, not anymore, actually, after the SEC. But you used to be able to go to Coinbase and stake. You could stake a coin and earn like 6% yields. Yeah. In reality, Coinbase is making like 25 to 30% on that. They're paying you six, but they're making the other the huge chunk of the margin on those fees. When you go to a decentralized exchange, you can actually make the majority of those fees, if that makes sense. And so we we can go and stake. So, for example, if we hold, let's say there's two coins that we like, which is called Bitcoin Ethereum, we like those coins. But also every year we just get the transaction fees by holding those coins on the and instead of earning 4% on Crypto.com, we're earning 25% or 28% on these fees. And by the way, when there's volatility, those fees spike. So when there's a crazy time like a banking crisis, those fees go from maybe 10% to 80% right on if you get an annual APY so they can jump and spike very hard. Additionally, we have a full strategy. We hold about 40 to 60 coins at any given time. We do a lot of research on the coins we hold on the positions we hold on the contract. Sometimes those contracts can get hacked. You can lose your money. Anyway, there's a lot of research that goes behind.

22:00 Bridger: 100% deployed at any given time.

22:02 Lincoln: No. Oh, yeah, we keep one of our buckets. 25% is actually in that's our lowest yield. Bucket is primarily in stable coins. So those stable coins we hold as and as a dry powder for us, they'll yield two to five percent a year. So they yield a little bit kind of like holding a bond. But at any given time, we can use that dry powder to get into new, brand new positions that we see coming and we want to be a part of. So we have 25% low yield. We have then have 25%. We call it mid yield. We then have 40%, which is high yield. That's ecosystem interop that we do. And then we are last 10% of our portfolio's moonshots. So we actually we do have a portion of our of our portfolio to moonshots. That's where we you know, we now we need to see a docs team and you see utility on those coins and we see a clear road map. So we do actually a lot of research, not just just crazy dogs on coins. We actually do a lot of research. We want to make sure there's actual real utility in these tokens and actually a utility better way to say as like software. Is there actually a true like software company behind this token? Yeah, it's just something that's made up or is it actually like a and we can give you a bunch of examples, but there's some really cool actually utility based tokens and some of them have the potential to truly moonshot. And so with us, we can mitigate risk if we can produce a good APY every year. But then we also have some really good moonshot positions over the course of a decade. We're hoping that a handful of those hit and pay back our fund 10 times over while we were producing yield the whole time.

23:29 Bridger: Wow. Awesome.

23:31 Lincoln: So you're managing about 10 million right now. It's up. It's up. Well, it's it's kind of the crypto market, right? And then we do distributions and stuff, but it's above 10 million now.

23:41 Bridger: So tell me about that. Do you read this? You go back to like an original balance at the end of every year.

23:46 Lincoln: Do you let the fund compound or we do every calendar end of every calendar year? We distribute. You just read December 31st. We distribute any profits. We do our whole carry and split at the end of the year. So it's just going to be your principal, your principal investments at the end of every year. Now, investors can reinvest that back in. Yeah, they can add that back in if they want, but they can also take a cash distribution. Yeah, we did that. We there's currently there's SEC is deciding on it. Looks like they're I think they're going to put it into effect where all hedge funds have to do that. You actually have to distribute profits. Some hedge funds run for a decade and never distribute profits to their investors. However, the managers are taking distributions all the time. They're taking their carry and their management fee. So they're taking carry management fee for 10 years and their investors, their clients have never taken actual distribution. And so I think the SEC is going to make that change where they're actually a force hedge funds on a schedule. I don't know what the schedule will be. We just we guess it would be an annual schedule and we and we didn't want to do that as well. We wanted actually our investors to have payouts and distributions. Yeah. And it's almost a good marketing expense, too. They they go tell their friends they want to get back in and they can compound

24:50 Bridger: the money. Yeah. Yeah. So give or take 10 right now. Ten and 20. I think I won't give it because the number changes between 10 and 20. Yeah. You know, what's you know, you said you mentioned earlier that you want to be a billion dollar fund here in the next, you know, couple of years. Like, what's your you know, what's your road map to get there? Are you going to launch subsequent products that have different trading strategies? Is it just this one fund that you think can take you there? Because I know you've started with accredited investors and, you know, you're going to start going after more family office, larger investor profiles. I'd love to just hear, you know, how you plan on scaling your firm over the next

25:28 Lincoln: five years. Yeah. So it's funny. We go back to it's funny being in a crypto winter right now. So we had a lot of family offices lined up and during the last kind of crash, they've all just they say, we think you're going to be great. Your team is awesome. Just we are scared of the asset class of crypto in general. Yeah, we have zero crypto exposure when two years ago they, hey, we want three to five percent of our family office to be exposed to crypto. Now they're saying we want zero. So we've got to spend a lot more time saying, hey, you know, this is like buying real estate in 2010. You know, we are at the like this is the time it's still the still the same road map, still all the cool stuff that's going on. We still have a central bank, digital currency we believe is coming. We still believe that there are all these it's inevitable how good this technology is over the long period of time. And we've got to we have to help them have a mind shift. So there's a lot of work. Educating. Yes, a lot of educating that's going on. So we actually currently are working with a number of family offices that are they're just kind of waiting. Their managers are still very nervous that we've had a banking crisis. Their portfolios beat up the last year. And so they're like, really, is this the right time to make a, you know, a bet into a new asset class that we don't really fully understand yet? So now, though, with this last few weeks, they're starting to warm up to this. So just a couple of days ago, Citadel, BlackRock, Fidelity and Schwab all announced they're getting into crypto exchanges. This comes on the heels of the SEC going after Binance, the SEC going after Coin Coinbase. And so that's actually perked up a lot of years of having offices like, oh, OK, big money starting to get into this. So it's just it's funny to try to, you know, and there's some family offices that are very like we're in. We have a few of those that have already invested with us. And then we have a lot that are like, hey, we're just we are we have to and we have to sit down with them. And you'd be surprised actually how little they know about crypto. Yeah. And this is a professional family. We're talking to the CFO, the full management team, the like these are asset managers and they don't know the first thing about crypto. Like the first thing like we have to we we spend an hour and a half with this one family office. I mean, they had no clue what like what even a block chain meant in the most basic sense. We spent 45 minutes just let's just talk about what this technology is and how it works. And and so there's a lot of there's still this big education gap. And people right now maybe listen to this about crypto. And now I'm not just I'm not a crypto maximalist like to serve as well. I don't like my whole net worth. I have 10 percent of my net worth in crypto. Yeah, maybe 11. I still own a lot of real estate. I invest a lot of companies like I do a lot of that. But I think I think people should have exposure to this asset class, whatever makes sense for you and your personal portfolio, but not financial advice. But I just think, I don't know, it's a it's an interesting asset class enough to have some exposure to. Yeah. And so if you can do that through a risk mitigated process, that's kind of where it's at. So back to your question roadmap, we are now transitioning to we are kind of stopping pitching. We're not really pitching a credit investors anymore. Yeah. It's a good base. Whatever it's built is a good tracker. And a lot of them want to see, hey, we want to see you guys in this game for three or five years before we invest, which is totally fine. But now we're shifting our full focus to larger like mid to large family offices and even starting to push to institutions. Now that we have a tracker, we're doing a full audit on our fund. We do an annual audit every year. They that's what they want to see. They want to see stuff like that so that we can just show that we're legit. We're you know, because they're they're red flags are all up just because we say crypto. It's like 10 red flags that go up. So we've got to show here. Here's our audit. Here's our all of our compliance stuff. Here's our third party administrators. Here's our performance over like, you know, here's our NAV reports, all the stuff protocols. Right. You guys take that really seriously. So which is we're starting now to warm up to bigger check sizes.

29:10 Bridger: Takes time. Takes a lot of people don't realize that. Right. When you're when you're barking up an institutional tree or a big family office like you're you're from your first meeting to investment doesn't happen. You know, in a few weeks or even a few months sometimes it can be years.

29:26 Lincoln: Right. That they're watching you and following you. If we were running a real estate fund right now, like we I think we'd be well over one hundred fifty million right now. Yeah. Because it's just when you pitch real estate, you have depreciation. It's a lot just it's a lot easier. So they're already sold on the asset class. It's a lot just simpler. You can actually see the asset when you're pitching someone on crypto like it's just way different. Yeah. I almost equivalent like a 10 million our crypto fund is worth a hundred million dollars real estate. I could totally see that. That's kind of how I think about it.

29:52 Bridger: You know. Yeah. Well, Bridger, what's what's been the hardest part about running a fund and being a fund manager? Just in general. Yeah. Across the board, across the board. It could be raising money. It could be actually managing it. It could be working with investors. It just could be the startup, just the day to day of you have a bad trade. You know what? Yeah. What's been the hardest part?

30:16 Lincoln: A couple of things come to mind. I guess I'll just spit them out. I don't know if it's in order. With a hedge fund, there's been we try to not day trades up, but there's the last year I mean, we've seen this crazy crypto cycle. So we've seen FTX blow up. We've seen the deep pegging of USDC, the banking crisis, which affect crypto. Those are the three largest crypto banks right by the way that blew up. I know people don't realize that Silvergate, Signature and Silicon Valley Bank, they were in charge of, I don't know, 80 to 90 percent of all crypto in the United States. Yeah. We were up late all those nights, like about whole weekend we were working, you know, to try to watch and get news and like, where are we going to move and thinking through our positions and how we're going to structure. So there's a lot that happens there, which is kind of fun, too. It feels like you're doing, you know, this running this big fund, which is kind of cool. But those have been some stressful moments, especially last year. FTX blowing up, Lunaterra, Genesis Global. I mean, you can name there's 20 crypto companies that have blown up. Yeah, I tell you, you can't get much worse news about crypto. Like when you talk about like invest when there's blood in the streets. Yeah, like there's blood all over the streets right now. And it's actually we that makes us so excited, though, like we are grabbing positions at such discounts of really good technology, really good utility. So anyways, and obviously I'm optimistic we're generally long on crypto. Yeah, most of the time. And but we're pretty excited. So that would be the first thing. Investors actually, we have great investors. We worked some people have really a lot of problems with investors. Our investors have been great. They've been awesome to work with. We've had a lot of a lot of great time with our investors. That might change the future, but investors been great compliance. If we're always compliance is always just not the funnest thing to do. Make sure everything ducks are in a row and stuff. That's just part of the job, though. There is all I'll leave it at that.

31:54 Bridger: Yeah. Well, I want to revisit, you know, as you were talking, just do you plan on launching subsequent products that have different strategies or is it just

32:03 Lincoln: the one that you're running with? So we we believe this will be our flagship product because it's it's this product we built is built for family offices, institutions, risk mitigated. It takes all the old school investing principles and just plugs them into crypto. So we believe this will be our flagship product. We might launch a transition to a three C seven fund. We can take 19 or nine investors and take qualified purchasers. All through the same vehicle. Yeah. But the same core strategy. We've discussed launching an ETF fund ETFs currently are dead, but still have, I think, a lot of utility behind them. So a full ETF fund. We've also looked at launching a full we call it like a moonshot fund. So for people that just love adrenaline and just want crazy highs and lows. So we take that 10 percent of our portfolio and that would be a hundred percent moonshot fund. We've actually looked at doing those subsequent subsequent products

32:51 Bridger: in the coming years. And is that opportunities that you've seen as a manager, like an opportunity in the marketplace or these investors that are asking for these types of products?

33:00 Lincoln: It's been both both. Yeah. So we've had. Yeah, we've had a lot to ask about when NFTs were really hot. Can we please get this? And actually, our team has done very well. And I teach just individually. Yeah. So trading and buying. And there's a lot that you can do within the NFT space and then the moonshot product. We have some people that just want straight adrenaline. They're just like, dude, I just treat this like casino money. Just throw it in like I either want to be a billionaire. I want to have zero money at the end. And so we're like, hey, our fund really isn't built for that. Like we're we're built to preserve capital and grow it over a long period of time. And so it's been it's been a mix of both. The moonshot fund has been more from investors asking for just more adrenaline. Yeah. So we may or may not do that one, but we'll see.

33:38 Bridger: Cool. Yeah. Cool. Well, I want to ask you, you know, to other emerging managers, prospective fund managers out there or current fund managers, you know, like, you know, just want to give you some time here to like, what advice would you have for these individuals that are that are looking into being a fund manager?

33:56 Lincoln: I think you got to play business as an infinite game. Signing Sinek put this great thing out about finite games versus infinite games. A lot of us try to make finite games. We try to play life like sports. There's a you know, you have a time clock, you have a winner and loser. And we try to make things that are infinite into finite. Like you don't win at marriage. That's an infinite game. The goal of marriage is to continue to be married and be happier and happier. We never like win at marriage. The same thing is true with business. And I think running a fund, you never really win at running a fund. Yeah, you can set time stamps like this year to this time. But the goal of running a fund or running a business is to play the infinite game, is to stay in business and to keep growing that business over a long period of time. I think a lot of people get into business with a finite mindset when they're really playing an infinite game. And by the way, the infinite game mindset always trumps and beats the finite mindset. For example, United States went to war with Vietnam. They came in with a finite game. We're going to come, we're going to kick out communism, we're going to win. And the Vietnamese or the local people had an infinite game mindset. Same thing is true with Afghanistan. This is our homeland. We will fight forever. And what happens typically is the infinite mindset typically ends up kicking out and winning the finite mindset that happened in Vietnam. It kind of happened in Afghanistan. 20 years we spent there. We said, hey, we just, we can't keep doing this. And they are there. This is our homeland. It's where we live. We will keep doing this forever. And the infinite mindset always beats the finite mindset. So back to the question about running a fund, having an infinite mindset. Currently, I'm 28 years old. My mindset, even with my first two funds was I want to just, I want to be in this game and I want to be in this game forever. And so I need to do treat investors right. I need to be honest. I need to make sure things are done properly with compliance. Like I need to make sure I'm straight with the SEC. Like everything's mapped out the right way. And even if that costs us a few dollars up front or whatever, like I'm playing the infinite game. I'm way more interested in with an investor coming in about giving them a good experience and good performance with our fund because I know if I do good to them today, that will produce five or 10 or 20 times the capital in the future. You look at these great fund managers that are today, Ray Dalio, Warren Buffett, Jim Rogers that we had at our event. Actually, all three of those started their first fund in their 20s. Their mid to late 20s was their first fund was launched and they played the infinite game. And now, you know, they're older in their 70s, 80s, 90s. And we talk about them like crazy. It was 60, 70 years ago. They started this game and they started with a hundred thousand dollars. They started with $50,000 and they played the infinite game with markets, with their fund. Their fund didn't blow up. It didn't go bankrupt. They just kept playing the infinite game. And today, wow, I can't believe Warren Buffett or Ray Dalio or all these big names. They've been playing this game since they were 26 years old. And they had a fund actually. It wasn't just they were kind of trading. They had a fund when they were 26 years old, 27, 28 years old. So my advice to any person in the that's aspiring to be in this game, whatever, I would say get in the game and play the infinite game. It doesn't matter if it's small today. You're not playing for today's money. You're playing. I'm playing the get rich long game, not get rich quick game, but I want to get rich and get really rich over the long period of time. And funds are an incredible vehicle to do that. You're in the right vehicle and you're at the spot. And if you can find a great management team, a great process and system, and you can be compliant and follow the SEC and just treat investors the right way, that will pay compounding dividends over the course of your life.

37:36 Bridger: Love it. Amazing. Thank you. Just a couple of rapid fire questions here to wrap up. You know, any any habits you feel like that have contributed to your success?

37:48 Lincoln: I am an active proponent of morning routines and just routines in general. And I change my routines all the time to try to optimize and find what works best for my energy and my life and my health. Your brain and how you show up to work every day is I think the biggest metric of being successful or not. If you're full out and have energy and focus, you could accomplish anything in this life. The contrary, if you're depressed, if you're sad, if you're kind of tired, typically nothing really gets done. And so if you can train the internal, your body is an incredible thing. It has internal energy. It has other stuff. If you can train your body to access that kind of stuff, you can do really well. So a couple of things I've tried out. I've tried intermittent fasting. I did that for about a year and a half. That's where you eat for eight hours a day. You don't eat for 16 hours a day. Love doing that. Really changes the energy in your body. It pulls out different energy from stored fat in your body. Really interesting. Currently, I love doing ice. I do an ice bath every single morning. I did a sauna this morning for 30, 35 minutes. A very hot sauna where you're uncomfortable. You want to get out. What's that temperature? I think my thermometer is broken, but we're around 170 with about 80% humidity. But I think it's anyways, I actually, I do doubt that. I just do it until I just am uncomfortable. I put it as hot as until I'm uncomfortable. But I love doing that. Trying to get eight hours of sleep. And then working out, getting your brain right. I don't know. People talk about getting sunlight. I've tried that before in the morning. Whatever it is to where you show up at eight o'clock or nine o'clock in the morning, whenever you show up to work and you have full energy and that energy can sustain you throughout the day. I'm a big proponent of anything that does that. So cool. Flow periods, you can do 40 minutes. I actively study this and I treat myself as like the sample. I'm going to try this out. You know this, we always talk about energy drinks. I don't like energy drinks just because I don't want my body to be dependent on energy from a can or energy from another source. I want to have energy come from within me. And from the food I eat, I really track like what I eat for lunch. How do I feel at two o'clock? If I eat this for dinner, how do I feel the next morning? I think about all that stuff all the time. Because if I can train my body and mind to be in a peak state when I show up to work or on a podcast or a show, and I do that compound that over a year or five years or 10 years, I'm going to beat my competition and play if I can play that infinite game. And I can live a longer, happier, healthier life.

40:06 Bridger: So yeah. Well, on the flip, the only business pet peeves, things that just drive you crazy in business that you're like you wish people wouldn't do.

40:17 Lincoln: A ton. Or investing. I hate when people call me buddy. I've already said that before. Never call me buddy or pal or what's a sport? Like stuff like that. I've had, and I don't know, maybe just because I'm relatively young. Most of my business people I work do business with are twice my age. If anybody ever calls me like buddy or pal, I almost, I call hang up the phone. I just cancel the deal. I don't want, because it feels like a total little brother thing. And some people, I know just the way they grew up, they just call everyone. But I get that. But to me, I just hate it. I hate when people schedule, like when you're in a group chat and it's like, hey, we're going to do this or that. We hop in a Zoom call and there's just a lot of chatter. About an idea and business lingo that sounds really nice. And all these little words and phrases that people throw around in MBA programs that don't really mean that much. And then they talk, people love to talk about business. They rarely like to do business. I'm very execution oriented. I'm very action oriented. And so it really bugs me if people are wishy washy. And let's set up another call and let's, you know, circle back next week. And I'm like, dude, we're not, no one's going to do a thing from now until next week. Yeah. And we're going to show up to next week's Zoom call and we're like, oh, I forgot about this. Oh yeah, let's, let's re talk about it. We just waste a week. Why don't we just decide right now? Be decisive. I'm going to ask you right now, be decisive on this decision. Yes or no? Gun to your head. Do you want to go forward or not go forward? Don't punt this to next week. Give me an answer right now. And that sometimes people, I work with my team, I try to, anyways, they don't like that very much because I try to be very decisive and move quickly because money loves speed. So those are a few things that really bugged me.

42:02 Bridger: Not really, but they bug me in business and, and yeah. In life. Yeah. No, that's great. Bridger, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story. Talk to us about how you think about investing. Honestly, stoked to, you know, see where, see where things go for you over the next couple years, man.

42:20 Lincoln: Well, it's going to be fun and you as well. Well, and you guys don't know me and Lincoln work together every day. It's just fun to be in here and just kind of talk about this. We haven't, I don't think we've ever had a conversation like this before. It's been pretty fun. Yeah, it's been great. Love the show. Love what you're doing. So that's what's exciting.

42:30 Bridger: Cool. Thank you. 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, rate and review. I would appreciate that greatly. Thank you. 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 for 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 fund launch or black card capital partners may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast.