The RazReport

This is a replay of Jason Raznick's interview with Kevin O'Leary at the Benzinga Pyschedelics Conference.

Jason and Kevin talk about:

• Psychedelics as an investment opportunity
• Why Cannabis Industry Attracts 'Zero' Institutional Dollars
• The Most Successful investments

Hosts:

Jason Raznick

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasonraznick

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Click here for more episodes of The RazReport.

Disclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.

Transcript:

BZ: I want to introduce the number-one shark Mr. Wonderful. Kevin O'Leary. When did you first get into the psychedelic space?

3 years ago. I was here and a young guy came to me and said, look, I want you to give me a few million bucks to invest in psychedelics.

I said, are you out of your mind? That's an illegal substance.He said, no, I want to do FDA trials with it. And it was a very fascinating conversation because at that time everybody was trying to raise money for Bitcoin. It was very crypto oriented and I really got interested and I put a couple of guys with him to do some diligence.

And Alex one of the guys that works with me, Alex rarely gets excited about anything. He's seen everything. He's just came back and said listen we got to own this thing. The potential here is huge. And he was right. The addressable markets are in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

BZ: And so where is Mindmed right now?

K: When I index a sector, I try and mitigate my risk based on trials. In biotech medicine, the outcomes are unknown. So it's very binary. You can chase a molecule for 10 years and you in stage three lose.

And so you have to have multiple trials. I'm overweight MindMed, but I also have exposure to Compass. They're all doing things slightly differently, but they're all in stage two. And The minute one of them gets to stage three on any medicine, you're going to lift all the tides, so you want multiple exposure.

BZ: How did you decide to get into psychedelics?

K:How many times in your investment life, do you get to position yourself in a brand new sector?

A completely brand new sector? Never is the answer. You've once in a lifetime, if you're lucky. And this sector, and I'm not talking about cannabis, right? And I'm talking about psychedelics as medicine, FDA approved trials, non recreational use. Remember what happened back in the early sixties, the whole movement overdosing LSD caused this to be elevated to a narcotic and put aside, even though there's lots of promising evidence that micro-dosing, it could have some good natural attributes.

In terms of helping people with addiction, opioid addiction, alcoholism, anxiety, all of these different massive markets. It was ignored. And then we've tried all these other drugs like pumping kids full Ritalin and all this garbage. And we haven't explored this opportunity. And I think now we are.

And so for me, it's okay. There's been nothing new for 30 years in mental health. Other than just drugging people with more drugs. This looks more interesting. Let's put some dollars aside for this.

BZ: Are you invested in cannabis companies?

K: Let's talk about what cannabis is. Cannabis is a narcotic and that puts it in a difficult place for institutional investors.

If you have two states beside each other, one has legalized cannabis and the other hasn't and you are a shareholder. Somebody takes it across the border. and now you have aided and embedded transferring a narcotic that's punished by about 23 years in jail. I'm not that interested in that outcome for me.

Why don't we just get it off the narcotic list?

And so I represent institutional capital. We're always trying to put money to work but there isn't a dime of institutional money in cannabis industry.

Recreational cannabis is great, but it's a nothing burger compared to what this would be if it was a medicine and the potential of THC in small amounts or medicinal amounts, be FDA trials, and then approved as a drug that would have been interesting for institutions. And I think frankly, and I look at markets like Ontario, as you mentioned, the most advanced market. That business sucks. They don't allow them to brand anything. So the people in Ontario simply buy it from their dealers at a 30% discount and nothing's changed and it's a miserable business. So that's not a great investment at all. And the PEs of those stocks have been crushed.

You can't get me excited about that.

BZ: So your point is people in Ontario aren't going to the stores as much. They're going right to the direct source. Their dealers basically?

K: Now, either you arrest all the dealers and throw them in jail, like we've been doing forever, except that's a problem now because it's legal. So now you have to figure out the distribution channels in Canada, they don't allow branding. So THC is THC, whether it's an, a gummy or an edible or you're buying it in smokable.

There's no differentiation. So the people that are making that are selling a commodity and their margins are getting crushed. I don't find any of this very exciting as an investor. I think in a conference like this industry should do some soul searching and say, how do we fix this? And you start by convincing the president to get it off the narcotic list.

And you bring in billions of dollars into it for both medicinal and recreational. After you get it off the narcotic list. That's cannabis. That's not the problem with the psychedelics industry, it still can attract institutional capital.

BZ: When is big pharma going to get in the psychedelic space?

I think big pharma is starting to look at it because you're trying to figure out outcomes on massive addressable markets. And the way I view it is this is a personal opinion, but I look at this market, all the companies are going to to have to merge because they need each other and another $200 million.

By the time they get this to a medicine, that's about a billion bucks. They've got a raise it's much better if they combined all these trials together. In my view, these companies all have their own management. I know them all. I, we talked about this two years ago. I said, guys, there's so much still to be raised here, but so much potential.

We could get strategic in this thing. Let's merge them all together. That's not how they viewed it. So I own stock in all of them.

BZ: You think there is gonna be one winner or you might maybe a big merger of all three? Do we have some breaking news here?

K: No you've got the LSD crowd, the microdosing crowd and a lot of skepticism around that, but a lot of optimism too, depending on who you talk to, you've got the psilocybin crowd, then you've got the alternative molecule where you're modifying either of those, each trying to address different afflictions around mental health.

There's a lot of anecdotal information coming out of the west coast in the programming field, even though it's illegal, they're microdosing LSD, and there, which I don't endorse, but it's obviously got the research crowd really interested in understanding how this works and that's why those clinical trials are so important, but psilocybin also has potential as well.

Plus there's the whole counseling market where you take these drugs in addition to it, to a counselor. So there's a lot of different use cases to this thing, but I'm far more constructive on psychedelics for institutional capital than I am for cannabis, for reasons I just detailed, don't shoot the messenger.

Everybody was so excited about. Those stocks have come down 80% in PE since this whole thing started.

BZ: What's your best business?

K: Here's what I've learned about this whole shark tank thing. Somebody walks out in the carpet. I've never seen them before we give them a million dollars. We have no idea what the outcome's going to be.

We think we've got a winner, but we don't know. And then two years later, some ridiculous product that should have gone to zero ends up selling for a hundred million dollars. And so I have a different view about it now.

A woman walks out on the carpet. Jesus. You take a swab and you stick it in your cat's orifice and you send it to me and I give you a DNA profile of when fluffy is going to die. And I thought that is so stupid. I can't even imagine the test kits are $29 and you can get a new cat for $5. But I invested in any ways because she had such a great track record as an honorable. During the pandemic all of the110 million cats in America got something stuck up their rear end because that business has exploded and I was wrong, but I own a nice chunk of it. So I'm pretty happy.

BZ: How many investments have you done?

K: So you can take a product. The number one reason companies go to business and venture is they run out of dollars to acquire customers. They go bankrupt advertising, but when you're on shark tank, you acquire customers for free. So you can take a marginal business and all of a sudden it's profitable and shark tank because it's in syndication and perpetuity.

So we make a lot of money on things. I don't know if you saw the recent episode, banana loca, you So you can now send a banana in your kid's lunchbox filled with peanut butter, but unpeeled, how does that work? You stick a catheter up a banana and then press peanut butter into it. I thought what a stupid idea and Alex backstage said I have to own that.

And all of a sudden, all the big banana companies are calling us saying, Hey, can we do a deal? The stupidest idea I've ever seen it's crazy.

Lori taught me something. Stupid things made of plastic sell a lot.

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Episode Summary:

In this episode of The Raz Report, Jason Raznick speaks with Anthony Zhang, CEO of Vinovest.

Jason and Anthony talk about:

• How profitable it is to invest in wine and the yearly rate of return
• How much money is need to start investing in wine and the process of investing
• Anthony's favorite wine to enjoy as a wine investor
• Anthony's life as an entrepreneur

Learn more about Vinovest here!

Hosts:

Jason Raznick

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasonraznick

Sign Up to Benzinga Pro today to receive most exclusive interviews, news and stock picks fast!

https://pro.benzinga.com/

Click here for more episodes of The RazReport.

Disclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.

Transcript:

BZ: Very excited on this RazReport to have Vinovest CEO Anthony Zhang. Here's a way you can make money. This guy has created multiple companies and sold them. People reach out to me for advice on what to do for businesses. Next year they need to reach out to Anthony.

Welcome to the show, Anthony.

A:Jason, thanks so much for having me on. It's a pleasure.

BZ: Before we get into your entrepreneurial journey, I just want you to quickly say what you guys do. What is Vinovest?

A: We are a way for anyone to be able to diversify their portfolios into the asset class of fine wine. So we help people buy, store and sell appreciating assets, like investment-grade wines.

BZ: How long have you been doing it?

A:So we are rocking on year three right now.

BZ: And how has it, how has the journey been?

A: We launched actually March of 2020. So if you remember what was happening, that we were heading into a global pandemic. And I remember the first week me and my co-founder launched the business was when the stock market tanks like 20%, 30%.

We looked at each other and think holy crap, is this the worst time ever to launch a new investment platform? Thankfully things worked out. Been able to amass, tens of thousands of investors. So now it's broader platform. And the wine work has been doing pretty well as well.

It's 2020 it's at 17% returns last year, around 19%. And this year we're actually up almost 6% year to date.

BZ: Anthony where did you grow up? what's your story?

A: All right. We're in the bay area, but actually spent most of my childhood years abroad. Beijing, Hong Kong, Vancouver. But came back here for high school, finished up high school in Palo Alto, California, and then started college in LA. And I think that's when my entrepreneurial journey started with my first business, which was a college food delivery startup called onboard.

BZ:Is that the one you pitched to Mark Cuban?

A: Yeah. So after that pitch night with Mark I had the opportunity to join a fellowship program called the Thiel fellowship. For those of you who aren't familiar, Peter Thiel, every single year, gives out a hundred thousand dollars to about 26 people.

And it is no strings attached except you have to drop out of college. I got that. I dropped out of school and actually pursued that food delivery startup full time. And over the course of the next four or so years, we were able to grow that business out to over 20 markets nationwide. We had hunted a thousand students using it, and we eventually sold that.

We were able to get a really good return for our early investors. More than 2X. And if it's any indication, many of those investors now also back to my current company between 2X and 10X.

BZ: So you sold Envoy. And then you said, what was the other company you sold?

A: So if you remember what's happening in Hollywood in 2017, it was a Harvey Weinstein that was dominating the news and all the terrible things he did.

And a similar story was unfolding in Silicon Valley where a lot of big shot VCs were getting called out in the news for pretty much doing the same thing, racial discrimination. Sexual harassment. As a guy, I definitely did not experience any of it. And it was shocking to me and talking with a lot of my friends who, were female founders or founders from other minority backgrounds, they were sharing some of their stories with me privately. And I was like, holy crap these stories need to be able to be out there, but in a way that doesn't hurt the storyteller right.

In a way that can also benefit future powers. So maybe essentially like a rating app for venture capitalists and angel investors. And just because of the climate at the time that site really blew up pretty quickly. Hundreds of thousands of unique searches a month on entrepreneurs and other investors, actually just looking at that out, these other VCs and angel investors that they were potentially going to work with.

BZ: Anthony is that one still around?

A: Yeah. Now it's called Rate My Investors. So if you go to ratemyinvestor.com I believe it is still the largest database of vetted reviews on angels and VCs

BZ:So what was it like working with Peter Thiel?

A: So the program is pretty awesome. I think the biggest benefit that it gave me was seeing that "Hey, there are a lot of other young entrepreneurs that have taken a traditional path and they're taken out." I was, I was going into my sophomore year at college.

I was working a ton on the startup and everyone around me was just living a normal college life. I feel like I had a community and joining the Thiel fellowship and being a part of that, I think just gave me that sort of tribe that I needed to feel competent dropping out. Or also would have just been in my college apartment, being alone all the time, trying to build a company.

There's a quality standard that comes with becoming a Thiel fellow.

BZ: So while you were at USC you had an accident, right? And are you cool talking about that?

A: Yeah, absolutely. It's a part of who I am. So this was actually when I was running Envoy now. And this is about almost six years to this day, actually. I had a spinal cord injury and so those of you don't know what that is. It means that you pretty much get paralyzed from wherever in your spinal cord break. For me it was a surgical injury. So this was like up in my neck at the C5 vertebrae. And that meant I couldn't really move anything below my shoulders at first. And that completely changed my life because I was in the ICU for five weeks.

I could not move anything. Multiple surgeries and was on a ventilator for almost the next four months. And, talk about having to learn everything all over again. I wasn't thinking about my startup or, investors or anything like that, even though I was in the middle of raising around it at the time obviously that round crumbled.

But I was in full-on survival mode. I didn't even know if I could go back to doing any of the things I used to love. And recovering and being able to have even the drive to want to do something again, other than stare at the ceiling, getting in bed it was a really tough time and I'm really just fortunate to have my then girlfriend now wife with me.

And she was really just by everything and helping me realize that Hey Anthony even though, physically, you're not the same. No, you're all there mentally. You can still be able to do what you love, which is running businesses. And you shouldn't go back to doing the things that you love.

And so then during those five weeks or what happened to Envoy now and what, and just we'll go there first and then I'll. Yeah. It was honestly almost six months where I was away from the business by like co-founders took over, they were running the business in my absence. And, I actually refused to look at a phone for almost four or five months.

Cause I was just fully in denial, what had happened and it was in the hospital in, in, in our rehabilitation hospital for pretty much the next year. And. Th like mentally professionally, personally, how did this change you or did it change you? Yeah, I think what really helped me really snap back into reality was a statistic that my occupational therapist read me.

It was "they're saying that 80% of people have spinal cord injuries. They actually never go back to work." And I was like, holy crap. I don't want to be part of that 80%. I want to just go back to the real world and, be able to live life again. My life cannot just be in a hospital facility doing assisted care for the rest of my life.

That's what actually led me to come back to the. I told him, I go fast. Okay, I'm coming back. I'm still in the hospital. I'm still going to be doing, five to six hours of therapy a day and work on me, but I want to get back to running the business. And that was that, that turning point that kind of gave me a new perspective of being incredibly lucky to get to where I was.

But the fact that there was still so much more to go with the business. And I think that's also what I think helped to drive our company over the next year. So we've got to that eventual acquisition.

BZ: You've gotten some mobility back in your body as well, Is that correct?

A: I can definitely like move a few more things. I'm still in a wheelchair today, but I'm not completely independent. I still have to have the help of others to be able to get along with my every day. And I think that was honestly a biggest, big lesson I had to learn was actually to ask for help.

Cause as an adult, like you don't do that very often. And it was very hard for me to Come to that realization that if I wanted to actually have the freedom that I wanted to have in my life, needed to be okay with that.

BZ: So you do all this stuff, the delivery, investment crypto, how did you choose to get into wines?

A: I came across an article in the wall street journal and it was talking about all these ultra wealthy billionaires and Luxury assets they were investing in that was making them richer. And how crazy are the terms? Are all these assets work? On the top of the list, there's things like wine and whiskey are like classic cars rare luxury goods. And all of them had really incredible double digit returns over the course of decades.

And I was like, holy crap. Like I did not know art had those returns. I had not known why I'd had those returns and I was like, Hey, it sounds pretty cool. Being able to collect and invest in wine. And the worst that can happen is that I'm stuck with a bunch of nice wine that I can end up drinking.

If I'm not getting those returns or pick the wrong lines, if that's my downside scenario, it doesn't seem too bad. Decided to start collecting wine and realized very quickly why you need to be very wealthy because I was spending tens of thousands of dollars on things like insurance custody, setting up the right storage, getting, trying to get into all these like exclusive auctions.

And it's a ton of barriers to entry that I don't think would be feasible for any average retail investor or any even like most high net worth. So like the amount of work that it takes to actually properly and properly. Investing in wine is a lot. And I thought to myself that's ridiculous that we're in, we're in 2020, 2021, 2022, and this is still the way that you invest in wine.

The easiest way to transact wine is to wait two weeks and go and auction. And your market is the people who are in the room, right? That's silly to me, especially being in crypto where everything is transparent, global 24 - 7, right? Instant. That's actually part of doing that on the side for a few years and realizing that Hey, this is something that I'm very passionate about and I want to give this sort of access that I've developed myself throughout the years.

I want to give that to more.

BZ: So how does the process work? So there's a lot of stuff that you've done behind the scenes that we need to talk about here. How have you actually pulled this amazing platform off. Did you have to become SEC approved? Like how many years did it take? This is fricking pretty impressive, man.

A: . So this was this is just a lot of exploration between me and my co-founder and we realized that Even though a lot of people we think would be interested in investing in wine, but like yourself, for example, most people, first of all, haven't even heard of wine investing and they definitely don't know which ones to pick.

So that's why we chose this product. Which is essentially like a guided or managed portfolio as a first product, right? Like you pick your risk appetite, you pick, a few other inputs, how much you want to invest and things like that. And then we'll, we'll do all the heavy lifting for you, we help you pick the one. We help restore store the wines. We help you show the prices and history. And when you should sell those wines, we really are the ones to be that sort of like educational guide as you start your wine investment journey. So why do you think wine is as good as not as good as the alternate investment?

So I actually came from it from more of a crypto medical, right? Like people love. It's deflationary. It's something that has a very fixed supply, same with wine, and then get him to eat it. If you release a thousand bottles into the market, you can't ever print more bottles from that same year.

And why don't even take it one step further where in addition to that, people are drinking those bottles every single day. So maybe after year one, that 1000 bottles turn into 900. And just given supply and demand. That means that the remaining 900 bottles were just going to be a little bit more scarce and valuable.

On top of that wine actually agents, right? The profile of that wine actually changes throughout time and people prefer the taste of aged wine. So not only is this product getting more scarce over time, but it's actually changing and appreciating into a better product. And those two are really the key drivers of why wine goes up and down.

When you pick the right one. And to me, those things that seem like very simple to understand and something that doesn't really go away. People are not going to stop drinking wine anytime soon.

BZ:Do I invest buy the bottle of wine and you guys store it? Or how does that work?

A: Yeah, so we store it for you by default.

You can actually get it delivered to you and drink it if you want, but by keeping it within our storage facility. It makes selling the much easier, because it's like a, it's like buying a car where like the moment it's off the lot and it gets into like your garage, it's massively devalued.

So by keeping it in our temperature controlled facilities that maintains the highest possible resale.

BZ: How many facilities do you have?

A: All over the world, actually, because our wine has grown all over the world. So if we're buying wine from France for keeping it in France, if we're buying wine from Napa, we're keeping it in Napa.

BZ:Do you have to buy insurance on it?

Yeah. So all of these facilities have pretty robust insurance on them because what if the wine breaks right? What if there's an earthquake? What if you know the runs out of power and it's no longer temperature control. So all of those protections we have in place as part of the Beano best program, so that you actually can have asset protection and be able to feel safe as a first time.

BZ: Are you being the first robo advisor for fine wine?

A: Yeah, I think it's a very good comparison because we do have algorithms behind that make it a fully automated process.

And we're the ones that are seeing those and fully being able to manage it for. Of course I got human experts that do inform and update that algorithm, but it's really that combination it's so scale such a huge user base while not having to hire a ton of new people.

BZ: How many investors are on the platform?

So I think we're creeping up on 10,000 investors on the planet. And a lot of them are like yourself, right there. They're very much versed in the investing world. They're investing in other alternatives and they see this as just wasted bark, some of their money that doesn't have the same correlation to the other stuff that.

BZ: Now there's a quote, you said "the main thing separating someone with a hundred million investible assets and a hundred thousand investible assets is not the stock markets it's access to alternative investments." What do you mean by that?

A: I think access to quality alternatives is really that difference-maker because.

Anybody can invest in stocks, and you can pick all the same stocks. You can pick all those same cryptos, but still, I think that role of alternatives is where there is so much information asymmetry. There's so much gated, right? It's not everybody can invest in the top real estate funds.

Not anybody can get into the best startups. There's a, there's definitely a kind of a gate and a barrier there. And same with wine. Not anybody can invest in best wines in the world because of those reasons of, not having access or not having the right storage and things like that.

WithVinovest, we're trying to do our part in helping to change that.

BZ: Vinovest launched a live marketplace to buy and sell wine on February 3rd, 2022.Can you talk a little bit how that works?

A: So this is very similar to. A trading platform. A lot of people are going to be able to make their own decisions on, Hey if I don't want the managed portfolio to pick those wines out for me, if I, maybe I'm graduating from the manager side or maybe I'm just a more active type of investor.

And I like to make my own picks. That's the place for you, right? If you're really betting on the region of champagne, you can just buy all the champagne you want and be able to have a very concentrated portfolio. Or if you really love this one producer, do you think their line's going to go up, skyrocket, you can just do that.

It's a more, I think active experience for our users. And so far we've seen a really great response.

BZ: Can you give like a number of, so if I invested $5,000 today, In 10 years what will it be? Can ypu just tell me like a rate of return that you think I could get over the next year by percentage terms?

A: So historical rates returned to the wine market at been around just over 10%.

You can just compound that and do the math where it's a pretty stable asset. It's something that is going to have minimal drawdown periods during the sessions. And it's reliable, right. Line investing in wine has been around for how does. It just really hasn't been available.

BZ: Okay. So it seems like a no brainer. Are there accounts that invest in like hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions?

A: Yeah, we had people up on, on that level and those are more so like the institutional clients, family offices where they're managing large sums of money.

But most people are in the single digit thousands. They're just starting out the retail investors. They're looking to put some of their money in their overall investible portfolio into this asset, like wine and then build it up over time.

BZ: Okay. And how does Vinovest make money?

A:So we make money through our management fees.

So this covers the storage, the insurance, and all those protections that we talk about. And for that's how we, that's how we monetize.

BZ: Did you have to become SEC approved?

A: So this is outside ofSEC because we're not selling securities, right?

Currently is not deemed as a security, it's a collectible. And because we're also not selling shares that represent wine or selling fractional ownership, I think like a lot of the other, real estate or art sort of investment programs. That makes it so that you're just buying a bottle of why you're just buying a case of wine.

And you can drink it too. So that kind of preserves the utility of the wine, which makes it a lot more flexible from a regulatory standpoint.

BZ: So if I put a 100k dollars into. And I keep it in until 2025. Let's say the money stays with you guys and then you guys would say, if I want to sell the, you guys would send the money back, basically.

A: So we'd sell your wines off to the next person, right? And then you would you'd get those returns, the Delta between what you paid for and what it sells for.

BZ: I created my account. How do I fund my account?

A: Pretty much any single payment option under the sun. You can write us a check. You can pay in crypto. Credit card, you can link your bank account.

BZ: So can I do that online or do I need to call someone now all online so I you don't need to talk to anybody?

A: You can do that.

BZ: What is your favorite wine?

I'll say a favorite recent has been Vincent Dauvissat Chablis. Super crisp. Just goes really well with, cheese, fish, and even chicken. And that's one that I've been really enjoying recently.

So thank you for coming on.

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"Just like you use your dollars with an online payment service, you can still be defrauded USDC. It wasn't the dollars that defrauded you. It was the other side of it." Jeremy Allaire

"I actually believe the web of value exchange. Whatever you want to call it, the internet of value is going to be extraordinarily more valuable and extraordinarily more impactful than the web of information." Jeremy Allaire

Episode Summary:

In this episode of The Raz Report, Jason Raznick speaks with Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle.

Hosts:

Jason Raznick

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasonraznick

Sign Up to Benzinga Pro today to receive most exclusive interviews, news and stock picks fast!

https://pro.benzinga.com/

Click here for more episodes of The RazReport.

Disclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.

Transcript:

BZ: We're very excited to have on this edition of the RazReport, Jeremy Allaire founder and CEO of Circle

You're going to hear about building companies, building enterprises and Circle USDC, which is taking the world by storm in a good way.

Jeremy, welcome to the show.

J: Thank you, Jason. Psyched to be here.

BZ: Circle your latest company, I think you've raised over 700 million over $700 million for it. Is that correct?

J: that's exactly right.

BZ:When you founded this company in 2013 is it where you thought it would be?

J: when we founded the company back in 2013, there were a whole set of ideas that we had about digital currency.

We were very excited about this idea that you could build what we like to think of back then as an HTTP of money, meaning like a protocol for money on the internet. And by money we meant traditional money.The liabilities of a central bank, what we think of as everyday money. But convey onto that money, the power of cryptocurrency.

So Bitcoin obviously itself brought into the world, this idea of a protocol that could work on a decentralized infrastructure to enable people to directly exchange value in digital cash like way.

We wanted to build on that same fundamental technology foundation, but enable people to exchange, stable value assets, like dollars or Euros. And we believe that a kind of protocol layer for money would eventually become possible on top of these blockchain infrastructures. And that was a core mission and goal from the outset.

We experimented with realizing that idea through building on a lot of, kind of digital currency banking infrastructure, we built a consumer facing application that kind of brought that to life. We actually built it on top of Bitcoin, which was the first-generation blockchain that was available back in 2013 and 2014 and 2015. And in during that time period, and then eventually in 2016, when ethereum, which is the second generation blockchain technology really emerged, it introduced more of the building blocks that we had been looking for back in 2013, when we founded the company.

ETH allowed us in 2017 to begin work on and then also release what's now known as USDC, which is in fact the protocol for dollars on the internet and eventually other Fiat currencies too. But founding vision was there, the path to it obviously takes many, shifts.

The metaphor I like to use is you can see the mountaintop. You can literally, standing far back, you can see that mountain top and how beautiful that looks, but you actually don't know how you're going to get to the top of the mountain. And you may actually go up one path and realize, oh, I'm staring over a cliff. I need to go back down and go up another.

BZ: Ethereum is what allowed you to go create USDC?

J: So back in 2012 and 2013 there, there were a lot of technologists or not a lot, actually back then, there was a lot now, but there were technologists getting involved in this space. And a lot of us got really excited about ideas issuing other assets on top of the blockchain or smart contracts and programmable money and what it would mean if you could have if you could say issue a dollar token and have a smart contract that could enable the programmability of that was like a mind-blowing concept.

Early in my career, I worked on programming languages, app development, infrastructure, developer platforms, content infrastructure, lots of things like that. And so had a background in thinking about, developer platforms and the idea of a developer, an open infrastructure that was like a developer platform for money on the internet was super exciting. And so there were a lot of ideas on how to do it in 2013. It just technically wasn't possible.

The history of Ethereum is really relevant here because Vitalik, who also was really excited about a lot of these ideas of how you can extend this kind of blockchain infrastructure to do other things. A lot of people thought that might happen that Bitcoin itself as an open source project would evolve to do those things. But there was an ideological battle between those in the core development community who really wanted to keep Bitcoin simple and focused on being a kind of digital gold store of value.

Then there's a whole other group of technologists that wanted to advance this into being something that's more like an operating system that you could build a lot of things on top of including things like protocols for stable coins,DEFI, NFTs, DAOs all these things that have emerged. So it was really that kind of forking off and development of a new infrastructure layer that then made it possible to pursue and execute something like USDC.

BZ: Jeremy, where did you grow up?

J:I grew up in a small town in Southeastern Minnesota, a town called Wynnona Minnesota. I went to college in the St. Paul McAllister college and studied political science philosophy and a concentration in economics.

I got introduced to the internet in my dorm room, literally in, in 1990 had a high-speed internet connection, which in 1990, there was not a lot you could do on the internet, but I was down the rabbit hole became completely obsessed, made all of my educational work about it and started using it in my studies around what was happening in the former Soviet Union and what was happening in the sort of changing revolutions around the world and got me excited about the idea of an open network, open permissionless networks, decentralization, disintermediation, a lot of these themes that still show up today in the internet space got me into it. And then graduated college there and started working on my first company.

BZ: Did you ever go to Mall of America when you were growing up?

J:So mall of America merged when I was a little bit older, I think when I was in college.

BZ: But as a kid, did you have side hustles where you like selling the newspaper? Like Mark Cuban was doing the garbage bags? Were you doing that?

J: I was a paper boy, that was my first job if you want to call it. But I actually had, I got really lucky in a sense when I was a teenager. I convinced my parents to take, like some, a small amount of money. I had been passed down to me from my grandparents and was in like mutual funds, which was a big deal in the eighties. You had mutual funds. I convinced them to let me invest it into baseball cards.

So in the kind of mid to late eighties, I ran Southern Cordillera sports cards. So I ran a trading operation and I would deal and I would go and basically do baseball cards. So that was my side hustle that helped me pay for my spending money in college.

BZ:Did you have tables ? So you'd buy cards, flip them and did you make some decent money doing it?

J:Absolutely. Yeah, so I took long positions. Okay. On on term sort of players. Mark McGuire, Jose Conseco, that's just some of the big ones

BZ:What was one of your best trades?

J: Brett saberHagan was, 19, he had just an incredible record and I like accumulated a huge bunch of those. And then that was a short-term trade. I keep thinking in a bunch and then flip them at a huge increase in value as everyone wanted the Brett Saberhagen for a piece that I think that was one of the best one of the best trades I did.

I would do arbitrage.That's where I go to these shows. find someone who really, wanted X and I would just run around and find it, buy it for Y and then turn it around. So there's that. And then, I had I still have a fairly sizable collection.

BZ: How did you get involved in internet in college?

J: I had a T1 which was basically like a hard wire, it was effectively ethernet, but hardwired into a campus that were, and, campuses where some of the only places that had access to the internet for research purposes. And a T1 was, even now was whatever, I, that was back then 1.5 megabits per second, which was really good.

BZ: You're in college and you're exploring this whole open network of sorts were your parents supportive of that?

J: No, not at all. They were like, I don't know what this is. I don't understand this.I graduated college in 1993 the tail end of the first Gulf war recession.

. I studied, what I would thought would be interesting to help understand the world and whatnot. And so I was like temping and but, and, on the side I was just going deeper and deeper into the internet space.And and I remember coming home, I quit my temp job and said, fuck this, I'm going to be an internet consultant. I called myself, which was basically like helping educate people about how businesses, how to use the internet and actually, working on the very, very first websites, this was before, even like Mosaic was out, was hacking around.

Basically how helping organizations figure out how to build stuff from the web. And I went home and my father was just so distraught and just so afraid that, he didn't understand any of it. And he was like, this isn't a job, so concerned. I was following my bliss and it was good timing in 1993 to be really going down that rabbit hole and learning all the technology and figuring out what it was to. Build stuff back then. That led to the Genesis of some of the first products that I helped build and create.

BZ: You called yourself an internet consultant?

J: So there all these people learning HTML, and then in 1995, more people.

I really wanted to be able to do interactive apps where you could connect a database, you could have interactivity. And my idea was that anyone should be able to build a global online service because back then, like the idea of an online service was you had to have AOL, or you have to have, CompuServe or whatnot.

But I was convinced that an open network that anyone could publish to or any device could connect to, it would be a lot better. And so working with my brother, who's a much more of a computer scientist than I am, became the product manager designer for cold fusion and hidden the kind of chief architect. And we ended up working through a lot of ideas and building essentially the first easy to use web programming language and what is now known as an app server, an application server, one of the very first commercial app server, which basically was a piece of software you can put on a machine connected database, do transactions, dynamically generate webpages. And, that paradigm now, is everything from SAS and content management and everything else on, on the internet. So built that and, got super passionate about enabling developers to dream what they wanted to build on the internet, everything from content to community, to e-commerce, to all kinds of things and built, developer platform business.I find it, you can find it out there.

There's still millions of sites with that are still run by that it's now owned by Adobe. That product line is owned by Adobe, which bought Macromedia, which is I merged my first company or we merged layer into Macromedia as public company.

BZ: And when you started Cold Fusion, you and your brother, what'd you call the coming like the layer corporation?

J:.We had a whole family of products. We had the most popular HTML web development tool in the world Homesite.

Literally millions of developers use Homesite. So most websites in the 1990s were built using that. And it was one of the reasons why Macromedia wanted to acquire us because they had Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver was really popular with professional designers.

But like the average Joe or Jane would get Homesite it was free. And it was like super powerful HTML editor. And so we had millions of people using that.So no, like no one used front page, because it was so awful because it forced you into like these templates you couldn't get control. So Homesite was like gave you access to the HTML and made it really easy to edit the HTML. And we gave it away for free. It was like a feed, it was a freemium product. We wanted to get it out there. And then we got other people into our more advanced products.

BZ: So you were doing freemium before, that was even a word. Okay. Did you raise money for Cold Fusion?

J:I think it was three rounds of venture capital and then like a mezzanine financing. And then we IPOed in January of 1999.

We were a public company on NASDAQ for 2 years. And in January of 2001, we merged with Macromedia, which was about three times larger than us. And merged the two public companies. And I became the chief technology officer of Macromedia.

BZ: IPO process versus the M&A process? Which did you like better?

J:I like building. And operating. I I like that a lot. it's interesting, there are times and places where M&A makes sense both as a buyer and as a seller, obviously the vast majority of outcomes and business are some form of merger transaction typically or in bankruptcy. So the number of companies that remain independent is smaller.

But I think both had a lot of advantages back at that period of time merging at the time was a really good thing for our company and actually gave us a much stronger platform that was, as you recall, when 9/11 happened and the entirety of the certainty of the market, and really the demand for internet software and stuff collapsed alongside the collapse of the.com.

BZ: So Brightcove, how did you get to start that?

J: So in 2002, when I was chief technology officer Macromedia, we put the ability to render video and PR and have video as like a programmable object in something called flash player and flash player at the time was the most ubiquitous piece of software in the history of the internet.

98% of computers in the world had it. We could actually upgrade the internet to a completely new virtual machine that essentially like a new client in like less than 12 months. So we put video in and it was right before broadband came out and like for consumers.

And it was really clear to me looking at broadband wifi devices that can be connected to those.And then having a ubiquitous playback mechanism for video. I got really excited, started incubating ideas inside of Macromedia for basically self publishing, self video publishing type of applications actually built something internally that the company did not want to bring to market. I was really frustrated.

My vision was video's going to become as ubiquitous as text on the web. Everyone's going to become a video publisher. Every business is going to be able to distribute television quality video to devices everywhere. And so this was in like 2002, 2003. And so I got frustrated and left, went to a VC as a technologist and resident general catalyst and incubated brightCove.

And then founded it in 2004, really with this idea that again, video was going to become as ubiquitous as texts on the web and that you needed a new generation of publishing platforms for it. That could integrate everything that was needed for either a brand like a corporation. Or an organization or a media company itself to basically do direct distribution of television instead of relying on cable and satellite and all the old ways and transform other media companies who work in television and video into being into television and video. So it was a video platform company, a SAS company, as we now call these and founded it in 2004.

it had a really nice growth run. And I took it public in early 2012. And then stepped into a chairman role after about a year. Cause I had gone down the crypto rabbit hole in 2013 just became obsessed with.What was going on in crypto and made a decision to basically, start Circle.

BZ: Mark Cuban emailed me a question, Mark Cuban's known you from his tech days. His question is "what did you learn from your layer or your database days that you are applying today?"

J: it's actually really relevant. As I talk about the inspiration for circle and what, I've been inspired by, , in this space. in, in many ways, right?

What got me super excited about the internet in the first place was this kind of obsession with the idea of the internet itself, being an open network that was permissionless that anyone could bring a computer to and connect, and that anyone who did that could take open protocols like the SMTP protocol or the HTTP protocol or the VOIP protocol, or these sort of protocols, which are really just public IP, intellectual property, that's open source it's in the public domain.

People can write software to it and that you could connect anyone anywhere through these protocols and do really amazing things in terms of information, exchange, knowledge, exchange communications so powerful. That's what drew me into the internet in the first place and kind of an obsession with open networks, decentralized and distributed model.

What that could unleash and really a belief that architecture could maximize access and could maximize the ability for people to to reach the most people in the world and entrepreneurship and ideas. So that's what kind of, that was what informed. The work around cold fusion back then. And so if I fast forward to crypto, that was fundamentally the insight for me in 2012 and early 2013 was this is just like a replay.

This is just another open protocol on the public permissionless internet that solved a set of problems that hadn't been solved before, which was a way to ensure that data could not be counterfeited. And that transactions could happen in with certainty in an irreversible way without requiring centralization. And these are big ideas and it was like a fundamental new infrastructure layer. The internet was being born. And so when I looked at it and said, okay, This is going to do for the exchange of value. And I don't just mean moving value from point a to point b, I'm talking about the richness of what we do in exchanging value.

As people, as entities, as corporations it's going to do for the exchange of value, what the web and those earlier protocols did for information and communications.

And to me in 2013, like that was so profound because I actually believe the web of value exchange.If you want to, whatever you want to call it, the internet of value is going to be extraordinarily more valuable and extraordinarily more impactful than the web of information. And so it very much informed how I think about this and the work that we're doing here.

BZ: When you started Circle, did you start with anyone else?

J: I co-founded, the company was Sean Neville. Sean is absolutely brilliant. He he co-led the company with me almost like co-CEOs for a long time. And then several years ago, he just stepped into a director role. He's on the board of directors and he runs a crypto incubator, a crypto kind of studio incubator.

But he and I had worked together back Allaire, my first company we worked together a bunch at Macromedia. We worked together and bright Cove. He's just one of the most brilliant minds technological minds, strategic minds, creative minds.

BZ: Was Circle easier to raise money for than your previous ventures because of your huge track record of success?

J: When we started the company, I went to people who invested with me and who had made money with me in the past and said, this is what I'm working on. And they're like, Bitcoin I don't get this. You're crazy. This seems crazy. But. We believe in you, so go for it. I mean that kinda kind of thing. So it definitely helped.

2013 and then 2014, 2015, during that time, there were not a lot of quote unquote adults in the room, in the space. If people think it's a wild west, now it was an extraordinary wild west back then. And we had, seasoned entrepreneurs, technologists.

We had a really strong proactive approach with regulators with kind of major fiduciaries and really worked really hard to try and build something that was compliant and that, differentiated us as well and allowed us to raise quite a bit of capital. I think, a couple hundred million dollars within our first few years of getting started.

BZ: And were you personally buying Bitcoin back in those early days?

J: Yeah, absolutely. And buying ethereum and when it was less than a dollar. Like Solana and it was less than a dollar.

BZ: Do you still own some of that?

J: I am a owner of crypto assets. I don't talk about my particular trading and liquidity strategies, I'm quite structurally long on crypto.

BZ: How would you define a stable coin to a fifth grader ?

J: On the internet today, I can download a piece of software like WhatsApp or or log into a service like Gmail. We're open up Google Chrome, and I can connect to anyone else. Directly, I can have a direct communication with them. It doesn't cost me anything. It doesn't matter where they are in the world.As long as they have a smartphone, they can get that piece of software. We can do that. Or if there's someone who has an idea and wants to connect their computer, the internet and put some content on it, as long as I have a web browser, I can connect to that. And that's generally the case other than, some authoritarian regimes that have great firewalls.

But even there, like it's generally the case, you can connect to anyone. I can freely communicate with anyone in China right now. And that model is so straightforward. It's the air we breathe. We don't even think about it. the fact that this kind of open connect and open permissionless, global decentralized network of communications and information exists. So why can't we do that with money?

Why can't we have a way. Someone can just download a piece of software from an app store. And and then someone else could download a different piece of software made by a different creator or a different piece of hardware, or log into a service and exchange value with each other instantly globally frictionlessly at no cost. it's really that simple is how do we make it possible for storing, moving dollars or digital dollars to work in exactly the same way we have with information and data. And that's what we set out to solve is that problem and doing it on the DNA of the internet, doing it around this idea of an open protocol that anyone could connect to. So that's really the fundamentals of what USDC allows for. And, but I think. Yeah the idea goes far broader because you now have essentially an open API for dollars on the internet and it's programmable dollars on the internet. And so you can do a lot with that. And the use cases are really exploding,

BZ:How big is USDC these days?

J:So USDC has grown really fast at the start of the pandemic, there were about 400 million USDC in circulation that was just like, let's call it six months. Or, there's a year after or so after we had launched.

Then it grew to 4 billion in circulation by the start of 2021. And it grew from 4 billion to 42 billion in circulation. At the end of 2021 and it's already grown to to over 52 billion in circulation, just in the past couple months here.

And so USDC is about that big and I supported, trillions of dollars of transactions. Just on the public internet using blockchains. And it's still early days. It's super early days. Our view is that eventually there could be more than a trillion USDC in circulation and could be used for every imaginable use case for money and use cases that we haven't even thought of because programmable money is not existed until now.

BZ: How can USDC offer such nice interest rates when banks are giving 0.5%?

J: Look so if you think about. And you have a kind of base layer, which is the sort of digital cash equivalent of USDC. And it's a regulated, digital cash instrument that exists. And it's very easy to exchange, right? With point to point as your friends or others, that you've talked to really straightforward to send it, receive it, use it.

And it's become very popular as a digital currency to use in trading, investing, international payments, other things. And so as its utility has grown and as more and more people and firms want to use. +

As a form of working capital as a new kind of electronic stored value working capital mechanism, there's higher and higher demand for people who want to borrow it. And so one of the really powerful things about blockchains is not only do they allow these fast transactions to happen, but you can actually build essentially, borrowing and lending models on top of it.

And so there's grown over the past in particular, the past several years, the last two to three years, large, both centralized, what are often called CEFI lending markets and what are called DEFI lending markets, where the market of borrowers and lenders is convened by a piece of software on the internet. So you're not dealing with a company you're just dealing with a protocol, but nonetheless you have essentially interest rate markets of borrowers and lenders.

The demand to borrow USDC is high. And the interest rate that borrowers are willing to pay is high. And that is the source of those yields. Basically you have borrowers and to put it fairly simply the other side of that borrowing and I'll use circle yield as an example, because it's the one I understand probably the most you lend us USDC and we lend it wholesale to institutional borrowers. So these are in fact, hedge funds, family offices, systemic trading firms, electronic markets, firms, or other major firms in the ecosystem that want to operate using USDC. And these are firms that are borrowing at a high interest rate, but who are generating returns in north of that.

An 8% interest rate to borrow at an 8% interest rate or borrowed 10% interest rate. That's not unheard of in a lot of things. Our credit cards are 20% interest rates or 17% interest rates. venture debt, which is what startups borrow typically have interest rates of, 10, 12, 13, 14% on them. interest rates in securities lending markets, which is the interest rates that say an institutional fund would pay to borrow against their stock can be fairly high now, corporate debt that's underwritten where a corporation's borrowing against their balance sheet and their P&L and it's underwritten by an investment bank and has a coupon and rating. So that tends to be a lower interest rate debt product.

But generally when you look at interest rates that people borrow, right? They vary from, most single digits to high double digits or higher. And so what you have in USDC is you have a borrowing lending markets that exist at the retail and institutional level, and those are floating right now. So in DEFI right now, you can borrow you can borrow you USDC I think for 3%. the interest rate markets adapt to kind of market conditions and demand.

BZ: How secure is my money in USDC ?

J:The thing to remember is USDC itself is is regulated examine it's the USDC itself is A full reserve dollar digital currency.

Now, if you're lending your USDC to someone else you're determining what is the credit risk that I'm taking with, who I'm lending to. It has nothing to do with USDC. It has to do with what are they doing with it? So there are some major differences, right? Are you a secured creditor or are you an unsecured creditor? is this unsecured credit that's then being used to do highly speculative trading or is, this secured credit with known institutional counterparties? So you're dealing with a huge variance.

I like to use the example of a bank, right? If you walk into a branch of Chase and you say here's $10,000, you're depositing, and you're not depositing $10,000, you're lending chase $10,000.

And you have a balance that says $10,000. But actually what you have is you have a claim against their loan book. They're taking that $10,000 and they're lending it out eight times over. And you're basically saying, Hey, I think that they're going to be good for that, that the small business loans, the credit card loans, the home mortgages, the corporate debt, all the stuff that they're doing to take my money and lend it out on a fractional reserve basis eight times. But fundamentally, you've got an IOU and now, you might look at a dollar that you've deposited and chase really different than s let's say you went to a bank in Zimbabwe and they said, you can deposit your dollars. And you say I don't know, what are you going to do with my dollars? And so it all comes down to, w what in fact are you w what, in fact are you seeing on the other side of that?

So we've tried to design something with circle yield, which is very institutionally friendly. It's regulated, it's supervised it's over collateralized and it only, faces the best quality institutional wholesale borrowers on the other side. And so we've just tried to build some. I think the kinds of features that make it attractive, it doesn't produce the highest yields. It doesn't produce the same yields you might see through some of these retail platforms, but there's a reason for that.

BZ: Is there a chance of defaulting?

J: this has become a major issue from an investor protection regime, right? So very clearly, like I think the SEC, his view is that these are lending products. They're not banks. And in fact, for the average person they're basically making an investment and a lot of these are offered as an, they're unregistered investment contracts in a sense. What is an S1? And that's one is a public disclosure document that a retail investor can read and understand. And you can decide, you can read through the S one and say what are the risks? What is this? What am I actually getting into here? And so that's fair disclosure. So that's people and, the review of a major regulator the SEC.

And so that's one, one standard to look at, there are others that, don't have any of that. And so you don't actually know what the underlying risk is other than the reps that are made through marketing, or maybe some high level stuff. And so I think you have to, you have to look at this through, through that lens. now DEFI is a different story. if you get USDC. DEFI protocols have some advantages to them. But they also have a whole lot of risks to them as well.

There've been DEFI protocols that were hacked. And this is like software and all of a sudden the money is managed by software and the software gets hacked and they, that's gone, but you have some, defined protocols that are more pressure tested. There's probably going to be more and more disclosure audit type requirements on defy protocols over time, as well as the market participants want to have better hygiene around them. I think, buyer beware on all this stuff.

BZ: USDC has a brand. So do you talk to these exchanges to make sure that they're trying to make sure that borrowers are good ?

J: Because USDC is a free floating digital currency it can be utilized in so many different applications in so many different businesses and so on. And you've got, electronic markets firms that might be.

Doing a trade with someone with USDC for $300 million in one transaction, you've got other, NFT markets that are utilizing USDC for payments on pieces of digital content and the, and those are, multiple layers removed. it is important though, that we need to always ensure that people understand USDC as a dollar digital currency itself is safe, stable, transparent regulated, compliant, all these things.

Just like you use your dollars with an online payment service, you can still be defrauded. It wasn't the dollars that defrauded you. It was the other side of it.

BZ: Do you have a minute to talk CND ?

J:We initially negotiated a merger with Concord acquisition and business combination agreement in July of last year.

And getting through the SEC qualifications taken a bit longer than we had expected. We had thought it would be, consistent with other spots

4-5 months it's just taken longer and which is fine, and we're getting through it. We're making progress through every round of comments. But as we walked into the new year the business outlook has changed pretty significantly. The company grew USDC really rapidly. We're in a rising interest rate environment.

Our transaction and treasury services businesses are taking hold nicely. And so we looked at the actual deal was set to expire in April. And so we we re-negotiated the deal.

We extended the timeline so that it had enough time to get through the dispatch and the, in the sec process.

We also eliminated the pipe from the first year. we also issued revised financial outlook for 2022 and 2023, which are considerably stronger from from a both a top line and a bottom line perspective from where we were, nine months earlier or whatever that exact timeline is.

And so the increase in the value of the company is really reflective of the tremendous position that we've put ourselves in with the business and obviously the new outlook.

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"I'm actually very surprised the structure and amounts of financial advisor bonuses have never been outed broadly in the mainstream in the last 10-20 years." Henry Yoshida

"When you look at the marketplace here, there's about $14 trillion in IRAs, $33 trillion overall in retirement accounts in the US." Henry Yoshida

Why are financial advisors more likely to quit on a Friday before a 3-day holiday week?

How much do finanical advisors at the top tier wirehouses actually make? How are their bonuses calculated?

With decades of financial advisor experience under his belt, Henry Yoshida outs the secrets of the world of financial advisors on The RazReport. How they plan their moves from one wirehouse to another, how they manage and grow their customer base, and how they monetize their network.

 "Just so you know, when you start at McDonalds and you're 16, you don't even start on the burgers, you start by cleaning the kitchen. You don't actually cook any food. That's a promotion." Henry Yoshida

"People introduce me as a FinTech entrepreneur. I think of myself probably much longer as a financial advisor" Henry Yoshida

Tune in to listen to the world of financial advisors, lucrative profit margins and the war of AUMs (assests under management).

Episode Summary:

On this episode of The Raz Report, Jason Raznick speaks with Henry Yoshida, Co-Founder and CEO of Rocket Dollar. Before Rocket Dollar, Henry was the founder of venture capital-backed robo-advisor fintech platform, Honest Dollar which was later acquired by Goldman Sachs.

Yoshida started out his career as as an intern under Bill Clinton one term after the "most famous intern in history." Eager to learn to the rules of money making and after his family had a bad experience with a financial advisor, Yoshida started working for BoA Merrill Lynch as a financial advisor with a focus on 401k and retirement funds.

After a decade of experience and surviving 2 financial crises, he he quit BoA Merrill Lynch and started his own investment firm, MyGroup which was then acquired by CAPTRUST.

Now at Rocket Dollar, Yoshida manages ~$0.5 billion in retirement funds with a 20 people team and helps everyone access savings to follow their dreams.

Hosts:

Jason Raznick

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Disclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.

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Watch The Benzinga Global Small Cap Conference live here
Episode Summary:

On this episode of The Raz Report, Jason Raznick speaks with Vivek Garipalli, CEO of Clover Healthon his career path that eventually led his company to go public via Chamath Palihapitiya's IPOC SPAC.

From early on Garipalli describes his most hated job as "one where I have an employer". With the "itch to build something" Garipalli drops out of college and sets out on a journey that leads him to learn to appreciate failed businesses and the business of medicine. So much so that at age 27, he buys a bankrupt hospital with "youthful naivity" as the only bidder and sets off on turning it around.

Born to doctor parents, Garipalli realizes from an early age the disastrous consequences saddling physicians with administrative duties can bring.

"Healthcare is a business in which the path to profitability conflicts with consumer interest" says Garipalli. This is why we decided to arm physicians with free data that enables them to make better clinical decisions that cut costs in the long run.

Throughout his long career that even had him cold calling companies at times, Garipalli has learned that if a a business does not offer a clear solution to a problem it will not succeed no matter how much financial backing it has. He now approaches all problems in this manner: How can we offer a clearly defined and measurable solution?

He describes Clover Health Investments (NASDAQ: CLOV) as a long time horizon where the main mission is to drive clinical value within the Medicare space. "Obviously we believe we will be very successful" says Garipalli but also adds "Failure: It's not as bad as people make it out to be.You pick yourself up and you kind of figure things out from there."

Hosts:

Jason Raznick

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasonraznick

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Click here for more episodes of The RazReport.

Disclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.

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"Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life.. or come with me and change the world?" -Steve Jobs to @johnsculley former CEO of Apple $AAPL & Pepsi $PEP

"What I learned with Steve Jobs was to look ahead" John Sculley former CEO of Apple $AAPL & Pepsi $PEP

"I am interested in people who can explain what they want to do very clearly." John Sculley former CEO of Apple $AAPL & Pepsi $PEP on deciding which company to invest in

"I look for companies who are looking to invent a new industry." John Sculley former CEO of Apple $AAPL & Pepsi $PEP on deciding which company to invest in

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Episode Summary:

On The RazReport, Jason talks to John Sculley former CEO of Apple $AAPL & Pepsi $PEP on how he choose which companies to invest in.

Hosts:

Jason Raznick

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasonraznick

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For more episodes of The RazReport:

https://www.benzinga.com/money/podcast-show/razreport-stories-of-inspiration/

Disclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.

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"Nothing world changing was ever done in a 40 hr work week"  

"Tesla moves at the speed of thought and so do the Chinese" 

"Cameras should replace mirrors in cars"

"Tesla is 5-8 years ahead of the rest of the market"

Episode Summary

On The RazReport, Jason talks to Sandy- the inventor Elon consulted with on the SpaceX Design Meeting about his life, his magic behind the golf carts, his Ford years and what he thinks about Tesla.

• How Sandy revolutionized golf carts
• How he reduced 30% of the parts on Ford Taurus - Ford's best selling car ever
• The trip he made in the blizzard in a Tesla to SpaceX to meet with Elon
• The 3Ds Robotics should replace in human work force

and much more.

Host:

Jason Raznick- Founder, CEO of Benzinga

Resources:

https://leandesign.com/

Sandy with Elon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAtLTLiqNwg

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On this Benzinga Cannabis Capital Conference Special for The RazReport, Benzinga CEO Jason Raznick announces the Benzinga Cannabis Alliance with Jason Raznick, Ian Burnstein, Hugh Pobur, Chad Bonstein, Scott Foster and Kyle Kelly.

For More Information:

https://www.benzinga.com/cannabis/

Watch Replay at:

https://www.benzinga.com/events/cannabis/virtual/purple-track/

Kyle Kelly

Chief Executive Officer & Managing Partner@Synchrony HR

Scott Foster

Senior Vice President - Risk Management@NFP

Chad Bronstein

Founder, CEO, & Board Member@Fyllo

Hugh Pobur

Merchant - Credit Card Processing Sales@Superior Financial Systems & Alumni Merchant Services

Ian Burnstein

CEO & Founder@Storage Business Owners Alliance

Jason Raznick

CEO & Founder@Benzinga

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How Does Shark Tank's Mr.Wonderful divide his work day?

His 20&5 Rule That has kept hsi investment portfolio profitable

How he sets and executes his daily priorities

Why he was fired from his first job

How much of his investment is in Bitcoin and Ethereum?

How does he feel about the Cannabis Industry?

How he thinks Biden performed in first 100 days in the office?

How much the minimum wage should be and much more...

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In this episode of the #RazReport​​, Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary joins Jason Raznick to discuss:

- His bullish thesis on psychedelics ($MMEDF)

- Why he's a bitcoin convert

- The biggest investing lessons he's learned

Featured Guest:

https://twitter.com/kevinolearytv?s=20​

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Host:

Jason Raznick

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JasonRaznick

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