In this episode of the niche investment strategies panel, the speakers are exploring
why saying no to the wrong investor is sometimes the smartest business move you can
make.
For something that's so high -tech, how do you get that messaging across?
And if I am a family office, what are some things that I would look out for as
well if I was reviewing different companies like funds yeah great question so this
is something admittedly that over the years we I think in my inception years of our
company we struggled with in having a succinct and layman narrative to explain to
investors we would have some investors that would you know be eager to get exposure
to deep tech and AI and quantum computing, and they would invest just because they
were like, oh, we really trust you, and you guys sound really smart.
And you know, you want to take their money, but you know not to, because you're
ethical. Those investors are, number one, it's just the wrong thing to do if the
person, per Richard's point, doesn't understand the investment. It's probably not right
for them. Number two, it's If they don't understand, they won't be a good growth
investor. And so as a technologist, it's not the right type of investor to have.
And so being able to explain clearly, succinctly, and construct a narrative that's
easy for any level of investor sophisticated or retail institutional to understand is
absolutely critical. What we have done to refine and keep improving on that.
I brought on for, I did a TED Talk. I brought on a pretty world -renowned speaking
coach, worked with them for three months to practice with TED Talk.
By the way, I've got 2 .2 million views in three months. Wow. That's great.
Congratulations. Yeah, definitely. That's fantastic. And bringing in folks that have
done it before for Richard's earlier point, you know, bringing in validation to say,
these folks got involved. We, you know, went through the ringer with them. They
conducted due diligence. They went through, looked at our code base. They actually
see that it's working, you know, talk to our legal counsel. We bring in third -party
validators to check because, you know, there are folks that invest in deep tech
companies just because there's a great example. There was an AI company that, I
think raised $150 million or something. J .P. Morgan was their lead investor. This
company was supposed to be this amazing no -code platform for building software.
Turns out this company just had a few thousand engineers in India doing the coding,
making it look like AI was doing it. They say it's a new type of AI, all Indians.
Yeah,
it's a good one. We're 12 for a while. But you have to be careful. This is why,
per Brandon's point, doing your homework is important. Trust, but verify, like, just
because there's a strong anchor investor, good lead investor, what are you going to
say? Oh, yeah, here's my money because you did your diligence. Doing your own
homework matters.
Yeah, yeah. I'll definitely just have to jump on everybody's points here. Trust and
verify, especially in my industry. That's why we are so much more regulated than we
were in the
And as that question is asked, I think about my industry in the energy sector is,
are they making money off of you or with you? Because it's a commodity. So you're
getting paid based off of production, no matter what that's in. So being a
commodity, you want to make sure that they're making money with you and not just
off of you each and every month.
This clip was recorded live at our Family Office Club Super Summit to meet aligned
investors in gross,