How Naval Ravikant’s podcast supercharged the historic USVC launch with Asher Bykov

[Music] Every single marketer and every single brand should be attempting to earn a disproportionate share of conversation. Of you work for an organization where they say bring us a chart that goes up and to the right, you have a challenge. Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half. I am here to inspire you, to excite you, to motivate you, to transform you, to energize you. Hello and welcome to Pipeline Visionaries. This episode features an interview with Asher Bikoff, the head of growth at USVC, a publicly accessible venture fund built out of Angelist that's making venture capital investible for anyone starting at $500. In this episode, Asher breaks down how USVC built conviction with high trust creators like Naval and Onker Nagpull, a head of launch, and wireport fully of owned media assets, podcasts, newsletters, social email lists, became the engine behind a launch that reached tens of millions of people. He also shares his philosophy on brand as delivering on a promise, rather than a logo or campaign, and how he thinks about marketing measurement when the data will never be perfect. Let's get into the episode. Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries. I'm Ian Fazon, CEO of Caspian Studios, and I am joined by a special guest. Asher, how are you? I'm doing alright, my friend. Thanks for having me here. Yes, so excited to have you on the show. Your head of growth at USVC, USVC is a brand new, very cool company that has grown out of Angelist. Everybody knows Angelist, and I'm just pumped to get into how you are marketing it, how you are going to market, and all that. So tell us about USVC. Yes, so USVC is a publicly accessible venture funds to anyone. The dream and the vision of the product is to figure out how to index all of venture as an asset class and make it accessible to any US investor to start and broadly toward the globe in the future. It's been an awesome time thus far. The product officially came to market six weeks ago to a lot of positive reception, some mixed signals from a handful. It is genuinely a first of its kind product. There are other funds that are similarly structured, and I'm happy to get into all the nitty-gritty of how that all works for anyone who fancies the finance and legal talk. But my area of expertise in the midst of this world is figuring out how to build conviction over new financial products. My background for the last few years has really focused into that, so I'm happy to jazz all through that. I think this is so cool. I've been in inter-on-tech for the last 12 years, and one of the things I'm not an accredited investor, I definitely was not. Obviously back 12 years ago. One of the things that I would meet young founders or see some of these people building the future, and I was always thinking, "Man, it would be so cool to invest, but I have no way to do that." I was like, "Why doesn't someone just create a fund that you could invest in?" And lo and behold, 12 years later, USVC is born, and with a minimum of $500 investment, now you can be exposed to the asset class that is venture capital. Obviously, that's not for everybody. This is not investment advice, but I think that it's so cool, and it's so accessible, and the types of companies that y'all are investing in are at the very frontier of tech, and they're just isn't a vehicle for that. I found out about the company through Nivol's podcast. A lot of people fall in Nivol. He's been talking on the podcast about some of the stuff he's been working on behind the scenes for years and years and years. This is one of them. I'm excited for y'all, and I'm excited for everybody who has been on the sidelines that has not been able to participate in venture ever, and now finally can't. That's just really cool. I appreciate you sharing that note, and also the genealogy of how you came to know about us, and also for being an investor, I should say, "I appreciate you for that as well." Yeah, that's right. Full disclosure. I saw the announcement, and within five minutes had submitted money in the platform, so let's go. I've been waiting for this. This is great. I love it. By the way, the five-minute note is actually an important one. A quick background on why this product wasn't accessible 12 years ago. These are obviously heavily regulated industries. When you talk about private investing, the accreditation rule, which requires folks to meet certain bars of net worth and/or income on yearly basis, to invest in private assets. But the world's kind of flipped on its head in the last few years. You can now yolo your cash on triple leverage index funds. You can bet on whether or not Donald Trump will shake hands with Xi Jinping on Kowshi or Potley Market. There are all these degenerate meme coins that exist at this point. I feel like the world has flipped on its head in many ways and seen what risk actually looks like, which the purpose of a lot of the regulation around the industry that is private venture was to protect folks like you and me who may not be able to access the product historically. This product comes to market out of a difference in its change in stance from the SEC during this administration, specifically around professionally managed products that hold private assets. There are other products that exist. Many folks might have seen Robinhood Ventures come to market, which is a listed fund, different from USBC, which we could talk about. Similar infrastructure fund rise launched VCX, ARC investments had their venture fund actually two years prior to even our starting, which is more similar infrastructure. These products have started, but they're very nascent. The cool benefit of a company like Angelist, which is the backing and the underlying infrastructure for USBC, is we have 15 years worth of latent demand in our ecosystem serving startups, investors, fund managers, talent looking for startups, which was the history of Angelist in the way that it's structured. That haven't been able to find a simple product to go put their dollars into. In some ways, you can imagine it like a Vanguard ETF for venture. Obviously, different in structure, they're not really the same in terms of its actual entities and all the various fund financial complexity that comes along with these products. Core of USBC has been built out of the same way that mutual funds exist in any of our retirement accounts or taxable brokerages. It's a regulation piece called the Investment Act of 1940. It's basically the thing that allows USBC to be birthed, and now because of a change in the stance from the SEC, it allows us to hold private assets and make it accessible to anyone. Yeah, it's an incredibly simple process to do it, and it's an incredibly long wait. I love both of those things. I think Warren Buffett said, "The stock market is taking money from the impatient and delivering it to the patient." Venture is a 10-year time horizon. It's like, I saw some of the comments when you all launched online that were like, "10 years to get my money, thanks." I'll just go bit on Polymarket. I think. I think you're misunderstanding the asset class. That, to me, is again, part of what makes this so cool is that you're putting your money into something and you're putting your money into innovation and the next generation of founders and a bunch of those are going to fail and there's going to be some big wins. You get exposure to what's happening far before IPOs, and that's rad. Of course, marketing that is a huge challenge. I want to dive into this. Absolutely. The first piece here is, you have one of the great assets of any marketer. You have Naval, who is a one man, a one man, a wrecking crew in terms of an incredibly large following, an incredibly loyal following. And as a marketer, you always say, "You fight where you can win," and like, "This is one lever that you all have that is such a massive advantage." Coming into this has had a growth, knowing that you had that. What was that like? Man, in some ways it's a dream come true and a challenge unlike anything I've ever expected, which is to say, "Naval is a default no-guy." And I actually quite love that disposition, which is there are plenty of folks who are down for anything super excited. I tend to be that guy. Let's try everything. He is very measured around what he wants to promote, what he doesn't promote. If you are at all a fan of his podcast, which I know Ian, you are, you probably have noticed that for the last some odd years there's never been an ad placement on it. And I do it for fun. Obviously get a benefit from it, I'm sure it helps them in downstream ways with fundraising or investments, things of that sort. But by and large, they have never placed advertising in the midst of their promotion other than products that they own. I think it's a very interesting playbook for many content creators out there that have substantial falling. That's a total aside, but a nod to my past as well. But all that said, when we were going into launch, we sat with a handful of different resources to pull from. And the Valls audience was obviously huge. We had to build conviction internally. And this is the story that often doesn't get described, I think. in conversation with folks that have large following, is how do you build conviction? How do you make the case for, hey, this is going to be a win for you for us? He is chairman of our investment committee, so it obviously made sense. He was the founder of Angelist, so that also makes sense. But building conviction over this being the right moments to quote unquote, dump the truck was really important. So we can talk a little bit about that. The second was our general partner portfolio manager on Crenogpall, whom I've worked with for the last year. We actually came to Angelist in order to really bring USVC to market through an acquisition of his last company, where I was his head of growth. He also sits on a substantial following, more initially focused on personal finance, tax optimization, things of that sort. So if you think from a segmentation perspective, Navol's kind of like our top of funnel super broad in tech, a lot of investors, interested people. So a really great fit for this product, anchor, smaller audience, but really neatly focused on personal finance for the last handful of years, talks openly about how he's built in sold companies. So that would probably wager well. And off the back of his personal brand, we built a media company as well, which was called Silly Money, still is called Silly Money, formerly a newsletter media business. Couple that with Angelist's already existing audience, again, kind of like 15 years worth of work, tons of contacts through the ecosystem, email, accessible, GPs on the platform, LPs on the platform, things of that sort. I had really a marketer's dream of options. Folks that have been waiting for a product like this, all you have to do is tee it up correctly, communicate well with great copywriting, and have a great offer. Luckily, the great offer part had already been worked on for really somewhat five years by our legal team. And so now the job was just how do we bring this thing to market? How do we communicate effectively to an audience that already knows likes and loves some of the products that we've been around and tee up this as the next act? And I consider kind of the most important sequence of events in any form of marketing is a great offer, trumps any great copywriting, trumps any great design, which trumps any great media buying, whether that's because you have that distribution already or you're paying for it. And so offer part, ACEs, mostly first of its kind, many people haven't seen something like it before, and it's accessible at a low cost, just like you had just described, you can enter in for $500 fee structures, communicated publicly, and it's accessible to everyone. The second question was, how do we write this story well? And this is where Naval sir, great. So himself and Nivi were chopping it up, figuring out what's the right angle, go back and look at how he launched the product. It was a really interesting articulation of the history of adventure, which really is how venture capital comes to be. It's the adventure of starting a company. Equally true is for each of those different audiences and segments I wanted to communicate natively to them. So for the email list we had through Silly Money, there was a question of, hey, how do we frame this product in the lens of personal finance, in the lens of wealth, in the lens of tax optimizations through things like QSBS, or the tax benefits of capital gains compared to earned income, just as much as on-curs audience, where we wanted to kind of beat the drum of investing in startups, that being a thing that he's historically done. So it was this cool triple act, in some ways, four-time act as we started to build out the list for USVC, investors for USVC and came to launch. - Taking back to the conversation with Naval and Nivy about, hey, I wanna put an ad on your podcast. (laughing) Like again, zero ads from my understanding. I've never heard an ad on there, but yeah, they might have promoted other products in the past, but like zero ads and Naval is like so clear with his, I only do things that I am excited about. So it's like him just saying he's doing something that's already a very large signal to the market. And again, he's, like you said, says note everything, he's very selective, obviously I don't know him. But like this is something like, imagine for our audience who doesn't know who he is. Imagine the most selective artist ever. Like who has painted all of these paintings and has never, you know, seek to sponsor in any way, saying, hey, we're gonna put an ad in your show. A good description here, if you're not familiar with Naval or his work, he's one of the more prolific angel investors in Silicon Valley. I think a good comparison is akin to a Rick Rubin in some ways. I'll be right. Rick Rubin describes himself as I don't know how to actually do the manual work of producing music. I think Naval would probably take the counter of that. He knows very much how to start companies and continues to do so. That said, the conversation I will be totally honest, I cannot take credit for the idea of running ads. That really came from them. So they approached and said, hey, what would it need to look like because of our various different compliance obligations in marketing this product to run our first ads? And I will also add, they didn't just do it for USVC, they also did it for angelist fund management, full service fund management division a few weeks prior. So we had started to kind of work through the details of it all and what the process could look like. And in that story, I think there's a deeper trend that's changing. One being TBPN being a very heavy advertising product related to tech, investing things of that sort. I think got a lot of people interested in the idea of what could it look like for advertising to actually be fun. Yeah. And I think in tech generally, there's been this distaste for paid marketing, like build a great product and they will come becomes very core to the essence of it. And being promotional is looked down upon for whatever reason. That trend, I think, is changing in part because most software has become commoditized. In other words, they are functionally just databases and AI agents building things on top of each other, building ideally good user experiences such that people stay with it. But anyone can build anything at this point. So when that happens, the same commoditization that happens in e-commerce has now happened to software and much like that industry, promotion, marketing, branding becomes that much more important. Anyway, that all said, I think those are kind of the underpinnings that lead them to say, hey, let's try this out. I see some other people doing it. This might be fun. It's a reversible decision. We could say, I don't want to do it again afterward. And so work through the process, try to figure out what the right copy should be for an ad read like that. Obviously it being new and native. And also no real expectations going into it of, hey, we have no idea if this is going to work. Let's just try something. I think there's a lot of good that comes from that. Sometimes when it's just new, just try the thing. You don't have to logic your way through it, figure out what all the details are going to be, launch something to the world, see what comes back. So we had decent success on the first one. We launched a second one trying to see what the success would be. You'll probably continue to see us iterate on the process. But that's really how that came to be was a conversation they came to us with of, hey, we see other people doing this. We want to try it out and see if maybe there's a world where we can monetize the podcast in different ways. Maybe this can be a case study that we can use. I think the more powerful secondary effect for them though is obviously they are major shareholders in Angelist, which is participant in USB C and it's the infrastructure underneath it. They're investors, all the likes. So they've done the biggest benefit of what advertising in my idea should be, which is if you are so good at your craft in marketing and advertising, you should have a piece the upside beyond just the ads model. So they've got that piece already covered. Now they're trying to figure out, hey, is this actually going to yield in terms of dollars such that we can maybe make cases to advertisers that this is a good place to put their dollars. It really is a case study in how to do marketing correctly, right? It's like, hey, just spend years and years and years putting out your thoughts into the world. Yeah. And then also spend years and years building sort of the perfect product. And then on launch day, when you launch the thing and it earned the trust of everyone, then all of a sudden way more people than you would imagine might come in the door. And like, that's what happened, right? I mean, exactly. Like tell me, tell me about launch launch day. I mean, wow. So before I get to launch day, I should describe how I even ended up in the seat. So just a few weeks prior, the company where I was head of growth, carry.com gets acquired and announced. And quite literally the day after we find out I'm that angelist starting to figure out how do we launch USB C, rent me on context, make me familiar. The good news is carried.com is a product focused on a very similar subset of folks, different problem, but similar folks. The problem we hope to solve was to make tax optimization through smarter, investing strategies accessible to small business owners, maybe someone like yourself in. Yeah. First product was the solo 401k, successful on other platforms, but we built what we view to be the best solo 401k for business owners, self-employed business owners, content creators, agency owners, tech company founders who are running cash flowing businesses, whatever have you. And the product expanded over time to include integrated tax services, IRAs so that you could do a mega backdoor, author, a backdoor, off, things of that sort. So I had already been deep working with uncle thinking about how do we build conviction over moving dollars? And we could talk about what that function looks like in a moment. But company gets acquired uncle and I go to angelist to start the work on USB C's public launch. A lot of the underpinnings had already been worked on by our chief legal officer, Eric, he's fantastic. June, his chief of staff fantastic and the rest of the team at angelist to build out. We come in within two weeks, we get up to speed, and on that second week we are all right, let's launch next week. So I mean you have to think from my perspective, I'm sitting in the seat going, oh my God, I'm still fully understanding the complexity of how this all came to be because this is true financial engineering to bring this product to market. There is not a clear guardrail to make this thing accessible, but the hard work has already been done. And so we sit with that, we ask ourselves a question, what owned audience do we have? We're not going to do a ton of PR, we're not going to do a ton of paid media, there are other products that have come to market that spent a boat load of money before they took their product to be listed, for example, on a stock exchange. We're an unlisted fund, which means we direct the submissions through our own website. We are not actively traded on the stock market. And instead we issue shares every single day at a daily nav or the net asset value of the fund, which is a difference compared to some other products that exist. If you think about some of the listed funds that exist, they can trade above or below the true assets that are in there, our funds, that's not the case. The nav is determined by the financial committee that we have that determines the valuation of those assets, typically based on the most recent raises of the companies that we've invested in or the fund managers and who they invested. That all said, as we're thinking about going live, we sit with that question, we architect what the launch assets will look like. We go through three rounds of compliance with various different teams, which for anyone who's worked in a financial institution or financially regulated products, this will come as no surprise. There's a lot of that. It is not just a game of, hey, do I understand the investor or the customer? It's a game of, can I build enough conviction over the way I'm communicating in a compliance friendly way? And there's always a back-and-forth in that game, right? Because a lot of times legal and compliance teams, they want to neuter the core story so that it doesn't come off as too extreme. The marketer wants to go as extreme as possible to make it feel like it's the newest thing since sliced bread. I think we came to a pretty good place when we ultimately went live. And then the response was just, I mean, Ian, it was incredible. You are part of that in now being in our world, which is awesome. I hope other folks that are listening have also heard of us as a result of it. We had tens of millions of people see our product. Full-skies. That is a rare moment for a product that really, I mean, I'm not kidding when I say we had maybe 150 investors at the time before our launch. And so with all that attention comes a lot of challenge, which is to say, we have to go through all of our processes. We have to make sure we're communicating well. And then also we've never had public critique on the fund. And so that's what kind of transpired. And I wonder some of the things that you might even recall from your head of things that you saw. I mean, you mentioned folks saying, "Oh, this is an illic would vehicle. Why would I put my money in?" That's precisely the point. There's some education that needs to be done with those folks. And that's some of the work that we still have to do. There's the elements of how the fund is structured. It's a novel structure. It's not things that most people are common to as a retail accessible product. There were folks critiquing the fee structure, which I think totally valid, right? Like that's the beauty of the market we live in is there are different kinds of products. And so we had to move pretty fast after that to clean up some misunderstandings that folks had about the product, clarify down areas that were, frankly, we didn't really even anticipate the kind of response and how many people would see it. So we anticipated being able to tell that story over months and potentially years beyond launch moment. All that to say, it was one of the more incredible moments I've had in my career to date. It is the truest example I've ever seen of what a pull business looks like. And so I tend to describe marketing in two ways. You either push people into your ecosystem or you pull them into your ecosystem. It's demand generation or demand capture. I have rarely seen demand capture operate like this in what typically is seen as demand generating locations, social email, things of that sort. We're not ranking on Google and getting a whole bunch of keyword search. Frankly, we had no presence online. And so to me, that was a signal that this is right time, right place, right opportunity with the right people. And that's a super cool moment as a marketer because all of the the T's are crossed dotted eyes. And all you have to do is just really lay the arrow shoot. And hopefully you score once in a while and you make a really great opportunity for investors and also your team. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that you know, you mentioned sort of having a database with with angelist, obviously, I'm sure that helped. I don't know, you know, I'm sure you can't share like conversion metrics there. Yeah. But like, but what's interesting, though, to me is that database is actually a lot of people who might not be investors in USVC. Like, they might be, but they also might not be because there are a bunch of angels who probably have a bunch of investments. Absolutely. Whereas, which is like, right, it's like, for example, I was not on angel list, you know, because I, you know, didn't sign up to be, I wasn't an accredited investor. So I never signed up for angels. I've known about angelists, like I said, but I was not in your ecosystem, but I was part of your ICP, right? And, and I knew about Kerry. I saw the solo 401k and I was like, oh my gosh, that's so cool. So I'd, I'd followed Kerry a little bit over the years or over the past year. I didn't see the acquisition happen. So like, you know, it wasn't, I wasn't aware of there. I didn't know that silly money existed, although I probably would have been pretty interested in that as an independent business owner. But I also don't have pain. I didn't have the pain for Kerry. Not that anyone cares about my situation, but I think it's it's it's it's it's an interesting case done. Yeah. How you get there, right? It's an illustrative of why what the strategy that you actually ended up, precisely doing why it's so important is I was not part of silly money because we through Caspian use just works. So we have a P.O. So we have 401k through that and et cetera, et cetera. And and I've also I'm on a social media detox. So I've not been on X. I've not been doing that trying to free my mind a little bit. And the one place that I did hear about it is Navales podcast. And like, I know joke. I was like as a marketer. I was like, oh my gosh, Naval did an ad. Whatever this is has to be incredible. Like there's no, that he would not ever do this. Like there's zero percent chance he's going to do this if he doesn't 100% believe it. So I was like, I got to see what this thing is. And then I was like, Oh, shit, this is for me. So that was cool. But it speaks to from a marketing perspective that you built this portfolio of content such that you have again, not not not not intentionally knowing that this product has existed. Now, you know, Naval is doing his part. His podcast, whether you know, whether this existed or not. Angelus is going to, you know, building their list whether this existed or not. You know, you at a carry in with silly money doing again, a different product for a slightly different audience that hopefully has a ton of overlap, which is obviously why the acquisition was made. But again, like all adopting that. And then now it comes together in this portfolio that now has social, which can go viral. It has a podcast, which can go direct to people and explain sort of the thing. There's obviously like your blog, there's your massive push and angel list. You have the massive push that you can have with carry in with silly money. And you built this media property. And so all of that's up in, like you mentioned, anchor has this like, he has this amazing presence too. And now all of a sudden, you have this portfolio of owned assets that all can point out on one day to the same thing at the same time. And then wouldn't you know it? You know, it goes, it goes, you know, gain busters on the first day. It's like that level of sophistication is what we should all be building toward. And yet, maybe you don't have the time, maybe you don't have, you know, whatever. But it's like that strategy is like pretty accessible. Like it takes time. But it is accessible to like any marketer. Correct. Yeah. The funny part is the more I've gone deep into tactics, the more I realize the simple things work. Like think about how simple it is that you describe the end. It's like show up every day or in many cases, you know, you're not posting every day, but show up regularly. Post your ideas, share your best ideas for free. And people will trust you. And maybe someday down the line, they will work with you in some way. And I think as marketers at times, we don't put the magnifying glass on ourself. I refer, I guess in this example, mostly to a concept called the Solomon's paradox, which is the idea that you can give better advice than you can take your own. That's so true. Like think about how many marketers, you know, by the way, myself included on this, who you'll look at their page and their high ranking person at X company, Y company, they're doing incredible stuff, awesome brand campaigns. You look at their profile and you're like, are you a marketer? I really don't know. Like you might show me your portfolio work and there's a whole team working on it, but you yourself are a brand. You yourself can produce. You yourself can share ideas. And I want to thread on that in kind of two different ways. One is you've described perfectly in what happened to us in this moment with USVC, which is it was damn expansionary for our ecosystem. Yes, we were hitting people within our world, but it also brought people that aren't touching any of our lists. They're not intelligible to us. They were lurking. So maybe just following on the side. And so once that that I can share with you at least right now we're sitting probably June 10th of 2026, I hope this number only expands more than half of the contacts in Angelist's ecosystem, or sorry I should say in USVC's ecosystem, have no touch point to Angelist whatsoever. Amazing. Which means that we've now built a whole new top of funnel angle to drive dollars into our ecosystem. Angelist itself is a very interesting business with a variety of different moving parts. And I can't speak to all the detail of it because frankly I don't even understand the full extent. But Angelist as a business has its fund management division. It's had a whole long history of a bunch of different other things, but that's the primary business. It helps emerging managers and larger institutional managers manage their capital, their back office, all the distribution, things of that sort. There's a banking product called NOVA, which is the underlying infrastructure of how money moves. And there's a secondary's marketplace in the form of Meridian. Now there's USVC, which brings in a whole new suite of dollars into the world. And USVC can invest into emerging managers. We've done announcements with, for example, Ryan Hoover's fund, Weekend Fund, which is a fun story around there. We can buy assets off of the Angelist platform from the syndicates business, which has happened in the handful of cases that we've talked about already. So proprietary deal flow. There's this whole fun world that gets to be built out. And Unkers, spending most of his time figuring out what the right portfolio allocation should be. And for myself, it's the question of how do we land, which we did with the launch, and now expand into all these worlds that we might not have otherwise touched? And then the second thread on this, on the value of how more folks should be doing this kind of strategy, to me, the company doing this best in the world is probably still HubSpot. And HubSpot was birthed off of a very simple idea, which is that outbound is dead, and inbound is the way that companies will get customers. And it's built its whole company around it. It has expanded product set. It has gone horizontal. It has figured out how to do a lot of the transition now to a gentick workflows, things of that sort, very interesting company. For me, as I was kind of growing up learning marketing, I studied from the lens of content marketing and how they thought about purchasing owned assets. And you often in private equity folks will talk about buyer build. You could really do either. They've taken the strategy of mostly buying as of recent, but they've built a massive engine through their SEO content function, et cetera. But the more novel way that that operates is through content, media, video, written, newsletter, all those different disciplines. And they've made a lot of acquisitions as of recent in those spaces. So we saw all that happening, and we were like, this is default, yes, like this makes sense. And both uncle and my worlds come from the world of the creator economy, where that whole world is a game of just content marketing. So we asked ourselves the question, we were working together and continue to work together, which is how do we take the creator's playbook for building trust, I think influencers that we have become so popular and layer in financial products in the mix. And that is the very simple idea that underlies our whole growth marketing ecosystem is earn or pay for attention online by giving your best ideas away for free, transact through valuable resources, whether that's a product that you have, or an educational value proposition in the form of a playbook or a guide or a tool, and then use and use email to convert those people where possible and grow with them through financial products where you can maintain a fee structure with their compounding. That's the whole ecosystem purely described. It's not uniquely complex, there's only really three or four main components, but getting those right day in, day out, weekend, week out and building a team around it is the unique challenge that we especially now get to face as we bring this product further to maturity. I want to give some stats here on Neval because I think it's important to understand this and not just Neval, broadly. Neval says the internet, says the LMS, he's done 159 podcasts episodes since 2019. I might be high, but you know, they're in abouts, then he's done roughly like 20 to 30 external interviews over the last whatever. If you were to say, what are the rules of posting? You would say he did not post enough. 100%, like you would be like, he did not post enough if you go by the rules and he's not one for the rules. But so over the past year, he posts when he wants, right? He's like, I want on September 29th, he's got one on October 1st, one on the 14th, one on this November 7th, then nothing until February 19th. He just posts when he has something to say, right? Or him in Nivvio, Nivvio, to Tusses Armandoff or whatever it is. So you have that, right? That is one asset in the portfolio of your content portfolio, which is it is you tune in because it is you have to. There's only so few and you gotta, you gotta listen to it, you gotta re-listen to it, you gotta listen to it a third time, you gotta share with your friends, you gotta talk about it with your friends, appointment, television, is what they used to call it. Yep. So you have that. So then like that's one asset in the portfolio, right? Then you have silly money, you know, like almost a thousand, a hundred thousand people, you know, are on your email newsletter, something like that, right? That's correct. Incredible, right? And I love the win the game of capitalism by being smart about personal finance, tax and entrepreneurship. So then you have this other asset, right? Like that's like a completely different asset, has a brand, has a name, you know, like all the stuff, completely different asset. And so like, one is built around a person who's very successful and very brilliant smart. The other thing is built around the sort of like, you know, broader utility, but it's pretty faceless. Obviously, Anker is like sort of the face, but it's still pretty faceless, like in terms of generally speaking. But again, you're using Anker as an anchor there. And so like, what I think is so cool about this, about building, building these content assets and like you said, giving this smart idea is way for free, is that it is a diversified way of not just its style, its substance, its length, its duration. Its frequency, its completely different. And the two things don't have to be connected at all. The thing that connects them is the product in which you're selling that like each audience hopefully a percentage of that audience cares. And like that's the important part. I mean, I've heard, and I've all say on the podcast, and I don't know if this is true, that he never looks at the numbers. I would not be surprised by the way. Do you look at the numbers? Oh my God, man, every day. So for every person who doesn't look at the numbers, they have a guy or a gal or somebody else who looks at the numbers. I guess now it might be an agent. Right. And so yeah, I'm a numbers freak. Like I get into all the details. I'm trying to figure out how do we improve our submission rates, our dollars collected, like all those things. I've learned an interesting lesson in the midst of that, which is you will never have perfect data. Yep. But if you can figure out what the floor aka the most conservative scenario is, you can spend against that. And so I'll give you an example in the context of attribution. So for silly money, which was our sidecar at carry.com, bit of an arbitrage on our compliance obligations and app business, which had a registered investment advisor and a broker dealer for the products that we had also a tax firm. So other kinds of regulations that came along with it. Anyway, there were a lot of challenges. So you built a media, a separate media entity, separate website. Correct. Off of the website dedicated to personal finance. Completely. And so that formalized a structure of placing onker's ideas, my collaboration with him, his personal brand, outside of the auspices of the challenge of being the CEO of carry, for example. And so we were using that mechanism to basically build a substantial list to do all of our promotional marketing campaigns, events, things of that sort. And it ended up being the case that something like 40% of carry's customers in that final year before we sold actually came from that acquisition strategy. But we always faced a singular challenge, which is when we would spend money to get new subscribers, which we were getting for $1.25 to $1.50 per subscriber, by the way, it says nothing about qualifications, just our list growing. So that's a bit of an aside. But we never were able to nail down the pure knowledge of how much backend revenue was created from it. We could always approximate. And the reason for that is people submit with their personal email in one place, their work email, and another like you try and reconcile, it doesn't work, your first touch, your last touch, your mixed model. None of it's accurate, but all of it's accurate. And so the best advice I received from onker in the midst of our collaboration together, at least to date, was whatever the floor is, just accept it and spend against that. And I think that's a really important takeaway for a lot of folks in the process of marketing if you're a numbers person like myself, which is, I've spent so much time wasted on, but I just don't know, I'm sure there's more money coming out. How do I convey a better story about how much more money is actually coming out of the activity that we're doing? And the truth is, it doesn't matter. The value is in the value of the whole, and so you just need to know the baseline, the worst possible circumstance spend against that, and try your best over time to get a more and more clear articulation of what the story is. And I think the best leaders do that. They kind of look down into the abyss and they say, I don't know what's down there. but I could see a little light we're going that way. And I think great growth leaders do the same thing, because any number of people will have their myopic focus on one thing or another when I'm focused in on our lead magnet, funnel spending money against it. I'm not thinking about the seven other things that are going on in tandem with the events we're doing, the webinars, the whatever else. So it's really good to kind of like pull yourself back and see what all is happening. And then the one final note on this in the context of Nevol and kind of is posting frequency things of that sort, or him not being a numbers guy, compliments are super important in surrounding yourself by people who have the different skill set matters a ton. So I value the fact that he does that. And I don't even collaborate with him all that much in day to day as he's not a formal employee anymore of our world, but obviously a collaborator on a variety of different things and the founder of the company, et cetera. But I think back to a single concept, which I'd like to consider. I know Ian, we talked about this before when we first met, which is someone who I admire a ton, who may or may not disagree with me on how I actually market his Seth Godin. And to me, for anyone who's not familiar with Seth, he's like a 20 time New York Times best selling author. In many ways, he was the first internet marketer. He sold his company Yo-Yo Dine to Yahoo. He came one of, I think it was VP of marketing there, much of how we understand like the front page of the internet and the way it transpired was thanks to his ideas, beliefs that also execution. But in that time since, he's become much of an educator in marketing and in brand. And one thing that I love that he describes that I try to be a disciple of is the idea that brand is not a logo, it is not a name, it is not a design, it is not your product, it is the act of delivering on the promise that you make to the people you serve. - For sure. - And to me, delivering on your promise doesn't just mean, hey, I'm gonna post every single day just to get something out in front of you. It means, in a false case, I'm going to give you distilled quality, the most refined version of my ideas. That's his style. You'll see Onker's ideas, they probably align more in the lens of, hey, I got an idea, let me shoot it out right now, see what the world thinks. Myself, I'm somewhere in the mix of both, I like the craft, I like to shoot things out, see what happens. But really figuring out what that brand promises for you as a person, but then also more broadly as a company, I think it's like a pretty good way of thinking about brand rather than from the lens of like, what's the big splashy campaign we're gonna work on? Should we change our name? What color should we do? Those all matter, those are brand design, those are campaign design and brand campaigns, whatever have you, but the true essence of a brand is just deliver on the promise. Make sure it's clear, refined, and just you stick to it unless you're deciding to change it. - Yeah, I mean, like, it's the same thing. I mean, since I've been building shows, it's the same thing we always say is like, what's your promise to the audience? - Like, it's like, you know, the promise, the jeopardy, the promise to the audience is answers in the form of questions, right? Like, that's the promise, right? You know that there's jeopardy, you know, there's double jeopardy and there's final jeopardy. That's the promise. Every time, you know, you get that. If it's like whatever they acquire podcasts, like they are promising that they are gonna do more diligence and like dig into this and do more research, so much research, more than anybody else to get you, you know, all those details. And yeah, most people just like don't really wanna make a promise and then they definitely don't wanna keep it. What they really wanna do is change it a lot. And that's fine too, like do whatever you want. But if you look at the things that I think that endure, like you're making a promise and you're sticking to it. You know, one of the things about Seth and Seth, Seth Goen is in the intro of this podcast 'cause he's the goat. - He's the goat. - One of the things that he said that I just like, I think about all the time is he said that his blog, started getting good when he stopped trying to give people answers and just started asking the questions. And also he turns off comments. - Yep. - Say he's like, whatever. But like fill in the gaps in your mind, right? It's like why you know a good storyteller, you know, whatever when you see jaws. It's like what the shark looks like, you paint the picture in your mind. So you don't need to show the shark because it's far scarier to imagine this thing coming out of the depths and you know, biting off your leg than it is to see it. And the best part about that is that they would have shown the shark more, but the mechanical shark literally wasn't working on Seth. So Spielberg would have used the shark a lot more. And so like, they're in line to create creativity, right? Is like sometimes the lessons we make on accident, sometimes we make them on purpose. But I think it's just a really interesting sort of look at marketing to say, you know, USB-C is a product that's being built for five years with zero marketing. But also it's been a product that's actually had this incredible portfolio of different types of marketing that all sort of are able to cool us at one time. And you know, like if you started five years ago, if a marketing team started saying, hey, we're gonna market this in five years with a launch. I don't know if they would have got to that, you know? Like I would have thought of a million things, but like I don't know if I would have said, hey, you know, we're gonna take one of the smartest thinkers and start up and have them post like every now and then, right? It's like, he's like, no, let's get him every week and let's build this whatever. But it worked, right? So because it's important, 'cause he's only saying what he wants to say, correct. Or you know, building out the silly money side or whatever. So, and then I think it's just like wonderfully, wonderfully funny that you're all were like blown away if I have many people game. You're like, well, this is crazy. - Yeah, I mean, that was kind of the interesting thing, like for anyone that leads a marketing team, there are always those moments where things happen in ways you don't expect. And then you have a whole concert of people, at least when things go well, they go, oh my God, congrats, pats on the back, handshakes. This is awesome. And I'll be the first one to tell you in the midst of all of that, I was just humbled. I was like, I cannot take credit for nearly half of what's occurred here. This is in many ways a whole career's worth of work from a variety of people. And I should know, even though I mentioned earlier that in some ways the product was trying to be formalized for five years, really we only got our good grace with the SEC and roughly about September. And you can even imagine from September till about April. That's a handful of different months where the product was set up. Money was getting allocated. Money was getting raised mostly in private, but it was not publicly launched in any specific way. And so it was just, unlike anything I could have expected. I think most of the internal perception prior to launch was, okay, maybe it'll bring in, I for lucky a million dollars from the launch. - Yeah. - It far surpassed that by many orders of magnitude. And as someone who has spent a lot of time cutting his teeth into direct to consumer or direct to retail in this case, it's just great to see what can happen when you've built conviction for that long. Now, the harder job is what really happens now, which is you have to go build a really good product. And that's one of the things I'm very proud about so far with our team is in the process of allocating capital that's now been raised and will continue to be raised as an actively managed and evergreen fund, we get to announce new investments. So as an example today, June 10th, we just announced an investment into super base. - Yep. - And so it was a bit of a unique structure as to how we got there. We bought some investment stakes in a fund that had an early seed stage or early stage investment into super base. So we were able to do some interesting discounting. So this is fun portfolio construction now being built on how do we bring the most value to our investors, not just at the most recent price. So that's one way. The second way is we get to go communicate that every single week. So just before we got on this, I had just wrapped all of our announcement prep and launch. And so we go live with the social posts with Onker with our email list that's now grown to 20,000 people for USVC with collaboration with the super base team to their community. So there's these knock on effect. If we do our job right, the job for me as a marketer, again, continuing to extend the relationship of a good offer and a good product is, I never want to be in the position where we're marketing a product that has no legs. It's not performing well. It's not materially driving value. Obviously, those things can't be guaranteed. But if we do our job right and we select the right companies like I think our team can, then my job as a marketer is to make sure that the story of those companies is communicated well. The story of the asset class is communicated well. Which in essence gets me to the core essence of what it means to build a product like this, which is, you can build one of many different financial products. There are plenty of companies that give you a high yield savings account as an example of wealth front. You can go to your local branch. You can do whatever you have. The way that we will stand out knowing that there will be other products that come to market like a USVC, like they already have, is to tell a better story. Is to tell a better story about the companies that we don't just invest in, but the ones that are coming down the pipe that no one's heard about. It's the next anthropic, the next opening eye that frankly is staying in private right now and won't be accessible to most until it comes public. Ideally, USVC will have some share of that. And as an investor, you'll get a share of that by representation in the fund on a percentage basis. And so, yeah, even as a marketer, thinking about my love of different tech technology and cool products, I basically get the very fun job of figuring out how to tell the story of all these various different products every single week we can and week out as we launch new investments. Amazing. Asher, awesome avenue on the show. So excited to follow along the success of USB-C. Obviously, go to usvc.com, check it out. If you're interested in having some of your portfolio invested into venture capital, give it a look. Any final thoughts, anything to plug? I know, deeply appreciate the conversation for your interest and for the exploration that we're all going to be on figuring out how this comes to market. It is very much a living, breathing thing and I look forward to hopefully one future day when we get to talk about how well it all went and pull back the fold on on what the transpiring few years will look like. Amazing. Thanks for watching Asher. Take care. [BLANK_AUDIO]