Warum ich ACQ Ventures gegründet habe

0:00When I was chatting with Mike earlier today, he did say you've been shifting more to investing. Mhm. And we briefly >> is all capital. >> Yeah, ACQ Ventures and from my understanding that's much earlier stage. What prompted that actually? Honestly, just we had so much deal flow for it. Mhm. So, a lot of people were coming in and saying, "Hey." I would say it's it is largely tech. So, Cuz it's venture, you need to have really really potential big exit outcomes. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah, they're just the economic like the economics lend themselves to tech. But, we had a lot of uh people were coming towards us in in I would say like a couple buckets. So, bucket one is somebody who's already raised some round. Yeah. Consumes all my stuff.

0:34It helped them grow. And they're like, "I would just rather have you on our cap table than somebody else." And that's like perfect scenario, right? Like they already they they like the stuff they're used they kind of like subscribed our ideology. We can provide capital help them grow because we believe in thesis. So, like that's great. And those And the thing is is that the existing model that we had prior to that required us to have a significantly larger equity position Right. >> to justify uh the return, right? But, because some of these tech companies can have uh significantly larger exits and because they don't require more work, right? Uh we can take smaller slugs and do um and just do money only essentially.

1:07>> Makes sense. So, that's So, that was that was kind of bucket one. Bucket two is people who don't have a cap table at all. Um they're maybe bootstrapped, but they still want to take on some clear opportunity that we can help fund. Um and those also uh you know, as long as the the deal structure makes sense. Like those can make a lot of sense. The nice thing with that is that they require almost no work and expertise. Right. Uh and so, it's really just like these entrepreneurs are like, "I'm not trying to exit. I'm not trying to have a growth partner. I need capital and I prefer your capital to somebody else's." And we basically had so much of that. They were like, "We should probably just just spin this off." And the check sizes are not that big. And so, I don't even really need to raise a fund to do like I like I can just do it on my own. Yeah, exactly. So, um that's worked out really well. We've already done like I want to say like six or eight deals.

1:56>> Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Just in the last like two months. So like it's it's heating up really pretty quickly. Which is great. Or I'll just lose my ass and we'll find out. But like >> [laughter] >> When when we're I've deployed a lot of money. Like congratulations, you know, cuz it's funny cuz in the investing world it's really don't know this. In a fun structure you basically are incentivized to deploy capital. >> Yeah. And so >> out money. Yeah, so it's kind of interesting because like the traditional like clapping of hands that happens when it's all your money. Yeah. It's actually like well, I took a lot of swings. We'll see. You don't really have LPs. Your your LP is yourself. That's why it's a cool. I've spent all my money.

2:33>> [laughter] >> Amazing. Yeah, I mean fundamentally we operate 100% like a private equity group and obviously the fund the the the ACQ Ventures operates like a VC. Like we have a basically a general partner who just basically runs that came from the Y Combinator world like has really good deal flow on his own. Yeah, he sources a bunch of deals on his own outside of the network, which I you'll probably notice this is a common theme is like I want stuff that already works and that I can put gasoline on rather than it can only work because of me. School is an exceptional product. And was compounding month over month with zero advertising on its own.

3:15Then we added gas. If it only if it requires me in order to work, then it requires me to work until I die. That's not fun. And so just as like a side note for the creators like everything that I again I this keeps coming back to this point but like I solve for revenue retention because if if you go on vacation and the company dies, you just bought yourself a higher leverage income, but you did not buy yourself a business. And it's not an asset. It's literally only valuable to you and not valuable to everyone else. And the valuable to everyone else part is where where you get significant outside returns in terms of wealth creation.

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