From Entrepreneur to Investment Banker: Jason Kirby's Journey

0:00 Hello, Welcome everybody to another episode of Arthur's Roundtable. Thanks for your regular participation. Super appreciate the Family Office Insights community as well as the viewership for the podcast coming on and listening to us from time to time. So we're really grateful for that. We're super happy to have Jason Kirby here today. And as if after viewing this episode and listening, there's others that you think would benefit from hearing it. Please feel free to share. We're always delighted to have you do that, if that's OK. So Jason, give us a little background. Thanks for doing this. Tell us about your journey a little bit. Yeah, no thanks for having me on the show.

0:40 Easiest way to put it, I'm a super entrepreneur. I've built and sold multiple companies. Most notable was selling a company to Walmart tech company to Walmart back in 2018 and have since done multiple transactions both as a founder, operator, a non investment banker. I guess the the story starts with me starting my first business when I was 19, loving the adventure of wanting to build something I was passionate about. I quickly realized that passion doesn't always mean mean scale. And I had a good business travel, the world lifestyle business. It was fun, but I want to move on to bigger better things and you know, was enthralled with the concept of venture capital and like how do I get into that world? This is 2000 tried my first company, big giant flop, you know, trying to chase venture capital, great business had I not pursued venture capital, but try to chase venture capital and try to create a venture narrative when in reality it was never going to be venture backed. You know, despite everyone telling us to keep at it, keep going, you know, keep keep doing what you're doing, keep getting your numbers up.

1:41 It's like, OK, well, we're at like 60 K month over month, you know, 60 KA month, you know, month over growth, month over month growth is like 30%. That would have been like a, a home run in most people's eyes, you know, from like a seed stage startup trying to raise $1,000,000 on a $3,000,000 evaluation back then and couldn't raise money for the life of us. And you know, hindsight tells me the business model was never venture. You know, we, we were like, man, if we get to 10 million revenue, we crush it. So that's not venture and you know, quickly learned that that was not the right business to be in got an acquisition offer, chased that down ended up falling through in the final hour and like crushed my soul, but I wanted to make a bigger swing, go after something bigger left where I was in San Diego and moved to New York and launched a company called Liquid Sky, which was a GPUH compute, a network that enabled low latency interactive streaming.

2:30 So using GPUs for actual graphic processing, not AI at the time and quickly raised 12 million for that company. It was in a hot space. All the big tech companies were, you know, trying to solve this problem. We had a head start through our core product, about a million and a half users and it was just blitzing the market as fast as we could. But quickly realized that Amazon, Google, Microsoft were putting in about a billion dollars into this category. So we had to quickly find an off ramp or very, very deep venture pockets, which we having been in the market and raised some money, our investors, albeit they wanted us to go Unicorn or bust, billionaire bust is like to say we quickly look for an off ramp, which we had Walmart at the table. We were doing, you know, kind of B to B contracts and proof of concepts with Verizon, LG, Walmart and Walmart ended up, you know, coming in with the, the final bid that we accepted and selling to Walmart, which throws people off in some capacities.

3:27 Because like, why did Walmart buy like a, you know, GPUH compute server network? Walmart at the time and still is like, you know, there's a Walmart within 10 miles of like 95% of Americans. And when you think about that, when you think about their edge compute network, like that's pretty powerful. Like if you had GPU servers like a RAC and every single Walmart, what could that do? What could that unlock? And this was the advent of 5G being rolled out in 2018-2019. So that was all the rage, billions, billions of dollars being put into 5G. So just right timing, right to right place. Walmart promised the world they acquired us. And then shortly after the acquisition, we had scaled the team almost 3X. We were burning money like nobody's business. And then right before our big launch party, Walmart pulled the plug because Amazon was kind of destroying. Yeah, well, yeah, we we were supposed to build like the Amazon Prime, like the the video and gaming and music streaming competitor that Walmart was.

4:28 Yeah, we were the platform for Walmart to build that. But that was a fun project. But in the grand scheme of things, Walmart is a retailer and they were getting their ass kicked on their core home turf, which is, you know, retail and delivery. And they decided to reallocate all of their budget that we had towards next day delivery, which right move for Walmart 100% just sucked for us. And I was grateful for the team, what they gave us, but taught me a lot in terms of going through those types of transactions, raising money, selling the company, and then without any holds bar, getting right back into the mix and going to another startup, helping them with a $20 million merger with their biggest competitor in the HR tech space.

5:09 And then right off that going into a tech esports company that was doing like 100K in revenue and scaled them to 6 million in 18 months, closing in $11 million Series A in a very rapid period of time scaling the company. We brought esports to high schools all across the country. When I left we had reached about 3000 schools, 100,000 students cut about 6 million in revenue before before I stepped down and kind. Of during COVID right? Yeah, 2021 is when we closed the right. We kind of closed like December 2020. We had all kinds of anything that everything that could go wrong went wrong. We had a Series A term sheet that we got on March 12th, 2020 and that got quickly pulled on March 14th, 2020. You know, outside of pivot the business do a bunch of wild changes to kind of navigate that because we were selling to schools and schools shut down.

6:04 Everybody. Yeah, it's like, how do you sell to schools? Quickly realized that esports were the only activity you could do during COVID, and that message spread like wildfire. It was not particularly easy, but we were able to convince schools that this was a worthwhile effort and investment during the time of remote learning when they had no idea what they were doing. They were all scrambling hair on fire, and kids were spiraling downwards as they kind of seek engagement and peer-to-peer support. And so we were able to kind of capture that opportunity and pin the right message to the right people and just started rapidly scaling and, you know, growing the business, which was really exciting to see.

6:50 But after doing that for about a year and a half, wasn't my company. I wasn't the founder came in as kind of the COO and they were still like pretty nascent. And so I, after I did my part, decided it was best for me to part ways and kind of took a break. And it's the first time I took a break since I was 19. So 15 years of just hardcore nonstop go, go, go, go, go. And you know, I had a it, got married, had a kid and just kind of like wanted to see what else is out there. And after being involved in multiple transactions, being an Angel, being an LP and a couple of funds, and just kind of seeing the market from a different landscape, and also having sold my company and been in multiple transactions, I was just like, you know, one of the biggest things that I missed in those transactions was unbiased advice.

7:46 Everybody had an agenda on one side or the other trying to pull you this way or that way, right A. 100%, you know, the board was like billion or bust. My technically Samsung was supposed to buy us at superior terms, much better terms, you know, about nine months a year before Walmart acquired us. But our board got super greedy against our like went over our head like went straight to Samsung. Your board. My board, yeah, and basically told Samsung like you need to pay double or or we're out and we didn't want that. We were stoked on the deal we're like this is a great deal we're happy and Samsung took three weeks came back to us and said sorry, we're not changing anything this is the deal so we proceed but we lost three weeks and guess what happened in those three weeks?

8:38 Samsung's president or sorry, CEO went to prison 2017. That was like a huge global news. He went to prison and every deal was dead on arrival. And so the day of closing, bottles of champagne ordered, buses picked up, the team, new offer letters printed, new office set up. And we got a call from Korea like 2 in the morning that the deal's dead and everything was dead in the company. So that was fun. And because our board got greedy, they, you know, we were out of cash. We had $1,000,000 breakup fee, but we were burning half a million a month. So that wasn't super helpful. And a board came in and basically said, all right, we'll save you and gave us like these horrible terms, like 3X, like pref, you know, $4 million.

9:25 Crash down round. Yeah, super. You know, crammed down round, like absolutely screwed the team. I had to get a golden parachute because it was so bad. Just in case the next acquisition wasn't so good. And you know, it's it's pretty depressing how and like we turned it around. We got a, you know, almost similar terms from Sam's Walmart a year later, but with that 3X lick pref. It was, you know, materially far less capital. And we had this banker that was like a more of a over glorified babysitter who didn't add any value in the transaction, didn't bring anything to the table. So I was just really bitter about this and I was really bitter about my experiences and other transactions of it was very much like you had to be in the club. You had to know the people.

10:10 And that was not my world. You know, I grew up in a middle class household in like Orange County, didn't know anyone and just how to build material value to get enough attention from people to where they would actually invest. Couldn't just like knock on my buddy's door, my neighbor's door and get capital. And so I was a little bitter about my experience in transactions. And I was like, OK, a lot of founders feel this way. How do we change the game? And that's what ultimately led me after a couple years to building what's known as Thunder today. So it launched it out of AVC Venture Studio called Airplay Ventures out of New York. And the intent was how do we be an investment bank for founders by founders that basically put a banker at your side at the earlier stages of the company, not like precede seed or anything of that sort. But like, you know, later stage companies kind of like lower market 5 to $100 million type of transactions and help these founders navigate their options.

11:09 What's actually on the table for them? What can they do? What can they not do? You know, what are some of the deals they can structure their company around what the comps are Because like that exists for like the best, biggest companies in the world where a banker's always desperate to help because it could be in a $20 million fee. Happy to offer, you know, free advice and things of that sort. So we just took a different approach where it's like, OK, let's the founders that are still in the shit, still grinding, still like creating, you know, material value at the early stage and haven't really been picked up on yet by these kind of bigger firms. How can we better support them and help them navigate their options? And sometimes that's venture all the way billionaire bus. And sometimes it's, you know, like I'd love to make $20 million.

11:51 I was like, well, that's not a venture story anymore, you know, what could you do? And so we help underwrite debt, equity and M&A opportunities for companies. Yeah, we worked with I think probably like 40 companies at this point. Now transacted, you know, my partner's in the transacted, you know, billions at this point. And what we're ultimately looking to do is help founders navigate what's the most optimal opportunity and then bring those deals to the right parties that actually want those transactions. That's we're constantly building our network and building our, you know, expertise in various different niches and categories to, to make sure that we're identifying what's a good deal, architecting what that good deal would be. Meaning that we know what the founder wants and we know what the buyer or investor wants and making sure that there's going to be a, you know, equally beneficial relationship in that transaction and helping connect those two parties. And yeah, it's been a ton of fun. We typically only work with tech companies for the most part. We sometimes invest in some of the companies and take an equity position.

12:53 Sometimes we, you know, if it's bigger companies, we don't have the balance sheet just yet to to write big enough checks, but we'll work with those deals, but typically in that 5 to $100 million transaction range. So it seems to me and tell me if this is really contributes to your edge, not just knowing the buyers, but onboarding the right entrepreneurs, but also helping them not make mistakes that you made or at least aware of things that they would otherwise not know because of what you've gone through. Basically what it comes down to is what is actually possible and what do those founders want?

13:35 And are those in the same then diagram, you know, is there like a equilibrium there? Does that actually exist? Because like, you know, talk to a founder like, oh, I won $100 million. Like no one's going to give that to you. Right. Yeah. You know, if you're not the AI breakout, everything's awesome you're not getting your 100X revenue valuation get that out of your head. 2021 is long and gone. So we are we're we're a good reality check. I would say most times I'm spending time with founders, I'm kind of helping them understand the macro market. There's a lot of false, false data, but just misperceived data. Like they hear a story of a, some company raised whatever billion dollars or whatever valuation and they have no idea what's actually going on behind closed doors.

14:22 They don't know those numbers, they don't know the growth rates, they don't know anything. All they just see is like, well, I think we're better, why don't we get higher? Yeah, if they can do it, we can't wait. Yeah, it's like that's, that's not how it works. And I also, it's like, especially if like a founder, you know, doesn't have deep rooted connections. I got my favorite, especially maybe for your audience is like, well, we know we're not really VC, but family offices will love us. And I was like. Everybody thinks family offices is default position if you can't get VC or private equity right? I think it's either dumb money or they think it's like, you know, like, oh. They like us. Yeah, like, oh, they'll just throw money at us. Like, well, yeah, sure, family offices are popping up everywhere and they become a a very popularized vehicle for, you know, individuals and families to manage their wealth. But then we also become very sophisticated, like they're hiring top talent.

15:12 They are creating, you know, structures. They're removing the maybe legacy of the the third generation member. Just like, oh, I'm going to invest 10 million of my friends, you know, you know, cannabis business or something like those things aren't, you know, they happen, but they don't that's not the norm. And, and as the saying goes, it's like you met one family office, you met one family office. Like none of them are the same. I've never met one family officer. I'm like, oh, you're just like this other one. It's definitely a misconception that founders have. And they're like, Oh yeah, just maybe some individuals or, you know, family offices would love to write a check to us. I'm like, and what are you offering them? I'm like, oh, well, we want to raise 5 on 100 and we're doing like 4 million of rabbit.

15:54 I'm like, they're not. Dumb. They're not. I don't know if you found this to be true, but you know, we traffic in family offices that's, you know, one of our businesses. But the thing that I think people make the mistake regularly is that family offices, unlike a fund, for example, or an institutional investor that is bringing in cash every week and has to deploy it. There is no hurry. Like they're not itching to deploy their balance sheet. They're going to take their time. And so and they tend to do that. And so people who think that family offices are a quick check, it's just generally not true. Yeah. And also it's just like, you know, investing in venture directly, like a as like a direct investment opportunities like most of the family offices I see doing directs, it's either that a deep connection with that particular individual or, you know, people at the company and the management team or it's strategic like that they have a family business or portfolio company that they know the industry to have an edge. Like it's just it's just so funny when I meet people and they're just like, yeah, family obviously should invest in us. Like also it's like what percentage of their allocation is towards these types of direct investments funds? I think is a little bit more, you know, reasonable to expect family, obviously to be engaged, but again, takes years to build those relationships.

17:19 Not like someone's just going to come and write you a check. Like, hey, that guy's a cool guy. Here's $10 million. Yeah, just doesn't happen there. There are the cases where you have a deep relationship because of your history and that they're confident because you built three businesses and the check is a lot easier. But that took 10 years, right? Yeah, but it looks for like, so the person that doesn't know that history, that sees that person, oh, he raised money from a family office. Like, yeah, but you don't know that history. You don't know that they maybe went to school together or they had a, or maybe like they don't really know each other. But like a family office knows someone that's also invested very well and they have a high sense of trust, is connected to that deal. And so they trust that individual. And so they're going to write the check. And so I just feel like we get these companies all the time that we say no to that, you know, come to us with this kind of, you know, pie in the sky expectation that money's just going to be thrown at them if they meet them. And the reality is just like, like, that's not like 1. Like if you really want that, you got to make it like a insane deal.

18:25 Like make them a ton of money. Like when I structure some of my own direct deals for the deals that I'm doing, I make them wildly favorable to investors just because like if I don't know that investor like deeply, like a deep rooted connection where I'm like delivering consistent returns. Like the only reason they're going to take a leap of faith on me or anything that I present to them over say a deal that they have a relationship with. Like I got to have that kind of risk rate, you know, kind of risk payoff. Like there needs to be a higher premium paid to them to want to trust me to, to do that deal. And these founders coming out to me and like, having these, like, we want to give up 5% of the company, you know, it's like insignificant, you know, unless you're the hottest thing in town and you got term sheets being thrown at you left and right. Like you just can't command that kind of expectation from family offices.

19:17 Yeah, I think that's right. What is your deal sourcing methodology? Meaning the companies, the entrepreneurs, the candidates that whether they qualify or not. How's how's that look? So I would say the best deals that come through US are often our relationship with VCs like my world is venture, you know, came from the venture world and had built deep roots. And what we've kind of found our sweet spot to be is like, you know, like venture backed company that is like the golden child and a fun that's like clearly hitting all their Marks and they have term sheets being thrown on them left and right. Like they don't need help. They have all the help they need. And what we found is like AVC is what they ultimately need help with is like really good companies that maybe don't fit the venture mold anymore.

20:03 So like. They're still trapped in this venture mindset, but they need to be pivoted to either strategic exit or private equity type structure. That's wildly different multiples, wildly different expectations. And VCs are not really incentivized to have those hard conversations with those founders. And so they bring us in and they're like, hey, can you talk to this founder? And we look at the opportunity to look what they're doing. And sometimes we're like, no, this actually still has venture opportunity. You're just doing the wrong thing. Go do these three things for the next 6 to 12 months and you're back on track. In some cases it's like, hey, you had a good run. Your, your sector was hot. It's no longer hot. You were getting 20X multiples, you know, two years ago, three years ago. Now you're like 3X multiples.

20:47 Like it's just a wildly different game. You have to be offering a financially viable offer to investors. And so a lot of VCs bring us into like, have those conversations and help founders transition the business to a more accept like this is like, I always say this, like strategic exits are always the best outcome in most cases from a financial perspective, but they're harder to come by. And they only really come when there's potentially going to be, you're going to be taken off the table by someone else, meaning they have to have like, they have to take action because you're going to disappear. And that only happens if there's a lot of players at the table. And really only the players that might be at the table is like private equity. And so we always try to structure all of our deals to be capable of a private equity transaction because that at least gets 3-4 bidders at the party to then hold those strategics accountable to actually taking action. So worst case scenario, we sell for maybe that lower multiple that P thinks they have the edge to, you know, increase and make a profit.

21:51 But ideally we're going to have multiple strategics at the table knowing that that this deal will happen and they will lose this deal if they don't take action. Yeah. Do you, do you find that the companies that the BC's asked you to come and help that most of them, they're going to end up flushing because they're not throwing any more money at them? So BC's often come to us on this conversation is because they like the family, they want something to happen and they would love a return. And that's often what we're shooting for. But it depends on how much capital went into it. What's the stage of the business where they're at? They're like wildly overfunded. It's hard to clear the hurdle. We had a really good company come to us. They raised 60 on 2/20, you know, a couple years like kind of like end of 2022, the market was hot that they were in. Now it's not hot and their their competitors have fallen off a Cliff.

22:40 The public comps have fallen off a Cliff, but they're doing great. They're growing. They're, you know, have probably one of the best products in the industry, but you know, they're below their prep stack right now because they raise so much money so fast. It's such a high valuation. Yeah, that's a bummer. Yeah, it sucks. But what we identified, like what? Well, they came to the VC came to us and they're like, can you do anything? And then we sat with them. We looked at everything about the business and what they were trying to do that this is a kid, you know, they had about 25,000,000 on the balance sheet and they're about to put it all into like this. What they thought was going to be a venture idea, basically pivot the whole company and like can spin out a new company and try to like do this venture thing that had from their perspective better multiple and all stuff.

23:24 But the problem was it was a solution looking for a problem. And they're heavily technical. And so they were trying to build us like deep tech type solution. And what we realized is that would completely mean they would derail their existing business, which is doing well. They just have to do more of it faster. And So what we came to them is like, hey, we audited everything. We looked at everything. What we identified is this idea is a horrible idea. You will fall flat on your face. You will not receive additional capital. And we call customers, we call all these different, you know, people that would potentially use the product and they're all just like, I wouldn't pay for it. Yeah, it's just like. And and so we validated that this was just not a material business for them to pursue. But what we did identify is like, look your multiples are depressed and mostly due to the current administration in office right now. And whether they stay or don't like the category will correct not to what it was, but it will correct you have an opportunity to gobble up and acquire your competitors acquire market share at a substantial discount when they're all depressed. They're all.

24:27 Suffering yeah, they're all suffering they cannot raise money, they're all burning cash because they're all expected to burn at all cost, which is not the game, you know, the game plan anymore for that industry and these guys actually have really solid unit economics, they just need more scale. I was like, if you acquire your competitors at what is effectively, you know, less than 1X revenue, maybe like .5 X revenue, then you're getting a wild discount to what they, you know, are. And when the market just evens out a little bit and you consecutively show consecutive growth year over year, like you can get back to like 3-4 X revenue multiples, which again, not the 60, you know, X that you had before, but like you can have real business.

25:09 You clear your prep stack and you'll be able to make return capital to everyone and everyone will make money. You know, it's going to take three more years of this playbook. And we had some other suggestions which, you know, I can't share, but they, you know, the board loved it. They're like, we haven't seen this idea come across our table, like let's go ahead and pursue. And so 2026 is the year to go and do all those transactions. And so that's what we helped do. We could help them go and secure those transactions. So we actually do buy side management on that, on that front. So just being able to come into these companies and understand like where the value lies for them to kind of clear the prep stack because like, yeah, they could have sold, they could have if they wanted. They were all burnt out. They didn't have energy probably would advise them to be one that sells, but they were hungry. They had they really wanted to take this thing to the next level.

25:55 So it's like, OK, that's an important element of the strategy that we define. Like they were not ready to call it quits. And so it really challenges us like what is possible. And that's a ton of fun. That's like, it's an amazing exercise to go through and help these founders unlock things that they're not really allowed to think about. Sometimes, you know, it's like they're they're not allowed to think about the safe, you know, like the PE playbook of M and a roll up like they're supposed to be like technology, you know, grow at all costs, you know, spend, spend, spend. It's like, no, like the good business economics is not a bad thing. Yeah, especially when you're multiple has been falling off a Cliff and it's nothing against you. And wouldn't it be true also that if they aggregated the businesses and did what sounds like a roll up at discounted valuations, that now they're of the size that an exit like a PE exit would be plausible? Yeah, that's exactly it.

26:50 And so worst case scenario, they sell the PE where they are. Best case scenario they sell them the kind of the number one player in the market that will hopefully recover. That's been kind of one of the, you know, things that we taking a gamble on is like they, they seem to have the economics figured out now, but they're still not appreciated. So we're hoping that the markets will appreciate the number one player right now and acquire our client in like 3 to 4 years for a premium. So are you finding these companies largely in? Usus, so we have offices in London and New York. We predominantly have US clients but about 30% of our businesses UK. Can you talk about what's happening there in the UK and the EU in terms of business sentiment?

27:37 That's a That's a deep rabbit hole, man. Yeah. That is, I have some I have some opinions on the UK like look, coming from the US, I'm biased because you know, under the free, you know, as much as people complain about the US and you're like, go live in another country and then come. Back, yeah, try that for a minute. Like, well, you don't you don't know how much is true that we hear, but especially the UK based on what we've heard. I mean, they definitely are not the land of the free right, which is, you know, to to just a pine on, you know, why we left at the very beginning 250 years ago, right, same sort of thing. But what?

28:21 What? Go ahead. My my take right now is like I have to come back to the USI live in London now. I love the quality of life, like from a family, lifestyle perspective, my young kids, it's great. The walkability is great yeah, foods great a lot of good things, but the tax and the the business into like I, I run the the post exit of founder community here in London. There's like 304 hundred of us. I host dinners every month. It's like such an amazing community and they're dropping like flies. They're there's so much, there's so many people vacating the UK, Dubai, Spain, Portugal, Milan, US, like everyone's leaving because it's just the way the government's acting here.

29:11 And I'm, you know, I'm a, I'm basically a bystander. I'm just like an observer, you know, being here. I don't vote or, you know, do anything, but just talking to my tax account in here, I'm like, wow, it would be wildly cost prohibitive to stay, you know, at the non Dom period. And the they're eliminating a lot of like entrepreneur benefits. I just, it's just so not like, granted, is it better than Europe? Yeah. And so there are still a ton of Europeans migrating to the UK to build because the US is so much more difficult to get into. Initially, no, not make it easy, but basically a pause on everything, more or less, yeah. So like my my take is there's some good talent here and it's far cheaper than the US as far as like good talent so that there's some advantages of having an office here or being here. The business is and will continue to conduct in the UK. It's not like all doom and gloom, but like some amazing people who have the means are leaving. And it's because the taxes is because of just the prioritization of public service to at the expense of the wealth creators and the value creators in which there's a degree. But when you look at just for, for me being an American and having to pay American taxes and US like UK taxes, what kills me is like I have US real estate for all the obvious reasons of depreciation and tax benefits and all that kind of stuff. UK will basically just pass that has to pass through the UK after four years of living here.

30:42 And they just tax on revenue. Like there's no writing off depreciation. There's no writing off of expenses like it's. There's no. Yeah, you made a couple 100 grand on this property, Like, OK, we're going to tax you at the couple 100 grand. I was like, well, no, my, my net operating income's here and they're like, no, that doesn't count like. What absolutely makes absolutely no sense. Yeah. So like, real estate is a disaster in my opinion. And like I thought when I moved here, I was like, oh, I want to own a place in London, shopped around, looked at all this and I was like, wait a second, it is exponentially cheaper to rent here and all the rights are in my favor. I could sign a lease and break it and walk away. Like this is like, this is awful. I want to own a property here.

31:27 Yeah, we have one of our family offices who's also a huge real estate developer in rental properties and they just dumped $400 million in the London suburbs building rental apartments because that's that's the way to go, right? No one's buying it. Investment totally. Yeah. Single family home. Not a good idea. Yeah, like because the buying of the house, like my house I live in right now is probably like 2-2 and a half million if I were to buy and, or probably 2. I'm getting it for like 5 grand or £5000 a month. Like just as if you're not familiar with the, we're going way down a tangent, holy bear. So I'm very upset about the system here. So I have a stamp duty tax here, meaning like rather than paying property tax over extended period of time, you pay like 6 to 10% upfront of the purchase price that is non recoupable. So call it a $2,000,000 house, you're paying 200K upfront and then you're having to put it as a foreigner. I had to put at least like 3540% down. So I'm like all this cash in to which is a flat market, meaning there's not really any appreciation. I have to renew my mortgage every two to five years because they're all Arms.

32:40 There's no like 30 year fixed. It's all Arms. And then like my rent for two years, I only really plan to be here like 2 years and I could probably go back in the summer. I paid less in rent in two years than I would just pay in the stamp duty tax. Like a transfer tax that you and you probably can't, I don't know, you're AUS taxpayer, so maybe you can deduct it. But that's a big number, yeah. It's just. It's. Yeah, it's just dumb. Yeah. This is like, why would I do that? Again, I have the optionality to go back to the US, so I have a flexibility of choice. But yeah, it's definitely discouraging. And also like, the incomes here wildly lower than the US. Like, I could pay someone here, you know, maybe call it 80,000 pounds, 100,000 lbs.

33:27 But in the US, I'd probably pay like 180 for that person. And like, good for talent arbitrage as a owner of a company, but for like employees like how? How do you survive in London? You don't want people suffering, they can't pay attention to their work, right? Yeah, so there's a lot I can complain about UK tax law here, but I digress. And I'm no expert, but I just from what I've learned and what I've heard, I definitely want to go back to the US. Yeah, well, it's important to hear from people that are living it, which is more credible than just reading the fake news, right? So how how does are most of the VCs Silicon Valley type VCs that you've made relationships with or are there other places?

34:10 All over, so UK based, london-based, New York based. I would say my strongest connections are in New York. So that's where I was before Israel. Not a really good talent in Israel. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's global like a couple of really good firms in the you know, Austin actually I'd tell you probably like the Silicon Valley ones less. So there's a handful that I'm pretty close to, but they're more of the smaller funds. You know, I would say they, the silicon mindset is Silicon Valley mindset is like it's billion or best all the way. They just don't really care otherwise for the most part. So that's not really our ethos. So we don't really drive too much opportunity from there, like New York and Austin, Seattle, London, Germany, Israel, Like yeah, those are kind of the markets that we, you know, probably pull in the strongest relationships.

35:03 Do you feel like there's if you had more capacity, you could service more companies or are you kind of comfortable where it is right now because it's a lot of work? Sounds like it's a lot of. Work. Yeah. So the beauty of our model and what makes U.S. special is we operate as a partner model. So I recruit like exited founders or very successful bankers that hate the banker ecosystem and culture. So we're we're five partners, four of us are exited founders. One of them is like an ex banker from Goldman. And what makes us kind of special is we have this model that is very flexible for these high talent kind of people that are already made it. They don't need a job.

35:45 They want to be in the game, but they don't want to be in it alone. And so we have such a large top of funnel across multi version sectors and divisions. We ultimately help them get access to really interesting companies, really interesting founders that they have material value to offer them. And so we provide them the infrastructure to go support them and help them in the transaction. So everything that we do, everything I've mentioned, my team is capable of, my partners are capable of. Most of the deals I mentioned were my my partner's deals. And so I'm able to kind of provide this experience for these high caliber individuals to be able to leverage the best parts of them and like the fun parts of like building deep relationships, focusing on strategy, you know, teeing up opportunities to their network.

36:35 And they're focused on those aspects. What we have a full delivery team underneath them that's doing decks, modeling collateral, you know, all that kind of the the work that must be done to have the confidence in the strategy. And that's kind of pretty crucial to ecosystem that we build. And we're always actively recruiting for amazing partners. Is. Have you found that the grunt work that would normally be done by an analyst can now be done 90% by AI? Seems like a lot of people experiencing that, right? Yeah, it's 70%. That's kind of an eculation. So we have a team of analysts and very talented like from 5 to 15 years of experience and I push out I we do a quarterly AI day.

37:20 Like what are you going to make faster, better, cheaper with AI? That's like a cultural thing we have in the company. And sometimes we built our own AI stack with like helping identify relevant investors. So we have like 10,000 firms that we're constantly tracking, monitoring for changes and data for updating on a regular basis. And then we input company data into our network. It will say like, hey, here are the Ed investors that are statistically more likely to engage in this opportunity. So we build some of our own stack. We have love open AI and Gemini perplexity for various different tasks and responsibilities and research and whatnot. Like it's one of those things where if you're not using it like you're wildly inefficient.

38:03 Oh, it's. Crazy perplexities because it gives you all the sources. I mean, they were the first ones that come out and just say, OK, this is where we got all this data, so you better check it, right? Yeah, and what I love about it actually is their their comment browser. They have I automate all kinds of stuff on the the comment browser. I'm like, hey, like I probably can't share what I'm automating to some degree. This is a certain compliance thing. So it's just like, I don't want to do, you know, like have to do, don't want to do. I can literally write the prompt and it will just do the task and like check the boxes, you know, read the question And it's just like, you know, something that would distract 45 minutes of my brain capacity for like say client work or meetings or whatnot. And I'm writing a 4 minute prompt and just letting it run in the background.

38:56 Yeah. So there's just, there's a bunch of really cool stuff out there that's yeah, you're, you're losing if you're not using it. What have you found in terms of for the benefit of the audience here are your investors. 10% family offices. 20% family offices in aggregate, but not, I know it's germane to the deal, but what's your investor network look like in terms of composition of family offices? It's on the lower side. You know, I would say we're, we push more to institutional funds, just how we structure things. And they're just, it's a little bit more reliable to kind of know their scope, what they do, what they want in family offices.

39:44 We've had, I guess I have some just good relationships, but it's in the small number in terms of just understanding what they actually want, what they do. And also like, do they have any interest in what we do? What I try to do is just like here, here's here's the options on the silver platter in terms of like what this deal could be and why it might be relevant to you. And so we shop it out to, you know, a good chunk of family offices that we've met with, we had dinners with or anything like that for them to have the optionality. And some of them are, I would say. Ragtag family offices like kind of borderline or you just an ultra high no earth or you actually family office to like institutionalized, you know, family offices where we're talking to like more of an employee as opposed to, you know, kind of the principal. Yeah, the principal.

40:30 So it's it's a bit of a mix. Love to have more of those conversations. It's just one of those things where it's like, wow, sounds like what you're doing is really cool. I don't necessarily have something in the books just for that specific thing because like sometimes we're like, we're, I just did a deal. Hopefully it closes this week. We'll see. There's like a football club here in London or outside of London and I'm at this family office. And then they're like, we're really into like they have like, oh, we do all this stuff. But like, honestly, all we really care about doing is like football club deals. I was like, that's so random. Well, just what happens? My friend is an owner of like a, you know, level 5 football club outside of London and I go to the owner's box, meet all the owners and they're talking about their expansion strategies and all that stuff. And actually he's like, oh, you guys, oh, you should talk to these.

41:14 And they're like that. Like just something as simple as that is what connects the dots on on some deals. But yeah, so it's, it's interesting how the preferences and desires can, can change and just being able to log that and be able to understand how do we know when to bring this deal to that family office at the right time? And that's what a lot of our AI is. We record and track everything. And they were able to query our own database with like a rack model to be able to understand like, OK, who have we talked to in the last year, 2 years, three years that would be interested in something like this? And we like kind of put in the company data and it's like you talked to James from this family office, you know, 18 months ago, Here is your last e-mail exchange and here's why they'd be interested. I'm like.

42:02 You mentioned how long that would have taken. I want. To give it. Up and a half ago you would have forgotten first of all, and secondly you would have taken forever to retrieve that data. It's pretty amazing. Yeah, that's that's why I just record everything because otherwise I, I, I, I have way too many meetings. My meeting recorder tells me it's like, yeah, 45 meetings last week for a total of like 1000 something minutes. I'm like, who did I meet with? Yeah, right. At the every Monday I have to go through and say who did I meet with last week just to kind of make sure I keep track of things. Yeah, it's thank God for the recorders just because otherwise and they can do them in person now.

42:42 You can record it in person logs in the same file which is great. That's awesome. So, well, maybe there'll be a handful of family offices that listen to this, be interested in having a conversation with you, which is part of the objective here. But at the very least, I super appreciate you sharing this because it's been fascinating. Yeah, it and what you said at the beginning is, I think, really relevant in that you were struggling to, when you were doing the deals for yourself. Everybody had an agenda and nobody was working on your behalf besides you. Now you can step in and say, OK, is this good for the investor or is this good for the founder, right? Yeah, yeah. And that's, that's what I love to do. That's my favorite part about what we do is really helping solve these complex, you know, problems. And also hearing like what investors want and trying to keep a pulse on what actually what deals do they actually want to pursue.

43:36 Because in the market's shifted so much in the last few years from like sector preference to AI this, AI that. And it's just a matter of like, OK, well, like who's still looking for these types of businesses? What are they willing to pay and being able to use technology to streamline the kind of memory recall that's required to kind of do these deals to kind of tap the network that we already have. And as I kind of very much express, I meet with a lot of people every single week, always looking to meet more and just trying to help expand, you know, who we talked to and and who we might be able to help and, you know, facilitate interesting opportunities too. Yeah, it's misused as a sound bite in the public media, but do you have any opinion about the frothiness of the AI?

44:21 You know, I was on record not too long ago on another podcast around this topic. Yeah, At the end of the day, it is a bubble, but it's not, it's not, it's not the same bubble that we attribute to likethe.com or, you know, the housing bubble or anything like that. There's a material value being created in these companies very fast. There's an adoption rate we've never seen before in the AI sector. Like people are like, oh, the CapEx going in these companies, like, yeah, like, but there's revenue high, growing, fast growing revenue right behind them. The problem is the bubble that in reality that people think is happening, it's like, oh, bad AI companies are getting funded like, I don't think so.

45:02 Like most of the company AI companies, they could be disappearing very quickly. So I think they kind of like the precede seed Series A companies that are like AI wrapper of that and AI wrapper of that. The application layer guys, those ones are getting wiped out very fast because the big model guys are just yeah, we'll offer that like similar like, you know, the App Store and Apple back in the day where, you know, the flashlight app was like, let's just get rid of that. Let's just make it ourselves. Like those things are happening so quickly that it's hard for Visa and I'm talking to a lot of companies, which I feel so bad for it. They're like, hey, can you help sell us? And like, I'm like, AI is going to gobble you up. Like who would buy you? Like if you're not AI native with an immense, you know, it's like Moat to defend yourself.

45:51 You just don't really have much value in today's economy. Like you know what conglomerates like there used to be a decision in M&A, strategic M&A, it's like, well, how much, how much time and toss would it take to build? This to build it, right? Yeah. And you know how And that's that values. From this to this, Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, I had to have 30 engineers for a year do this and now it's like I'm going to have a guy on this weekend get a prototype out the door. Now, granted, it's not enterprise grade and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but like that self-confidence of MVP makes them feel like they can produce an equivalent product very quickly. So these SAS companies that are like sub 10 million in revenue that don't have a true Moat, don't have true AI, they're going to have a hard time getting the premiums they thought they would get.

46:40 And that's a hard reality for me to share because that's obviously disadvantaged me like most bankers are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can totally sell you for 10X revenue. We did a deal like that in 2019. Yeah, right. And, you know, it's just like I can't tell them that. And as much as I, you know, won't get the job. That's all right. Reality will set in. You might make a little bit of money, but then it'll fail, right? Everybody will be unhappy. Yeah, I do. I do AI roll ups for fun. Oh, that for fun. That's a part of my job. But like we that's one of my favorite parts is like these AI companies that are rolling up service companies. So we have a deal right now that's coming together like companies doing like half a million million EBITDA somewhere in that range. And they came to us and like, oh, we want 5X, you know, EBITDA.

47:22 I was like, well, you're a service business at 15 X 15% EBITDA margins. Like that margin is going to disappear in like a year because like AI is going to wipe you out. Like in this client that we're representing will be the one that wipes you out because if you don't, if you don't settle them, they're just going to replace you. And like you have the opportunity to give them a two year head start with your client base and get a premium now more like 2X3X and sell today versus? 0. You get 0 like your business will slowly deplete and you know, would you rather get the cash up fraud, go figure out something else, go live on a beach for a couple years or would you, you know, try to compete? And so kind of a fun conversation to have with some of these companies about what should they do in these environments.

48:06 So it's been really like a fun project to to be working on on that front. And there's tons of them, right? It's kind of endless. Yeah. Especially the overlay companies, because they just took all the LLMS and built something that anybody could build over them with the little engineering. Right? 100% yeah. Wild. Well, I super appreciate you doing this, Jason. Tell everybody it's Thunder VC, right? Yeah, the website's Thunder dot BC if you guys have any questions, you can reach me at Jason at thunder.bcyoucanfindme@linkedinat.linkedin.com/and/that was it. Jason R Kirby. I put out a podcast called $100 million exits, right?

48:47 Interview founders and investors that have experienced $100 million plus exits. I've had, you know, 100 episode, actually 100 episode goes out tomorrow. So happy to, to chat, talk to you flow, kind of share what we're doing on the how we help companies navigate these these situations. So maybe if they have a portfolio company that they're kind of figuring out what to do with, we can have that conversation. We're always having to have conversations, see where it goes and, you know, see what can be done. Yeah, Super interesting. Really appreciate it. Yeah, Thanks for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you, everybody for spending with us. The only thing you can't make more of. And that's your time.

49:29 Super cool, Jason. Thank you. Appreciate it. You bet. Thank you.