 I'm excited. You know how you've been saying, man, I'm about to try to get into this tech world, trying to be a billionaire. I want some Bitcoin. I want some crypto currency. What's up? You remember you was all on the crypto currency? I was. We ain't had the right people. We didn't know the right folks. We was just out here, you know, just on the hope and a prayer, you know, just buying whatever coins we could find, but we should've got in touch with our next guest first. Had we done that J-O-N, there ain't no 10-9-months paper we had. We probably built on Elon Musk's status, if we would've got in early on the crypto boom, if we would've just knew him when they did the GameStop shit, we would've been straight. But, you know, that's neither here nor there. Now we know the right people and we plugged in. But before we even get to introducing people, you know what I gotta do, right? Gotta let them know the black market is open. They don't know where is J-O-N when we was building this black market. We wanted to have like a black version of Radio Shack in them. Like, I knew Radio Shack was the shit, like in the 80s, you couldn't even walk by Radio Shack without going in there. They had all the race cars outside, remote control shit with the batteries and shit. We just grabbed a remote and then they'll put the batteries in there and let you dry the shit. You knew you couldn't afford that shit. This back when remote control cars were like $150. Crazy. What a time. But my next young partner, my next young guest that I got in here, bro, the CEO of Tech Company. You love to see black people doing shit like that. So I need everybody here to welcome Josh Hollis to the black market. Yes, sir. Josh, what's up, man? What's up, Carlos? How you doing? Man, tell me something good. Man, everything is going good right now. Bless to be here. I appreciate you all for having me. Hey, man, we appreciate you stopping through here. Because I heard you've been out here making a whole bunch of moves, making some money, doing all kinds of amazing things in the community. What's been up, man? How's business? It's going great, man. Amazing. We just graduated from Techstars Atlanta. What's up? Powered by JP Morgan. Okay, so you know it's big money. Yes, sir. So we're out here raising the C around, automating our application, getting it out and about to push out events coming up this new year. So we're very excited. Man, what you got over here? I see you got screens out. What is this? So this is a demo of our iOS application. Okay. Basically what we have is a social event platform for event management and experience discovery. It's a two-sided platform, two-sided marketplace. Essentially you have your event creators and your experience goers, and we service in-person, hybrid, and virtual events. Yes, sir. So like a social event, right, if you will. What sparked that? So in high school, I was in charge of coordinating Homecoming and Prom. I was an event curator for that. And just stepping into the shoes of an event curator, I got to experience the tedious task of curating an event, coordinating with venues, finding the perfect place to accommodate my guests, things of that nature than the promotional aspects of it. And that moment sparked the idea of like, what if all this was streamlined? So then in college, when I went off to Boston University, I seen multiple instances of students going to events and the venue being over capacity and people just not having a realistic idea of what they're going to do within their city. So that idea came about once again. The summer of 2016, I was working at Southern Company doing application development there and I kind of got distraught with the corporate lifestyle. I was working at AT&T the past two summers and going into Southern Company doing application development. And I decided that summer, man, why don't I just go head first into this entrepreneurial route? So I did that. Why doesn't any people quit the corporate world? I feel like people want to really have passion. You know, they want to be passionate about what they do. And there's a really good quote, you know, if you love what you do, then you won't work a day in your life. And since then, I feel like I haven't worked a day in my life. It's been tedious, you know, it's been arduous and like a ton of work involved, but I've enjoyed every single step of the process. Well, you can hear all these things about how it's not many black people in the tech world or in the tech field. What has been your experience as a black man in the tech world? It's been a journey, man. So, you know, obviously it's predominantly dominated by white males, Indian males. And it's been a journey because, you know, going into the space, you don't know what to expect, you know, especially from a young entrepreneur. I started my company when I was 18, 17, 18. So I didn't know about, you know, venture capital and raising money until I really got into the space. And obviously, you know, we're going to have to diversify the space. We're going to need a new wave of entrepreneurs, a new wave of investors coming about in the space and investing in people that look like us. I think a really good example of this is a venture capital firm called Harlem Capital. They're investing in diverse entrepreneurs and founders, women and founders of color. And a ton of, you know, new black-owned tech companies are coming about. So I think the space is changing, but it's going to really have to start with us as a community. You know, as everyone knows, we have the culture. And if we can kind of merge the culture and tech, then we're going to see a lot of equity, racial equity coming to play. What's the goal with the app? Our goal with the app is to scale and, you know, make it the essentially the one-stop-shop for experiences. So not only can you, you know, go to a festival, a concert, a party. Say you want to go to Miami and jet ski, you know, we'll provide you those experiences. Just providing people an avenue to not only connect to their favorite people, places and things, but to also have that experience curated from start to finish. Pretty much to guarantee you have the time that you want to have. Exactly. That's dope. A concierge from your pocket, if you will. And it can be for whatever it is you feel like doing. Exactly. Worldwide. Worldwide. That's hard. Because you see a lot of people, you know, they want to recreate the pictures of people's vacations and go to places that they go, but it's like, it looks fun, but you don't know exactly the details and the ins and outs of this. Exactly. I think that'll be dope to just bring that experience to the users. Yes, sir. Streamlining. That's a genius-ass idea. I appreciate it. Thank you. So who else is on your team that keeps you motivated, that keeps you innovative? Yes, sir. Keep you going and all of that? Yes, sir. So I have my two co-founders, my older brother. His name is James Hollis. That's crazy, man. What is it like being in business with your brother? Especially being a little brother? Yeah, it's been amazing, man. Obviously, you know, we have our mishaps, but working with family, you know, you're always going to work through those scenes and become stronger and grow from those experiences. So it's been very rewarding as well. You know, he compliments my strengths and I compliment, or I compliment his weaknesses and we compliment each other's strengths as well. So it's been a really great journey building with my blood brother. So in addition to that, I got my, consider him my brother, Malik, Malik G. He's the, our operations officer. He's also our host. He hosts all our events. Yeah. So a brief background on Malik. Malik went viral on the Rap Battle Parody, which is like a viral YouTube skit. It's a comedian, super hot fire. I'm not sure if you guys all know that. He's the host of all those videos. They actually just put out a video nine days ago with a rapper named BabyTron. They already went viral. It's already hit like 1.1 million views and counting. So Malik's the energy of the company. He brings the energy to our in-person experiences, hosts all of them. And he's done an amazing job for us. What would you say is your role? You've got your big brother there. So I'm sure y'all have already delegated who does what and who makes the host. What's your strength? I'm like the brain of the company. Like I'm the lifeblood. I keep it going. Keep the wheels turning. When people, you know, obviously in business, you're going to have your droughts, your periods of, you know, being unsure. And I keep everybody motivated and keep everybody stuck in the vision. What about your brother? My brother, he's our chief financial officer. He has his series six, series seven, all his financial licenses. So he pretty much handles financial operations. He also helps us with the fundraising and allocation of, you know, accounts, accounts receivable and accounts payable. What would you say is like I'm asking you this as, you know, as a black man in tech, what's been your most successful way to raise capital? What works best for your company? Well, at first it was through friends and family. I just having a really solid network. I came into it with a really strong network. Just a brief background. Our first investor was the, he was a former VP of Oracle and a president of a company called M4. So he was our first investor. And we, I came into it with a strong network from my college acquaintances and friends I met along the way. But more recently through tech stars, which is a global pre seed and seed investment incubator. Essentially with tech stars, they have this thing called the tech stars universe and there's a whole network and database of investors. And my biggest success I've seen thus far is taking all those investors aggregating them into our own database and blasting out email campaigns and taking meetings, one-on-one meetings with them. So that's been a very successful method of how we've been fundraising more recently. That's hard man. What can we look forward to from like, from y'all in the future? Yes, sir. We're going to have a new iteration of our app coming out, version 2.0. That's going to be the full bells and whistles of our app. You know, we're going to have automated host approvals. So right now you go on our app. It's a manual process involved. We've delegated and curated our network of hosts and event creators. But all that's going to be automated in the next iteration of our app. We're going to have things like follow kits where you can follow your favorite event, attendees and event creators, group messaging, going live at events, things of that nature. Just things that make the experience very intuitive and a one-stop shop experience. I got to get you to check out our app while you're here. We got a channel 85 app. Yes, sir. We put all our exclusive content up. So I want you to give me a, give me a tick out. Check that out. There we go. Go through there. Let me know what you think, man. We might need to, we might can kick some back and forth off camera how we can make our app better. Oh, I love this. This is really dope. One stop shop for all the, all things 85 South and everything that we do. Kind of got to like a world star fill into it if you will. Exactly. A little cleaner than a world star in my opinion. Yeah, man. I love it. See, we are here talking to professionals, man. We're trying to take our app to the next level. And things of that nature, man. You never know. You might have a collab here in the future, man. What's your social media and all that? And where can they find you? Yes, sir. Where can they mess with you? I'm definitely going to download that. Get y'all five stars as well. So let them know where they can get in touch with you. Support you. Invest with you. Shoot some ideas over here. So my social media is Jay Moves. That's J-M-O-V-E-Z. You can find us everywhere on Twitter, Instagram, or I guess it's X now. X? No, it's Twitter. We're black. You know, black people, once we know your first name, we're going to call you that forever. But you can find us at Moves app. That's M-O-V-E-Z, APP, everywhere. And we have a lot of other apps in the works as well. So make sure you check us out. Download us on the App Store. Give us five stars. Leave us a rating. And, you know, we're going to be pushing out events, content, a lot of exclusive things on our social media and our iOS and Android application. Look, it's your first time stopping through the black market. But don't let it be the last. Definitely won't. You got the demo this time. Yes, sir. So when you up and running and you fully funded and everything, come back and promote the app. Yes, sir. And we'll definitely be hosting events with you guys in the future. Yeah, let's collab on something. Something virtual, man. Let's try to find a way to get 85 self in the tech world. For sure. A lot of ideas. We need to bring back chat rooms or something. Yes, sir. We might be able to talk to the people and revive black planet. Anything. You never know. We already got the culture. So if we can merge the two, we got the capital, the culture capital. So you over there in the tech, I'm over here in the culture. You got to be my gateway over there. Yes, sir. All right, man. So look here. The black market is open. Black people taking over the tech world.