 So we know that the market is quite volatile, but as we all have come to understand, bear markets don't last forever and need to do bull markets. So today, I want to talk to you about options as we get headfirst into the upcoming bull market, which could be 2024-25, and the different options that are available to you. So without further ado, I'm going to bring in two people, Kevin Maloney from iTrust and Joe Endoso from Link2. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. Hi, Rob. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you, Rob. Absolutely. So Kevin, when you guys started to work with Link2, I was kind of a little bit hesitant because I don't like change because I'm getting a little bit older in my ways. But when I took a look at it, I thought to myself, this could be something that could do very well for people coming up into these bull markets. So Joe, I'm going to start with you. And the questions that we have are pretty simple. First of all, what is Link2 and why the partnership with iTrust? And we'll talk about the current offerings. I know that you guys did pre-IPO Coinbase and how that worked out. And then also, what are the future plans? So first things first, Joe, what is Link2? Why should we take a real deep look into it and what's happening behind the scenes? So we're a private investing platform that offers the ability to regular individuals, people like you and me, Rob, the ability to systematically access the best investment opportunities in the private tech investing space. So these are basically the best tech companies in the world while they're still private, being made available so you could invest in them before they do their IPO or have a liquidity event in the broad market. That's an important distinction because historically, that kind of investing, investing in the private market has been the best asset in terms of performance, in terms of investment returns in the last 30 years. It's not a secret, right? If you looked at the big public market indices, like the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, to see how quickly weighted they are towards technology companies, technology companies will make up roughly 40% of the total value of that public market. So it's no secret in the public market that that sector and the companies that make it up represent the best, most exciting investment opportunities. But here's what's hard to do. It's easy to go on your brokerage platform today and invest in Amazon and Google and Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. But what if you had the opportunity to invest in those companies before they went? At a price that was a lot lower than where they were when they IPO'd and afterwards. That's in a very simple way of describing what our value proposition is. We give you the ability to come and you can do it in a really simple, easy way because we're tech-enabled, so it's a very quick to invest experience. It's sort of like investing in crypto or investing on Robinhood and stocks, but it's in private company equities. And you can do it for as little as $2,500 for your first investment. And after that, the investment minimum is no more than $5,000. That is super low. And there's no other private investing platform where you can do that. So, okay, there's so much to unpack here. And the reason why I was one of my first read through this and I was excited is because I remember in 2021, when everybody was going through the massive bull run, we all remember those days. They were fantastic days. And then when we started to see these fantastic gains come about, there's a lot of people they were talking about, you know, if I take these gains, now I'm stuck in this this ugly dirty fiat. And you know, with inflation, who knows where things are going to go in the government? And of course, the next question that I would get was, well, you know, what are the alternatives to investment? Now, I can't tell people what to invest in a financial advisor, obviously. But when I took a look at this, I thought to myself, well, as time comes on, this could just be one more option. People like real estate, people like precious metals. And then there's another option here that we could take a look at as things move forward. So I can totally understand it. But one thing you said, though, and I think people's ears perked up, Joe, when you said there's a price, and the price was $2,505,000. Who is this available for? Because these are securities, correct? They are. And as a result of that, we're a securities firm and licensed as such, because we couldn't do this otherwise. But having said that, they're open to individuals also, not just institutions. And institutions have traditionally been pretty much the only ones that have actively invested in this space. But what we're doing is opening it up to individuals. You still have to be an accredited investor in the US. And if you're in a foreign country, and about 15% of our customers are overseas, you've got to abide by whatever the local regs are in your country. And some countries have similar types of regulations. So it's not open to just about everybody. But it certainly covers a lot, right? If you look at the states, give you a number, Rob, there's about 25 million people who are accredited investors. You look at it totally, it's about 75, 80 million globally. Some people are doing pretty good. And then just as a refresher, if my mind serves, you, for being an accredited investor, if it's still in the United States, 200,000 for a single person per year or 300,000 if you're married, I think it's up to a million or a million dollars plus for the amount of revenue that you get or the assets that you own per year. Is that what an accredited investor still is in America? Are we different now? Yes, you've got to have, if you're an individual, you've got to have income that exceeds 200,000 for the last two years. And obviously in the current year. And or you can have a net worth that is a million dollars, not counting the value of your home views. Gotcha. Okay, so everybody, that would be something for you guys to understand. And that'll be for you. Now, before we get into the current offerings and the track record, Kevin, Mr. Maloney, CEO of iTrust. So how did you guys sort of talk about this? And I know that there's been some emails coming out. So what is your guys's role with iTrust with Link2? Yeah, thanks again, Rob for having us. So we came across Joe and Link2 over the last couple years, we've been in touch, we've had multiple meetings, we've been friendly, we've seen each other at the various digital asset events. And we went out to our 200,000 accounts, 200,000 clients that have signed up for iTrust Capital, about 45,000 of them are active in funding accounts. And we do surveys twice a year. And we know that we have clients that found us because they want access to, you know, digital IRAs. And in our survey that we do a couple of times a year, we got feedback that they want certain coins, they want certain other alternatives listed as accessible through their IRA. And because we had a great relationship with Link2, we've watched them execute. They're very transparent about their strengths and weaknesses. They're, you know, registered broker dealer, I like the way that they are compliant, they follow the rules, they're working with their credit and investors, and they are very clear and transparent about the risk. And that's really important, especially in this market, but it's really important if you're regulated. And so we kept in touch when we connected earlier this year, and Joe had approached us with some ideas, we said, Hey, this is interesting, you guys have clients that want private equity and potential access to IRAs. We have clients with IRAs that want access to private equity deals. You guys have vetted these deals. You know that there are there's plenty of risk. Obviously, we all need to do our own due diligence. And we came to an agreement and said, look, let's let's put I trust capital on there. Let's see if we can further integrate and get our platform integrated with yours, and see if our clients would want access to your deals and vice versa. So it's something that we've been talking about for a couple of years. We started to dive into earlier this year and and exploring with a test right now, real time. And we want to further integrate down the road, again, because our clients are asking for alternative real estate products that are generating yield and access to private equity. So that that's kind of the big picture. And, you know, we have to be really careful. Again, these are self directed IRAs. So it's always up to our clients to make their own decisions. But you know, we we they're not all successes, right? They're not all home runs. And we have to be careful about who we align with. We need to make sure the moral compass is pointing north, and that we've all got integrity and safety security and compliance at the top of the at the top of the list. And Joe and his team seem very ready and able to deliver transparency and and have not are not willing to, you know, skirt any of the rules, which is critical to us. So that's how we got alignment there. Gotcha. So when you're talking when you guys are both talking about that, and thanks for the answers, I appreciate it. Is there a way for us to do to pull a Peter Teal? And what I'm talking about is this Peter Teal was able to do have a massive return as he puts shares of PayPal into his Roth IRA. And as I think he's almost ready to take it out, he hasn't been able to take it out of his of his IRA right now tax free. So in this situation, I trust and link to is that a possibility or that's not a possibility? It's an absolute not just a possibility, but it's something you can actually do today. And it's the singular reason why we wanted to partner up with I trust. And not only that, we liked I trust so much, we have we've actually invested in and encourage our community to participate in that investment. The reason is very simple, right? If you if the premise is that everybody that's an individual like those of us on this call, should try to mirror what the smart money is doing, then what the smart money is doing is a it's significantly allocating portfolio to alternative assets. That's number one, you look at university endowments, pension funds, hedge funds, all the big money, all the smart money have allocated to alternative assets to the tune of anywhere from 25 to 50% of their portfolio, depending on which institution you're speaking about. Those are allocations that are well above what the individual is doing today. So the individuals behind and lagging and needs to allocate more to alternatives to mirror what the institutions are doing. That's point number one, Rob. Point number two is when you look at the range of alternative investments you can make, the best performing investment asset class amongst alternatives in the last 30 years has been, guess what, venture capital investment into private tech companies. That's what we're offering our members the opportunity to make. So you can be in the best performing asset class within that alternative span. That asset class and everything else on all but that asset class particularly is driven by capital gains kinds of returns. So it's super important if you want tax efficiency to have an instrument that you can invest with that is tax efficient. And that's where the IRAs come in. So it was always part of our strategic plan to have some form of integration and partnership with a very compliant tech enabled IRA provider so we could help our customers get tax-efficient treatment for those capital gains on their private investments. And the I trust guys absolutely checked all the boxes for us. Gotcha. Okay, excellent explanation. And for those who don't know the story, Peter Teal, he socked away a lot of his PayPal shares when they were worth not much at all. And then watch it appreciate as you put into Roth IRA and now as you've been able to take it out for a massive amount of gains. And if you're looking for the story in the video itself, there's going to be a link in the description. You'll also find it right here. All right. So with that being said, let's go under a second piece, which is the current offerings in the track record. Let's be honest gentlemen, nobody's perfect. We've had some hits. We have we had some misses. So Joe, Kevin, you want to chime in at some point too and just talk about it. But we'll start with Joe and link to hits and misses. So you talked about Coinbase, Joe, what else you got? So we've had six successful exits in the last IPO window. And those were Coinbase, Robinhood, Marquetta, Sofi, Novium and Nerdwallon. And if you rank them in terms of returns, the best return by the way was Coinbase. That was about nine and a half X in a period of roughly 14 months. And the worst performing was a roughly 1.2 X in a period of about nine months. Right. So all of those performed better than market. And obviously, Coinbase was a whopper. So I, and I think that's also another, you know, another point that would be interesting, particularly your audience, Rob, is that the Coinbase investment, which was the very first digital asset company ever go public, by the way, was not happenstance for us. We have a very long-term and positive view about blockchain technology and the companies operating in that space. And so even though we've made over 70 investments so far in our portfolio, a significant number of those approximately 16, I believe, have been in the digital asset space. And so even though Coinbase is now public and no longer in our portfolio, because they've exited, we have today names like Ripple, Circle, Kraken, Chain Analysis, Block Demon, BitPay, Uphold, PolySign, Figment, Dapper Labs, Copper, Alchemy, Deanalytics. Check out our platform if you're interested, but you will find if you're a believer in that space, very, very high-quality companies available for investment. We've also made available lots and a growing number of portfolio companies in generative AI, in space technology, and we just closed a couple of days ago our very first investment in a quantum computing company. Interesting. Interesting, Joe. So that's great. That's a pretty darn good track record, I must say. But for all the goodness, we're not going to hit them all, right? VCs, the ones that I've talked to, say it's a great idea, but we can't be winners all the time. So Joe, which ones have not been the greatest that have come? The worst one, the worst investment we made was actually also in the digital asset space around, and that was BlockFi, right. Yeah, that was a complete zero. And all I can say is that we did our due diligence, but the one thing we did not see and discern was how exposed they were systematically to hedge funds that had exposure to the whole Lunatera meltdown. So that was a fatal blow to BlockFi. I think the good news for our members is that the amount of money that our members collectively lost on that investment was only about one-fifth, one-fifth the amount that we lost. So the thing about just backing away a little bit, the thing that is also unique about LinkTube, right, is that we actually take risk on all of our portfolio companies. We actually make these investments using our own money, our own capital, before any of our investors actually participate in them. So we hold risk across the entire book. And that is very different than every other investing platform, which is, they're purely brokerages. We are a brokerage, but we're also a principle. So there will never be a situation where our customers lose money and we don't. In the case of BlockFi, we lost 5x what our customers did, right. So we went with our customers, we went together with them, but we lose with them as well. Yeah, I got it. And so thank you for sharing that because it's very hard for, we can talk about the winners all day long, but you got to say, hey, you know what, we're not perfect. And just to speak on that, talking about losing money, on this channel, we talked about a lot of projects. And two of the big regrets that I have personally is talking about Voyager and Celsius. And because of those two platforms, a lot of my funds, six figures on Celsius, close to six figures on Voyager was locked up. Now with Voyager, we get 35% back. Celsius, who knows where that's going to go. And I will say, I will give you kudos because before we talked, you said that, you know, when you guys did your due diligence on not only Celsius, but FTX, you said there is no way this is going to work. So Joe, you know, good job on that one, smelling it out as you call it, didn't pass the smell test. Yeah. You know, for a while there, we looked like we were not very smart and, you know, not going where the flow. But I think in the long run, it proved, you know, I'm old enough to know that, you know, in this business, right, sometimes the best deals you do are the ones that you don't. That's a good, I'm going to steal that from you, Joe. That's a good one. The best deals you do are the ones that you don't. Kevin, before we move on, as far as future plans, just real quick, how's itres doing, hits and misses, what's going on over there? Good. Yeah. I mean, we're cranking along and we're excited about this partnership for a bunch of reasons. A had brought Link2 onto our cap table. They made an investment, which is, as you heard from Joe, really important. They put intellectual and financial capital or skin into the game. And they spent a lot of time with visits and due diligence on the platform. They saw us grow. They saw us hunker down over the last 18 months. I mean, we had to make some difficult decisions and really curtail our spending coming from 21 into 22, even after a large capital raise. So we were the beneficiaries of a terrific series A amount of capital and a very large valuation. And that is like oxygen. If you get too much, you can get a little bit giddy. And if you don't have a little enough, you can die on the vine, it's about managing and treating that carefully. And we treated every dollar like it was our own. We made very difficult cuts. We had to cut really smart people. We had to cut back on office space, personnel, equipment, marketing significantly. And it was tough. It was really tough. We had to clean up some things on aisles 9, 10, 11 and 12. We had some spillage here and there. And we got through that. We got through that as a team. We were lean, focused and disciplined. We knew our strengths and weaknesses. We relied on partners to do what they do best. And we got through it. We built the trust with our board. We had a lot of support from our board. And we were very transparent to our 200,000 accounts that have signed up, 45,000 active users. And by the way, if you think you're amazing at everything, all you have to do is go look at your ratings every day, because if you're in the retail business, people are pretty vocal. Even if it's affecting 10 or 12 people, a very small audience, you can't hide that. And so we look every day at the ratings and we respond accordingly. And I think Joe, having access to our financials and our lean, disciplined approach and us getting back to break even and then getting back to profitability, I think he saw that we were an open book that we were open, honest, ethical and coachable people, trying to always do the right thing for our clients, trying to give them the best service, pick up the phone, answer their emails and times of stress or strain or any time there's been glitches. And certainly we've been, they've been the recipient of plenty with the technology platform. But we got through those things with a lot of transparency. And we come out stronger and Joe got to see that you really can't hide your idiosyncrasies in a tough market. Everybody looks like a rock star or a hero in a really good market. But we've had some challenges ourselves. We were fortunate enough to avoid partnerships with some of the big losers. We've been approached by five or six of the big names that we can all think of that have had certain demise in their trajectory. And not that we were smart or brilliant or better than anybody else, we just something didn't make sense. Something didn't add up or it seemed a little bit too risky. And with a compliance background, I and our team have spent a lot of time and money with legal counsel trying to do the right thing. And if you have a moral compass and culture that is innate the DNA from the ground up from inception is about compliance and doing the right thing, it's not hard to shift and move and adjust. And then I think Joe and others got to see that we're excited we're on the platform. It's a pretty phenomenal list of names that he was able to get into also. And they don't all work out, of course, but we were proud to have them as investors and see what the appetite is for our team and then further integrate. At some point, we'd like it to be a few clicks on our end also, and allow our clients to self direct and participate into private equity deals and real estate and the other things we're looking at in through their IRAs. And our job is not to prescribe, right? We want to remove barriers, inspire and provide access. And so while we're not going to prescribe and tell people what to do because we don't have a sales team, we don't pay commissions, we're not a broker dealer, we don't make recommendations, we don't want to prescribe. We want to provide access to really good partners and have people and remind them to do their own due diligence and then participate and go as they desire. Don't bet the farm, but a lot of people are crypto curious and they're curious about alternatives and they want to participate. If they can do it in an IRA, we think it's a phenomenal platform and they should take advantage of the tax benefits. And there are some benefits that everybody should explore with their tax advisors that you can take advantage of. I certainly hope some of us on the call today can get to a place, even a fraction of what Peter Thiel had in his IRA, but it worked. It was amazing. And that's one of the asset classes that really intrigued us is the private equity. There's a lot of potential for growth. Plenty of failures, we know, but there's a lot of potential for growth and you've got to dive through and do your own due diligence. But I will say, Joe and his team, I mean, they dive in. They're doing due diligence and they're trying to weed out bad actors and business models that may not work. There is one more thing I'd like to add to that piece, which is we've all gone through this brutal bear market so far. And just like Warren Buffett talks about, you can see who's swimming naked when the tide rolls out. And I always say this, pay attention to those who are building and thriving in the bear because they will crush it in the bull. So for this and this information that you at home are watching, just take this and just see if this is actually something for you. Because I got to tell you, bull markets or bear markets don't last forever and bull markets as the same thing. So gents, this will be the last one. And Kevin, you pretty much talked about a little bit about this alternative investments, but future plans and how to find out more information. So because anything else you want to add, Kevin, besides that the alternative investments, I know you talked about real estate, you guys already have precious metals and of course, and now with LinkTube, but anything else? Yeah. So we've got digital assets. We just added five in the last two weeks. We listened to our clients, several clients recommended certain coins once they pass our sniff test. Again, we don't recommend it, but we have to make sure that these are generally have potential. So we looked at adding five assets, which we checked the box on. We talked about private equity, which we're checking the box on with LinkTube, but we are currently engaged with a few groups on alternatives such as real estate and debt that can drive some what looks to be pretty attractive yield. And look, with 200,000 accounts and 45,000 active users and two billion, roughly two billion in assets and nearly eight billion or seven and a half billion in transactions, you know, we're starting to become a force, a small force of nature. And we want to listen and iterate quickly based on feedback from those surveys we do with our clients. They're pretty transparent about what they want. And so we're listening and we're looking at launching cash accounts also, so that you can have one dashboard with a qualified custodian as a wrapper, which where assets are held off balance sheet where you can log in and deposit your funds and treat it like a taxable cash account from our transactional platform, all of the liquidity and trading and settlement and qualified custody and institutional cold wallet custody happens with third party providers that are regulated in institutional quality. And we are, again, the software dashboard that allows people to guide their dollars where they want to go. And we want to continue, as I mentioned earlier, remove those barriers, inspire them to participate and make their own decisions. And this is right along with what we've talked about and linked to and the list of names they have, we're happy to be part of that platform. Excellent. All right, Kevin, thank you. And Joe, we'll finish off with you. What do we have as far as future plans? Because we touched a lot, and of course, this is new to us and my subscribers. But where do you see things going in the next year, two, five or so? We're just going to continue growing. We launched this platform back in February of 2020, Rob. And since then, we've achieved close to $260 million in cumulative investment by our members on the platform across 70 plus private tech companies. So we're just going to continue to scale. Our revenues have grown tremendously year on year. We're going to look to do conservatively $60 million or so this year in top line. And we have always been cashflow positive and profitable from the first year we launched. So we've been super lucky in that respect. So it's just a matter of continuing to scale. I'd like to see our international component grow. I know you have many listeners that are overseas and let me emphasize again that we are a global investment platform, meaning regardless of what country in the world you're in, you can participate as long as you comply with your country's securities regulations. And we check that box as part of the onboarding process to make sure that you as an individual are compliant in your home jurisdiction. And once you're set up and onboarded, you're basically it's a click to invest. Very simple, very easy transaction experience. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, stick with what you're good at. And it looks like you're pretty darn good at what you're doing, Joe and Kevin. So gentlemen, thanks for coming on. If you want to find out more information, there is a link in the description looks just like this. And you know what that iTrust is a sponsor of the channel and there are affiliate links here. So if you cannot stand to use affiliate links, you don't have to. You can go right to itrustcapable.com or you go right to link to.com. However, if you do that, give us out on the $500 sign up bonus when you go to link to with the link in the description. And that'll do it for today. So, Gents, I got to say thanks for coming on. This will be a continuing discussion. So I'll have you guys on back again. So I'd like to see, well, of course, Kevin, how things are going with iTrust and what you guys are doing new, but then, Joe, I'd like to see how the things that you guys are investing into, the ripples of the world, how things are moving and moving forward. So that's it for today. Anything else before we take off, Gents? No, thank you, Rob. I appreciate your time and always look forward to the insights and the comments from your viewers. I know you have a lot of options to talk to people. It's great to get in your schedule. And I look forward to the next conversation around innovation and sort of what's next and talk a little bit about the, you know, global and, you know, macroeconomics factors that are affecting and people's sort of sentiment at this time. And we can do a little speculation also. Absolutely. We can do that. And of course, my subscribers will have money, many, many comments. All right. So that's it for today. So everybody, thanks so much for stopping by. Appreciate it. Like this video, thumbs up, subscribe. But that's it for today. Thanks so much for stopping by and we'll see you on the next one.