The Future of Private Markets: Accredited Investors, Blockchain, and Tokenized Assets

Billions were raised “overnight” during the ICO era and it exposed a hard truth: when technology moves faster than securities law, founders and investors both get burned. That collision is where Herwig “Happy” Koenigs built his edge, first by learning the compliance rules that govern private fundraising and then by helping shape what compliant tokenization can look like as finance moves on chain.

We walk through Herwig’s path from the University of Miami Launchpad to co-founding InvestReady, a RegTech platform for accredited investor verification. Along the way, he breaks down what “accredited” actually means, why the SEC designed guardrails for private markets, and how founders can structure early progress without blowing up their burn. You’ll hear how a modest angel raise, tight co-founder alignment, and a deliberately lean “zombie strategy” helped InvestReady survive long enough to expand into KYC, AML, and on-chain identity.

From there, we jump into Bitcoin, Ethereum, smart contracts, and the ICO boom that convinced Herwig tokenization was bigger than a trend. He shares the story of advising one of the early legal security token offerings and then building Security Token Market (STM) with a Bloomberg-style vision for tokenized asset data, research, and community. We also get specific about startup financing mechanics: family office capital, preferred shares, board seats, Series A dynamics, and how timing can matter as much as product.

If you’re building in fintech, blockchain, tokenization, or just trying to raise smart money without losing control, you’ll come away with clearer language, sharper questions, and real founder lessons. Subscribe, share this with a founder friend, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

Connect with Keith on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithkohler1/

Transcript

Financing Man Sets The Stage

Keith Kohler 0:03

Hi everyone, it's Keith Kohler, your financing man here with the latest episode of How I Financed It. And as you all know, I'm all about getting founders the right financing at the right time. That's Transaction Me. And also meeting founders where they are and guiding them along their financing journey. That's transformation me. So transaction and transform plus transformation equals financing man. And today, as you all know, uh a lot of my background is in the consumer space, consumer package goods. However, I also am an investor and have an interest in certain elements of the technology space. And so I'm excited today because we're going to explore that area of my life and that larger ecosystem. And really excited to have someone with me today who is a major player and a major creator of a very important and growing segment of the tech ecosystem. So I can't wait to hear all the elements of this story because it's bound to be a unique one, particularly across all the different episodes we've done of How I Financed It. So would you please help me welcome to the How I Financed It stage, Herwig Koenigs?

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Here he is, Herg is here. Welcome. Glad to be here. Of course. You know, good to see you, Keith.

Keith Kohler 1:28

I'm digging the smile right away. It's like, hey, we both had our coffee. We're ready to go, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:34

I'm happy, like I said. I'm happy to be here.

Keith Kohler 1:37

That's it. And happy isn't indeed even the nickname that you use, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Correct, correct. So for anyone uh who's uh you know pleasure to meet you, you can call me happy herwig. Uh it's nice to meet you. Thanks for having me, Keith.

Keith Kohler 1:49

I have to start with that even before we start with the urgency. How did how did happy come across?

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Uh-huh. That's that's that's what I'm sure we'll touch on in a little bit too. But uh essentially, uh quick answer is I did over uh 300 episodes over six years of a podcast of my own. 300. 300 of them. And I ended each one of them with the with the phrase happy tokenizing, everybody, because I wanted to make this a a you know, not a scary technology, it's not a boring finance thing, it's something fun. And it's and you should have fun with it. So I always said happy tokenizing, and I've always been a very positive and optimistic guy. So I think the the name kind of just stuck.

Keith Kohler 2:27

Well, I can really appreciate that because I think technology and even your sub segment can sometimes feel a little bit overwhelming or hard to understand. So to for you to show up making it, as you said, fun, where probably not a lot of people would ever introduce that term, but at least you can and also accessible, understandable, approachable. Um, I think that's a tremendous asset that you have. And of course, I've known you in that way, and I'm glad that you've adopted it as your own. So I'm really glad to lead off

Why They Call Him Happy

Keith Kohler 3:00

with that. And hey, tell me a bit when you think about your journey starting off in this broader technology space. Can you share with us how that all got started?

SPEAKER_01 3:09

Yeah, you know, actually, hence the the name is a great way to start it. I'm actually not originally from uh America. Uh I am now a proud dual citizen, I will say, but originally was born in Belgium. Uh, and so came to the States very early on. And I like to joke, you know, what if scenario we can never know, but I'm not so sure I would have been an entrepreneur if I had stayed in Belgium, right? You know, culturally very different to start a business over there. Uh and when I came to America, it was celebrated to be an entrepreneur. In fact, it was an American dream, right? Uh, and so I subscribed to that um very much so, and found myself uh, you know, kind of embracing that through what was happening at the time in the United States in the 2000s and 2010s, which was its own sort of uh technical revolution with uh websites, right, and subscription models and apps. Uh and so that's sort of what started my journey was, you know, I kind of fell into the the technology entrepreneurship craze, uh absolutely loved it at a very young age, started working for some uh startups in New York City. I grew up in New Jersey. Uh and so having that experience uh early on, even before college, uh during some summers, uh I was already, you know, I had the bug, if you will, uh, where I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur one day. Uh so coming to the University of Miami, uh, which brought me to my home of Miami, uh, where we uh eventually got to meet Keith, uh, is sort of what cemented that, because they had a program there called the Launchpad, uh, which is essentially entrepreneurship services, right? It's the career services for entrepreneurs, they call it. Because you don't need help making a resume, you need help reading a resume and making the right decisions, right? So uh that you know is what helped me uh start my journey, I would say.

Keith Kohler 5:00

Yeah, I really want to witness that because I think the immigrant story for everybody is a little bit different. And I uh I can understand Belgium, of course, is well known for being the center of European governance and multinational institutions. Um and I imagine that has a big a big impact in the culture and in society, into drawing a lot of people into thinking that's kind of a career path which could make the most sense.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

Yeah, you know, it's there's three levels of government in Belgium. So, you know, if you thought it was bad in the States, you know, just go over to Belgium. Uh but culturally that that is sort of how it is. It's sort of, I think it's a great place to live uh and a great sort of you know, uh welfare and uh, you know, living conditions and and you know uh benefits from the government, but that comes at a price in high taxes and ultimately uh in more of a model where you're part of society as opposed to uh sort of pushing society forward, I think, in many ways. And when it's more celebrated in the arts and sciences than it is the way it here is in the United States to really celebrate success, you know, in whatever way possible, so long as you know it's done the right way. But even sometimes I think in the United States is glorified if you do it the wrong way, right?

Keith Kohler 6:23

But I don't I don't have a bit of all of that mix and so you came to the launchpad. Was launchpad was a defined program at University of Miami? Did you apply for it or do you brand new program?

SPEAKER_01 6:35

Yeah, brand new program. So I think it started in 2008. Uh, and I came to the uh university in 2011, uh, and it was funded by several other entrepreneurs, uh alumni said, hey, we we need a program like this, we want to see something like this. It was a first of its kind. Uh Dr. Susan Amott had approached the the University of Miami with sort of this concept of entrepreneurs need uh a new way to support themselves while they're in college. And we didn't, you know, as a consultant or as someone as a student consultant to help others with their businesses, which is what I did at the launch pad. I didn't tell you, hey, you know, Keith, and by the way, it was open to alumni, so I could have an alumnus.

Keith Kohler 7:20

Oh, I was not just for in students.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Absolutely. It's it's a free service to this day. That if if anyone's listening here that you know happens to be a cane, you know, go canes, uh you know, this is a service you can take advantage of still if you have a business or a business idea. And the concept is simple. We are gonna ask you the right questions. It was the Socratic method of saying, hey, Keith, not go do this, but have you thought about this? Have you thought about your customer? Have you thought about a business plan? Have you thought about how you're gonna finance this? Uh, see what I did there, right? Like these are the questions that you know, people who are first-time entrepreneurs or someone who's an inventor or an engineer or a programmer, right? They may not have you know been thinking about. And we provide the resources and sort of guidance and education and the right thinking, if you will, to help, you know, teach them how to fish, not necessarily, you know, you know, give them the fish.

Keith Kohler 8:18

I think that's an important lesson. First of all, I appreciate what you're saying about Socratic method versus many programs out there kind of can feel top-down, like this is the way to do it, you must do it in my system, etc. And yet I'm glad to see that you felt it was a bit more you outward, encouraging you to think about what's best for you and how you want to show up in the world. And I'm also glad to hear that that program's been going for some time.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

Yeah.

Keith Kohler 8:45

And

Launchpad Lessons And The First Pivot

Keith Kohler 8:46

um, so there you are, right? You're in the middle of Launchpad. What ideas were you considering?

SPEAKER_01 8:52

Yeah, it was uh it was still sort of this, you know, this was 2012 when I had sort of my my first idea to say, I'm gonna try something. It was like a sort of a combination, I think it was a combination of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Like it was like every it was craziness. It was never gonna go anywhere. It was trying to boil the ocean and become the next Zuckerberg, right? Classic sort of starry-eyed thinking. Um, but uh there was a major law that passed, and you know, the program itself was doing great. At this point, probably had helped dozens uh of entrepreneurs or students, right? Sort of coming through the program. In fact, Blackstone had come in and taken the model and expanded it from a sort of charity angle to other universities. And so now I was sort of helping other mentors or guidance, you know, people learn how to do this. Um, so you know, it was hard not to become an entrepreneur, right? I like to joke that the launch pad is as much as it is a service for entrepreneurs, it's also an incubator or a training program for the people that work there because every day they're seeing all kinds of success and failure and different results. Um, and one of the biggest challenges every entrepreneur has, and this is a lot of why we're all watching this show, I'm sure, is fundraising, right? Financing. It's a huge challenge, and it was back then just as it is today. Um, every entrepreneur I see, no matter what they had or what they were working on, that was gonna be one major challenge. If anything, vibe coding and other things make things a lot easier to get started, but there's always cost, right, to business and resources. And so, how are you gonna go raise that money? Ultimately, there was a concept called crowdfunding that had just become popular around the time. Kickstarter.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Right. And it just really started, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Yeah, they they actually kickstarted. Um, you remember the VR headset, the Oculus Rift? Uh, that was a Kickstarter product, a private company doing uh virtual reality goggles, and then Facebook bought them in just two years. Uh, just not no kidding, in two years uh from the Kickstarter campaign for I think it was billions of dollars. And so everybody in that Kickstarter campaign was sort of saying, Hey, uh, all I got was a t-shirt and and the headset, and like you guys just made a ton of money, but I basically funded you guys as an investor. What are we supposed to do uh about this? And this idea of equity crowdfunding came along uh and basically uh had to get legalized, right? This was a law that had to pass called the Jobs Act, and it enabled crowdfunding for businesses. The this was a first in history.

Keith Kohler 11:40

I recall that, and it was an it was it took a while to sort out how does this really all work, right? From a regulatory perspective and um other ways. But it got sorted out, right? And it was a viable option, as you said, for a lot of companies. I noticed that crowdfunding, we just don't hear it as much anymore. It's it's rare to see companies doing it, but you were there at the beginning and you saw its proliferation.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

Yeah, I think people still use it in a creator uh sort of perspective, right? Or fundraising for causes. But I think the world quickly moved on to say, hey, you know, fundraising and financing is done typically through Wall Street, through venture capitalists, through angel investing, through banks, right? And and and personal financing options. So uh this idea of crowdfunding really never took off for businesses, uh, not in the sense that we saw wish something happened a little bit later with tokenization, right? Sort of the main topic of today, I'm sure. But you know, it did start my journey because what happened was a law passed that said, hey, you need to verify investors that participate in these equity crowdfunding deals. And what I was doing at the time was trying to create a, I think it was called Alumvest, I called it. Uh, you know, Alumvest Investing, right? Alum Vest as a platform for any university to enable students or even alumni to put their business or science project up, right? And receive the financing from alumni because they are more likely to want to support their their university back in this way, do good and well at the same time. It's a philosophy I believe in strongly. So uh that was the idea, but I realized I need this super complicated technology that didn't exist, that the mandate the law was putting out. And so I pivoted in the moment very quickly with uh my co-founder Adrian Alvarez for Invest Ready. Uh, he at the time was a lawyer saying, I know how to verify this, I know how we can put this together. And sort of I was saying, you know, I'm a hungry young entrepreneur, like I really want to lead this thing, and we teamed up. Uh, and you know, I'm not a lawyer by practice by any means, but I certainly it taught me the rules, and I had to learn sort of these intricacies or the regulations of fundraising and financing. I wasn't just an entrepreneur, I was like actually like learning the intricacies and the rules, right, of fundraising.

What An Accredited Investor Really Means

Keith Kohler 14:19

When you were doing that, if you can kind of take us back to that time, what did you find interesting? What did you not like? What were some of your do you recall how you were feeling and thinking about fundraising and financing at that time?

SPEAKER_01 14:32

Yeah, I mean, it was definitely daunting. Again, I think I was fueled by a lot of, you know, dreams and ambitions that that help you and passion is key for everything you do, right? Um, but at the same time, again, as I mentioned, this is sort of a what we would call reg tech regulation technology, right? So being a young guy, not even out of college, leading a regtech business can be daunting, right? I gotta work and try to get investors or partners or clients, right, and sell them on this legal technology. And here's this young guy, you know, sort of selling this stuff. So we have to lean on Adrian and you know, really lean on the technology itself to show you that we had a great product uh that you know fit that solution to that problem of verifying investors, qualifying that they say who they are and that they meet a certain threshold, accredited investors. If people are familiar with the term already, right? That's what InvestReady does, making sure they are accredited.

Keith Kohler 15:32

Yeah, actually, can you help us again define that a little bit more specifically, accredited? Because a lot of people hear the term and may be confused about it, even if they read about it online.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

As I as I mentioned, right? Entrepreneurs, they kind of go off and they get they raise some money and maybe they they they keep going and focusing on their business. For me, I had to go in and learn all of these rules around fundraising. And one of those key terms is accredited investor. So um, unlike the public markets, where anybody can go and buy a stock because they're regulated and are on public exchanges, right? They're public securities. When we're dealing with private businesses, not everybody can just buy shares in the business. Um in fact, the essentially the rule is only accredited investors outside the institutions and the banks, which are all considered accredited, individuals that are qualified to just invest in a private business without restriction, are known as accredited investors. They make $200,000 a year in income for at least two years, or they have a million dollar net worth, uh, which doesn't include their house, their primary residence. So you can't be like up a million dollars on your house and call yourself accredited. Um, you really need to have the assets that the SEC essentially, which by the way, was created in the 1930s, okay, when they came up with these rules. So let's give them a chance about how archaic they might be. Right. Basically said, look, private businesses are risky. We don't, you know, the SEC's job is to protect grandma and to protect average citizens, right, from financial harm. That's why we're considered one of the best capital markets in the world because we're the safest and the most secure to operate in. And one of the things the SEC said was look, we're just gonna eliminate that risk for most people and say you can't invest in private businesses unless you're accredited. And basically, if you're rich enough, that's really what their mentality was. The logic was if you can afford to take the loss of the investment, then you should be allowed to make the investment, right? And so that's where this kind of term of accredited investors to this day, you know, mostly refer to now known as angels, right? Or VCs uh that are really the ones making the investments in the businesses. You can raise money from friends and family, right? There are some rules that you can as a tricky, but in sort of a big way, you can't just go today and say, hey, I'm raising money for my business, put money in in anyone you want, unless you use a new rule that they came out with from this crowdfunding thing I was talking about. But up until 2012, no one could go out and say, Hey, I'm raising money for my private business, you know, and that's that's a huge change, that's a huge shift.

Keith Kohler 18:26

Yeah, it's really quite something when you think about that. A lot of these securities laws were made in the 1930s, of course, coming out of the 1929 stock market crash.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

Yep.

Keith Kohler 18:36

Um, I know probably a lot of people in the larger universe would say it's the best thing that ever happened to the US and it's the worst thing. That hey, regulation is great that we have it sometimes that you love it and you can lean into it, and other times, oh, that's horrible. It's too restrictive. And it's a dance, right? And yet I think, as you said, overall, I think most people would agree it's good to have those guardrails. Because as you said, um the grandma is the typical thing, right? Is the the old metaphor that we use that hey, you ask her and she doesn't know just because she doesn't know, and she winds up giving someone money to buy the Brooklyn Bridge, right? It's kind of that whole idea. So so here you were doing that business, right?

Building InvestReady On A Lean Budget

Keith Kohler 19:25

And how did you finance it in the beginning?

SPEAKER_01 19:28

So now we actually I had three other co-founders, so this was already you know a big, big, you know, larger than normal, you know, co-founder size. And in fact, it was all folks from the University of Miami, so we were sort of all able to not have to go full-time. I was a student, they all had jobs, so we didn't need a uh amount where salaries and operational costs.

Keith Kohler 19:53

And that's such a big thing. That's that's like I can't emphasize that enough. If people have a big SGNA or salary burden, selling general and administrative, it's such it puts you behind the eight ball right from the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

I think there is some people who have the mentality that you have to quit and your job and do things full time in order, like that's in my opinion, not true. No, it's just not better off, right? Doing the business on the side while you keep your your form of income and and understand how to keep the costs as low as possible to make the business a success. Yeah, sorry, yeah.

Keith Kohler 20:31

No, so for co-founders, I and I want to explore that just for a minute. Um, I think one of the things I've been focused on as a theme, and it really came top of mind for me after the pandemic, is the theme of alignment. And I'm wondering, when you first got together, did you get to a good level of alignment early on about hey, this is how we want to establish and grow the business?

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Yeah. Kind of you did wasn't. In fact, I mentioned this guy, Adrian. You know, he's sort of the main co-founder because he was the both the law degree that we needed to, you know, as the license to sort of certify investors, which is critical as you could think of as part of this business. But also, you know, he was the sort of the original guy while I came in. And then we needed a technical guy. So we brought in our technical guy. Um, and finally we had another guy who said, I really believe in this mission. I want to invest in this and be a part of it and help where I can, sweat equity-wise, right? Um, and so uh essentially we were able to first have a good split between me and Adrian and comfortable about what his role is and what my role is as CEO, right? Sort of uh what I wanted. And then we brought in our technical guy who understood the industry standards, right? This wasn't a we're gonna split everything equally and get everything complicated. We were all professionals, all involved with the launch pad. We all knew the challenge. Challenges of operating and co-founding challenges, right? Co-founder challenges around splits and equity and these things. For him, it was easy to join and get his share as a technical co-founder. And then finally the investor came in and as a fourth co-founder, sort of set the price for putting in a little bit of money. Where we, I think we were talking like, I don't know, it was like uh two, two thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars, you know. And I think he came back after the negotiation and said, I would have done more, or I would have done a higher valuation. It was like, you know, it's just so funny, right? And I was like, okay, now we got the four of us, but we were able to get in, this was critical, we were able to launch a minimum viable product, right? An MVP between the four of us without needing those salaries, having sort of the four of us uh with our um competencies spread out, right? Not overlapping, and then finally having just a little bit of that cash that you need, because you just really can't do anything for free these days, right? So having that little bit of buffer from uh Will was his name, uh, you know, helped us critically to get to that stage where we're like, okay, now if we want to take this thing to the next level, we need to raise money. And so I went on the road and I started to talk to every possible investor I could find in Miami, which by the way, especially back then, was very difficult. Not a lot of investors in Miami, not a lot of tech investors in Miami. And I, you know, I couldn't just fly to San Francisco and take off class uh and go raise money, right? So I ended up raising money through angels, uh, including a legal tech group of lawyers, lawyers that came together that said, hey, we want to invest in some reg tech type businesses. And we were one of them. And we ultimately raised a little over $100,000 from pretty much local angels uh and grew the business with that.

Keith Kohler 23:59

Yeah, I really want to emphasize and relate to our viewers and listeners that was a big deal at that time. Again, as you said, Miami was not anywhere near the ecosystem that it is today in technology or in fact any space at all. And so I think you would agree that getting $100,000 at that time was a real standout accomplishment.

SPEAKER_01 24:22

It was huge. It was massive raising any level of money for an entrepreneur, I think, is a huge accomplishment. That first check-in really is the hardest, no doubt about it. Um, so you know, once we got that in, we were able to kind of keep going.

Keith Kohler 24:37

How did that hundred thousand dollars help you? How how far did it take you?

SPEAKER_01 24:42

It it you know it lasted because we recognized um that in our industry, we were very early, right? We were making a bet that all of finance is gonna shift online. Um, and so we knew we got to say, again, leaning back on the fact that we didn't need salaries, I was still in college, right? We were basically using that towards marketing and tech, right? And that, you know, most people should put money raised outside of getting their product and and operations down towards marketing, right? Getting the word out, getting customer. Um, so we did what we could with that with that. But when we realized that it was gonna be a challenge to continue to raise money, we even had competitors a few years later from when we started shut down. Um, and it was because we enabled the what we call the zombie strategy, which is you can't kill us. We're gonna be low-cost leaders, provide the software solution to the market, and make sure that no one undercuts us and make sure that we can basically run the business in a way that will never put us at risk of having to shut down. Now, obviously, there's been many cases where that almost did happen and we avoided it. But at the end of the day, it is what allowed us to sort of do a very lean, really lean approach to making that business work. And again, the ingredients were we didn't need to have all four of us full-time. And I was very much sort of, you know, living off the safety net of college and believing in after college of eat what you kill, right? So not not very many pretty months, and ramen profitability, as they call it, is all you need to afford ramen.

Keith Kohler 26:26

Building on that, Herwig, how did it then grow from there and where is it today?

SPEAKER_01 26:32

Uh so today we are now uh we started in in 20 uh 13. So we are now basically approaching our uh 13th year in this. So pretty amazing. I don't know, you know. I guess it's accomplishment, I think, to say if you have kept the business going for over 10 years. The zombie strategy is working. We now have verified, I think it's well over a hundred thousand accredited investors for the space, right? Uh we've we've done business with dozens and dozens of customers, well over a hundred if you count individual entrepreneurs that use our service, but we have exchanges, crowdfunding platforms, right? All these different types of use cases and financial services applications that are leveraging our technology. We've expanded beyond our core service to more regtech related, you know, uh adjacent services, background checks, KYC AML checks, on-chain identity using the blockchain to basically create credentials on-chain for folks, for investors. That's uh, you know, that's where we've grown to today. We have we we didn't take on more money, but we did have a successful secondary, partial secondary exit, right? So when we brought in a new shareholder, we sold. We didn't we didn't raise money with it, partial sale for the founders. Um, we've acquired companies. So we actually have acquired another company uh since then. Uh so all of it's going extremely well. Uh and you know, we've even been entertaining acquisition offers of our own. Uh, and part of it is is uh the founders coming together and saying, what do we want to do with this business right now? Um, because we have something that you know is is in good shape. Uh we could either apply it to grow, or uh as many people like to use the term lifestyle business, right? Instead of pitching investors that we're gonna go out and make this a hundred million or a five hundred million dollar business, which is not easy no matter what you're doing, right? We could keep things easy for ourselves, right? And maybe we're happy with a $50 million business, right? And growing into that. So these are some of the key questions we're gonna have to ask. Uh, or do we sell today, right? For what we've for the right price for for what we've been able to create as a business.

Keith Kohler 28:52

So amazingly, it was just that $100,000 raise.

SPEAKER_01 28:56

That's it. That's what that and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.

Keith Kohler 29:01

You know, it's a great story, Kerwig. And again, yes, for the benefit of our audience, I know there's a second part here, which is why I rushed through this initial part a little bit with Invest Ready. Because um, and I didn't know that story fully, but I'm glad we put it out there. Uh, because I think it's an interesting lesson of okay, you had alignment from the beginning, you had four people with different skill sets, and you everybody recognized what their contribution was. Um, you achieved a raise in a NASA market where probably very few others got that, and you made it work for you. And again, happily the benefit of keep keeping your expenses low is low allowed you to be where you are today and just again continue to fund the company from income from operations. And then so let's get to what's next, Herwig, right? But InvestReady wasn't just enough for you. What else what else came after that?

Bitcoin To ICO Mania And A Compliance Wake-Up

SPEAKER_01 29:59

In fact, in another world, I might still just be CEO of that company and and who knows where where Invest Ready would be. But I actually had to step down as CEO uh at one point because uh I got excited about something else that what I saw was even bigger than what we were doing at InvestReady, um, but also uh very complementary uh to what I was doing at Invest Ready, right? So it wasn't like I was leaving my co-founders and they were all like, okay, go go pursue your dreams, bye, you know, after I think it was six six years at the helm. Um, but it was also, hey, uh, if this is successful, this could be very good for InvestReady as well, right? Uh, in terms of sending customers back and in terms of partnerships, uh, aligned potential investors, etc. So um what happened was during college, I learned a little a thing about a little uh asset called Bitcoin, which had only just launched, you know, a few years prior to that, um, and wasn't really being used or being taken very seriously at all. Um, but uh there were, you know, being in tech, especially back then in Miami, the tech circles were very small. We'd like to joke, you could know all people on your fingers, right?

Keith Kohler 31:23

Brian Breslin was one of those.

SPEAKER_01 31:24

Brian Breslin was one of those 10. Yeah.

Keith Kohler 31:28

Way back in the day, and thinking, wow, this guy has something. I don't know what it is, but I know he has something. And I was astonished at what he achieved in creating community really quickly.

SPEAKER_01 31:37

Yes, he he is the he was he was the community organizer, the only real community organizer. There were some other small events and there were startups and and cool things going on. One of my favorites was Waffle Wednesdays by Live Ninja, but it was a super small scene, right? Super small scene.

Keith Kohler 31:55

Umky energy to it, right? Because it was passion.

SPEAKER_01 32:01

It was all driven by passion and collaboration because we all recognized if we're gonna succeed as Miami or as entrepreneurs, we need to work together because we don't have what Silicon Valley has. And maybe most people don't really look at the grip that Silicon Valley has today because you can have successful startups in Miami, in New York City, all over the world today, right? But back then, especially to be a tech entrepreneur, there was an immense pressure to move to San Francisco and raise money from venture capitalists in San Francisco. So the fact that, you know, I got to stay a Miami company was huge. Um, and obviously being able to raise outside of that ecosystem was huge. Uh, and Bitcoin was born out of one of these philosophies we talked about earlier about credit investors and loss coming out of the crash in 1929. Well, there was another crash in 2008, wasn't there? Um so that is what led to Bitcoin being created. Um, and Bitcoin was slowly starting to bubble up to the point where people were recognizing the technology. And uh something uh two two things came about. One was called Ethereum, but the idea of a Bitcoin chain, like a blockchain, the idea that you don't need to rely on one token, but that you can create your own token on a blockchain. They called it um smart contracts, which is basically a fancy way of saying code, if-then statements that you can program into the blockchain, which is just a ledger, right? That's a it's a spreadsheet. It is a ledger, it's a you know, it's all we're using it for. And in this case, the Bitcoin ledger is one that everybody around the world has access to, and you would need more uh power or electricity than China has in order to basically corrupt and change the network. So, what everyone agrees is that this is the most trusted ledger in the world. Whether we agree on the asset and Bitcoin, this is not a Bitcoin. Right? It's it's it's a value. But what we all can agree on is that, right? That it is a secure ledger that has never changed. And so this concept of, well, a secure ledger backing an asset that people are paying for, well, that that sounds pretty interesting for finance, right, as a whole, for what they call stable coins or for money. Why do we need to have money physically when we have it digitally in our bank accounts? There's now the concept of having money that the world can recognize, right? Not just through some server or through some company or bank saying it, but through the same universal ledger system that we can all trust that money, even if it's not Bitcoin, but American dollar back money or something else. And then there's that concept that applied to everything and beyond. People were saying blockchain is gonna be the next wave of the internet, right? Because you can use this for supply chain, you can lose this for use this for gaming, you can use this for all sorts of innovations. We saw them in the form of meme coins or NFTs, but one of the ones that was the most amazing to me, that that was what took me on my journey, were called ICOs, initial coin offerings. And and the idea was simple. I can make my own Bitcoin, I can make my own token, and I can build something behind it. And anybody around the world can basically give me Bitcoin or Ethereum, uh a digital asset, and immediately without a bank, without finance or money or anything else, instantly essentially, you can make the swap happen. So if I had my Ethereum and Keith made a Keith coin, I could be like, bro, here's some Ethereum, give me a million Keith coin. And then we're all gonna go and we're all gonna tell the world about Keith coin, right? And hopefully everybody starts buying Keith coin. And that's what happened during the ICO era. People raised, I'm not kidding, billions of dollars. I'm not kidding again, overnight for certain projects that were hyped up, that were marketed correctly, and that had the network effects, that literally had people scrambling on their phones saying, I want to get in, I want to get in, I want to get in, uh, and and put and just threw money at projects, right? It was incredible. Anyone looking at it saying, hey, there are now hundreds of billions of dollars being raised potentially through these ICOs. This is a big deal because we have something called financial markets and financial rules protecting grandma, like we talked about earlier. Where we want to make sure anybody that's pitching these financial opportunities, which is what most of them truly were, they weren't authentic Bitcoin type projects that weren't necessarily trying to skirt the law. Uh, and in this case, the SEC went after a bunch of these projects, if anyone remembers, saying this was illegal, you can't do this. And my training from InvestReady was already going off as alarm bells back in 2016, saying, hey, this stuff is not gonna last. It it kept growing into 2017 and 2018. So in 2017, I found myself in the situation of I'm a compliance guy, I am very active in the Miami tech scene, and I happen to enjoy and participate in this ICO technology. So the stars simply aligned, Keith, because when you put three and three together or there, you know, you get tokenization. You get the idea of you can use blockchain to create tokens that represent real assets like shares in your business or a line of credit or equity or any other commodities, other assets, money, you name it. Um, and that's that's what what you know brought me down into my next act, as you call it, my second act.

Keith Kohler 38:08

Yeah,

The First Legal Token Offering Breakthrough

Keith Kohler 38:09

and that was the birth of STM, right?

SPEAKER_01 38:12

That's right. So uh right around 2017, before STM, security token market, security tokens is what we called these things because securities, the term for assets or equities and financial instruments that the SEC, the securities and exchange uh enforcement, uh, you know, the SE uh so for that, we we said, okay, we're not utility tokens, we're security tokens, we're not ICOs, we're STOs. And I had to go and preach to people in the market to say, hey, forget this ICO stuff. People did not like hearing that it was illegal, and people didn't like the idea that you had to go through a lot more hoops in order to pursue this. But at the end of the day, I made a bet very early on that this was the future of finance, and so I had to find someone that would be willing to test it, right? And so there was uh an entrepreneur in Miami by the name of Brian Drakeen, who had a facial recognition uh technology that wanted to do an ICO. I convinced him he had actually found me out related to what was going on with this stuff, and I had convinced him to not pursue an ICO, pursue it the legal way. Uh let me advise you, right? Let me find you some lawyers that I know in the space that are helping with this stuff, because not many were, right? Let me help you find a technology shop that can help you put together your token because it's not that easy, even if it is today, right? Especially back then. And then last but not least, you need my technology, my compliance expertise, right, and my sort of ICO experience to help you make sure that you bring on investors correctly, right, and do this the right way, as one of the first ever token offerings in history to be legal and backed by equity in a business, in a private business specifically. Right. And so I did. You know, they they did it, they raised $12 million in two weeks because ICOs were still going crazy, and this was super novel, right? And that was when the alarm bell or the the ring, the ringing in my head went off. Yeah, the light bulb moment to say, okay, you know, as cool, as cool as compliance is, and how that is infrastructure, right? As we like to say, picks and shovels to what is happening with on-chain or digital finance. This to me was okay, this is sort of like the internet coming to capital markets, right? The internet coming to finance. How can I position myself uh to be in front of that? And I started after I was advising a few companies on the consulting side. I met Kyle Sondland, who is also a University of Miami uh student at the time, and then uh graduated very shortly after, and also working at the launch pad. So it was like, oh my God, this is amazing! Here's a local guy who knows how to help entrepreneurs, who's also passionate about uh this technology. Uh, and we created STM, which again, security token market, the market component really stood for kind of like Bloomberg, like being a tracker to say, hey, come to STM. We're gonna tell you about the market. We're gonna tell you what tokens are or what assets have been tokenized, where they're trading, what price is it, right? What did it trade at yesterday? How much was it traded at? What blockchain is it on? What rights and other things do you want to get? What news is related to? We ended up doing podcasts, as I mentioned earlier. We started a conference in 2023. We had news uh letters and research reports, you name it.

Keith Kohler 42:01

I mean it's really quite an arc when you think about it, right? And it's so when you started that again, was it a similar formation experience like you had with InvestReady with co-founders and putting partnership agreements together? And tell us a bit about what was your initial raise and go to market to launch it.

STM Funding Terms Preferred Shares And Leads

SPEAKER_01 42:22

That one was really interesting because I had initially started with the consulting business. Um, and Kyle was sort of in the picture, but with the consulting business, I had started with two other uh partners, uh, one of which actually ended up uh as because we all sort of put some money in. And in fact, this person was not in Miami, so they had to fly to Miami a lot. Uh, needless to say, long story short, they took advantage of not having proper controls in place, putting too much trust in a in a person that I didn't really know all too well, and they took advantage of that. They ended up using a lot of the money for personal expenses, right? And they abused uh it to the point to be staying and you know, going to nice restaurants and spending company money on things that would never be considered truly, you know, uh useful for a startup specifically. Um, so you know, obviously with that partner things were not going to work out and had to go through the difficult uh challenge of removing that that individual from the business, which is never easy when you have signed agreements and set up an entity and things like that. But we pushed through that. Um and the other individual that I started the company with, Mario, he was still very excited. And Kyle was sort of like perfectly entering the picture to replace this sort of other guy. But we were meanwhile talking to an investor, a local family office. Um, they wanted Mario and I actually to launch a fund uh and invest their money into other tokens. And I had no interest in taking on that sort of. And responsibility. I did not feel that, like, you know, from my perspective, everybody makes money in a fad, like ICOs or what happens in crypto. There, it takes really special skill to be able to differentiate yourself and not get caught up and you know, lose when everybody else loses too. Let's just put it that way, right? So I'm an entrepreneur. I really wanted to make sure how can we take advantage of what we know is happening, which is finance is going to take advantage of this technology. So we kept the consulting business, but we had sold the investor on Bloomberg, you know, is a huge opportunity, right?

Keith Kohler 44:38

Bloomberg marketplace, kind of right.

SPEAKER_01 44:40

Yeah. Like it's a it's I think Bloomberg is like the top 10 richest people in the world. It's one of the most powerful companies, uh, private companies on Wall Street today. Uh, right. And so the idea that they are sort of a media outlet, a data source, right, through their Bloomberg terminal, a lot of that lined up with us of you know, if if all everything's coming on chain, we just basically are gonna build a bigger Bloomberg. Uh so what could go wrong, right? Um, and so that investor gave us a million dollars, actually, to say, hey, um, we're we're gonna invest in you, we're gonna go out and do this. That's when we brought Kyle on as the CEO of Security Token Market because we saw his vision and commitment to sort of that project. And meanwhile, I was very busy doing a lot of the consulting, right? The consulting was leaning on my compliance experience, on my experience that I had with the previous offerings, right? Kyle was sort of coming in to this picture differently, so it was perfect. Um, from there, you know, uh, we ended up uh, I think this was 2018, right? Uh, by the time 2021 came along, which by the way, we had to survive COVID just like everybody else. It wasn't a, hey, things are going great. You remember when I mentioned about how nobody loved the idea of what we were pitching them because there was a much more interesting alternative like ICOs about? That was very much so the case all the way up until you know, even 2021, or even arguably up until today, right? Only recently has this technology truly have sort of product market fit or mature to that point. It was ICOs, it was NFTs, it was DeFi and yields coins and these other, you know, yield chasing. There were a lot of fads, meme coins, and everything else that have taken over crypto. All while this technology has been silently sort of developing in the background because there have been a lot of builders behind the scenes who knew, just like I did, that this is going to replace Rails for Finance. This is going to replace fundraising, it's going to replace markets, it's going to change everything. Um, and so uh today is really when we're seeing a lot of that. But I say 2021 as the next sort of milestone because that's when we raised uh another venture round. So we raised a Series A at that point, and we did manage to raise 3 million uh in financing that time. We actually were hoping to raise more. We wanted to raise 7 million. To this day, it still probably would have been the right number uh to help us get grow even further to our aspirations. Um, but um, you know, market conditions. As I mentioned earlier, there was there was a bear market that entered in 21, 22. Uh, and the fact that what we were preaching back then still wasn't that hot, that sexy, you know, is is what you would say in in that kind of terms. We still had a challenge raising that money, but certainly it's no small sum. Um and we got right to putting it to work uh to try and and grow things to the next level. Like I mentioned, we ended up launching a conference, uh, we ended up growing the team. At one point, we had over 20 people. Um, and at one point we wanted to shrink that back down, right? Um, just because uh that's that's timing in the market is truly everything. Um that's a huge part on the execution, is you know, the the a lot of times for what we were doing, even starting back in 2018, could be seen as you know, done early or too early. But uh fortunately, uh we did have a lot of success with the business and we did actually manage to sell it. Um, so that is uh the the cool spending to that story.

Keith Kohler 48:32

Yeah, so Hurric, I think what's interesting uh about what you said about STM and its journey is multifaceted. Again, you this was second act, so you were well informed versus your first act, and yet I think it's a it's a remarkable streak, I think, in two settings to have that level of alignment, the right people show up, um, a good and a good thesis, but still in both cases, you were pioneers, you were people doing new things in the market that were not perhaps well understood, or some people didn't quite grasp the concepts, and yet you still succeeded. Both and now in STM with the family office with a million and then the round for three million. Could you briefly educate our audience on what were the instruments you used to do that and what were kind of the key terms that were a part of that?

SPEAKER_01 49:27

Yeah, there's definitely um, you know, uh a lot of different ways you can raise capital, right? In this case, uh the first round, the seed investor that came in just as a single individual, right? Talk about a best case scenario leading essentially around, right? Um, and not to mention, by the way, I'll I'll offer this extra tidbit, a family office. And it is worth clarifying and understanding the distinction between a venture capitalist and an angel or a family office. A venture capitalist is investing someone else's money, they have a reputation, a track record, a target and performance returns they are trying to hit, regardless of your personal plans, right? That's a very important thing to keep in mind because that's how some founders have found themselves selling too early, being dragged along into situations they didn't agree with, or even being removed from their own company, right? So VCs want those controls and see those controls. Angels and family offices can't speak for them all, right? Especially since many of them are essentially becoming their own VCs now because they recognize the value of the asset class. But many of them are much more laxed in terms of how they approach uh their investing as well as uh their management of their investments, right? Uh it makes them somewhat easier to work with. And when it comes to startups, a toxic angel investor or a toxic investor of any kind in itself is too much of a cost and a waste of time for the entrepreneur to be dealing with and should be avoided at all costs, right? So, in my opinion, uh we we hit the magic situation and we got a fantastic family office investor ready to give us the full amount. And most importantly, they just believed in us, right? They believe in me, what what with not just a vision, but our ability and capacity to execute it, and no matter what, right? And because they also recognize this was this was early, this was a bet, right? This is uh, you know, on trends, this is always a bet. Um, so you know, having the passion to make sure that you keep going is another big thing that I think investors look for. And so I think that was the easy situation of okay, we have a lot of alignment there. Uh, the investor wanted um essentially the same share rights, actually preferred rights instead of common. So we would have been or are lower essentially as founders from this investor. So on the flip side, right, this is sort of one of those more advanced lessons of make sure you recognize what rights and controls come with those preferred shares, what they convert to into common, going back to important decisions, because what this family office did very cleverly, right, is make sure they had a lot of controls as a result of their preferred shares. And they also wanted a uh a board seat, right? Um, but that that sort of came as part of also when we sort of set everything up more professionally, when we went down into the next round, because in the next round, with more money, we needed to bring in venture capitalists, right? These are the folks that are now much more prepared and ready to give you the check size you need when you're beyond the pre-seed and seed stage, where you know, some rich folks that you find might be able to give you what you need, or in combination, a syndicate versus when you need to try to raise, like we were trying to do, seven million bucks, right? You want people that are on average giving out between one to three million bucks. Um and that that means the amount of people you can talk to shrinks dramatically in terms of who's interested in what you're doing and has the capacity, or what they call the dry powder, the actual money sitting in their bank accounts to be able to invest into you. Um, so that was a little bit uh different as well because we knew we had to find a lead investor there. And in many cases, you find a lead investor, they also can get some preferred uh rights or uh some preferred shares. So we were actually working on a fund that actually never materialized, but they had a rofer, a right of first refusal on that fund. They were gonna have some economics on that. Uh so there was sort of using the fact that we can come up with a special deal, right, for this person who's gonna give us the most money, and the person who's given us the money first. It's a big deal for someone committing that money. Um, you want to kind of give them the extra incentives that they need. Everybody else sort of followed on, right, with the fact that, okay, there's a big investor now. Uh there are some more strategic investors. We managed to get a big blockchain's venture capital fund to invest in us. We had another big wallet company invest in us in the blockchain space. We had sort of that big VC that we brought in, but then the rest of it was back to what I knew best, Keith, which was you know, rolling in a lot of angels, getting a lot of small checks to make it happen. In fact, the first check we got in the Series A was not actually a venture capitalist. It was an angel investor putting up 100,000, helping me set the terms, helping me give that confidence to any other investors that somebody is already participating and that we could go and raise this full round. Um, so sometimes you gotta, as they like to say, build the airplane on the runway as you're taking off, right? And kind of make the stars align for you to be able to sort of get everyone to come together and say, let's do this thing. Um, and so that took well over, um, you know, I don't think we announced it until 2022. And it basically took well over a year and a half until we sort of we're gonna close on the final three and and keep going. Some of it was already closed on, right? So it was just sort of do we want to keep trying to raise money on what we were hoping to raise, or should we just say, let's take what we got from who who we've gotten it from, the market was where it was at, let's close it up and and focus uh until the next round, right? So that is where we ended up.

Keith Kohler 55:51

Um uh, you know, that was all you needed to get to grow the business until you decided, hey, we're gonna sell this.

Selling STM As Tokenization Hits Product-Market Fit

SPEAKER_01 55:59

That's right. So, right up until last year, um, and in fact, Kyle in 2023, the other co-founder I mentioned, he actually left and uh started another business in the blockchain. Remember how I kind of mentioned for my first business, I went and I saw an opportunity, similar kind of opportunity for Kyle. Um, and realistically, we, you know, around 2025, uh, where we were in the market, I mentioned earlier as well that finally this industry has reached product market fit. What do I mean by that? There are multiple tokenization companies that have now reached a unicorn status, a billion-dollar valuation for what the business that they've built in tokenization. Some of them have even gone public. You may have even heard of some of these names, like Circle, the very popular USDC stablecoin provider, right? These are real businesses that have created meaningful amount of value and tons of riches, right, for their investors, right? And very useful solutions for the market. And we are now talking at, I think it's over 30 billion in actively tokenized assets. We're talking about basically every major asset class, from money to treasuries to bonds to now public equities. Robinhood is is already offering tokenized public equities in Europe right now. Oh, wow. So the gold commodities uh are being tokenized, uh, private credit is being tokenized, real estate is being tokenized, and of course, private businesses, like the very first one that I advised, are also still actively being tokenized. But funds are also being tokenized. Banks, thanks to the Genius Act, a new piece of legislation. So another big one, like legally, something major passed to help solidify this industry and sort of make things legit. To now we have BlackRock, we have JP Morgan, we have all the largest banks and asset managers in the world basically endorsing and admitting that this is gonna be the future of finance. And so at that moment last year, we had to make a big decision of do we want to keep raising money? Because we are now actually going to compete with Bloomberg. Not the idea of becoming we're gonna actually compete with them, we're gonna compete with other providers like SMP and data service providers from the crypto space. And we even had competition that was already, you know, knocking on our doors and making it clear that this is gonna be a very serious um commitment. And so, as a as a board, uh we decided, you know what, let's also explore what it looks like to sell. And we ultimately found a buyer that's uh what's called an Oracle provider. They basically verify data for the on-chain world. And in this sense, a critical piece of infrastructure for the oncoming wave of trillions of assets coming on-chain, needing this solution. So we said, perfect, they need a conference. We have a conference, we've got millions of data points on billions of transactions, you know, billion dollars is worth of transactions in the space, right? A lot of alignment that said, you know what, they're already doing fantastic. This company called Redstone. Why don't we uh end up working with them? And we actually ended up, you know, announcing a sale. We're actually still in an earnout right now. Um, so you know, nothing's done until it's done, right, Keith? Uh for fundraising until money's in the bank, for a sale or an exit until the earnout is complete. But at the end of the day, um, you know, we were all very happy about the outcome and the opportunity. Uh, and there is more upside. We actually do still have our consulting company. Uh, and I actually have already started to put the pieces in place for my next project, which uh Security Token Group, the parent company behind STM, also has exposure to. Um, so in a way of sorts, even my next act, my current investors are also already going to see a piece of it on top of the existing consulting business and the fact that we had a successful exit uh with STM, the data and media business that we had built.

Keith Kohler 1:00:18

Okay, so as I reflect upon what you told me, I think of Shakespeare a little bit. You've had act one, act two, act three is coming up. I don't know how many acts they're going to be, but I know they're going to be fruitful. And I really admire you, Herwig, because not only as being a pioneer, um, but your boldness about being out there evangelizing, I think is an appropriate word for you in an industry that you knew had something, and you played the long game and through these iterations, fine. It might not have been a unicorn yet. And yet I think you're building towards that because of all the accumulated knowledge, relationships, etc. And I really admire also the maturity of the decisions you made in that hey, this isn't working out, or no, maybe I'm better over here, and Kyle's better over here. And I'm sorry you went through that issue with the one partner who didn't act well. And yet that's a thing, and we've seen it, and it seems like you've just handled what needed to be handled, and you recognized the writing on the wall, and you did it. You acted, you didn't hide under a rock. Um, and I just really admire that part about you. And also, I'm a big fan of thought leadership and creation and innovation. And you've written a book on this area, um, which is important and everyone should get it. What's it called again?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:44

Blockchain explained, your ultimate guide to the tokenization of finance.

Keith Kohler 1:01:48

Everyone must get that. Uh, I wish I were a little bit like Oprah and said, and everyone in the audience gets a book. I don't have that right now, but that'll happen soon, perhaps. And you know, Herwit, thank you so much uh really for sharing your journey. And I know there's more of it, and perhaps we'll do a second act ourselves sometime on this.

Pride Timing Advice And How To Connect

Keith Kohler 1:02:06

Yeah, I'd love to. And yet, um, as we conclude this time together for how I finance you, there's two questions I always use at the end, and I'd love to get your brief thoughts on that to wind us down. And the first one is what are you most proud of?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:20

Okay, well, I think uh that's an easy one. I am definitely most proud of everyone that I've had a chance of working with, right? Because I myself already am, I guess, proud, but also just happy, if you will, that I get to do what I do every day, right? And pursue my passions and dreams. It's the folks that sign up and say, hey, I want to work with you and pursue those passions and dreams and put in the same level of effort. Like that's who I'm most proud of because those are the people that deserve the praise just as much as I get to be on here saying, hey, look at all the cool things that we've done at the end of the day. Uh but of course I could be extremely proud of the fact that, you know, we've managed to raise capital, venture capital money again. That's a challenge that many entrepreneurs uh face. And, you know, just succeeding in that is everyone deserves praise, you know, to and a pat on the back. Um and I guess I'm probably also most proud of the impact uh that I think cumulatively the businesses are making. And that that can be both in a doing good and a well set, right? In a good of entrepreneurs are pursuing their dreams and using my tools to help make that happen in some form of a manner, right? And that's awesome to see. And that might even be leading to job formation, to improvements in the economy, to actually people being better off from a wellness perspective. That also gets me really, really excited about what this technology and what I'm doing and who I get to work with on that uh is. And that's what tokenization is all about. If you will, as a sort of foreshadowing to my next act, that is my entire goal, is to you know, impact the world by connecting the world to this technology uh and hopefully having everyone be better off as a result of it.

Keith Kohler 1:04:15

And in fact, providing more access, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:18

Correct. It's you know, cheesily said as banking the world's unbanked, but that is what tokenization is doing. Anyone with a phone is going to be able to start tapping into financial services that were typically entirely restricted based on geography, based on net worth, even as we talked about earlier, right? Or simply because you didn't know about it, right? Access, like you're saying that hey, now that this opportunity can be put in your wallet, that you can find it over an app or a website, that just was never possible before. Uh, and I'm excited to see what the world looks like when everybody is connected in that way. And you'll be creating that world, which is I hope to be helping part of creating that. I definitely won't be responsible for it. This is a movement that's going to take thousands, if not millions, of entrepreneurs to help shape what truly is the future of finance, right? That's what I'm so excited about about it every day. It's hard not to when you're talking about literally you know almost every part of the world uh being impacted here.

Keith Kohler 1:05:24

Thank you for that. And our last final question What would Herwig today tell Herwig when he was first starting out?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:34

Always chin up, stay positive. Uh, I don't think that would change, uh, you know, so but uh I think for sure, recognize timing. Um at the end of the day, uh, I think I've probably suffered and persevered through more pain than necessary. Uh that, you know, sometimes I have a stubborn conviction that you as uh you know, thank you. One of our investors in the Series A, Keith. You know, you well know that, you know, I don't give up easily. And so sometimes that is a great strength, but it can also be a weakness in recognizing when there could be better opportunities ahead. And one of those examples might be that uh even you know, with the sale today, right, we could have maybe done that sooner as an example, right? Or uh the idea that I'm not being too stubborn to say, let's go make a billion dollar company and potentially risk another five or 10 years and not having that outcome happen, right? And so for anybody, and specifically for myself, you know, who is so um prideful in achieving that outcome or making that happen for their investors, just know that, you know, typically your investors are again, they're investing in you, they're behind you, and that there are many other outcomes that are also correct outcomes, uh, and that don't require you to necessarily zero some game, you know, one or the other. Uh, you know.

Keith Kohler 1:07:08

I love it. It's uh it's a great combination of answers you just gave us, Erwig. And I really appreciate your focus on impact, uh, job creation, um, access, all keywords that I think are benefits of finance that we might sometimes overlook beyond it just being the transaction. So thank you for bringing that language and that intention into this container. And so today we get to wind up this episode of How I Financed It by Herwig thanking you for being here. I'm of course happy, yes, happy to have had happy Hurric Konings here today on this uh How I Financed It stage. So this is both Herwig and I signing off on this episode.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:52

It's been my pleasure, Keith. Thanks for having me.

Keith Kohler 1:07:55

Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of How I Financed It. I encourage you to reach out to me on LinkedIn at Keith Kohler1, and I look forward to connecting there.