Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #736: Bitcoin Treasury for Business with Scott Marmoll

Transcript

#736: Bitcoin Treasury for Business with Scott Marmoll · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

0:00
Scott.
0:01
Marty.
0:02
We're here.
0:02
We've been working together on something for the last, what, two months now?
0:07
Measured in AI years, probably two years.
0:10
Yes.
0:10
But yes, at least a couple months.
0:11
Yeah.
0:12
And so I think we just jump right into it because we're launching the PDF that we've been working on,
0:16
the Bitcoin Treasury and Exit Playbook,
0:19
which we've been mulling around again for the better part of two months
0:24
and basically what you're doing at Capital B Advisory,
0:26
what I'm doing at TFTC and 1031,
0:31
what the Bitcoin price is doing right now going up.
0:33
I think it's important for business owners
0:36
to understand, particularly private business owners,
0:40
to understand the opportunity that Bitcoin presents them
0:43
as a balance sheet asset.
0:45
So we banged our heads and our clankers together
0:47
for the better part of two months.
0:49
We came up with this playbook, which you can go get now.
0:51
The link to the playbook is in the show notes here,
0:54
so you can go find those.
0:56
But yeah, I think that's what we're going to do today is just walk through the playbook.
0:59
But before we walk through it, maybe explain what the audience will get out of this if they listen to the end and why you're passionate about this particular part of the market.
1:10
Yeah, I think hopefully useful tool.
1:14
You know, Clanker aside, the content is ours with a lot of thought and detail into it.
1:21
It's a playbook for, you know, the Bitcoin space has a lot of advice on what to do as an individual.
1:26
and some individuals are business owners
1:29
and those Bitcoiners need a guidebook
1:33
for what that looks like for their business.
1:36
Because at the end of the day,
1:37
the goal on the individual side and the business side
1:39
is to get as much Bitcoin as possible.
1:41
I have sort of a decade of experience
1:45
helping private business owners raise capital,
1:47
whether that's selling the business,
1:49
raising debt or equity,
1:51
and recently brought that skill set
1:54
specifically to the Bitcoiner
1:56
business owner sector, which is not to say Bitcoin focused businesses and services exclusively,
2:03
but rather just anyone with the mindset of a Bitcoiner should probably get advice when it
2:08
comes to raising capital or selling their business from someone with the mindset of a Bitcoiner.
2:12
So that's the idea. Playbook has lots of nuggets of wisdom from the dipping your toes to stacking
2:21
a little bit of sats with the company cash flow to how do we augment that to should I own this
2:27
thing at all when Bitcoin is your opportunity cost that question gets a lot harder to answer
2:32
so that's the attempt and hopefully some good wisdom in there yeah I guess we start out it's
2:38
broken up into four parts the four first part is the case for Bitcoin treasury in the first place
2:44
like why if you're a business owner whether you're Bitcoin or not should you be thinking about this
2:50
obviously Michael Saylor strategy been a big meme in public markets over the last almost five years.
2:57
But this strategy applies to private businesses as well and probably is actually better for private businesses.
3:05
It does and it is with the caveat that it's a little less financial engineering, right?
3:11
Like Saylor's created a magical flywheel that I think people will study for ages.
3:17
In the private markets, it's a little simpler.
3:20
The opportunity is similar, though, which is accumulating Bitcoin on the balance sheet for businesses is augmenting the performance in the balance sheet,
3:30
whereas the historical sort of fiat landscape for valuing businesses is all based on the P&L.
3:35
And so you start to accumulate this hard asset.
3:38
It gives you optionality to do other things.
3:40
First section is kind of Bitcoin curiosity around the Bitcoin or business owner.
3:44
Okay, what do I do?
3:46
What should I do to start to explore that?
3:49
Same as when you're first exploring Bitcoin as an individual, you start to get the advice of, hey, I should DCA.
3:55
I should be careful not to be in a forced seller position over the short term.
3:59
All these things apply, but in the business owner perspective, there's other factors.
4:04
A big one being that if you own control, then the difference between doing this on your personal balance sheet and on your corporate balance sheet, there might be no difference.
4:13
There might be major tax implications.
4:14
And if you have sort of shared equity with family members or early investors or scaled investors, then suddenly the unilateral control to distribute capital is limited.
4:29
But if you own control, then you still have the control to raise or to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet.
4:36
So for some folks, it's like, hey, my father-in-law is a minority investor.
4:41
And if I distribute cash to buy Bitcoin on my personal balance sheet, I've got to distribute cash to him too.
4:47
And he's not going to buy Bitcoin with it.
4:49
And I'm tired of arguing with him at Thanksgiving.
4:51
I'm just going to buy Bitcoin and put it on the company balance sheet so that he now owns some Bitcoin through that minority equity position.
4:59
So lots of little factors in there.
5:00
I think at the solo entrepreneur and small, small business phase, it's really hard to distinguish between the personal balance sheet and the professional sort of corporate balance sheet.
5:08
But as you get into that sort of two, five, $50 million of free cash flow, you're talking about businesses that have different tradeoffs between the tax and the shareholder dynamics for stacking sats in the corporate entity versus distributing to shareholders.
5:25
Well, not only that, too, but once you get to those larger scales of cash flowing and then stacking cash on the balance sheet,
5:34
the opportunity cost of keeping it in cash versus something like Bitcoin is extremely high.
5:38
That's something we described in the first section as well, is trying to make the case, why should your business have Bitcoin on its balance sheet?
5:46
Well, exactly. And I think, you know, do I expect the sort of non-Bitcoiner to crack this book and go, oh, my gosh, this is it?
5:52
Maybe not, but I think it's going to help.
5:55
And that first section is just explaining,
5:56
look, if you have $10 million of working capital cash
6:00
that you keep on hand to fund payroll and inventory
6:03
and maintenance capex, that's a painful necessity
6:08
because over a year's time,
6:11
if you're, everyone's experience inflation is different.
6:15
The CPI number is just one metric,
6:17
but for most folks, especially in businesses,
6:20
you're probably closer to PPI.
6:21
that metric is still totally manipulated but the reality i think for most businesses especially if
6:27
they have to accumulate any hard assets on the balance sheet is like 10 percent purchasing power
6:31
loss every year so 10 million dollars of working capital cash gets you eight million dollars worth
6:35
of stuff in a year that's a huge that's an important piece of the business um to to have
6:41
optimized and you know there's a lot of different ways to skin that cat but certainly just sitting
6:46
on a pile of cash is not the best way to do it.
6:48
No.
6:49
And then in terms of bringing this back to board members, family members,
6:55
I think the way in which we describe the frame is really highlighting that problem
7:00
that you just described with the erosion of the purchasing power,
7:03
the cash sitting on your balance sheet,
7:04
and basically having them recognize that first.
7:07
So if you do have a board or a group of people you need to convince,
7:10
I think framing and backing into a Bitcoin treasury strategy is very important here.
7:16
Start with the problem.
7:17
Exactly.
7:18
Yeah.
7:18
I think, and this is true for orange pilling your friends and family, your colleagues, or in the boardroom.
7:23
Start with the problem.
7:25
Who does a really good job of this?
7:27
Jeff Booth, right?
7:28
He was in nine chapters of the book, Price of Tomorrow, before he mentions the word Bitcoin.
7:32
And he paints the problem pretty well.
7:34
So I agree.
7:35
It's the same approach there.
7:37
because the odds that even if you are sort of fully orange-pilled Bitcoiner,
7:42
it's not likely that your $20 million EBITDA business
7:45
has a perfectly aligned board on this topic or shareholder group.
7:50
It's common.
7:51
I see a lot of like brothers-in-law that co-own businesses.
7:54
That's a very common dynamic, right?
7:57
Guys end up brothers-in-law through marrying
8:01
and then they start a business sometime in their 30s.
8:04
And by their 40s or 50s, they've got like a really nice asset.
8:08
One of them is a Bitcoin or one's not.
8:10
This is a super common dynamic.
8:11
I'm actually working with some clients right now that have this dynamic.
8:13
They're not brothers-in-law, but they are dear friends.
8:17
One's totally down the rabbit hole.
8:19
The other one's tiptoeing.
8:21
So this would be a great tool for that conversation.
8:23
And then moving into the tactical playbook and sort of frameworks for thinking about how to approach an allocation,
8:33
depending on the scale of your business,
8:35
the buy-in from board or brothers-in-laws
8:37
that you may need?
8:38
Right.
8:39
Yeah, I mean, I think the last thing you want to do
8:42
is rock the boat.
8:43
So you want to be careful that you don't kind of say,
8:46
all right, team, we're all in Bitcoin
8:48
on October 6th of 2025, right?
8:50
And then suddenly your working capital situation is dire.
8:55
So, you know, the case is gonna be different
8:58
for every single business and situation,
8:59
but thoughtful approach to what's our runway, what's our burn, what is our sort of cash conversion cycle,
9:08
and what can we do to safely move some of the value that's trapped in that situation into Bitcoin.
9:16
And I think boards think about this anyway because they certainly don't want you sitting on cash,
9:21
but usually it's, hey, reinvest in the business.
9:23
But if the reinvestment in the business is like a 10%, 15% return on invested capital,
9:29
So, you know, you probably want to evaluate other options a la Bitcoin.
9:34
It's a lot less work to sit in Bitcoin and clip that success.
9:39
It's also very hard to sell a board on that when we're at, you know, 70-some K and down 40-plus percent.
9:45
But it's also the best time to do it.
9:47
It is.
9:47
And we touch on it in the playbook as well.
9:50
But I think building on what you were just saying there with our experience at 1031,
9:55
and we've seen this within our portfolio, Grant Gillum, co-founder,
9:59
and a partner of mine at 1031, he wrote this piece, I think, two or three years ago,
10:04
maybe even longer than that.
10:05
At this point, Bitcoin is the fourth lever of equity value growth.
10:10
And it's something we've highly encouraged portfolio companies to do,
10:16
particularly if Bitcoin is significantly below the price of the previous all-time high,
10:22
and they've raised around, let's put a chunk of that into Bitcoin,
10:25
make sure you have enough runway to reinvest in the business and make payroll and all that.
10:29
but put a chunk of Bitcoin, build out your company, your product suite as quickly and as efficiently as possible,
10:39
run as lean as possible, get to revenue, profitability, and you'll find at the end of the day,
10:44
Bitcoin has this forcing function to make you efficient, to make sure that you're not adding a ton of bloat to your organization.
10:51
And then on top of that, once you get to profitability and you're looking pretty,
10:57
when you go back to market and Bitcoin
10:59
has appreciated, that takes two or three years.
11:02
The value of the business is
11:03
looking good and then you have incredible optionality
11:05
as a founder. So a bit different scale.
11:08
You're talking mid-market, established
11:09
companies, spitting out cash flow.
11:11
But it's true either way.
11:13
I don't know where it was. Grant gave a presentation
11:15
I watched on YouTube.
11:17
Riga. Yes. And he's got
11:19
great memes in there.
11:22
Grant does a wonderful
11:23
job of balancing Wall Street jargon
11:25
and memes. I think there's a Michael Jackson
11:27
thriller zombie image in there that gets to the heart of the problem, which is a lot of businesses,
11:33
you know, if their sort of hurdle rate was Bitcoin, then they shouldn't exist. And yes,
11:40
you guys at 1031 have lived it. The scale is different in venture, but honestly, you know,
11:46
I think a lot of the way 1031 thinks about investment is more like a private equity fund.
11:50
I mean, Bitcoin land doesn't have super copious numbers of 10, $20 million EBITDA businesses, but I think you guys are working hard to change that with the investments you make.
12:03
And whether a business is negative cash flow like a venture opportunity or mid-market and cash flowing quite nicely, the math is the same, which is holding a bunch of cash for the long term is for sure not the best idea.
12:17
Then the question is just, well, what is the right mix?
12:20
Um, and, and I definitely think that from the investor perspective, from the 1031 perspective,
12:27
you guys have probably seen it where having Bitcoin on balance sheet augments the equity
12:31
value math in a way that's been helpful in otherwise, you know, down times in, in business
12:37
cycles.
12:38
Um, and you're right.
12:40
I think it, it sounds too simple, but really just as long as you're not like right at all
12:45
time highs, it's probably an okay time to stack aggressively into a Bitcoin treasury
12:49
for the long term.
12:51
And I think we talk about it in the book,
12:54
in the PDF here,
12:55
but you guys have seen that firsthand, right?
12:57
I mean, some of the 1031 portcos
12:59
have kind of weathered longer
13:02
than they otherwise would have
13:04
because they raised
13:05
and allocated meaningfully that raise to Bitcoin.
13:09
And now it gives them more runway
13:11
because it's more than it was
13:12
if they would have kept it in dollars.
13:14
Yeah.
13:14
And I think this gets into a good
13:16
point of the playbook as well,
13:18
which is running through the tactical decision tree of do I lump sum, do I DCA,
13:26
in what situation should I do either or.
13:28
And I think that's very important too because I think a lot of what we see in the 1031
13:32
is the raise and most companies will do a DCA over a set period of time.
13:37
Yep, yep.
13:38
And that set period of time is less than a four-year, if cycles exist,
13:42
it's less than a four-year cycle.
13:43
There's not a right answer on this.
13:45
That one, I mean, even, well, I'll tell you, on the personal side, whatever, if anybody could just look through all my trades, they should just do the exact opposite.
13:54
Michael Saylor is competing for top tick king, but I'm pretty darn good at it.
14:00
But the good news is if you just wait it out, that trade ends up being a good trade anyway.
14:04
But that said, I like what Adam Back says about this.
14:08
It's like if you take out, what is it, the 10 best days of a year in Bitcoin, you're just down hilariously.
14:13
which means time in the market is more important than timing the market I think the DCA strategy just feels responsible when you doing it with large quantities When you get into seven eight or nine figures
14:26
it's kind of nervy to be the guy that hit the button to do the spot buy.
14:32
Because again, even if you're the control shareholder,
14:34
whether that's at Thanksgiving or at board meetings,
14:37
someone's going to be yelling at you if the timing was wrong.
14:39
So I think there's a balance there.
14:42
and at the end of the day, you know, the advice is just advice and the business owner has to decide.
14:49
But I think that's right. It's like some version of we're going to like size into this over six
14:55
months or 12 months, but also case dependent, right? How intense is your seasonality on cash
15:01
conversion, right? It's like, oh, we buy a ton of equipment in the fall. Well, let's not run out of
15:06
cash in the fall then. So, you know, that's always going to be a case by case situation. But
15:11
the sooner you're off zero, the better.
15:13
And I think for some businesses that'll be the case.
15:16
But many it'll be, we want to move
15:18
what is already a personal Bitcoin strategy
15:19
into the corporate here.
15:21
Well, I think it's important to elaborate on this too
15:24
because we say it in the piece
15:26
that if you pick a certain strategy,
15:30
let's say you want to DCA a certain amount,
15:32
either into perpetuity over a fixed period of time,
15:35
and let's say the Bitcoin price dumps by 30%,
15:36
you stop doing it because you're scared out of the market.
15:40
You have to go into this with the mental framework that there is going to be volatility.
15:44
Whatever plan you set, you have to stick to it.
15:48
The easy part is buying the Bitcoin.
15:50
Ask any long-term Bitcoin holder.
15:52
The hard part is stomaching the volatility.
15:55
So absolutely.
15:56
Set a plan.
15:57
Work with an advisor to set that plan.
16:00
Be deliberate about establishing that plan outwardly with the key stakeholders,
16:08
whether that's the management team or shareholders or brothers-in-law,
16:12
so that you have something other than your own emotions
16:18
to point to when decisions are being made on that strategy.
16:21
Because for sure, if you're new to Bitcoin
16:23
and you started sizing into it in October of this year,
16:26
you probably have a little heartburn right now.
16:28
But if you've set a playbook and you're sticking to it,
16:31
then you can kind of rest easy that we need to see this all the way through
16:35
before we get heartburn and change our strategy.
16:38
All right, now let's walk into the spectrum of sort of different Bitcoin strategies depending on where the particular business owner is in their personal journey with their business.
16:49
Some Bitcoiners that run businesses are like, hey, I'm going to keep running this for 10 years, so I'm just going to do a set and forget a DCA strategy over the next decade.
16:57
Others are later in their careers and looking to make an exit and sort of framing what options exist to acquire Bitcoin using your business across that spectrum.
17:11
And for those who are closer to selling their businesses, what does the landscape look like?
17:17
why is now opportunistic?
17:19
The Bitcoiner business owner hero's journey, I call it.
17:24
It's similar to the individual Bitcoiner hero's journey.
17:26
You start stacking some sats, you get excited,
17:29
you sit in the red for two or three years,
17:32
then you're kind of permanently in the green,
17:34
you continue to stack sats,
17:35
you start looking around at what else can I sell,
17:37
you start liquidating IRAs and other positions,
17:41
a decade in, you sell your chairs.
17:44
The hero's journey on the business owner side looks similar.
17:47
the scale is different, but the game is similar. Stacking Bitcoin to the balance sheet,
17:52
some conservative portion of cash flow. Okay, get more aggressive. Okay, 100% of cash flow.
17:59
Okay, can we borrow money against the business to accelerate that? Can we pull forward accumulation?
18:05
And then Bitcoin or business owners, thinking about the end game for their business,
18:13
have a different hurdle
18:17
because Bitcoin, historical CAGR,
18:21
pick your number, 30%, 40%, 50%
18:22
makes you really want to own more of that thing.
18:25
And if you're looking at your business saying,
18:27
okay, next year, if we want to grow 10%,
18:29
we need to put in,
18:31
we need to reinvest into the business meaningfully
18:33
and we run the math on that
18:35
and the return on invested capital there is 15%, for example.
18:39
In fiat land, that's great, right?
18:41
Private equity will underwrite that all the time
18:43
because they'll use leverage and they'll augment that and they'll make nice returns for their LPs.
18:48
In Bitcoin land, you're like, okay, I can spend whatever, make 15% return on it with a bunch of
18:54
risk, execution and otherwise, or I could have taken that same cash and just bought Bitcoin.
19:01
Then it gets harder. So then you start thinking through, okay, the hurdle rate for a Bitcoin or
19:06
business owner is that Bitcoin CAGR. And the hurdle rate for the potential acquirers of your business
19:14
is the fiat treasury's CAGR or yield. And so what we're seeing, and this is in the materials,
19:22
is that the fiat markets are overvaluing your business because they don't understand Bitcoin.
19:28
I have a theory that the reason private equity hasn't yet come to understand Bitcoin is because
19:33
if you take their playbook, which is five to seven years of illiquidity, and you apply it to just
19:39
buying and holding Bitcoin for five to seven years, it kind of begs the question of like, well, why
19:44
does this industry exist at all? Why are we allocating capital, paying two and 20 to these
19:50
private equity professionals for them to underperform spot Bitcoin, which is liquid 24-7,
19:55
tradable 365 around the globe? And if I just don't touch it for five to seven years, I probably
19:59
they outperformed 99% of private equity funds.
20:03
That is your advantage as a business owner
20:04
because they're going to keep valuing businesses that way.
20:07
It's their job to deploy that capital.
20:10
That's private equity fund, LP capital,
20:14
limited partners, think teachers pension funds
20:17
and the firefighters union and university endowments
20:21
chasing yield to pay their pension liabilities
20:25
and other sort of long-term liabilities
20:28
like from insurance funds.
20:29
and they have to make a return.
20:32
So there is this artificial bid for nice cash flowing businesses.
20:37
And you can take those proceeds if you're at that stage in your business
20:41
and sell all of it, part of it, raise some debt,
20:47
or just stack a little bit of Bitcoin.
20:48
But all across that menu of options,
20:50
depending on where you are as a business owner,
20:52
you can use sort of future performance,
20:55
either equity value or cash flow,
20:57
to accumulate Bitcoin at what I think everyone agrees is lower prices than it will be in the
21:01
future. That's the exciting trade. And so you can see in the materials, you know, the overall equity
21:07
valuations across public and private markets for these businesses, the enterprise values rather,
21:13
is just going up and to the right. There are interruptions around COVID and whatever else,
21:17
and I'm sure what's going on right now in macro isn't great for valuations, but overall,
21:21
the trend is just up and to the right. So we see inflation everywhere, including in asset prices.
21:26
that is coming to Bitcoin.
21:29
But while it's still overstated in equities,
21:33
you own equity as a business owner.
21:34
So there's a monetization opportunity,
21:36
but it is not near as simple as logging into Fidelity
21:40
and selling shares of Apple Computer.
21:42
The private markets are very illiquid, clunky.
21:45
It takes months to negotiate.
21:46
It's a lot of heartbreak.
21:48
But deal-making is a ton of fun.
21:50
And so that's CBA's pitch.
21:53
Well, let's go into the three different scenarios
21:55
you listed.
21:56
sell the whole company, maybe sell part of it,
21:59
roll it back in alongside the PE sponsor.
22:02
And yeah, so, and then the other one is keep it, right?
22:04
So the first one is,
22:07
hey, return on invested capital in this business
22:09
is now like objectively unexciting to me as the owner.
22:12
I want to take all of my chips and go home
22:15
and my chips are going into Bitcoin.
22:18
That is the full sale strategy.
22:20
I think the biggest thing for that plan is exit planning,
22:25
which needs to happen way before you decide to go to market. I tell business owners,
22:30
you should work hard for years in advance to make yourself useless to the business.
22:35
That way, when the time comes to sell, the buyer isn't saying, okay, you need to be,
22:40
I need you shackled to the desk here, right? I like to joke that private equity funds,
22:44
they buy your company, they don't want you to go to the beach, they want you to drive a really nice
22:47
car to the office every day. And so you've got to work really hard as an owner entrepreneur
22:52
to do the one thing that you've always most times struggled to do, which is take your hands off
22:57
and start empowering your team to run the business without you so that when you do go to exit,
23:02
you really are a passive shareholder because passive shareholders get paid cash,
23:06
active shareholders get paid in earnouts and other contingencies that tie you to the business.
23:11
The next category is like, hey, I really like my business. It's got a great return on invested
23:16
capital. The opportunity to grow here is huge, but I'm tired of betting the farm and I'm overweight
23:22
my company and underweight Bitcoin. And so I don't want to miss the boat on Bitcoin, but I also not
23:28
ready to like give, like sell my job away. I like running this business. You are in that case,
23:34
private equity's favorite because you're saying, I want somebody to give me some money to take risk
23:38
off the table. And then I want to go pursue the half a dozen aggressive growth strategies that
23:42
I've always thought about, but always been scared to go after because I don't want to personally
23:45
guarantee. I can't get the bank to give me that much money, whatever the risk. Private equity is
23:52
going to eat that alive. They love that because they're saying, hey, there's a bunch of low-hanging
23:55
fruit. The only reason this hasn't already happened in this business is because the owner
23:58
is tired of doubling down with basically, and sometimes literally, signing the deed to his house
24:03
to the downside case. So in that case, sell a portion of your business to a private equity fund
24:09
or other acquirer. Roll some of your ownership into a minority position. Stay in an operator seat
24:15
and go execute on that next phase of growth and know that you're partnered with people on the
24:21
balance sheet in the investment that their job is to make three, five X on their money. And so
24:26
you're riding along in your minority position with that, but you've also just taken some cash off the
24:31
table. You've likely eliminated personal guarantees in the business and you're in a position to really
24:35
chase the next phase of growth with the institutional sophistication that didn't exist before, right?
24:42
They're going to help you set up a board. They're going to give you strategic planning, but you also
24:45
are going to have, you know, in a, in a worst case description, you're going to have bosses. So there's
24:50
a balance there. And then the far end of the spectrum would be, you know, don't partner with
24:55
these folks at all. I think it would be like, this is definitely the case in a lot of Bitcoin
24:59
companies is if we have, if a Bitcoiner has started a business, they have looked at the
25:05
risk reward and said, I think I can outperform Bitcoin here. TFTC and CBA are both great examples.
25:10
And like, can you picture a scenario where you would sell equity for anything beyond like a
25:16
insane valuation? Probably not because you want to grow and be the beneficiary of all of that
25:22
cashflow. And so I think in that scenario, if you've got lighting in a bottle, uh, then,
25:28
then your goal should be to never give away any equity unless you're at that stage. So I think
25:33
that's the early stage, right? Stack Bitcoin, grow the business on your own. That mid stage is really
25:38
interesting because there's a lot of that happening. And then that final stage, you've
25:41
really got to make sure that your transaction preparedness puts you in a position to
25:45
not be a key man or mission critical to that transaction.
25:49
Yeah. Let's go back to two parts.
25:53
One being the second option.
25:55
You're still part of the business, roll alongside the PE firm.
25:58
I think another thing that we highlight in the playbook as well
26:02
is that you take the proceeds, buy Bitcoin, your long Bitcoin,
26:06
PE fund at the end of your relationship, they get their nuts,
26:10
and then you have the potential if Bitcoin has a good run
26:14
during your engagement with the PE firm to buy your company back.
26:18
Yeah, so this would be so fun.
26:19
I think we'll find this, you know, we're looking for this client at CBA,
26:23
but I love the idea of using the private equity fund's money
26:28
to buy Bitcoin on the personal side.
26:30
Watching them, you know, make some smart decisions,
26:33
but maybe some dumb ones too.
26:35
And at the end of their sort of five, seven-year process,
26:38
they're, you know, hiring an investment banker to go sell that business.
26:41
You're a minority owner.
26:42
and you're like, actually, I'll buy it.
26:46
And you use your Bitcoin stack,
26:48
which has probably grown much faster
26:50
than their investment in your business,
26:52
to reclaim ownership of your business.
26:56
I think that would be really interesting.
26:57
I've heard, I've had clients who've lived this experience
27:01
where they sold to a big private equity fund.
27:04
It didn't go great, whether growth slowed down
27:08
or leverage was poorly managed or whatever it was.
27:10
And they end up partnering with other groups
27:12
to buy back the business and sort of write the course and grow it again.
27:17
I think entrepreneurs are kind of serial.
27:22
They're very competitive, and they like to win.
27:24
And I think it would be a pretty cool win to unlock some liquidity from your business,
27:29
use it to accumulate Bitcoin at what we all agree are lower prices today
27:32
than they will be in the future, and then fast forward to that future date
27:37
and say, hey, private equity guys, nice trade you did there.
27:39
I'll actually take it back.
27:41
And oh, by the way, it's going to take me half of the cash you gave me five, seven years ago because I stored it in Bitcoin.
27:48
Yeah.
27:49
And then second thing to bring it up on, you're a Bitcoiner ourselves, own a business.
27:54
I alluded to it earlier with how 1031 portfolio company founders typically view their businesses.
27:59
But Bitcoiners are good business operators, or they should be at least.
28:04
That is the thesis for CBA.
28:06
So I'm counting on the Bitcoin community to be, to make me look, to prove me right, which is, I think Bitcoiners are by nature contrarians.
28:16
They have figured out something that requires a lot of humility.
28:18
Now, I'm not saying we're all humble, but we had to start humble, right?
28:21
Because you had to say, okay, what am I wrong about?
28:23
Oh, literally everything when it comes to money.
28:26
And then you sort of reeducated yourself on the Bitcoin standard.
28:30
So if that is an archetype and I think somebody just did some research on like the emotional intelligence strategy or whatever Yeah Myers Yeah Myers I think Brandon Quintum did that years ago but he brings it up periodically It must have just hit like it just bubbled up to me recently
28:47
And it's like, you know, Bitcoiners are one of two types.
28:50
I think my thesis is that Bitcoiners are good business owners
28:53
because they have figured out something that takes a lot of research and humility to understand.
28:58
And if you apply that mentality to businesses,
29:00
my thesis is that like being bitcoin first as an advisor to business owners i'm going to get to
29:07
work with all the best business owners because all the best businesses will be run by bitcoiners
29:11
um and and it's also a fun top of funnel because there's no such thing as someone who's like oh
29:18
yeah i used to be into bitcoin and so my tam for people that want to work with cba because they want
29:25
to work with the advice of an advisor that understands bitcoin is just however many bitcoiners
29:30
there are their own businesses, and I'm betting on that number going up forever.
29:33
Yeah, I think it will.
29:36
And the thing I wanted to bring up after that is just highlighting that this is real.
29:44
And not only is it real, it's more real than it's ever been because of the emergence of AI tools.
29:49
Talking about running lean operations, I think that's one thing we've really bonded over over the last two months
29:57
is banging our heads together,
29:59
talking about our AI setups
30:00
and what it's done for our individual businesses.
30:02
Yeah, I owe you a big thank you.
30:04
So anecdotes about AI and deflation
30:06
that are useful for this
30:07
is primary to my business and it's thanks to you.
30:12
So I was playing around with OpenClaw,
30:13
like everyone, in late February
30:15
and was trying to hook it up to Maple.
30:21
Ambitious, you know, privacy preserving,
30:24
the right ethos.
30:25
and you and I were chatting and I'm like, I just, this is, this thing is a net negative to my
30:30
productivity right now. What am I doing wrong? And you encouraged me, you know, the trade-off
30:34
is obviously privacy, but you're running a business. So it's not like you have super good
30:37
privacy on that side anyway, lean into the frontier models and, and also lean into the spend,
30:43
find a way to justify it. Right. So if that's, if you're pinching pennies on your AI subscription,
30:49
that's not the right approach. Find a way to make it pay for itself. And that advice from you
30:54
was probably in late February. And, you know, the anecdote for CBA is that prior to late February,
31:00
the goal, so I launched this firm in October of last year. I was previously a vice president,
31:04
Kenner Fitzgerald, not on their crypto stuff, but just a middle market investment banker.
31:10
And so I launched this in October. The goal from October to sort of, I'll call it, you know,
31:15
D-Day for OpenClaw and AI was to grow the business to a scale where I could justify a million dollars
31:21
a GNA, a team of five, maybe three associates and two analysts or two associates and three
31:25
analysts in investment banking to support deal execution for my top of funnel deal flow,
31:31
enter OpenClaw and Frontier Models, agentic AI in general. And now I'm not sure that CBA ever
31:38
needs a junior team member. And so like people say, well, where is the actual deflation in AI?
31:45
Well, I mean, it's a million dollars of savings a year for CBA. And I know that you're seeing
31:50
this on your side too but it's just that's happening really quick business owners especially
31:55
in the middle market that that won't that aren't going to get disrupted by like oh we're a sass and
31:59
we just don't exist anymore that you know live in the physical world molecules wise their opportunity
32:04
to layer ai into their stack is is like they can probably shave multiple million dollars out of gna
32:09
um and so you know let's go after that as a bitcoin community and and make even greater
32:15
businesses and and then use those to accumulate bitcoin yeah and the anecdote from our side i
32:20
this playbook is a perfect example of it like i said we banged our clankers together it's not
32:24
really for the content itself but it's structuring it in a way like this pdf that we have i think
32:28
it's very beautiful and the bigliest this has been an idea like partnering with somebody like you to
32:34
do uh sort of like a collaboration on something specific in the space in this case the bitcoin
32:41
treasury and exit playbook for private businesses but i wanted to do this for years but in my mind
32:45
it's like i really i've got myself the team has grown we've added two team members so including
32:51
myself there's six of us a couple of them are part-time over the last year we've added two
32:56
and i've never had the confidence or the resources to be like okay if i wanted to do something like
33:01
this i'd probably have to go hire a designer or somebody who can just run and lead this stuff and
33:07
now that's not the case like we could sit there we went back and forth over multiple calls over the
33:13
course of six weeks about how this is going to be structured and then we got our final sort of text
33:19
and the graphics we wanted to put in and boom the clanker was able to actually format and design it's
33:24
incredible pdf uh in minutes yeah i i think um i think that this it turns you i think i'm stealing
33:33
this from you somebody i listen to a lot of podcasts uh you know it turns the ideas guy into
33:38
a results guy. And you've got great ideas. And those can now basically come into existence with
33:44
a voice message. I know the Bitcoin community is very pro-privacy and that there's massive
33:50
trade-offs running these things on frontier models where they're for sure hoovering up your data.
33:55
But look, if you're a business owner, who are you kidding yourself? All of your data is getting
34:00
eaten alive. And I know that's not a good answer. That's a quitter's answer. But also, I think,
34:06
if we look at where open source models are today, six to 12 months from now, I think it's not
34:10
unrealistic to say we can self-host some of these things. Now that won't be cheap, but if you're a
34:15
business owner getting a million dollars worth of GNA value out of running agents through OpenClaw,
34:22
Hermes, whatever other agentic harness, and you need to spend 30 grand on GPUs, okay, it's pretty
34:29
easy to do the math on that ROI. And so you can either sit around and wait for open source models
34:34
to be ready for that so you don't ever have to violate the privacy.
34:37
But you'll also be, you know, I mentioned at the beginning, it's like AI is like dog
34:40
years.
34:40
Like you'll be years behind if you don't play with these things now so that when you can,
34:45
you know, take an open source model on your own hardware and run it, you're ready because
34:48
you've already built the systems and processes around the business to be ready for that.
34:54
Yeah.
34:54
And I feel like we're very fortunate at TFTC because we run a media business.
34:58
A lot of our output is public anyway.
35:00
And so the input on the back end is just like a lot of source material.
35:03
if our chats were to get leaked it's just us right like hey literally read everything we've ever
35:08
written create our voice and here's the topics we're interested in here's the source material
35:14
we want to report on help us format it the right way and people get people it is funny there are
35:20
a lot of light lights out there who are they say oh this is all ai slop i i don't think they
35:26
understand like yes ai is helping with the with the output the end output but there's a lot of
35:32
curation and context provided before that and i showed you the sort of hockey stick growth we've
35:39
seen on in terms of engagement and what's happening and i think despite what the luddites are saying
35:45
like the proof is in the pudding like it's helping us be better at disseminating information absolutely
35:50
if you're already a master of your craft which i'd like to think that you are i like to think that i
35:54
am adding ai to your stack augments it uh augments you in the same way that tony stark's iron man
36:03
suit augments him if you are not then you become a slop cannon and there is no in between and so i
36:10
think what i've found actually great example i actually launched a side business focus on this
36:15
i'm helping folks in the bitcoin community and now sort of just broader community get these
36:20
harness setups running on their own machines. And I recommend the frontier models, even though
36:25
there's a privacy trade-off. Every single one of my 30 plus customers now has started their own
36:31
business. I think there might be one exception to that. And in every case, they're not saying,
36:38
hey, AI, how do I make money? They're taking what they're already good at and working with their
36:44
agent to build something that generates value for the world and bringing that to market.
36:50
And so it's such a fun project to see folks kind of bear that out.
36:55
What you, what you see online that is, you know,
36:58
causing the Luddite behavior is people will just get a new agent and say,
37:01
make me money. You know,
37:02
I think you and Matt probably went through this experience trying to have them,
37:06
having the agents trade, um, trade, whatever marketplace,
37:11
you know,
37:13
there are high frequency funds that have been working on that strategy for a
37:16
long time. And so there's not a lot of alpha there, but if you're,
37:19
if you have literally anything that you think you're halfway decent at,
37:22
you can basically build a business around it with like a few voice messages. Um, so there's,
37:27
there's never been a better time to start a business. Um, there's never been a better time
37:31
to be in Bitcoin. Uh, I'm very bullish on, on all the, all the above and the intersection of AI and
37:36
Bitcoin is pretty exciting. I didn't have in my base case for Bitcoin, uh, 50 plus percent
37:42
deflationary event in AI sort of bringing value to the world. And my thesis is that the only
37:49
strategy to solve for that. Like we can't have deflation in the economy. Like central planners
37:54
could be laser eyed Bitcoiners. They don't have a choice. They can't have the value of the money go
37:59
up. So they're going to have to print the difference. And so like when I first got into
38:03
Bitcoin as a gold bug and I was like, wow, they're going to, they have, they have to print so much
38:06
money. They have to print so much money. Um, I, I have, um, friends in the Bay area, Bitcoiners,
38:15
San Francisco area that we keep in touch even though I've moved away.
38:18
They are my original sort of Bitcoin meetup folks.
38:22
And whenever we're texting about macro, I usually end our conversations with,
38:27
they are going to print so much money.
38:29
And for better or worse, AI accelerates that, I think.
38:33
Yeah.
38:34
We got a bit of an AI tangent.
38:37
We glossed over it in the piece, but maybe we can do a whole other one on that.
38:41
Yeah, I'd love to.
38:42
how Bitcoin optimizes business or AI optimizes business.
38:45
And then you can use the efficiencies and the productivity
38:47
and hopefully the revenue and cash flow gains to funnel it into Bitcoin.
38:51
But bringing it back to the playbook and just tying a knot in the exit decision
38:56
or the three decisions that we talked about, why moving now as opposed to waiting?
39:02
Yeah. So set aside Bitcoin for a second.
39:05
The conversation I have with business owners for all of my career in fiat land,
39:10
in private equity and in fiat land M&A, in private equity as a buyer in fiat land M&A,
39:16
because I sort of went both sides of the deal table. It's always, you know, now's an okay time
39:21
to sell, but I don't want to take the tax hit because I've got, you know, X value in the
39:27
business. And when I sell it, you know, 80% of it's going to be ordinary income or no, sorry,
39:32
20% of it's going to be ordinary income. And the other 80% is gonna be goodwill, which will be
39:36
taxed at cap gains rates. Nobody wants to give away, like say you sell a business for a hundred
39:40
million dollars and you give 30 of it to uncle sam like that's really painful and i don't like i
39:46
don't think it's a an ethically good thing to do even so like there i understand people's a lot of
39:52
business owners like well i want to delay that i want to deal with that later i want to get my
39:55
house in order figure out a way to avoid more of that tax and i agree like there are legal and and
40:01
trust and uh tax efficiency stuff that we kind of allude to we are neither of us professionals in
40:08
those categories. I think you should get good advice in those categories. But if you're like
40:13
waiting to sell or raise capital or take chips off the table because you think that you'll somehow
40:18
save money on taxes later, if Bitcoin is your opportunity cost, good luck. Because American
40:25
HODL says, this thing's a runaway freight train. Like every day you wait, the risk that you never
40:31
see that price again is real. And so take the tax hit, see what that looks like and stack Bitcoin
40:38
today at today's prices versus waiting five years, assume any reasonable CAGR for Bitcoin,
40:45
and then run the math later, even at a more efficient tax rate, you're going to see that
40:50
you'd have more Bitcoin by making that trade today. And this is a fun plug. There's a calculator
40:56
on the CBA website that helps you look at this, which is just, okay, do I raise capital now? Do I
41:02
sell equity now, whether it's control or the whole thing or most of it or a minority and use that to
41:09
buy Bitcoin at today's prices? Or do I wait? Okay, well, what do I wait for how long? Okay, what's
41:14
the Bitcoin kegger over that timeline? How much Bitcoin would I get if I waited? And it's, you
41:19
know, that calculator, you know, I built it with my clanker. It's pretty hard to get that calculator
41:24
to show you that the better trade is to wait.
41:26
And now obviously as an advisor
41:28
who makes transactions happen,
41:30
that is self-promoting,
41:34
but it is also just mostly true,
41:35
which is if you look back
41:36
on when you should have bought Bitcoin,
41:38
yesterday was the best day,
41:40
today is the next best day.
41:41
Any form of waiting usually ends up being a mistake.
41:45
Yeah.
41:45
And then getting into the technical details.
41:48
I think that's important.
41:49
We can wrap up the four sections there,
41:52
but then we'll get into some examples,
41:54
which you provide at the end, some case studies.
41:57
But in terms of what this looks like,
42:00
not what this looks like in practice,
42:01
but that's, I think, one of the underappreciated aspects
42:06
of businesses getting into Bitcoin.
42:09
You can convince them, like, all right, I'm in.
42:11
I'm going to DCA.
42:12
I'm going to lump sum.
42:12
I'm going to do this, that.
42:13
But what do you actually do?
42:14
Who do you work with?
42:15
Who are your counterparties?
42:16
So I want to be careful not to, like, pick favorites.
42:19
There's a lot of good services out there.
42:20
a rule I would suggest folks adopt is look for businesses, services, and advisors that are
42:27
focused on Bitcoin only. In optimizing for more than just Bitcoin in the crypto world,
42:34
usually corners are cut and shortcuts are taken that are dangerous. And if someone doesn't
42:39
understand that Bitcoin is the signal amidst the crypto noise, then you have to sort of doubt the
42:44
rest of their advice. And so start with that as a filter. And then I think there's several
42:49
categories. So there's, there's tax, right? You definitely want, well, you have to pay your taxes.
42:53
You should do that every year You probably have advice for that already but I think tax efficiency for a transaction whether that raising capital to invest in the business acquire a competitor
43:04
take chips off the table, sell outright, there are things you can do ahead of time with tax
43:08
attorneys to be more efficient with that tax implication. Legal, from a structuring perspective,
43:15
you know, when you transact, regardless of the type, you'll be making representations and
43:21
warranties that create scenarios where if what you said or disclosed during the transaction was
43:27
untrue, that can have real recourse. And so you want to make sure that the attorneys helping you
43:34
document your transaction are top notch. Attorneys are painfully expensive, but sometimes it's money
43:41
well spent. I'm curious to see how AI drives that cost down because a lot of what they do is just
43:46
pattern recognition. So I'm excited for discounts in that category and I'll help businesses find
43:51
them. So yeah, legal tax. If it's Bitcoin accumulation, then you got to think about
43:59
custody for sure. And there's a there's no one size fits all. I think on one end of the spectrum,
44:04
like a cold card in a desk at the CEO's office is a way to do it. But like, who are your
44:12
shareholders? What is the risk profile? When do you need to move the Bitcoin? You could look at
44:17
multi-sig setups where your board has a distributed set of keys, but then you run into this problem
44:23
of like, okay, well, when we cycle out an employee, a C-level employee or a board member, we have to
44:28
do a key rollover ceremony. That can get messy. There are businesses and service providers that
44:32
cover that space. What else am I missing? Trading. So obviously, if you're going to
44:39
deploy a Bitcoin accumulation strategy, you need to have an exchange acquire the Bitcoin for you,
44:44
take your cash and give you sats for it um trying to think of what else did we cover in there
44:51
there is a whole checklist that folks can go through and i think it it'll depend where you
44:56
are um i mean being mna prepared like you just don't i think we touched on this earlier but it's
45:01
like it's just not going to happen tomorrow that's right yeah you can't log into fidelity and sell
45:05
shares in your in tftc and uh and and i can't in cba and so i think there's a lot of work to do
45:11
there. It doesn't start when you decide you're ready. It starts well in advance. And so getting
45:17
good advice on what that looks like, building a playbook and working towards it, whether that's a
45:21
12 month, 18 month, three year plan, you know, just a regular way M&A process could take you six plus
45:29
months. So and then and then what you need in that checklist will depend on where you're at.
45:36
And so this will dovetail nicely into case studies. So CBA's client base spans anyone that's a Bitcoiner. And so in some cases, I'm helping seed round businesses, make introductions to potential investors. In other cases, I'm working with scaled entrepreneurs selling the whole business because they have looked at the return on invested capital in that business and said, I'd rather own Bitcoin and everything in between.
46:04
And so in the sort of Bitcoiner seed round sort of stage, you're thinking about what portion of this raise do we allocate to Bitcoin?
46:15
How do we manage against our burn?
46:17
And you have these two trends of like, well, I want to raise as much cash as I can to buy Bitcoin today, but I don't want to sell any equity because the only reason I'm building this thing is because I think it's going to outperform Bitcoin.
46:27
that's a very different mindset than fiat vc where you're saying just raise as much cash as
46:33
possible because that's all that matters um and the other end of the spectrum before you come to
46:39
the conclusion i'm going to sell the whole thing look at with an advisor what does a partial sale
46:46
look like what does taking some chips off the table look like work with tax folks to look at
46:50
what actually you know net proceeds is going to be um and then have a real sense of humor about
46:55
it's not going to happen overnight because it's a lot of work yeah well getting i think to give
47:01
tangible examples of companies that you've worked with i mean not to name them by name but you have
47:07
a few in here that i think would be helpful for for people listening yeah maybe their business is
47:12
similar and so the franchisee i think is a really good one the franchisee is my favorite and uh
47:18
i called him before this to see if he would mind what level of uh of commentary i gave and so uh
47:25
I'll keep it high level, but a multi-site franchisee,
47:30
so I've done a lot of multi-site franchisee M&A
47:32
in my Fiat days.
47:35
This is a business in food, in restaurant,
47:40
in a really nice scaled franchise brand,
47:43
and the owner is a Bitcoiner.
47:46
And so you're thinking, okay,
47:47
well, that business has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
47:49
The reason CBA is involved is because the owner is a Bitcoiner
47:53
and he wants advice from another Bitcoiner.
47:54
they are exploring the outright sale of that business because the return on invested capital
48:01
of opening another store another of the multi-site brand is like 15 ish with leverage
48:10
that's like not worth it when you think about the opportunity cost of just holding bitcoin
48:15
and so for that situation we got involved early and started talking about hey maybe you should
48:22
raise some debt to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. So they started accumulating Bitcoin on
48:26
their balance sheet a year ago. And the start of our conversation was, I think you should raise
48:31
some debt. I think I, at the time, assumed he was pretty bullish on his business. I was like,
48:35
I'm not telling you to sell equity. I think you should use debt to accumulate faster at lower
48:40
Bitcoin prices last summer. And through that exercise and learning what the options were
48:47
in the debt markets, he was like, man, I don't have that much conviction in the next five years
48:54
of this trade to be long the equity with leverage just to get a little bit more Bitcoin exposure.
49:00
And so through that exploration, we came to this conclusion of, I think there's a number where I'd
49:05
like to sell this business. And so that's what we're working through right now. But that is a
49:10
great example of one where he literally lived through the journey of just started stacking sats.
49:14
we worked through that with him
49:17
then we explored well could you
49:18
use leverage to speed that up
49:20
there feels like a runaway freight train
49:23
in Bitcoin right now, last summer we sort of
49:25
all thought we weren't going to be where we are right now
49:27
but it still would have been a great trade
49:29
if he ended up doing it, but through that
49:31
exercise and looking at okay I have to do what
49:33
I'm going to have to personal guarantee potentially
49:34
I'm going to take on how much leverage, that's how much
49:37
interest expense, whoa
49:38
that's a lot of heartburn, I'm not that bullish
49:41
on the brand here or the
49:42
the underlying, um, investment opportunity. And so then I think the conclusion is going to be,
49:48
let's sell this business. Now, part of the heartbreak in my business is the business owner
49:52
retains up until the day of closing the right to change his mind and say, nevermind. Um,
49:58
so I like to joke, you know, MNA advisory is like 364 days a year of heartbreak. And then one day a
50:04
year, you're like crying tears of joy because you get a deal closed. Um, so I think I might be a
50:08
little bit masochist for enjoying it so much but those closing days are very fun yeah all right
50:13
next one uh multi-unit operator that that was the multi-unit operator so i jumped out of order the
50:18
first one uh is is really transaction reparation is more of a an abstract of if you are in a sort
50:28
of nice fiat business and you're thinking through what does that look like in 18 months don't wait
50:33
18 months to call right we there's a lot you can do ahead of time the main thing we talked about
50:37
earlier, which is make yourself replaceable, make yourself irrelevant to the business as the owner,
50:42
as the control owner and entrepreneur. If everyone is paralyzed when you're on vacation,
50:47
the investor, the buyer, whether it's a strategic or a private equity fund or a family office,
50:51
is going to have a lot of trouble letting you go to the beach. And so then you get back to that
50:56
analogy of they're going to want you to drive a really nice car to the office every day.
50:59
So the work begins well in advance of a transaction to make yourself not needed.
51:05
And so you explored this option with the multi-unit franchise owner, but he decided not to, wants to sell the business, but diving into who the leverage equity play or leverage treasury play may make sense for you.
51:18
Yeah, so that's what we explored in the mid-stages with the multi-site operator, which was, I said,
51:23
look, I think you're bullish your business, but you want to get more Bitcoin. You started stacking
51:27
a year ago, and you're kind of feeling behind as the price runs. You have access to the private
51:34
capital markets. Private credit, for all of its being in the news lately, is still $2 trillion
51:39
of dry powder begging for anything good to lend to. And the anything good to lend to is cash flowing
51:45
businesses. And so the idea there is, okay, let's go raise three or four times EBITDA,
51:53
depending on the business and the situation, of debt capital, put that debt on the balance sheet,
51:59
put the cash on the balance sheet on the other side, use that to acquire Bitcoin. Now, that's
52:04
never really been done. Typically, these private credit funds, what they're underwriting is they
52:09
give the owner a mountain of cash, the owner distributes that cash to himself, he buys a boat
52:14
or an airplane or, you know, another vacation home. And in that case, the private credit funds
52:20
recourse, what they're lending against is the business. It's not the boat, the airplane,
52:24
the house that actually sits outside of the business. And so my argument to private credit,
52:28
even though this sort of deal has never happened before, it's a better underwriting for them,
52:32
because now there's the equity and cash flow that you're used to underwriting, but there's
52:36
also this Bitcoin on the balance sheet. So your private credit fund guys aren't going to suddenly
52:41
become Bitcoiners. But even if they valued the cash Bitcoin on balance sheet at 50%, it should
52:47
give more recourse to the loan than a typical, what it's called when you distribute the cash for
52:53
the airplane situation, is a dividend recap. So this should be net better than a dividend recap
52:59
from the private credit side. And safe to say those folks are dying for a new form of deal with
53:04
better collateral because we've seen what's happened to the public ones with redemptions.
53:09
You've seen the software credit deals aren't panning out as many thought they would five years ago.
53:15
I mean, I think you and I could both rattle through a half a dozen software, you know, B2B SaaS, like SMB SaaS products that we've replaced in our own businesses that otherwise I'd pay 50 to 100 bucks a month that now I just, I clank them together.
53:29
Yeah.
53:31
What would you say to people who say this is insane?
53:34
We're not going to have businesses.
53:35
What's the incentive for anybody to go start a business?
53:37
I think that the Bitcoin hurdle rate does make it really hard to justify starting a business.
53:43
But I mean, you and I are living proof that there's still businesses worth starting.
53:49
But yeah, maybe that person is right when they say, if this continues, no one will ever open
53:55
another Taco Bell. And I'd ask that person, well, does that sound like such a bad thing?
54:01
So I do think that as the hurdle rate for investment capital rises, some businesses
54:06
that currently look like good businesses
54:08
will actually be exposed to be malinvestment.
54:11
Because if I can make 30, 40, 50% CAGR holding Bitcoin,
54:16
I'm not going to open another Taco Bell as an example.
54:21
So yeah, I think there is this period of austerity
54:24
where folks would rather save.
54:26
And saving is investing in the future.
54:28
So that's not a bad thing.
54:30
No.
54:31
All right, any final thoughts?
54:32
Anything we didn't cover that we should get in here?
54:33
I think this is very concise.
54:35
I think we ran through the whole playbook.
54:37
I think it was good.
54:38
I would just say, I think,
54:41
so I want to give a shout out to the Bay Area Bitcoiners.
54:46
My Bitcoin origin story is mostly private.
54:50
I didn't really sort of visit or talk with folks
54:52
about Bitcoin and meet space for a few years.
54:55
And when I finally did, it was during COVID in San Francisco.
54:57
And so I was just like dying to talk to another human being.
55:00
Those guys were the start of like kind of giving me
55:03
the encouragement to, hey, like you should talk to people in person about Bitcoin because
55:07
you do a good job of explaining it. And then I'm now in Charlotte, North Carolina. That's where
55:14
we'll hope to stay for the long term. I'm very involved in that group. So I also want to give
55:17
a shout out to them. I think I would encourage everyone. And the reason I thought of Bitcoin
55:23
meetup groups is because I'm hearing exhaustion from like five-year Bitcoiners who are like, man,
55:32
Like if we get to September of this year and we're not higher, then I'm really in it for the tech at that point.
55:39
And, you know, I'm in it for the tech, too.
55:41
But the tech is number go up.
55:43
And I think one of two things is going to happen in September or by September.
55:47
Because September of this year, the five year rolling comp is a 65K high of September 2021.
55:53
So either Bitcoin's return is going to look really mediocre or we're going to laugh about how worried about the price of Bitcoin we were with the straight over muse stuff going on.
56:02
when you fast forward to September of this year.
56:04
Put me in that second camp,
56:06
but otherwise I'll come back on
56:07
and I'll help craft a new narrative
56:09
that you just have to zoom out further.
56:11
But I would just say,
56:12
well, I would say what you say.
56:13
We're going to win
56:14
and I'm excited for the future for Bitcoin.
56:16
We're going to win.
56:18
Go check out the playbook.
56:19
Let us know what you think.
56:21
And yeah, if you're a business owner out there,
56:23
I mean, I think what made me feel confident
56:26
about writing this with you
56:27
and now publishing it is that we're living it.
56:30
like tftc runs on a bitcoin standard 1031 runs on a bitcoin standard cba as well and uh
56:38
it as somebody's been doing it i've had bitcoin on the balance sheet since before sailor uh 2019
56:45
it has i mean it has helped us reinvest in the business it has helped us me as a business owner
56:51
grow grow the stack and it is a very pivotal tool to our capital stack that that has benefited us
56:59
massively over the last seven years.
57:01
Absolutely. And a huge thank you to you, Marty.
57:04
Your
57:05
openness to exploring this has
57:07
been very well
57:09
received, and I'm grateful for the
57:11
partnership. Like I said, real recognize
57:13
real Scott. So, that's all.
57:16
Go read the playbook. Peace and love.
57:17
Bicky!