Latest / Earn Your Leisure / Cliff Notes: How Arlan Hamilton Raised $30 Million
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- 1:13Speaker 3: Today, you say you raised thirty million, what's the processes
- 1:16Speaker 3: of raising money? Like, how do you who is in
- 1:19Speaker 3: your circle of investors? And how do you network and
- 1:22Speaker 3: promote your fund to actually get money into it.
- 1:24Speaker 4: Yeah, so it started out with that woman who it
- 1:31Speaker 4: started out with that woman who didn't have a lot
- 1:34Speaker 4: of network and so was she worked at a big
- 1:38Speaker 4: company and then she had some money from that, so
- 1:41Speaker 4: she put in like an angel investor. But then she introduced
- 1:43Speaker 4: me to her friend who happened to just be in
- 1:45Speaker 4: a network. That friend happened to be like a tech
- 1:48Speaker 4: person from Facebook who knew a man named Lars Resmussen
- 1:53Speaker 4: who co founded with his brother Google Maps. So that
- 1:57Speaker 4: third investor in twenty fifteen or the twenty sixteen that
- 2:02Speaker 4: and he's a very early investor in Canva. So he's
- 2:05Speaker 4: just very very successful and he sees things early. But
- 2:09Speaker 4: that was kind of like the first like like that
- 2:13Speaker 4: I could see, Oh, I'm going to be talking to
- 2:15Speaker 4: people who have a lot of money and you know,
- 2:18Speaker 4: connection here, so I just spent you know, every day,
- 2:23Speaker 4: every waking hour, reaching out to people, working with people.
- 2:26Speaker 4: Then like maybe mid twenty sixteen, Stuart Butterfield reached out
- 2:31Speaker 4: the founder of Slack. He just saw what I was
- 2:33Speaker 4: doing and he wanted to be part of it. I
- 2:36Speaker 4: reached out to Mark and Dreson because he he said
- 2:39Speaker 4: that something I wrote was interesting, and I use that
- 2:42Speaker 4: as an opportunity to ask him to invest and he
- 2:44Speaker 4: ended up investing in three of my funds, like the
- 2:46Speaker 4: smaller funds, which was has been really cool. He has
- 2:50Speaker 4: also blocked me on Twitter, so that tells you my life. Like,
- 2:54Speaker 4: I have no idea to ask him. I don't know
- 2:57Speaker 4: I should ask what Chris? I should ask Chris any? Yeah,
- 3:01Speaker 4: you should ask Chris. I know y'all are friendly with him,
- 3:03Speaker 4: but Marcus he blocks everybody. He blocks everybody. But I
- 3:06Speaker 4: must have said something one day that upset him, because
- 3:09Speaker 4: I will call like, I will call people out, like
- 3:11Speaker 4: I call out Peter Till, I'll call out people who
- 3:14Speaker 4: are like friendly. I'll call out and reason I've called
- 3:17Speaker 4: them out before. I've had conversations with.
- 3:19Speaker 1: Chris about what did you call them all for?
- 3:21Speaker 4: And when George Floyd was murdered and Dreason Horowitz, which
- 3:25Speaker 4: is a multi billion dollar fund, announced their cultural.
- 3:28Speaker 3: Fund Culture Leadership.
- 3:29Speaker 4: Yeah, and then they also, I mean they also announced
- 3:32Speaker 4: this like one or two million dollar fund, and I
- 3:36Speaker 4: just it hurts me to say that word because it's
- 3:38Speaker 4: not to me a fund that invests in black people.
- 3:43Speaker 4: I know what it's like to put together a million dollars,
- 3:46Speaker 4: So I'm not saying it's nothing. But when you have
- 3:48Speaker 4: multiple billions under management, and your response to a black
- 3:52Speaker 4: man being murdered on TV is to say, here's this
- 3:57Speaker 4: penny less than a penny, I was offended. As someone
- 4:01Speaker 4: who had invested at that point in maybe one hundred
- 4:04Speaker 4: and forty companies led by underrepresented founders. I still am
- 4:07Speaker 4: offended by it. And in fact, I mean I know
- 4:10Speaker 4: the people who are all part of it. It's not
- 4:12Speaker 4: like I'm over here just like mad at them and
- 4:14Speaker 4: yelling at them. I've talked to all of them. I
- 4:18Speaker 4: appreciate the work that Chris is doing. I appreciate the
- 4:20Speaker 4: work that Nate did. You black men in these organizations.
- 4:25Speaker 4: I just think that the organizations are it's really interesting
- 4:29Speaker 4: to me that they're run by white people, white men,
- 4:32Speaker 4: and they especially Ben Horwitz wants to be so close
- 4:35Speaker 4: to the culture. And if he's your friend, I'm not
- 4:37Speaker 4: trying to offend you, but he wants to be so
- 4:39Speaker 4: close to the culture. But tell me, besides, like two
- 4:43Speaker 4: founders that I can think of right now, how many
- 4:45Speaker 4: times do they put more than ten million dollars in
- 4:46Speaker 4: to a black founder's company when they are those two
- 4:50Speaker 4: invest in. It's their business, it's their money. But just
- 4:54Speaker 4: like it's their business to not do that, it's my
- 4:57Speaker 4: business to talk about it and to say wow to.
- 5:01Speaker 1: The overall goal for backstage capital, you said you raised
- 5:06Speaker 1: thirty million should be valued at one hundred million? Is
- 5:09Speaker 1: there a number? Should it? Are you looking to be
- 5:11Speaker 1: a billion dollar fund? Like? What is the goal? Right?
- 5:14Speaker 1: Because obviously as you have more capital you can deploy. Yeah,
- 5:17Speaker 1: it won't be a thousand new millionaires, It'll be yeah million.
- 5:20Speaker 4: Well, the thousand new millionaires comes from me teaching people
- 5:22Speaker 4: how to fish. That's straight up. It's not about how
- 5:25Speaker 4: many people can invest in. But I think I think
- 5:28Speaker 4: for everyone involved, our founders, for the LPs who've already
- 5:32Speaker 4: invested in, the ones who could invest based on the
- 5:35Speaker 4: deal flow that we have, the people we get to
- 5:37Speaker 4: see the access we have. I just told you I
- 5:40Speaker 4: invested in open Ai. Nobody else got to invest in
- 5:43Speaker 4: open Ai, you know, directly through them, right, unless you
- 5:49Speaker 4: had like one hundred million dollars fifty million dollars this year. Yeah,
- 5:54Speaker 4: just yeah, I mean, you know, obviously wish it was sooner.
- 5:56Speaker 4: But it's the thing though. It's like when Troy invested
- 5:59Speaker 4: in Uber and Lyft. But anyway, I think for everybody involved,
- 6:07Speaker 4: we should be at least the three hundred and fifty
- 6:11Speaker 4: five hundred million dollar fund under management within the next
- 6:16Speaker 4: five years. That's what we should be because we can
- 6:19Speaker 4: deploy it, We have the access, we have the skills
- 6:23Speaker 4: to deploy that you don't all. You don't always have
- 6:26Speaker 4: to have so much money, Like Robert Smith has billions
- 6:29Speaker 4: under management, your friend, right, because he's a private equity investor,
- 6:33Speaker 4: so he's making investments that are so much bigger than
- 6:36Speaker 4: the kind we're making. So we don't have to be
- 6:38Speaker 4: a billion dollar fund to be super successful. But I
- 6:42Speaker 4: think that a three hundred four hundred million dollar assets
- 6:46Speaker 4: under management is something that's exactly where we should be
- 6:49Speaker 4: in the pocket.
- 6:50Speaker 3: So what's should track record for your fund?
- 6:53Speaker 4: The track record is that we're about well, it's called
- 6:55Speaker 4: TVPI total value paid in. That means that for every
- 6:59Speaker 4: dollar that you've put in, what is that dollar worth
- 7:02Speaker 4: on paper? Essentially, So we're somewhere around one point four
- 7:06Speaker 4: one point five x hovering across two hundred companies, which
- 7:09Speaker 4: is pretty hard to track. But across that so we
- 7:13Speaker 4: haven't had any major exits. We have like three exits
- 7:15Speaker 4: that have been small or aqua hires. We invest at
- 7:19Speaker 4: the earliest stages, but if you look at the enterprise
- 7:23Speaker 4: value of our portfolio, it's in the billions, which is incredible. Hundreds,
- 7:28Speaker 4: if not thousands of jobs created directly from our investment
- 7:32Speaker 4: and revenue is in you know, the hundreds of millions.
- 7:36Speaker 3: So what will be your pitch for investors to invest
- 7:39Speaker 3: in your fund? Like, what's the main thing.
- 7:41Speaker 4: That you would I certainly cannot pitch to investors. I
- 7:45Speaker 4: can tell you hypothetically because I'm not allowed by the
- 7:49Speaker 4: SEC to.
- 7:52Speaker 3: What makes your fun attractive? In your opinion?
- 7:55Speaker 4: We were you know, the thesis that I had ten
- 7:57Speaker 4: years ago or twelve years ago played out. I said,
- 8:01Speaker 4: you can either be you know, we've done so much
- 8:03Speaker 4: or so little. You can either be crashed by the
- 8:05Speaker 4: way that's coming or you can write it. It's everything
- 8:08Speaker 4: I've said has happened. It's a video of me in
- 8:10Speaker 4: twenty seventeen talking about what happened in twenty twenty two
- 8:14Speaker 4: and twenty twenty one. Like it's just it keeps happening.
- 8:18Speaker 4: So it's been proven out. On top of that, there
- 8:20Speaker 4: are multiple funds that have been created after us and
- 8:25Speaker 4: with our mandate in our blueprint that are have gone
- 8:28Speaker 4: on to do well and who look to us for guidance.
- 8:32Speaker 4: So we actually have all of the touch points. We
- 8:35Speaker 4: have all of the deal flow and the network and
- 8:40Speaker 4: the infrastructure that we've built manually essentially, so everything that
- 8:45Speaker 4: they're looking for for those to find the companies, they
- 8:49Speaker 4: don't have to do a thing, you know, come find
- 8:51Speaker 4: the companies through us. Then we nurture the companies. They
- 8:54Speaker 4: don't have to do that either, and then we are
- 8:56Speaker 4: able to the way we've already done, source the companyanies
- 9:00Speaker 4: that then go on to have high enterprise value.
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