Bryan Schielke 0:00

You've helped launch nearly 400 investment funds. What separates fund managers who successfully raise capital from those who never get off the ground?

Bridger Pennington 0:08

Yeah. So through fund launch, we've launched, like you said, of 400 plus funds, which is a big number. These are private equity, these are hedge funds, venture capital, private credit funds. And this is through our platform, Fund Launch. And so this is over the last about six years. And so then we throw events, we have networking groups, we get to meet, and I get to see a lot of these managers. And the question is like, what separates ones who raise, who are successful? I run two funds myself. And so what I've noticed, well, I would say twofold. These are emerging managers. And so it always comes back to the jockey, right? On the horse, the conviction of the jockey and the person behind that's pretty obvious. I think everyone would probably guess that. Number two, though, the market of their strategy. And it's an interesting flavor that they have to combine as an emerging manager. If you're too generic on your strategy, the question is, well, why would you win versus somebody else? There's 50 other firms doing multifamily real estate in Dallas, Texas. Why are you going to be the 51st? And maybe that jockey has a great background of why they're going to be the 51st. And so a lot of times we don't see those managers raise as well. Now, typically, what we do see though is if that manager, let's call it multifamily in Dallas, Texas, but they have a just a twist, just a flavor change of what they believe gives them alpha or an edge in the Dallas market and multifamily. We had one group, they were, I mean, and I've seen the wildest funds. You can't imagine like the types of funds we've seen. But we had one group actually doing multifamily with like agriculture. So they would place their multifamily next to existing farms and others. And the tenants could go farm on the roofs and on the and on the sides of the house. And it was like they could have their own gardens. Other groups have done, you know, mixed use. They've done malls below and above. They've done retail space. They've done entrepreneurship housing, is an interesting one we've seen. So it's it's housing, but everyone in the complex has to be running a business. So there's kind of a networking effect that happens inside of the multifamily units. We saw one doing student housing, and it was that, it was a similar strategy. They took every, so they had roommates, there'd be four people to a room. They would take a like a STEM major, an engineering major, a finance major, an entrepreneurship major, and then they had like a computer engineering major, and they would put them as roommates together with a venture capital firm that once a month came to the apartment complex and had a pitch night. So I what I'm getting at is for an emerging manager, they have to obviously be a good jockey, but there usually is a twist, a flavor, and edge of why they can win. It doesn't need to be that extreme, like I just mentioned, but those managers tend to, at least investors, and most of these emerging managers are raising from high in Earth individuals, find a good product market fit for them to go raise from. So I'd point it to those, which is a, I guess, I guess a little bit vague. It's a it's enough structure with enough vagueness, I guess, or edge to make something pretty a pretty good financial product to sell.

Bryan Schielke 3:02

Very cool. That's fantastic. I love the examples. That's awesome. Okay. All right. Next question. Fun launch has grown into one of the fastest growing companies in America. Looking back, what were the biggest decisions that fueled that growth?

Bridger Pennington 3:15

Yeah, we hit the Inc. 5000 list, which is pretty cool. We're a bootstrap company. I think for us, we a couple things on the beginning days. When we launched, we launched right before COVID. So it was 2019, we launched. We built the product with our customers in hand. So customers would give us feedback. We'd build the product, build with customers. Then COVID hits, and we're like, crap, businesses are shutting down. This is March 2020. If you remember, Rudy Gobert got COVID at the Utah Jazz, and then everything just went bad from there. And so we leaned into heavy, like, we got to make this thing work. And so me and my co-founder, Mason, and our few people we had, we started, we said, we are hopping on calls. I did a weekly webinar. So we did, I did a webinar every Thursday. We do a live stream webinar. We talked to all of our clients. We'd, you know, show our offer what we're doing. And we just sold and and like leaned into the online space, leaned into webinars. We totally pivoted and grew from there. And really we've tried to stay to our roots of talking to customers, tweaking the product with customers, and then selling directly to them. Like, how often do you get to talk to the CEO of a company or at least have them present their products to you on a pretty regular basis? For us, that I think gave us a unique edge that was kind of unique that other companies did not do. And we still actually do that today. I still, you can see my studio here. I still do a lot of live calls, live interactions with customers. We do office hours. And I think that's given us somewhat, somewhat of a unique edge when people are building. And our company helps people build funds. And so they want to talk to someone who's ran a fund. I've ran three funds now. And so there's just a different level of, I don't know, trust, credibility, et cetera, in that. Um, but also I think we hit a good market. We hit other good things as well. And we've been very fortunate. I don't underpin that as well. I don't think everything's just on us. I think we've been very fortunate and blessed from above to be in the position we're at. So it's been, it's been awesome.

Bryan Schielke 5:11

Very cool. No, that's great to see. Awesome. Okay. Let's jump into the next one here. You often say that great ideas are not enough, and then execution is everything. What do aspiring entrepreneurs consistently underestimate when building a business?

Bridger Pennington 5:25

So I started six businesses my first two years of college. I was, I got I went on a two-year church mission to Taiwan. I spoke Mandarin Chinese. I came home, I was very ambitious, and I was like, I'm going to start building businesses. I was in school and I was like, I gotta have a window here where I can build stuff. So I built a Chinese tutoring business. I built an online website building business. I wholesaled two real estate properties, two houses. I did a, I, again, I like six businesses in two years. What I found was I was a wantrepreneur. And I actually had some traction. I was making some money, but I was a wantrepreneur. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I liked listening to the podcasts. I liked reading the books. I liked telling girls I was going on dates with that I was like starting this little company. And like it was cool to be a wantrepreneur. And there comes a moment, you probably know this, of like, okay, let's actually do the work. Like, let's actually be entrepreneurs. And um, it wasn't like a day at switched for me or anything, but like the mindset of who cares about the the what you learned on a podcast or a YouTube thing or like that, like let's just do the work, let's generate revenue. Let's go get dollars in the door, let's launch. Let's not talk about launching, let's not whiteboard launching, let's launch, you know? And then now that we've launched, let's keep launching. And so let's keep moving. And so that's that's a huge, it was a shift I had to make. I went through this like, you know, and I was spinning my wheels. I remember one night being like, I don't know if this is ever gonna work. And I've done that actually multiple times of like, is this gonna work, right? Is it are we gonna make it through? Are we gonna figure it out? And it's funny, I've never seen someone put their full heart and energy into something and fail ever. Uh, I've uh, you know, I've seen people, and myself included, every time I've put my whole heart and mind, like everything into something, I've never failed at it. And I don't know if other people have as well. Now, I've done things half-heartedly and failed. And so what I get back to is with entrepreneurship, being an actual entrepreneur, not a wantrepreneur is huge. Execution, launching, moving, what are the actual dominoes that need to fall to make things happen in the real world? So much of our time is spent constructing, building, managing, kind of putting together, but like we need to direct that to actual output. What is the output from your actions, your thoughts behind the scenes? And so that's a lesson, a principle I try to live by. It's still sometimes hard, but that's what I try to do.

Bryan Schielke 8:07

I love it. Lots of those out there. All right. Uh let's hit the next one here. You're now using AI to simplify the complex process of launching investment funds. How do you see AI changing entrepreneurship and wealth creation over the next decade?

Bridger Pennington 8:25

Well, AI is everything right now. Uh, we're at the application layer. So what we're doing is saying, hey, this old archaic process of building an investment fund used to be you call a lawyer, you ask, hey, I want to build a private equity fund. They say, Great. Fill out a questionnaire, give me some details on your fund. And that lawyer bills you $800 to $1,000 an hour. They ask you questions like, are you going to run an American or European waterfall? And you say, I don't know what that is. And they go, Great, let me educate you on this. And they talk slow and they'll teach you the ins and outs of an American or European waterfall, or a 3C1 fund or a 3C7 fund and how the exemptions work. And you end up spending $50,000 to $100,000 to $200,000 to build a private investment fund. It takes three to six months typically. And then if you want to, you go talk to investors, then you change things and they want to, again, bill you for every change. That's an old archaic process. And so we said, could we simplify this? Like we've launched 400 plus funds. And so we actually said down to first principles, what is actually happening when you're building a fund? There's about 200 decisions you have to make when building your fund. What's your management fee? What's your pref? What's your timeline? Your these are all decisions you have to make. Why couldn't we help you make all those decisions with an AI agent together and multiple agents working together to build your fund? We could draft legal docs with you and then hand those off to real attorneys to then tweak and sign off and then launch your fund. That's what we've built with Fund Launch AI. Right now we're launching funds, the launch process about seven days. So back to being an entrepreneur and a entrepreneur, like you can come build an entire fund and launch your fund in roughly seven days on Fund Launch AI, which is a huge cost and time reduction from working with traditional lawyers or big law. And these documents are phenomenal. They're actually, we think, better than other documents from funds. You produce about 15 documents when you go launch a fund. So it's a massive upgrade for entrepreneurs building funds or even syndications or SPVs, a huge like unlock. Now, the bigger, broader question was AI, this is happening not just in our industry, but every industry right now. We are in a super cycle wave of innovation and adoption. Do not ignore this. We are all in. I've pivoted both my companies to be AI first, AI native. It's quite impressive the unlock, and it's only getting better.

Bryan Schielke 10:50

That's amazing. Good to hear. I love it. Okay. Great stuff. Let's jump into the next one here. You've built businesses in traditional finance, blockchain investing, and education. How do you decide when to embrace emerging opportunities versus staying focused on what already works?

Bridger Pennington 11:08

Well, to underpin our company, I mean, we have intentionally pivoted our entire company away from older models to what we think is the next wave of innovation, which is underpinned by you could say blockchain and AI. Right now, there's about 10 emerging technologies all hitting at the same time. And we're seeing a convergence of those technologies. So robotics is one I already mentioned, AI. AI underpins all of them. Multi-onic sequencing, blockchain, I already mentioned as well. Quantum computing is another one. So you're we're seeing these, they're converging. And by the convergence, we're seeing a huge outpouring of incredible technology coming out of it. The last time we saw this was two technology platforms sitting with the internet and the personal computer in the early 2000s. Prior to that, the early 1900s, we saw the telephone, electricity, and cars, I guess mobile carriages coming together at about the same time period. In the early 1900s, that 5X GDP. So we went from about 0.5% GDP to 2 to 2.5% GDP growth. And we sustained that for the next 100 years. We saw a big jump with the internet. And now I we are seeing this, you know, massive. Now this is a super, we believe a super cycle. And so, you know, it doesn't happen overnight. This happens over, you know, a decade or two. But everything fundamentally is changing. And something my dad taught me, my dad's a successful financier and entrepreneur as well. And he's like, Bridger, whenever there's a wave happening, he goes, I used to fight the wave. I used to put my hands up and say, I don't want this wave or I don't like the wave coming. And he goes, now that I'm an older man, I've decided you just got to grab your boogie board and go with the wave. And what's cool about the 2020s is we don't just have one wave hitting, we have multiple waves hitting at the same time and they're compounding together. And don't miss this wave. These waves happen. He's like, at least in, you know, these happen maybe every 20 to 30 years, these types of waves. And billions and if not trillions of dollars are made in these waves or in the wakes of these waves. So try to position your company, your team, your family in front of these waves to do well. And so that's what we've tried to do. Uh the last year, we have ripped apart our entire company, processes teams to be AI first, AI native, and actually build AI products to build into this wave because, you know, it's just a matter of time. You got to get with it or get out of it. So that's where we're at.

Bryan Schielke 13:39

I love it. Embrace it and ride it. Good stuff. Okay. Last question here, and we'll get you out of here on time. Your career's been built around helping others build wealth and launch businesses. What advice would you give someone who wants to create long-term financial freedom but doesn't know where to begin?

Bridger Pennington 13:56

For, and I'll just I'll speak to people that are, you know, I'm still in the game, is I guess what I'll underpin. You know, I'm I don't stand here as some exited billion-dollar founder, like, you know, I'm in the game. We've had success so far. I manage, you know, our funds manage about $630 million of portfolio AUM. We've done well as a company. We're Inc. 5000 company, but I again I'm still in the process. I'm in the game. But if I was talking to my younger self in my early 20s starting those businesses, a few things, well, I already mentioned one entrepreneur and entrepreneur. The other thing I would say is, I'll just share a story. I was 21 years old. I was worried about I had a business that just started and it was kind of going and it was working well. And I was considering slowing down in school or dropping out. But I also had a full-time job offer in Silicon Valley once I graduated to make six figures. I had a stock option, bonus, like all this cool stuff to happen. So I was in this decision point. Should I go do the job and do the corporate route? Should I maintain stay in school or should I drop out of school? Or, you know, or there may be a mix of the three as well. And I remember this guy from Harvard came and spoke at our school, successful entrepreneur, and he gave this great speech. He finishes the speech, he comes to the back of the room and he's standing next to me. And I'm like, that's the guy is right. He's like literally standing next to me. I'm like, he just he was just, I don't know, took a break. The next speaker was up or something. And I was like, I'm gonna go talk to this guy and ask him my question. So I walk up to him, I said, Hey, my name's Bridger, I'm a student here. I actually have one question for you. I have this, you know, budding business starting to take off. What would you do? Would you do the business? Would you go take the job in Silicon Valley? It's a great job. Like and he kind of looked at me with like this funny face. He was like, What are you talking about? And I was like, Well, it's it feels really risky to like, what if I go after this business and it fails? And I maybe I drop out of school or I take classes slower and I miss the job opportunity. And he's like, he's like, risk, what are you talking about? He's like, Bridger, if let's say you do the business, do you you think the business is gonna do well, right? I'm like, yeah, it's looking really good. He's like, you do the business, and let's say it fails. Do you think the school you're in right now will take your money again and let you finish more classes? He's like, Yeah. He's like, secondly, do you have a family member or friend, if you really hit rock bottom, you could go sleep on their couch and they have food in their fridge, probably and like a roof over your head for a month or two? Like, do you have somebody in your life, an aunt, an uncle, a parent? And I was like, Yeah, I have somebody in my life. I I I bet I could, I bet I could bum on their couch for a month or two. He's like, all right, so that's worst case scenario, right? That's better than 90% of the world lives right now. 90% of the world does not have food in the fridge, air conditioning, and a roof over their head in America, and a school that will probably let you back in because you already got in once. And by the way, America loves entrepreneurs, even failed entrepreneurs. He's like, that's not risk. We're not talking about risk here. Risk is like you're gonna die or you're gonna lose an arm or something. That's risk. This is not risk. That's your downside. What's your upside? I'm like, well, the upside is we make millions of dollars and do really well. He's like, Well, that's a pretty obvious choice for me. And it honestly changed my whole perspective. And I talked to it in the same time for another friend. He was like, dude, you're 21 years old. You risk it all. What do you lose? Five grand in your bank account? Like, who cares? If you're 40 years old and risk it all, that's a different level of risk. You got a mortgage or a house or kids or a sp like that's a different level of risk than when you're 21, 22, 23 years old. Take the heavy risks now. And that was such a great lesson for me of like, yeah, go. And that's we ended up going and launching Fun Launch, and we, you know, crushed it. We did hit hit, we've hit the Inc. 5000. We've done over 45 million revenue. Like, I ended up dropping out of school. I've never been back to school. I now run two investment funds. Like it kind of has worked out. And we'll see. We'll see if it all works out in the end. But as of today, it's been working out. And so if I go back to my younger self, I'm grateful those other older entrepreneurs told me that. And I thought that's what I would share with somebody else. It's act, it's actually not that risky. Even though it feels like it in the moment, it's actually in the perspective of the world or history of the world. The decisions we're making are actually not that risky compared to our ancestors who were making much riskier decisions, you know, crossing an ocean or doing other things to move countries, et cetera. So that's what I would leave the group with.

Bryan Schielke 18:29

That's a huge perspective and fantastic that you were able to get that at the right time. That's that's phenomenal.