From Building & Exiting Companies to Investing in Billionaire-Backed Strategies with Chris Van Dusen – EP 255

Justin Donald: What's up, Chris? Good to have you on the show.

Chris Van Dusen: Thanks for having me, Justin. This is amazing.

Justin Donald: Well, this is awesome. Yeah. You and I, we've tried to connect a few times, and in fact, we were almost scheduled. I don't know what we were thinking, but we are almost scheduled to do our recording on St. Patty's Day, and I think both of us are Irish, although my percentage is probably a lot smaller than yours. But I'm glad we opted for today's date.

Chris Van Dusen: Yeah, I think it would've been a very lively podcast if we did it on St. Patty's Day, though.

Justin Donald: I'm sure it would've. It's always been one of my favorite holidays of the year.

Chris Van Dusen: Oh, that's amazing. Again, thanks for having me. I'm glad we connected and so let's go. Let's have some fun.

Justin Donald: Yeah. Well, I'm excited to learn your story because it's not every day that we get someone that has been an entrepreneur and is an entrepreneur that is also an investor. And I'd love to learn from you, how you got into this space. When did you decide to become an entrepreneur? Did you learn this from your parents? Did you figure this out at a young age, or were you much older, like a few of my other friends I've had on the show?

Chris Van Dusen: Yeah. I would say older, not as old as I am now, right? I call the accidental entrepreneur or even the forced entrepreneur. So, I graduated from college at William & Mary. I played sports at a high level baseball. I started in sales right after college because sitting behind a cubicle wasn't necessarily in my cards. I didn't think that was going to be something I would thrive at, right?

Justin Donald: Yeah. I hear you on that.

Chris Van Dusen: And ended up in sales. It was great. I had the opportunity to come to California at the end of ‘09. And the company I came out for, they did a big restructure, and all of us who had come out, 75 days after I moved to California, we were all gone.

Justin Donald: Oh, my goodness. That's brutal.

Chris Van Dusen: It was brutal. So, you go from Williamsburg, Virginia to Newport Beach. Very different cost of living. Very different economics. And so, it almost became a necessity. It was, alright, I'm in real estate investment banking. It's 2009. I'm not sure who's hiring in that world, what activity is really happening meaningfully. And so, it really was to just stay afloat. I said, "Okay, I got to figure this out. And I met my wife a few months after that. We started our first company four months into dating, back then, do a marketing firm. And kind of everything took off from there. She started a firm in 2013. I started one in 2015.

We were doing high-intent media buying, conversion rate optimization for high-growth companies. And then I met these five guys and started what ended up becoming the second-largest CBD brand in the world.

Justin Donald: Wow.

Chris Van Dusen: And so, we were fortunate enough to sell that in ‘21. My wife and I co-founded a liquor distillery in 2018 that we sold in ‘21. We sold a beauty care brand quite naturally in 2019. And then those are the fun ones you get to put up on the wall, but there were quite a few along the way that didn't work as well. And that's kind of part of that journey that we all take. And at the same time, I had raised a couple of funds with a buddy of mine from college, and I was an active investor. And so, back in 2017, I met this guy. His name's John Garcia. He was the founder of Solyco Capital, where I'm at now. They invested in one of the deals. We took a full cycle, but really at the end of the day, I fell in love with their ethos, what they do because it's very different than just being a venture partner.

And had the opportunity to join in January ‘22 as a senior equity partner. And so, I spend my time looking for amazing opportunities to get involved in, bringing capital to the firm and what I call power brokering an ecosystem, really figuring out of our 38 portfolio companies, who needs to be with whom and why, and how do we kind of one plus one equals three within the portfolio, not only as ecosystem investors, but certainly pass that into how do we just drive value for our LPs, for our investors, for everything else.

Justin Donald: Well, I'd be curious to know some of the lessons learned along the way. I mean, obviously, you had some exits, which is great. I don't know if any were big enough where you could just do nothing, but I'm sure some were sizable enough that you had the capital to start the next one or start investing on your own. So, I'd be interested to hear how some of those exits kind of inform that next chapter for you and build the confidence to do another one because the odds of your first business succeeding are very low, right? It's like 95% fail within five years. So, you had one at the beginning that was part of that 5%. You had another one. You had another one. It sounds like you may have had another one or your wife, I don't know how involved you were, but I mean, that's a lot of exits. That's a lot of success there.

Chris Van Dusen: I don't want to call it the spaghetti principle thrown off against the wall. Maybe something will stick, right? I love getting involved in businesses where I think I can add value. So, I start there, right? Set a different way. Think about the Warren Buffett model, right? Invest in what you know. So, for me, in all the companies, I always sat in the Chief Revenue Officer role because I knew how to scale businesses, especially at the time, very different today, but this is 2016, 2017, 2018, when we were really growing these businesses. The digital landscape was very different. And so, I knew we could get attention, we could grow, and I knew as long as there was a direct-to-consumer piece, we could really do well there.

And so, we would try things that we thought were interesting. Luck plays an entirely underplayed role in all of this, right time, right place. And so, I think at the end of the day, I wouldn't say I picked. I was lucky enough to get introduced to great co-founders that we were able to do really meaningful things at the time. And as long as I could do what I thought I was good at and could bring value to, not just, “Hey, I have an idea, let's try it.” Something I go, "No, I have an asymmetrical advantage and I think I can do it, and here's how I will add value,” was really the biggest thing. But then again, look, I'm telling you about three. There are about eight more gravestones you got to cross in between you hit each of those three, right?

So, we tried different things, and it was always, was I willing to put my own capital, my own time, my own energy? Because time and treasure are the resources we have here, right? Am I able to take those, put it in, and do I believe it enough? Because if you don't, or the small group of people you build at the beginning don't believe it, how is anyone institutionally or a VC firm or anyone else supposed to believe it, right? It's not a blank check to go do whatever you want. And so, it was, I'm going to go try this and get it to a place. And some I said may have opportunity. The education chasm is too high or the resources needed to really scale are too big, so no. We're going to shut it down.

And I think the big lesson is try. And whether or not you're an intrapreneur doing it inside of your own company or trying to build your own new company, the idea of try things, fail fast, we've all heard the story, right? But try, push, see if there's something there. Follow some data, right? That was what we came from, from the marketing side, but it was really go push. Go try.

Justin Donald: Well, I love your humility to say, “Hey, luck plays a role.” I love telling people luck plays a role. Timing plays a role. I mean, to even have a business that could exit in 2021 I think is just you set yourself up for success, even having a business that could sell during a time of like peak valuations. I made a critical mistake in 2021 that I didn't take a couple of offers that I was given because I thought that I could time it better. We could grow it more. I mean, so I'm looking at it from the other side, where it's like I learned some valuable lessons in not taking a great offer when the offer was presented, because that offer has not been presented.

Two specific potential exits for me, and I'm nowhere close to what I was offered today on one of them. And the other one, I'm not far off, but it would've been a sweetheart deal, so I love that you could pull the trigger as well because timing matters.

Chris Van Dusen: Timing matters. And I didn't grow up a country boy. I grew up in Connecticut even though I went to college in Virginia. But there's that old saying, right, "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.” And I think at the end of the day, it's apropos to being an entrepreneur is we all love our baby. And let's just call it that, right? As our child, we started it. Remember the first LLC docs, if that's what you had, right? Like, you worked on the logo so hard because it's the most important thing. You're really trying to get this thing done. And many years later, now someone's evaluating it, and they may be tearing it apart, and you're like, “My value for this is much higher than yours.” And you're like, "Yeah, but your value is, this is something you've poured your heart and soul in.”

But in any business, there's an actual, tangible enterprise value. It may not match. And so, sometimes it's getting over a little bit of ego or hubris to say, “Today, this is as far as I can take it, or as far as I'd like to take it. I want it to have a future life. Maybe that's better by somebody else to do, and this is the value of that today. Am I okay with that? Does it allow me to do something else, or is this my opus, and I want to go down with it?” Right? That's up to the individual entrepreneur. But at the end of the day, it's really coming to grips with, does my expectation of this company match the marketplace's expectation for value?

Justin Donald: Yeah. Chris, where were you in 2021 when I needed this advice, and you would tell me, “I'm selling,” and I'd say, "Okay, maybe I should too.”

Chris Van Dusen: About 40 pounds heavier, dealing with attorneys trying to do two deals at once. So, I'm not sure I had the bandwidth, but I've definitely gotten the, I have my licks in, if you will.

Justin Donald: Yeah. Well, you've had your entrepreneurial successes. What I find very fascinating is that you've also had a lot of success as an investor, and I find it very rare that an entrepreneur does well as an investor. Luckily, I've had success in both as well. But I've had a lot of hard knocks along the way also that have informed my decision-making, because as an entrepreneur, we find a way. We're optimistic to a fault. We're going to figure it out. We'll get the people. We'll get the revenue. We'll cut expenses. We'll do what we need to do to find a way. And as an investor, it's a totally different mindset.

I mean, you have to step into it saying, "This isn't a good deal because rationally most deals are not good deals. And the only reason I'm going to do this deal is if I can prove otherwise, right, if I can prove that it is a good deal.” So, you have to start from bad deal and move to good deal, versus, as an entrepreneur, it's like, “I'm going to take this thing and I'm going to make it great, and here's the vision, and I'm going to work all these hours. I'll do whatever it takes.” So, it's just two different mindsets, and I'm curious how you bridge that gap.

Chris Van Dusen: So, we have a statement in our firm that one of our other partners named, and it's reckless optimism. That is what an entrepreneur needs to have almost. An investor can't afford to have that.

Justin Donald: No, because you could die. You could lose everything.

Chris Van Dusen: Exactly. And so, track record's certainly important, but here's, I think, an interesting nuance is we like evaluating, and I'm not talking about Solyco. Just we, as humans, like evaluating the deal. So, we'll sit down and you pore through the deck and you're looking at assumptions and you're looking at market and you're seeing like, "Oh, is this going to revolutionize?” Some things do. Some things are disruptive, some things are unbelievable to the zeitgeist of our world. Others aren't. So, we can start there and go, "Okay, is this something lofty enough that we want to get into? And is there enterprise value?” Great, great, great, great, great.

That's validating whether or not this is interesting enough for our investors, for returns, for something we think is change culture, possibly. And you can do that. That's the science part of due diligence. The art is who's sitting across you at the table. And I'm not going to say people do or don't do this in diligence, but for me, it's a very important thing because as someone who has had a few exits, had a few gravestones, has gone through the entrepreneurial journey, which is not easy, number one. Number two, so I trained in Brazilian jiujitsu. It's what the thing is, what looks like a record behind me, right? I have my black belt, and the only reason I have my black belt is because I was too dumb to stop doing it a long time ago. That is an entrepreneur.

And I kid on the dumb part, but you get up every day, and the value proposition is tough. I'm going to get up. People are going to tell me I'm not going to make it, nothing's going to go my way. I'm going to go to bed exhausted. I'm going to work longer hours than I did in my corporate job. I'm going to eat stuffed sandwiches all day long, and I'm going to get up and do it again and again and again. And so, Groundhog Day, and some days you feel like you're on cloud nine, and some days you feel like your business is about to go underwater, and everything in between.

Justin Donald: And they could be next door days, right? It's like one day after the other. It's like, "Everything's great.” “Oh, no, we're about to die.” Yeah.

Chris Van Dusen: So, I come back to, I think, a very important thing, which is when I'm across the table, I want to get to know the founder or the co-founders, right? And really understand, A, values aligned not only with our firm, but together, because no one talks about it probably enough. When you have a co-founder, you're like the jockeys, right? Not the horse. You're trying to see, okay, these two people aligned. Do they have clear expectations of the same goal today, tomorrow, 18 months, 36, 48? Do they step on each other's toes? Are they complementary or are they competitive? Like, that is interesting. Number two, I personally like investing in proven entrepreneurs. They've done it once. Doesn't mean they have to have had a nine-figure exit.

Have they gone through the process of taking an idea, growing it, building it, nurturing it, supporting it, understand what it takes to fully bring it into a market, validated whether or not it has product market fit, understood where to put scale, where not, all of the things while it's noisy and you're trying to support staying alive. If you can do that to whatever end, when you do it again, you already know what you're walking into. You already have your level of playbook. When you've not done it, it doesn't mean you can't. There are great entrepreneurs, right? You did it for your first time once. I did it for my first time. But when you're evaluating the human side of it, you're saying, "Does this person have the grit, resilience, determination to be a good steward of our investor capital?”

Justin Donald: That's right.

Chris Van Dusen: And do they have the ability to do it? Yes or no? And sometimes that's longer than just something you're going to see on a 12-slide deck with an appendix, right? Because it could be the best idea in the world. But if they don't understand truly what it takes to get it done, then that's a dangerous place to be.

Justin Donald: Well, you've articulated something quite well that I love talking about, which is I built a vetting deals course with one of my dear friends, Hans Box, who also is kind of our in-house analyst and CIO for a lot of the deals that we do in Lifestyle Investor. And we built this course, and one of the foundational concepts is that you bet on the jockey. And the jockey, like, having a good jockey can turn a bad deal into a good deal, right? But if you have a bad jockey, they can easily take a great deal and make it a horrible deal. And so, it is first and foremost about the jockey. And then for me, it's everything else after that, the idea, the TAM, just all that matters, just not as much to me as the jockey. So, I love that you're the same there.

Chris Van Dusen: I think you look at and you can look up any of these stories, right? I'm not telling anything revolutionary here, but even Stewart from Slack, right? Sold Flickr to Yahoo, made a little bit of cash, started a video game company, raised a whole bunch of money as a proven founder, was literally shuttering the company because it didn't get enough traction but they built an internal communication tool, and he pivoted it, and it became Slack, one the most valuable, if not most valuable communications companies sold to Salesforce. That's betting on the jockey.

Justin Donald: Yep. It sure is. Yeah. I love that. And I think it's fun to kind of break down the different investment sectors. So, one of the things I love to do, and my goal here is to democratize what single-family offices are doing. So, the groups that manage money for the billionaires, it's to democratize what they're doing for people that may never be billionaires but can use the same playbook. And so, I study data. I have access to all these reports, all this information. I love sharing it inside of the Lifestyle Investor Mastermind community. One of the things that we find is, and this is contrary to what most people believe, most people that I've run across that people that haven't had exposure to our education, they think that the wealthiest people typically make their money in the stock market, which is not the case.

And in fact, the wealthiest families in the world only have about 15% to 25% of their net worth in the stock market. And often, it’s so that they can borrow against it to go buy alternative assets, right? And so, we’re going to talk a little bit about this because you guys specialize in this space. But what I want to make clear for everyone is that in the last couple of years, these reports and the reports from Goldman, the reports from JP Morgan, the reports from KKR, Apollo, UBS, I mean, these all are spitting out almost identical data, just all within the same wheelhouse that most of these billionaires, 50% to 60% of their net worth is in alternative investments. And so, I share this because if you break it down even further, well, what’s alternative investments? Well, real estate, private equity, private credit. Well, we can break down private equity a little bit more into venture if we want to. And so, you see the wealthiest people that have anywhere from 4% to 10% of their net worth, unless they are in the industry, know it better, maybe they might go up a little higher to 12% or 15%, but generally, we see about 4% to 10% there. And then we see about 20% to 30%, often even 35% to 40% in private equity. And so, I’d love to hear your thoughts (a) anything you can share on the difference between the two, but be any of your findings, anything because you’ve been in this space for a while now.

Chris Van Dusen: Yeah. So, I’ll plug Solyco for one second, but I promise you I’ll bring it back around. Really, when you look at Solyco, we’re a private investment firm, right? We have strategies in ventures, strategies in private equity, strategies in private credit, strategies in real estate, right? We have an RIA attached to the firm. That way we can build vehicles through it, right, and help our portfolio companies.

What we realized was, to your point, our largest investors, our large family offices who want a manager to have the ability to run strategies for them. And so, what we’re known for is the venture side. We do a lot, we have about 38 holdings in series seed through B, anywhere from half a million up to upwards of $10 million in these companies, right? And so, when you’re looking at that strategy, it’s very different, right, on a risk adjusted return perspective, your earlier stage. I like personally being in this kind of a B range. I think you remove a lot of execution risks, but still have a great return.

Now, you get to private equity and to kind of take a step back, and I’m sure a lot of your listeners know this, but I would always say this kind of quick version of private equity versus venture is venture’s a minority stake. Private equity is a majority stake, a controlling stake, could be one company or it could be a strategy to roll up a bunch of them. One is going to reinvest their profit dollars, if you will, or revenue dollars in the continuation of growth, and many times won’t be profitable for a long time. And that is okay on strategy. Private equity, they are traditionally already kicking off profit dollars, which means you now control a company or multiple companies you’ve rolled up that are kicking back dollars to pay off any debt dollars you used to buy them and returning you money every year.

And so, those are very different strategies. One is looking at MOIC or multiple on invested capital on a long term. Five to seven years, I’m going to invest a dollar and hope to make 8, 10, 12 back over this period. The other is I’m going to invest a dollar and maybe at exit in five to seven years, I’m going to get two to three times my money. But along the way, I’ve been taking distribution. So, my internal rate of return, my IRR will be nice every year because I’m getting cashflow back, right? And so, those are very different ways to look at it. They all kind of fit in that alternative bucket.

And you mentioned private credit, which is a great thing as well, which is saying, I would like to use either cash dollars that I have in making return on it every year, simple interest, or if it’s in a retirement account, right, tax advantaged. But my risk is maybe that entire vehicle going default, but probably not because it’s backed by real estate or other things, but I’m going to put money in and get a return. That’s all I want, and I want it to be fixed and a little bit higher and less speculative than maybe buying a midcap or small cap strategy in the market, right?

But real estate becomes the great wealth builder and that’s where you see a lot of people put their dollars or things associated with real estate. So, I go back to, at the firm, we started it this way, so that we could provide these strategies for investors who are looking to diversify in the way that you did, right? Because any way you slice it, a good kind of weighted portfolio, and I am not a financial planner, so please not financial advice, when you look at it, your 0.4% to 10% is in any kind of illiquid long-term play. That’s venture, right? That could be private equity as well. The rest of them are typically liquid or have some kind of calls every year that you can force liquidity into because you don’t want to be locked in. Those dollars are sitting there, right?

Capital markets make it easy because you can buy and sell on a daily basis. But what you find, to your point, and again, this is some advanced tax planning, I’ll say way over my skis so I don’t want to go too deep here, but yeah, you have X amount of dollars in family office, in the market. You can take margin at good rates and you can take that, invest in real estate, use the rental rates, the rental fees that are coming in to pay off that loan that you took from yourself.

Justin Donald: Yep.

Chris Van Dusen: Well, that’s pretty interesting, right? But it has to be in the capital markets. It has to be something you can securitize enough to take the dollars out. So, you find that the bigger family offices really get creative on how they’re able to play and continue to acquire more, whether or not more means more deals, more real estate off a smaller bit than their total amount is by playing with leverage smartly. And so, that’s typically the piece that most people miss, is they’re able to take assets, they have leveraged them into new assets, pay those assets off, wash and repeat, and it’s been happening for many years.

Justin Donald: Yeah, I love it. And I love the way that you kind of described it. It’s like, hey, there are pros and cons to each of these. You just need to understand them. It’s not that one’s better than the other, it’s that you want to use them in tandem at the right allocations, so that way, no matter what the season is, you have the potential to make a good return. And I just think so many new people that join our community, they want to expose all of their money to get the highest return they can. And we always tell people, hold on, don’t rush into anything. Let’s focus on education. Let’s focus on building out the foundation, investor IQ, investment criteria, goals and dreams. Like let’s do all this stuff first because the goal is not to maximize every dollar. The goal is to put a certain percentage at risk and put a certain percentage at no risk or virtually no risk, and to have different percentages in each of these different asset classes because that’s how you make money in any season, right?

Chris Van Dusen: And you talk about it as a difference between wealth preservation and wealth creation, right? And there should be a portion being preserved and a portion continuing to create, kind of dumping that coal back in the fire, right? And as a percentage basis, naturally, everything will continue to go up over time.

Justin Donald: Yeah. And something else that you guys, I think have gotten into recently or maybe it’s for a while, it’s a niche that I love investing in, and that’s pro sports. And I’d love to hear some of your thoughts around that because, and I interviewed Christopher Zuck on my podcast, who’s done a bunch in the pro sports space as a feeder to one of the bigger names. And I’m just, I’m very bullish on pro sports. I’m very bullish on media rights which kind of control the valuations there of pro sports and with streaming coming into play and all these different opportunities to really grow valuations. And by the way, I’ve already had my first exit on one of the pro sports teams that did have a minority equity position transfer, right? So, I’d love your thoughts around it.

Chris Van Dusen: Yeah. So, two things, one, kind of for full disclosure, we haven’t made a placement yet in a pro team and there’s a reason and you hit on a lot of them. And it’s truly understanding for some of these leagues when you’re established league, right, if you’re doing a minority stake in a large kind of big five sports team, these are media companies. So, you’re trying to evaluate them as media companies. They used to be great tax havens, right, for very wealthy families to invest in because they would lose money. Well, to your point, TV rights and digital and everything else, they’ve become these masterful media companies with unreal valuations. I’m sure you saw the Lakers huge valuation on sale.

Justin Donald: That $10.1 billion.

Chris Van Dusen: Insane. And so, I think, he bought that what, for a couple of hundred million back however many years ago. I don’t care how you slice it, 30 years, it’s a great return.

Justin Donald: Oh, yeah.

Chris Van Dusen: Right? And so, you have to have this long vision, which in venture starts breaking down, right? Because we don’t do long vision necessarily. I wouldn’t call 5, 7, maybe 10 years this long vision, so that becomes a little tough.

Justin Donald: Well, and to certain degree, it’s just getting to the next round. It’s like doing what you need to get to the next series, right?

Chris Van Dusen: But as invest and hold, I have quite a few friends that own teams in both football and basketball, and certainly, they were family businesses right, for many years. And they’ll pay unbelievable dividends for that family. And so, you could assume the same thing to say in the next 20, 30 years, being a minority investor today, not expecting a distribution today, but being part of something that many years from now could sell is great. The problem I’m seeing, and there are a lot of people who have forgotten more about investing in sports teams than I know. So, I want to also be careful. But when I look at valuations on emerging markets, emerging leagues, and certainly, after Wrexham and Ryan Reynolds and that whole thing, looking at some of the second and third tier teams in Europe, their valuations are out of whack for what they can do. They’re selling you the dream, not selling you the company today.

Justin Donald: I agree with that.

Chris Van Dusen: And so, what really becomes tough is evaluating it and saying, well, we’re not Ryan Reynolds, right? I don’t have a production studio. I’m not going to get a documentary on Netflix. Like, how am I going to take this $3 million investment in a fourth-tier league European football team and make them into a 10, 20, 30x in a reasonable amount of time, right? Do those players come to Wrexham because they want to play in that team or they want to be associated with Ryan Reynolds and Anne, right? Like, there’s some intangibles that are amazing to look at, but are very difficult to repeat.

And so, we’ve had some things come across, certainly my desk where on the surface you look at some of the other investors and you go, that’s really interesting. Household name musicians and athletes trying to buy another team in Europe, and you’re like, yeah, but, but these valuations are way out of whack. And how are you getting there? And you don’t make any money unless you move up leagues. And what’s the strategy for that? And how are we getting the players…

Justin Donald: Not getting distributions during season or I mean this is a true play where you’re sitting and holding and you’re hoping valuation goes up because you’re only making money on the sale.

Chris Van Dusen: Correct. And then what you find is a lot of the minority sports teams here in the US are long-term investors trying to sell their minority stakes out, and so, they’re at a premium naturally. These usually aren’t distressed, but it’s people who want to come in for a 4% of name-the-team-type play. And you’re back to, you’re, as a minority shareholder, not getting any rights. And forgive me here, it ends up being a vanity play.

Justin Donald: Yeah, 100%.

Chris Van Dusen: And again, doesn’t mean you can’t make great money, but as a sponsor, for lack of a better term of deals, it’s hard for me to do that. Now, what we do is we love sports as a category, right, as a business. And so, we have a CPG brand that’s associated on the sports side and have their drinks in a lot of the main sports leagues. We have a company called ai.io, which is AI for scouting and player development. Unbelievable company out of London. It’s saying this entire industry is very interesting and there’s a lot of changes happening as it kind of grows global. How do we participate there? And so, I’ll equate it back to the old gold rush, right? Like, let’s go picks and shovels, not be out there panning. And it doesn’t mean that there’s a great opportunity to go pan, but I’m not sure which sports franchise in Europe’s going to be the one that makes it versus the one that stays in tier four forever.

Justin Donald: That’s right. Yeah, all good points, Chris, and it brings me back to just this idea of building, scaling, and exiting across different industries. You’ve had a lot of experience with it from marketing agencies to health and wellness brands, now cutting-edge tech. So, how do you approach building value across such diverse sectors? And what consistent principles have guided your success?

Chris Van Dusen: So, when you talk about adding value, if it’s personally me, I look at it and go, I have this kind of book, if you will, or story of where I’ve had successes and failures. So, learn from the battle scars. Let me share with you things, right? So, if I’m sitting on a board or mentoring or doing whatever, let’s talk through where you’re trying to go. And I’ve probably seen that chapter before, right? I can tell you how it ends.

Number two, I think what’s really interesting from a firm perspective is Solyco being very different than that. We have about 40 on staff, and these are all seasoned operators. And so, when you’re doing earlier stage investing, almost like private equity, we have teams that we put on secondment as second jobs inside of these companies. It’s not mandatory, but you could assume most series seed or A don’t have fully baked executive teams. They don’t have full of CFOs. We can go in there and help them see what they’re not seeing.

And again, during this formidable time of growth, we get to be there helping them scale. And I think that’s really important. I wish I had it when I was doing it, right? We raised money for one of the companies, but the other two were self-funded, so it was very different. We’re sitting there as entrepreneurs looking at each other going, none of us have done this before, so we’re going to try, right? But it would’ve been great to have a group of individuals who interests align, sitting there, going, here’s a way you can do it, and here’s some pitfalls to avoid, right? Those are the biggest things.

Now, really, when you talk about value across all these sectors, I think, and it’s a gross generalization, but to be a good venture private equity partner comes down to a couple of things. Do you have to know what you’re looking at? One, that comes from experience. But number two, when we talk about it at the firm and I talk about it a lot is the idea between capital and smart capital. Now, that sounds very cliche, but smart capital is what can it do for you more than just sit in a bank account or a balance sheet waiting to be deployed? So, when we make investments, you get from our firm the breadth of the years of experience. Sure, on operations, but think about more the network.

And so, when you are an entrepreneur who’s been building something amazing and if you met someone at this company, this industry, this area, it could be a game changer. Hopefully, those resources you brought in from a capital can help you do that, which is why if you’re building a healthcare company, go find amazing partners who really understand healthcare because they’re going to open up doors. If you’re doing something in sports, go get amazing investors and firms who do a lot in sports because they’re going to actually bring value more so than just someone who wrote you a half-a-million-dollar check and says, let me know how it’s going, right? And I think that’s where our partners, we all come from different backgrounds, have different ways we look at things and can help add that value.

Justin Donald: Yeah, I like it and I like that you’re talking about the derivatives as well. So, pro sports, depending on where you’re investing, what you’re investing in, hey, a lot of opportunity there, but let’s look at these derivative businesses. Let’s look at this other niche supporting, we could call it sectors or subsectors the way you can use technology for it, but you’re doing this also across the board of all these companies. And so, I love that you guys have that expertise. This has been awesome, Chris. Thanks for spending some time with us here today. Where can our audience learn more about you and learn more about Solyco?

Chris Van Dusen: Yeah. So, SolycoCapital.com, nice and easy. I’m on Instagram and LinkedIn. chrism, as in Michael, Van Dusen. Both the same on both of those, love to connect, and then happy to answer any questions for anyone. Would love to chat.

Justin Donald: This is awesome. Well, I appreciate you sharing so much with our audience and taking the time to break down sometimes what many would consider complex subjects or topics. Investing, I think, can be challenging for a lot of people, but I think you did a great job of really simplifying it across multiple different asset classes. So, thank you for that.

And I love ending every podcast episode with a question for our audience. So, if you’re watching this, if you’re listening to this, my question to you is the same each week, but what is one step you can take today to move towards financial freedom and really just move towards living a life on your terms, one that you desire to be in? So, most people spend their lives building and living a life by default. What can you do to live a life by design and what can you take from what Chris shared today to move you one step closer? Thanks so much, and we’ll catch you next week.