Hunter Thompson
speaker
70 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Hunter Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You know, well, yeah, that would have been really good.
So my story with them, I actually knew the founder, Nick Green, and he's a co-founder with Gennar. And the reason that they gave us the opportunity to invest is that they got said, they were told no from basically everyone, right? They went in there like, we're going into the grocery. Yep. niche, we're going to take over. And all the VCs were like, whatever margins are thin, like get out of here.
Like Amazon's going to eat you. You know what I'm saying? And I just knew Nick, he's a smart guy. He got a perfect score in the SAT. I liked the niche and I was like, whatever, here's the money. And I feel very fortunate about that. Now I'm not going to go into the details of like how the deal was structured, but the point is it was structured by a convertible note.
That is a discount to the next round. Right? So I write this check and I'm like, let's go, baby. They launch it. This is my first time investing in a startup. You're going to start laughing where this is going. As soon as I send the check, they had this soft launch and start taking off like a wildfire. But my round hasn't been established yet. So they're ripping in revenue. And I'm like, uh-oh.
They're going to have to be the next GoPro for me to make any money. Now, they ended up doing very well. But the point is... They ended up doing a very large series A, one of the most largest in California, and then a very large series B. Now, is it that they blew all the money and didn't do well? No, they were taking off like a rocket ship. And so because of that, you've got this little fire.
You're like this little seed fire. This is when I invest and now it's turning into a freaking raging thing. And you're sitting there with gas and the gas is cash and you just how much can we pour on this thing? And so that's what they were doing.
And so when they went back to their investors, you know, there's an important distinction between like the people that invest in seed deals, like you just mentioned, you don't typically do that. There's people that's, that's all they do. Right. Then there's other people maybe closer to you where they want to see multi seven figures in revenue.
Then there's other people that are like, I only want to see a hundred million or more. Right. So like sometimes it's a profile thing, but usually you would want to go back to the people that made that early investment. For a lot of reasons, sometimes it's contractual, sometimes it's just relationship. Hey, listen, you're the one that gave us our first twenty five K. And so that typically happens.
But in the world of like private equity, usually there will be lead investors and those lead investors usually have like a profile based on revenue or EBITDA, which is kind of like net profit.
and so that's the story of thrive market and now they're on a tear i mean i wouldn't be surprised if they ipo'd eventually you know at a multi-billion dollar valuation they did a really good job but the the margins are thin so it's not like they didn't do well they can turn it off at any time but that's kind of like the story of any business when you're trying to offset taxes when you're trying to buy employees you're trying to hire an onboard for the next year's growth
Now, sometimes what can happen is you implement an aggressive strategy like that and that growth doesn't happen. So you're going up, up, up, up, up, and you bring a bunch of people on, take a bunch of software risk, and then that growth stops. You can BK a company and be net neutral in revenue by trying to be aggressive like that.
And, you know, I've learned some lessons like that where I'm just like, Let's go for it. Let's take over the industry. And, you know, there's a reason I own raisingcapital.com, right? That's the initiative. We're going to take over the industry, right? So I take risks like that. And we know, though, that balance sheet is an indication of health, right?
So you got to use that thing appropriately and then raise money when you have to.
There's a million reasons. I'll start with one that's super basic. Even if you're 100% self-centered, money in the bank account kind of guy, you'll find you'll make more money. Just purely economically, you will make more money if you have a philanthropic element of your business. Also,
if you don't have that element and all the people that are more successful than you, that you look up to are telling you to have that element, freaking just trust them. You know what I mean? If you don't want to trust me, you don't want to trust him, like whatever. But like, there is a reason that people that crush at the highest level do it. And it's because it's not just the money.
It's also like the fulfillment element. And We talked in the beginning about how my background is kind of getting a lot of real estate nerds to like tell their story and make it more compelling. There's nothing more compelling than helping people, especially if you can tie it into, in some way, something that's really deeply meaningful for you.
whether it's your background, your situation, your family, your community that helped you out, it just really resonates with people. And I see it not being like a multiple, like it's so many great people have talked about this, but like you give away a dollar, you make 10 back. Now that's not why you wanna give away the dollar, but like I've just found that that's what the economics are.
And I'll give you a perfect example. We have an event. It's called Raise Fest. It's in Phoenix in a couple of months. And we are going to give away some money to a charity. And it's like a family-based charity. The charity is for people like pediatric cancer. I can't even freaking say it because I have a very young son. But that's why I'm doing that, right?
But also, I mean, I know that if I write that check in front of everyone, number one, they're going to be way more likely to write that check as well. And also like we have a program, right? We want people to buy the program. And one way to get that is to have them understand that they are investing in someone else. And that gives them confidence to invest in themselves.
Now just real quick, I want to talk like behind the scenes, like think about it. If you're thinking about, okay, there's these people in the audience, they only have so much money. Are they going to run out of money on the charity thing? They're not going to want to, it's the opposite. It's like they're making that commitment. Like I want to do this for someone else.
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