- Duration: 49 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01K0Q5A3DVAE8Q0CCB9X88FH1V (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01K0Q5A3DVAE8Q0CCB9X88FH1V)
Transcript
UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: We got David. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: David, what’s going on, man? [Michael Houck]: Hey, guys. Just one minute. [David]: I’m just grabbing my headphones and then I’ll be on with my camera in a sec. I got to just grab them. Hope you guys can hear me OK. [Michael Houck]: Is there a lot of background noise? I just got a new walking treadmill down here in South Carolina, so I don’t know if it’s loud or not yet. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Nope. Don’t just hear your voice. That’s good, man. I might need to get one myself, to be honest. [Michael Houck]: I used to do this every day, but then I was nomading for six months. And so I finally, finally arrived down here at my new place. And I feel like I’m back in my groove now. It’s great. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: I’m going to Google that after this call and try to get one on my own. [Michael Houck]: I’ll send you, I’ll send you a link to the one I got. Cause it does the incline. It actually has like speakers. So no way. Yeah. Please send it. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Please send it. [Michael Houck]: and I would love to check it out. [Michael Houck]: Well, cool, dude, I feel like it’s been a while, but I’m pumped that we’re getting rolling here. So I’m excited for you to meet Andrew and David. They’ll be helping out with the different parts of this, but we’ll go through that. But I’m just pumped. I think it’s gonna be real good and we’re excited to dive in. So I guess before we jump into anything, just wanna throw it to you and see, Any questions that we should sort of go over that are top of mind on your end first, or should we just sort of take it from there? [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Yeah, no, look man, I’m pumped as well. Apologies took so long, came out on vacation after a couple years as well, so trying to lay low for a bit, but now I’m excited. So over to you guys, we’ll follow your process and hopefully see success. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Okay, well, I will, I mean, you and I already know each other, so I won’t go into an intro, but I think I think would be good for Andrew and David to give intros and then I guess all three of you guys can sort of intro to each other. [David]: So David, if you wanna kick us off. Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Nice to meet you, Mohammad. [David]: I’m David. I’m gonna be doing most of the writing content and some strategy on the account. I’ve spent the last five years now working in finance and crypto space. So I feel like this is going to be a good combination. I’m excited to like, learn more exactly what you guys are building, how you’re building, and then bringing some expertise to the table when it comes to crafting content. And yeah, looking forward to it. [Andrew Cheng]: Excellent. Cool. Hi, Mohammad. [Andrew Cheng]: It’s great to meet you. Do you prefer Mohammad or Rafi? [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: I think Rafi is good. Rafi is good. Yeah, I think so. Sorry about that. No, all good, man. [Andrew Cheng]: All good. Well, awesome. It’s great to meet you. So I’m Andrew. I’m the content operations manager. I’ll be handling scheduling your post once you and David find a good rhythm on content. So I’ll be scheduling that. I’ll also be working on your X account to post on your behalf, as well as doing reactions on your behalf as well to your own posts. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: So I’m looking forward to working with you. Brilliant. Brilliant. Good to meet you guys. Look, I’ll be short. My name is Rafi. I’m from LA, where I am now for the next month or so. Just by way of background, so you guys have some context. Parents are from London, but I moved to LA when I was about two years old. And last 15 years or so, I’ve been living between Doha and Dubai, where I’m going to head back next month. And previously had my first FinTech, which I sold in 2017, which was around really just aggregating and digitizing microfinance in North Africa and in, you can say, in West Asia. That was sold in 2017. I then joined as an advisor on AI and crypto to the Prime Minister of UAE, who is also the ruler of Dubai, but in his capacity as Prime Minister of the country. We set up the world’s first Ministry of Artificial Intelligence in 2017, the minister and I, the current minister. And we then set up the Supreme Blockchain Council for UAE. So we wrote the regulations that you see today that comes out of Dubai, FARA. And I then left the office to start this company called Facet, which you guys, I’m sure you’ve looked up. I think the name itself gives the background, which is that it’s a play on the word F-A-C-E-T, an asset, that we look at assets in a multifaceted way. So the whole point is really to bring a variety of different asset onto crypto rails and make them multifaceted from a remittance standpoint, sort of value collateralization, just buying and holding, you know, generating yields, et cetera. And that’s where we are today. So I’ll kind of stop there, but looking forward to working with you guys. Sweet. And we can, we can blame Usman. [Michael Houck]: He introduced you to me as Mohammad. So that’s what I think. Period. Got it. Got it. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Got it. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Got it. Got it. Got it. Yes. So are you guys working with us on right now? [Michael Houck]: We’ve been on and off. Well, we’ll see. I think that they’re trying to figure some things out, but got it. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Got it. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Got it. [Michael Houck]: It’s been happy with everything. [Michael Houck]: So, yeah. [Michael Houck]: So I guess I’m going to turn it over to David for the majority of this call. He’s going to sort of lead the discussion, ask some questions, go deeper on things. And I’ll be here to sort of chime in and so Andrew as needed. And then at the end, we’ll sort of circle back to next steps and I’ll sort of give the lay of the land for how it goes from here. But David, if you wanna take it away, feel free. [David]: Yeah, I think that the best way to run the intro call, at least in my opinion, is just to obviously get to know you, get a good vibe check, see just your style, not only on a call, it’s like a very good thing to see like how you are, how you talk, how you are as a person, but then we’ll talk a little bit about like what you envision for the content, the account, the feel, the voice, the tone, those kinds of things. So, um, I guess because most like we’re going to be posting and writing from your personal account. So it’s obviously going to be personal content. Um, what I really want to understand is like what your goal is with the account. Like how do you want to be perceived on the timeline is like the biggest thing, um, how you are as a person. And this could be things like, you just, you just briefly sharing, like, when you’re in conversations with people, are you usually cracking jokes, having a laugh, that kind of thing? Or are you super serious and like, very big brain conversation kind of person? For me, it’s important because I want to understand, like, do we lean more in towards some shorter form stuff that’s like punchy and fun? Or do we write some longer thought pieces that dive deep into whatever you guys are working on? I’d love to just hear kind of about what you envision for the account, where you want to take it, and just how you are as a person, and see if we can translate that from IRL you to Twitter you. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Got it, got it, got it. Yeah, I think that’s helpful, man. Look, I think obviously you guys are the experts, but my kind of vision with the account is to create a personal brand that then the byproduct of which builds trust and confidence in the company, right? So that’s in facet. And then, you know, we basically have an exchange token coming out called OWN, O-W-N. It’s an exchange token, but with its own narrative around real world assets, et cetera. So that is also a byproduct. But coming back to the hypothesis, the hypothesis is that if it’s a strong founder led personal brand that will carry into the business, and by virtue of that, the token as well. So that’s the, you know, what is that opposed to? That’s opposed to me just shilling, pass it and own. I think just talking internally with my team, the idea is that, you know, build a personal brand and then relay some of that, you know, network capital and that content capital over to the organization itself. So that’s why it’s kind of a separate, that’s why you don’t see my kind of head of marketing on this call because it’s the whole idea is to build me and then hopefully that devolves down to facet and to own. So that’s point number one. Point number two is that, you know, I give a little bit about my background. You know, I’ve been trusted by a lot of leaders at the government level around the world. So, you know, we’re licensed in about 15 different countries. Our tab table is full of very influential family offices from many you know, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh. So, you know, this whole, what we call, so in fact that our markets are what we call Morocco to Malaysia. So if you think about that belt between Morocco in, you know, in West Africa and to Malaysia, in East Asia, that whole belt of countries in between from the Gulf to Turkey, to the subcontinent, to North Africa, that those are our markets. Now, you know, I’m originally from Turkey, I’m originally from Bangladesh, but I grew up in between UK and the US. So that whole kind of diaspora of people who are from this belt and outwards is the market that I’m kind of reaching out to. Number one. Number two is that privately, you know, one of the one of the secret sauces to our company is the fact that we built a pretty good cap table and that we have access at the kind of at the prime minister, senior government level of a lot of these countries. Basically, from my time in inside the UAE prime minister’s office. So the reason I mentioned that is for nothing else other than to say that I can’t be like fully jokey because I do work with a lot of these guys and there’s a serious approach to these countries. So, you know, if we’re going to lean, we’re going to lean in on more serious and, uh, and, uh, you know, and, and that kind of tone, but not necessarily like formal, but I think, uh, it’s kind of what I’m kind of presenting right now. So there’s no, it’s, it’s, it is whatever you gather from, from this conversation. [David]: Uh, Yeah. [David]: No, just, just to jump in, like already the points you’ve hit on is expertise, expertise, connections, and trust. And it, like you said, being connected with some high levels in different governments around the world. Um, there’s obviously a line we can’t cross, but it still allows for us to like still write like fun or engaging or emotional content without like becoming, what’s the word, like rude or offensive or anything like that. And then a lot of that will just come down to the language and the tone we use. So writing things, we can write complicated things, but write them very simple. The language we use to write content can be different. It doesn’t mean that the topics have to be silly or like super like… [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: 100%. I think that part’s good. And then just in terms terms of where we stand in the crypto world. I mean, I did the intake form. I saw like, you know, are we trying to write provocative stuff? You know, do we have any like strong views? I mean, I think the key thing is obviously I respect everyone’s views. I’m just talking about myself for the time being. I think the shortest way that I can kind of explain this is that, you know, crypto has a lot of these terms of, you know, prediction markets, you know, derivative trading. You know, the provocative view here would be, you know, we don’t do gambling, right? No matter how you word it. So we don’t do meme coins. We don’t, I don’t really take a lot of pride in even our guys at Fasted saying we’re D-gens, you know, in that sense. And the reason being is that, you know, we are taking, you know, money from, you know, people in countries where they can’t afford to gamble away their wealth, right? And running this business, I take that extremely seriously. So if I’m taking, you know, a thousand dollars hard earned money from a Nigerian guy or $2,000 over 12 months from a hardworking Indonesian girl can't be out there promoting them to lose that money that they built up over 12 months and surviving inflation and all sorts of ish that go on. So we take a very, maybe in some views, a conservative view on crypto, really built around real world assets. So even where regulations allow, and this is one of my big you know, talk tracks. You know, we're one of the most licensed companies on par with how many licenses Binance has in this part of the world. But even where licenses allow us to do meme coins, where it is prediction markets, all that kind of stuff, we don't do it. Right. So we have a higher moral conscience than that, from that perspective, really focus on long term sustainable. So I think that's a view that I like, Right. So that's one. And then the second thing is that the whole the whole trope around I'm originally from these markets, but grew up in the West, had a lot of luxury in terms of earning in dollars, investing in US markets and kind of international grade assets, want that for everybody that we're serving between, you know, Morocco to Malaysia. So I think there's an angle there as well. And then, you know, the third thing I would say is that, you know, your passport or where you're born shouldn't dictate the opportunities, at least financially, in terms of moving your money, earning your money, spending your money. So I like that angle quite a bit as well. So I think it's kind of built around that. Now, we do take a pro-government approach. So we're not anti-government. So you can't do this without government support, without regulation, without licensing. At the same time, we do do ethical rule breaking. And I think that's kind of the final point I want to mention, which is that, you know, when we're helping people in a country like Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, invest abroad, they are bringing their returns back to their country where they live. So even if the rules don't allow it, that's where we do push governments to say, wait a minute, this is actually in your favor. We're not enabling people to gamble. We're actually getting to invest in tokenized Apple, move their profits back to, you know, India, if you will. And that's good for you. And therefore you should license us and give us the green light. So that's the kind of the overall. So if we're going to be anti-government anywhere, it's not really anti, it's like pushing government to see that, wait a minute, the way we project crypto is actually good for you as a politician, as a regulator, and for your people. So that's the most anti-government we would go in the grand sense of things. [David]: I'm making notes as we go, just for myself as well. [Michael Houck]: And David, I'll also share the recording with you afterwards. [David]: I'm in the same page as you, where it feels like the whole degen thing really blew, like took off over the last two years. And it seems like last cycle, everyone was like, okay, crypto is the future. We're tokenizing everything or like we're bringing things on chain, decentralized finance, like all these things. Of course, there's always going to be silly things. But the last two years, I guess, because meme coins have been the only thing capturing attention because it's so short term brain rot, quick fix, like quick dopamine hit type thing. It's the only thing working right now. But there is a big narrative for RWAs. And I've seen it a lot. I know a lot of projects building in this space. And that's where the real use case is for crypto. And you guys are obviously fitting right into that. So this is good. It makes it clear on what your narrative is, what you want to push. I do think, however, though, it'd be good to have some either... It doesn't have to be super... What's the word? Um, touchy or extreme, but even some like a little bit more edgy, like hot takes or things you believe. So it could be, for example, like slightly batching meme points. Like that's also technically a hot thing to do. Yeah, you're right. Those kinds of things and those kinds of feelings, thoughts, ideas are important to share because then we can take that role with content. Like my thing is that you have to know within a few points in your head, what you're bullish on. What you're not bullish on and be able to explain those things very clearly and do it over and over and over again. Cause if you look at the best content creators on Twitter, especially like in the crypto niche, it's usually guys who love one thing so much or two things so much that that's all they talk about. Or it's guys who criticize one thing or two things so much because that's all they care about. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: You lean into those things and you go hard. [David]: Um, and I can tell like the RW and a narrative and what you guys are building, there's a lot to talk about there. Like we can, we can start talking about like, you know, why you guys are doing what you're doing, of course, but then how much opportunity it unlocks, not only for businesses, but like for individuals, especially. Um, but I think to counter that and add a little bit more spice on the content, either things that go against the trends or a different way to pitch what you guys are doing rather than like a win wins. It's sometimes you don't want it to just be all positive and win, win. You want to like hit someone in the emotional, like shoulder, uh, understood, understood. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: So, so look, I, I can give you a couple of high-level things right now that you can think over, because that's helpful. Because I'm naturally non-confrontational, but I think bashing meme coins isn't going to hurt me. It's okay for me to burn those bridges, so it's absolutely fine. You're nice to the guy, Rafi. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: That's all it is. [Michael Houck]: I get you guys, man. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: So look, I think a couple of things that, from a bashing standpoint, to be crude, I think meme coins, happy to bash. Happy to bash prediction markets as well. Those two things. I think also, you know, unregulated, unreigned margin trading options, you know, that sort of thing. Happy to take a shot at. I think those three things that in the RWA space, if you're looking for spice, I think the other thing about us is that we actually do this stuff, right? So until Robinhood made that announcement on their layer two and tokenizing stocks, 90% of US stock volume in terms of tokenized stock is actually happening on Facet right now. So we're about to lose that market share, but we sell hundreds of millions of dollars per month of tokenized US stocks more than anyone else. And it can be verified by just public blockchain addresses and stuff like that. So I think we mean what we do. We also are one of the top distributors of tokenized gold in the world right now, as well as tokenized emerging market government bonds. I think this is stuff that we are actually doing and not just saying. So the other area of focus is that if you look at our layer two called own, which is coming out in October, OWN, obviously the whole narrative, it's our exchange token, but the whole narrative is that if you look at the projects that are distributing tokenized US stocks, tokenized gold, tokenized bonds on facet, we do 90 to 95% of their volume. So the whole thing is that we're migrating. So they're doing it on Savannah, they're doing an Ethereum, obviously as passive, we're agnostic. But now we're saying, wait a minute, if we're doing 90% of Denari who just partnered with Robinhood of their US stock tokens, why not move them to our layer two? So when we call up the Denari CEO, you don't really have a choice, right? Because we can just pull the plug and move to someone else. So when we migrate these guys over to our chain in October, automatically on the on those of the world, you might have heard a mantra. We've probably are going to be one of the top RWA change just by sheer volume. And that's the key narrative that I want to do. And also the word own is very reflective of our values is that we want people to own stuff as well. So I think there's a kind of a Venn diagram here where we kind of hit a lot of these sweet spots. And I like what you're saying in terms of spice. So there's spice, against Gamecoin's objection markets, but there's also Spice versus some of the other RWA chains that there's a lot of this, but not everyone's moving the type of volume that we're moving. So I think that's the key. Yeah. [David]: And I think for bull posting your own bags, quote unquote, type content, like talking about what you guys are doing, the best way to do that is proving it with results. And if you guys are saying, doing most of the volume, you have the numbers, like, we'll probably need to talk back and forth more to like, get me to get some stats on exactly how much volume you're doing or facts about that stuff. Because then we can work that into content. And that kind of proves the concept. Okay, this is good. One other side question too, is that I think is, you don't have to answer this right now, because maybe you don't know, but something to think about as well as like, are there any voices or thought leaders in the space that you kind of Look up to whether it's you'd like this It can be anything from like you just like the person you like the style that they write the kind of post they write Or they're in the same niche as you and you kind of want to get associated with them Those kinds of things think about again don't have to answer right now because it might play this back to David. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: So I'm the other reason I'm Hopefully leveraging your guy services for a long period of time is that I don't got I'm not a social media guy by nature So even if you see any of social media outside of my LinkedIn, it's just Run by our team, right? So I don't even I'm not even on but I'm it's been on my to-do list to download the twitter app on my phone for Two years now, so I'll be very honest with you guys. So I'm not I don't even know who's staying What if you actually have people that you think are relevant? [David]: Yeah, uh, I mean I'd just like to learn anyway at this point in time, uh, I'll put together some names and people regardless I just want to know if you had anyone already in mind. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: I don't know I'm not gonna lie to you So I don't know I'd love to just learn from you and learn from these guys as well at the same time So, right. [Michael Houck]: Raafi, part of the reason this is important is because where Andrew comes into the picture here is that aside from just making sure the content goes out at the right time and we're reporting metrics and all that, Andrew's actually going to be logging into your account, finding viral posts from these lists of people and be leaving comments from you on their posts so that like we get some free views and free profile views and that leads to brand building to build your audience. So that's that becomes important. We'll put something together and send it to you for review. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Right. Very good. Excellent. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Excellent. [David]: Yeah, as you're speaking to, I was going through, I went through the facet website a few days ago, and I liked it. And I'm going through it again now, just like as we're speaking. So you guys are, you said it's chain agnostic right now. So it's like all built on your own platform, right? No. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: So I think, I think we're going through a big shift that you'll see over the next eight week. So I think the best way to think about Facet now is that we're a crypto bank. So there's something called Facet 4.0 coming out with IBANs and debit cards. But I think the best way to think about us is Revolut, except if Revolut was focused on Morocco to Malaysia and natively built on crypto rails. That is the most succinct way. And you're going to start seeing the shift on our socials in the Facet and our app very soon on that basis. So I think that's the I would also say that there are six asset classes that we've built all of our services around, which is crypto, metal, stocks, bonds, real estate, and stable coins. So I think that's something to bear in mind in terms of the way we look at RWA. So it's a very specific look at RWA. And then I would say, yeah, so I think it's the digital bank focus, but I think even there, play here that typically banks want you to get into debt. We're also having we have another take on banking as well, which is that, you know, our view is a bank should help you build wealth, not get into debt. Right. And that sometimes that is exclusionary. So our whole point is that we're, you know, we're basically your micro sized investment bank in your pocket, where you can do what a bank should do, which is move your money, but also help you build long term sustainable wealth. And the only way we can do it, which is our kind of update on Revolut, is that you got to build on crypto rails, right? So that you can get people into these tokenized assets effectively, seamlessly, et cetera. Second thing is that in the East, it's not that easy to move. I've been looking at this stable coin narrative. I mean, in the East, everyone still moves, and I say East in a very broad sense, but they still move dollars, but they move dollars traditionally on the SWIFT system or the IVAN system, which is disjointed here because they're not meant for these markets. And that's where the stable coin value comes in for us as well. So we, we move a lot of money for people in these markets up to a billion dollars a month these days. And that's the, that's the other thing that our bank wants to help small and medium enterprises do as well. Okay. [David]: So yeah, I think, I think that narrative alone is a big push. I'm in the same position. Like I'm, I'm in Canada, I'm in Toronto. So I've grown up, I've lived my whole life here and growing up in like the West, you don't realize it or see it as much. And I still haven't like seen it or realized, but, but working in crypto has allowed me to see that like most of the rest of the world doesn't have access to the opportunities I have. Even with the little things that like I could spin up a bank account, a stock, like a stock account, loads of money and buy whatever stocks I want. On us exchanges pretty quickly pay little to no fees. Like that kind of thing has been given to me because of my situation here in the country I'm in. And there's so many people in other countries around the world where like they either can't even get a bank account to begin with. They don't have much money to begin with. They want to invest some money, but then even if they had a bank account and some money ready, how do they move it? Get a stock account. Like there's so many moving parts and it's like almost impossible. And then they're left holding, most of them are now hold dollars for safety, but like They're either left holding their own currency, which ends up inflating like crazy and they get screwed or they hold dollars and nothing happens to those dollars and it's just sitting. And those people are the ones who have very little and want to build some wealth with it and yet are getting none of the opportunity. And like you said, like the only way to really like smash down that wall is with crypto rails because it basically solves all the problems at once. Uh, I'm very bullish on the, on the same things as you. So I think this is good. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: I would just add two more things, David, I think which was very important to that is that one is that if you're in one of these countries, Morocco to Malaysia, to access the ability to buy a dollar, sometimes they're paying a 20% spread, which is where Slovak coins comes in, number one. And sometimes there's a daily quota. So everyone who wants to buy a dollar on a particular day in a country like Nigeria cannot buy the dollar, even if they were willing to pay a 20% premium to buy the dollar. That's number one. Number two is that you could be a SME, like a small, medium enterprise or a freelancer. And when you get money into your country, if you're in a capital control country, the moment the money comes in, so you might've earned dollars, but the dollars then comes into your country from Google into a country like Pakistan and now converts into your local currency. And you want to send that money back out. You can't send it back. You can't send money back out of half of these countries. So once again, stable coins comes in too fast. If these are two things that we miss, you know, I bumped into CZ like two months ago, And, uh, and he was like, uh, you know, I don't see the value of, you know, stock tokenized stocks, uh, because anyone can buy it. But bro, the reality is that, uh, spend dollars out of your country in half the world is a impossible. If you have to pay 20% premium to get dollars to even buy Apple, even if it's not tokenized, it doesn't make sense to buy it anymore. There's a lot of these minute points that you wouldn't know unless you traveled abroad and kind of lived life and hung out with these guys. [David]: Yeah. I still don't know the whole story because I've only spent my life on the West side of the world. Um, I'm grateful for it, but like I was even speaking to a friend just yesterday, who's lives here in Toronto, but his family is from Lebanon. And he was explaining that recently that the government there, they like change banking, the banks all like switched up on the people. So now you can only withdraw up to like $300. A day or $200 a month. So there’s people who have surgeries to pay for and their bank just won’t let them pull out money. [David]: And they can’t move money around. [David]: There’s so many things that happen in these other countries. I guess America, Canada, the Western world is so privileged that we’ve built systems to be as open and free as possible. Not stopping government, of course, but there’s so many other countries where one day the people wake up and they can’t move money. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: And I’ll say one more thing, which is something I say quite a bit, which is that, you know, a lot of these countries, because ultimately I’m very realistic, like we’re still serving people who are middle class and above in these markets. Otherwise it doesn’t make economic sense. But, you know, what I find in these markets is that, you know, you can buy an iPhone or a lot of our customers will have iPhones or MacBooks. So they’re still buying Western products, but they can’t invest in the underlying company due to capital control. And government regulation. So it’s very ironic. So they can consume Western services and products, but they can’t invest in the upside of these services and products that benefit from their data and benefit from their hard-earned money. So that’s one of the things that regulation or not, that’s like a barrier that we’re trying to break down. And that’s the call to action that we have. Yeah. Yeah. [David]: And that makes sense too. Like the, the, and I’m sure you guys have a lot of institutional clients as well. Right? That’s right. That’s right. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: So we do about six, yeah, we do 60% of our revenue from SMEs and institutional clients, 40% from retail. Um, the brand is built on retail, but you know, the money comes from institutional. Yeah. [David]: I was expecting you to say a much higher ratio of institutional revenue wise, but 60 40, that seems like, Yeah, that’s awesome. Um, okay, cool. Yeah. The, the institutional stuff is like how you get your volume and your revenue up, but then the, the marketing, the brand facing stuff is user. Exactly. Got it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Um, okay, cool. I’m making it, like I said, I’m making notes as we go. [David]: Um, I really like what you said, how, like, I think there’s a way to turn that into like a one-liner punchy tweet, how like someone can buy an iPhone. But they can’t buy Apple stock. And if they had gotten Apple stock instead of buying that iPhone, how much they would have generated instead. [David]: Absolutely crazy. [David]: That’s a topic we should hit on again and again in different ways, for sure. [Michael Houck]: For sure. Yeah. [David]: I literally wrote down as you were saying it, like as a tweet. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: And I guess the other part of that, just to be clear, is that a lot of these people, that’s why a lot of them are bag holders for meme coins. Coins because the only way they can invest in something that’s not a locally denominated asset in their local currency until recently has been either blue chip crypto or meme coins, right? So once you’re on crypto rails, if you’re from Nigeria or Pakistan or Indonesia, you got to think that, okay, I’m finally getting out of my local currency. I’m finally investing in something that is, you know, at least theoretically international. But the only things I have are a 100 cryptocurrencies, right? So that’s where a lot of the meme coins got their thing. But, you know, for facet, what we’ve seen is that anytime we open into a market, people will literally swap their meme coins in, you know, 50% of it and buy Nvidia as an example, right? Because people are not stupid, right? So if they have an opportunity, they would do something that has underlying fundamentals, at least for a portion of their portfolio, if not all of it, right? So, you know, that doesn’t bode well for meme coins, because I think a lot bagholders just had no choice in parts of Africa and Asia. But when they do have an opportunity, just like all of us, none of us would put 100% of our portfolio meme coins since we have TWIX. And I think that same domino effect is happening across the world. [David]: Yeah, I agree. The educational component is catching up quickly where people in the East now know that like, okay, the S and P and like even these American markets and blue chest companies have been doing well for hundreds of like over a hundred years. And that’s like, they want to participate in it because they’ve before there was like a little bit of disconnect where, I don’t know, I guess before the internet, not before that, obviously before the internet, but even like as money culture, invest culture, probably like pre pandemic, I feel like it was a different time. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: But here’s what I would say, man. I would say that, you know, even for, um, I speak as an American, Like even for us, uh, I remember my dad investing on e-trade in the late nineties, but it’s never something that I grew up thinking that I’m going to do it. So it sounded like Robin hood came out where I’m like, okay, I need, I need a little bit of literacy in terms of what a stock market is. And that’s why there are no dips these days because even Americans are learning the average Joe, wait a minute. I can just put some money into S and P. So if we as Americans are just learning is over the last 10 years, Uh, actually the catch up is a lot faster. That’s like the whole Africa skipping the landline, right? So now there’s actually people in places of Indonesia who probably understand the S and T really well. Uh, because you know, it’s just a faster adoption curve in these markets, right? Versus the amount of time it took took us. [David]: Yeah, exactly. And like, so me personally, I wasn’t old enough and wasn’t investing during the Oh eight Oh nine crisis. So I wasn’t around to experience that. And then you got it more. That. So the pandemic was the first thing for me where I experienced like, okay, a global financial crisis. It was all very quickly, but I had always been investing in stocks and some crypto before then, because I went to business school. I’ve always been interested in stuff. Like I, it was, it was my lane. So like I, it was okay. And it made sense for me to be into this stuff. But no, none of my friends were investing buying crypto like 2017, 18, whatever. And then as soon as the pandemic hit, There was like a six month period where the world shut down and everyone became obsessed with stock. And I think that’s when Robinhood blew up, uh, all these kind of platforms because people were like, oh my gosh, they got stim, like stim, like stim checks in their bank, a couple thousand bucks, whatever. They’re like, I don’t know what to do with it. And everyone started talking about, okay, put it into the stock market, put it into crypto, buy some stuff. And then quickly from like 2020 to like now, obviously even shorter, it feels like the whole world, as a whole agreed on this notion that we should all be investing in growing wealth because inflation is killing us and all these things. And the amount of my friends over the last few years that have now come to me and said, how do I invest? What should I buy? Um, or not even asking me, they’ll come to me like, look, I started buying stocks and stuff. And I’m like, this is kind of crazy that now everyone knows. And that’s what I’m saying. Like the educational curve now has reached everyone. Like where everyone knows now this is what has to be done. And now it’s about building from the tech underneath to make it all possible. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Exactly. 100%. 100%. Nice. OK. [David]: I don’t know if I have any other specific questions to ask to help with the writing-wise. I think I have a good understanding, obviously, speaking with you now, how you are as a person, some of the bullet points we have, some of the hot takes we can potentially lean into. A lot of it’s going to come down to the first week or two, like writing a bunch of stuff, getting your initial thoughts on it, just to see if it’s like, just a vibe check. I know you said you’re not someone who’s on social media or using these platforms. So that’s totally fine. But we would never want to write content that’s in it, like styled, or like you don’t think represents you. So once we once we nail down that tone and style, then it becomes just a game of like, keeping up to date with what you guys are building, keeping up to do with the markets, trends, hot topics, and stuff like that. So once we have some initial content put together, we’ll be able to share with you together some first feedback, and then we can go from there. Brilliant. Brilliant. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: That sounds good, man. [Michael Houck]: Sounds good. Yeah. So Rafi, basically how it goes from here is we’ll do everything through Slack. [Michael Houck]: If you and David ever want to hop on and chat and things like that, I’ll leave that to you guys to figure out between the two of you. Some folks go totally async with us. Others want to do sort of recurring content calls. With David or whoever the writer is for them. So that’s up to you guys, but I’ll still be your primary point of contact for everything here. So if you have any questions or your strategy we wanna jam on, happy to do it whenever, but every week we’ll be sending you content through Slack and some questions that we might want your POV on. And so all we ask in that case is, pick up your phone, record a two, three minute voice note, or you just sort of ramble on your unique POV that we can incorporate. And then to David’s point, we’ll want the vibe check, especially early on, just like tone, style, we’ll send different types of examples. But then from there, we’ll handle all scheduling, we’ll report metrics right in Slack, and we’ll share a Notion workspace for you where you can see all the content drafts and things like that too. Brilliant, that sounds good. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: The only thing, David, I would say is that everything that I’ve written on my LinkedIn is by me. So I think that would be a good place to to start. And then yeah, I think I’m pretty hands off. But I think maybe first few weeks, we just, you know, just get acquainted. And we just say, Yeah, I like that. [David]: Usually the first the first two to four weeks will always be nailing down the direction. And then from there, it should be smooth sailing. Perfect. Perfect. Excellent. Excellent. I really appreciate it. [Andrew Cheng]: Well, I’m really quickly I was gonna add as well, the vibe check also goes with your reactions. So again, because I’ll be logging to your Account posting for you posting as you I don’t want to post anything. That’s not your voice. So the same issue Three to four weeks. We want to make sure that we nail down your voice We’re sending you some samples of how I would react to certain posts And I won’t post without your permission until we’re comfortable. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: The two of us are also comfortable I think that makes sense. That’s practical. So I’ll be on it. I’ll be pretty much I’ll try to be very quick from my side so that, you know, I’ll tell you guys thereafter. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think that the first couple weeks, the more responsive you can be, the faster we’ll be able to get to sort of a full autopilot type mode. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Sounds good. Cool. All right. [Michael Houck]: Well, any last questions, Rafi, on your side that we haven’t covered? No, I think it’s good, man. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: The only reason I wanted to start, like, right around now is that I am, A, I’m in between LA and San Francisco for the next month. So I’m also in your guys’ relative time zone, and theoretically, theoretically, I’m off from work. So we’ll be making this kind of my top off work priority. So that should be pretty quick. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: OK, awesome. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That works. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sounds good. [Michael Houck]: And we’ll be in touch through Slack. I think both Andrew and David will probably reach out for the vibe check over the next couple of days. So we’ll go from there. But if anything comes up, just shoot me a DM or push to the channel. We can take it from there. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Sounds good. Enjoyed meeting you guys. All right. Take it easy.