TRANSCRIPT
slava (00:02.535)
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Smart Humans. As always, very excited for today's guest. We have a serial entrepreneur, somebody who runs a VC fund, and just overall great human. So Ankur Nagpal, welcome to the show.
Ankur (00:15.982)
Thanks man, I'm excited to be here.
slava (00:18.151)
Yeah, so I mean, lots for you to cover. You're obviously now the CEO of Carry, which is a super interesting company. We'll get into that soon. But you also have like a long background before that. Being an entrepreneur that's already exited with Teachable, you have your own fund with Vibe Capital. Let's just go from the beginning where we always start with all of our guests. How did you get into alts? Where did it all begin?
Ankur (00:41.582)
Yeah, so I've never had a very conventional sort of professional career. I've not had a job basically ever. I had an internship when I was 18 and since then I've always been, you know, self -employed. And as a result, when you're self -employed or you're a founder, basically, if you look at your portfolio, your wealth is concentrated largely in stock of your company, a very, very, you know, I guess alternative illiquid sort of asset. But that was always my thesis while building my company Teachable, which I ran for seven years from 20...
14 to 2020, during which period of time I was like, look, my startup is going to be the single biggest determinant of how well I do financially. So anytime I spend on anything but that, it doesn't make sense. So I did that for, you know, basically up until about 2020, sold the company. And that's when I started, you know, really getting into running my own venture fund, taking investing in startups more seriously, all the way to where I am today, which is running a financial technology company.
slava (01:36.679)
And how did you evolve from being an entrepreneur to even having a VC?
Ankur (01:44.046)
Yeah. So, it all started because there was this program led by Accomplice Ventures, who was my biggest investor called Spearhead. And their entire thesis was, let's find well -connected founders and give them play money, right? It's not my money. It's not, it wasn't my money. They gave me basically, you know, initially was, initially it was a couple hundred grand all the way up to, you know, a million dollars to invest in any promising startups we came across. And at first,
For me as a founder at the time, it was a really good deal, right? Because they're giving me the capital to go out and make a bunch of investments, but that's what got me started investing in startups. And then after selling my company, I was like, look, I now have the capital to do this myself. I may as well, you know, put real skin in the game, put my own dollars here. So if this does well, I actually see the rewards from it.
slava (02:33.391)
So you say very casually like when I exited my company, all that, but you're one of those stories where there actually was a really solid exit, which is not something we hear about all the time, because sometimes you hear about high valuations, but not high exits, or sometimes you don't hear about either of those. So how did you get to A, high valuations, and more importantly, a high exit?
Ankur (02:40.59)
Mm -hmm.
Ankur (02:44.974)
Yep. Yep.
Mm -hmm.
Ankur (02:52.846)
Yeah, so I think we were very fortunate in that our company was run pretty efficiently. So my company was called Teachable for people who don't know what that is. Teachable help people create and sell online classes, coaching memberships online. Since we were selling digital products, it was relatively speaking, quite a good business. And by that, I mean, it was very capital efficient. So for context, we raised about $12 million. But when we sold the company, we still had $9 million in the bank. So we barely burnt anything on our way to get there.
We sold the company when we were doing about a $25 million run rate. It soon doubled to 50 million a few months after the exit, but that's a whole separate story. But I think one of the things that really helped us along the way is because of our capital efficiency, we always raised money on our terms, on really good terms. Like the round before we sold the company was two years before we sold the company. We were at about a $12, $13 million run rate. We raised 4 million bucks at a 130 pre. So less than 3 % dilution in that round, for instance.
But as a result, when I sold the business, I still owned over half of it. I still retained board control, owning two out of three board seats. And it did allow us to structure the exit in a way that we did well when the company sold.
slava (04:04.167)
And you sold for like a 250 million or something plus.
Ankur (04:07.118)
A reported $250 million where I signed a piece of paper that says I cannot I cannot reveal the purchase price, but I can reveal what was reported.
slava (04:16.615)
All right, perfect. So obviously we could have a whole separate podcast about how to run a startup, how to be efficient, how to raise capital and all that. But so then you started getting into angel investing partially through a spearhead and then you part of laid that into your own fund separately from the venture asset class. What do you think about other alternative asset classes today or how you've been investing in the last few years? For example, you know, crypto pre IPO venture, not early stage venture.
Ankur (04:28.942)
Yep.
Correct.
slava (04:44.615)
real estate, private credit, maybe art or collectibles. Do any of those resonate for you or do you like really not like any of them?
Ankur (04:45.91)
Yep. Yep. Yeah. So in general, I don't have a ton of alternatives outside of startups. And my thesis has largely been like, I don't feel like I have any sort of alpha in a lot of areas. With startups, I do feel like I know the space well, so I may as well take advantage of that. So the way I think about my overall portfolio allocation is I'm roughly 50 % indexed in...
the general stock market, right? Like you can look at it however you want, like largely US large cap, a little bit of international small cap, all of that. The other 50%, and that first 50%, that's sort of the money that I think will grow and compound, whatever happens, I'll always have that. The other 50%, I'm like, okay, let me go out and have fun with it, right? Let me go out and do kind of relatively speaking wilder stuff. So with that, I have a bunch of single stock positions, a lot of dollars in my own venture funds.
a lot of dollars in venture funds from friends, some in startups directly. I have probably, I would say, 2 % of my net worth in crypto. So not a ton, but a little bit, almost as a hedge. If all these crypto maximalists are right, and that's the world we're living in, it's good to have something. And then in terms of real estate, I have my current home, which I own fully. So I am holding a little bit of real estate. And the only other commercial real estate I'm holding is in an Opportunity Zone fund.
I'm happy to talk about that more, but that was sort of done primarily for tax alpha, even though I still do think it's a good investment.
slava (06:19.943)
So the 50 % that you're saying is indexed to the stock market, is it literally just indexes or is it somebody managing your money like close to an index?
Ankur (06:29.774)
It's, I can talk about that another time. I'm using one of the large banks. I'm not thrilled about that whole relationship, but yes, there it is. It is roughly, you know, we have a direct indexing portfolio. We have a few, a really smart, evil thing. A lot of these banks do, which is something I'm trying to like uncover is I didn't know what I was doing. And what they do is they place you in these funds that largely index the market, but they are proprietary funds that are only controlled by this bank.
So I'm sort of locked into this position where I can't exit it without invoking a massive capital gain because they're the only people that offer this proprietary product. So it's kind of messed up, but yeah, that's how, but we're roughly tracking the overall global market with a heavy US large cap exposure.
slava (07:15.591)
And with rates going up, interest rates, is there any like bond or private credit exposure or you just, that's not your bag?
Ankur (07:23.598)
So I did a little, I have, I personally decided, I don't know about a year, 18 months ago to kind of like change my allocation a little bit into treasuries. Cause I was like, look, 5 % risk -free. This has never happened in my life. Like what a great opportunity in retrospect, it looks like quite a, quite a stupid decision. And it, it is sort of like, I feel like in my, over the last four years, there've been numerous times where I've tried to be a smart ass and I've tried to like,
deviate from the overall idea of indexing the market and doing nothing. And almost every time I've unilaterally made the wrong decision, whether it's like loading up on Treasuries and stuff, where now my general thesis is, look, just let your money work for you. Don't focus on whether it's a good time or a bad time or whether the market is like going up or down. Build systems, automate it, come back to look at it when it matters, and don't try and be too much for wise ass.
slava (08:18.535)
Nice. Yeah, one of the hardest things for smart people to do is not do anything.
Ankur (08:23.598)
Yeah. Yeah. And every time I've tinkered, it's just unilaterally, you know, when I'm like, it feels like the market is too high, but it's kind of felt like the market is too high for the last 15 years. Right. And yeah. So it's so overall with like, you know, the half my portfolio that's meant to just index the market, I'm leaving that alone. The other half I'll kind of play around with. And again, as I said, that's very heavily loaded right now in venture, just because something unique we did with our fund that most people have not done is.
I put a lot of my own money into it. A typical GP commit is 1 % or 2%. My GP commit for the first fund was a third of the fund. For the second fund was about 20 % of the fund. So a lot of dollars at stake. We also never charged any management fees at all. So real, like, you know, real strong skin in the game. But as a result, a lot of my, you know, money is dependent on how my funds do.
slava (09:12.839)
And are you still running actively deploying the fund now?
Ankur (09:17.07)
No, I thought I would do both. I thought I could be a startup founder as well as run the fund, but within literally four to six weeks of doing it, I'm like, this is silly. Like I can't, I can't run my company properly. If I'm getting on calls to like evaluate new deals, I simply don't have the time or bandwidth for it. So I returned about 30 plus million dollars to my investors. And I said, look, I'm focused on the fund. sorry. I focused the company. I have a little bit of capital left. We may make one investment.
Maybe make three more investments total over the next year, year and a half, but you know, that's really it.
slava (09:51.271)
Yeah, for those that know, being a CEO is like 180 % job, right? There's not that much room for other.
Ankur (09:56.59)
Especially the early days, like I can believe it if it's year five and you have a machine that kind of works, sure. But like year one, you should not be, at least I realized, like no to myself is dude, you should not be doing this. Like it doesn't make sense.
slava (10:09.991)
And then you didn't really touch on any of the art or collectibles. Is that just something you avoid since it's not a space you know or something you know and you just don't think it's good?
Ankur (10:21.166)
I've just not thought about it, right? There's a massive universe of things that I'm sure are fantastic investments and stuff, but I just like, you know, I just haven't thought about it. The other lesson for me, by the way, has been investing is one aspect of it. Keeping track of all of this is also another thing. So now, for instance, like I'm so much more likely to invest in a startup if it's on Angel List, because they'll consolidate my K -1s versus me having to remember and chase something down. It's the same thing for a lot of other alternative investments. It's like,
The juice really has to be worth the squeeze. And it's, you know, like for something that gives me a little bit of alpha, it's likely not worth the time to research it, put dollars in and all of that versus kind of steering towards simplicity is the way I think about it.
slava (11:06.151)
Yeah, to your point about the K1s, whether it's in venture or any of these asset classes, just getting all those K1s together is probably the most annoying part of all these investments. Doesn't it seem like there should be a solve for all that?
Ankur (11:14.222)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're thinking about ways we can kind of build tech and what we're doing, but in general, like, I think I had this journey, right? I sold my business. I got super interested in investing. I did arguably too much. And now I'm like, look, I want to do, I want to do, like make a few investment decisions and just make them at a much larger scale. And I think that's going to be more rewarding. So.
I don't know what that will look like in the future, but I could totally see a world where, you know, I put a large percentage of my net worth to buy a big stake in one company or something that's sort of more concentrated because I think then it, it prevents you from being too scattered. And I think the mistake I made and a lot of other people who ran funds the same time did is we invested in so many companies that it was hard to sort of maintain focus and you just have these positions and lots of different things. No one position is massive where.
Now I think I'm more likely to do fewer things and just take bigger swings.
slava (12:15.303)
Gotcha, and you did mention this, I'm gonna be the last question about this section, the opportunities zone fund, can you talk about why you did it, what the opportunity was, how you decided on that one, et cetera?
Ankur (12:25.646)
Yeah, absolutely. So for people who don't know opportunity zone funds, they're a tax advantage way of investing in real estate in certain areas that the government has earmarked as opportunity zones. Historically, these were underdeveloped areas where the government wants you to bring dollars to these areas. And in return, if you have any kind of capital gain, which I did, I could delay paying capital gains taxes on it for at the time, almost seven years. And what's more, once you develop property on it,
After 10 years, you'd receive an automatic step up in basis, which means any appreciation over 10 years is basically tax free. it was a very attractive combination at the same time. I'm not a real estate person at all, but a good buddy of mine really does like this stuff. He also sold his company at the exact same time and he was interested in this project. And I'm like, you know, I'm happy to like run this with you. I'll put in capital. I spent no time in terms of the expertise that was all him. And we pulled our dollars in. We bought a few buildings in Bushwick and.
That's the other thing about opportunity zones is they're based on census data from 20 years ago. So in New York City, for instance, parts of like Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, somewhat trendy neighborhoods are classified as an opportunity zone. So yeah, I put some money in that. And again, it was just such a big sort of tax alpha thing that I did it for that reason. I am, again, don't have the expertise. So I'm not the one actually operating or running the business.
slava (13:48.231)
So is this like a large, let's call it public opportunity zone or a small independent thing that you got it. Okay, perfect.
Ankur (13:51.79)
No, we basically created our own. So as a result, again, my challenge with the larger Opportunity Zone funds is I think the fees are sometimes predatory because it's such a big tax benefit that the issuers typically have such outrageous fees. So for ours, there's no LPs. It's only two -GP structure where, yeah, there are no, like the fees are literally just like, there's no one making any profit on it outside of the appreciation.
slava (14:19.879)
So there's no fees on your fund. There's no fees on this opportunity zone. We're gonna talk about carrying fees soon. I see a trend. So here's a high level question we ask everybody. What's your thoughts on today's economy and market? It's totally open -ended. Take it wherever you'd like, talk about whatever topics you'd like.
Ankur (14:23.854)
Yeah.
Yeah, yep. I hate AUM fees. What can I say?
Ankur (14:41.966)
Yeah, absolutely. I think, again, for me, it's been a sobering realization that I don't know anything. This is the reality of it. And for a while, I was trying to be a wise ass and try to figure out, have very sophisticated answers to what I think is happening. Right now, I'm like taking a zoomed out view of like, technology has caused like immense wealth for a long period of time. And I think it will continue to do that.
The US market has been supreme over the rest of the world for a long time. And I think it will continue to do that. So while a lot may seem like it's changing in any given moment, I'm going to invest and take the view that things, you know, kind of, we see an extrapolation of what the past was. In reality, when you study anything, you're like, you know, at some point that's going to be incorrect, but it's just too difficult for me to try and guess at what point that's no longer true. So.
So my generalized sort of thesis when it comes to like the market, the performance is kind of zoom out a little bit and take the longer term view on things and just set up systems to kind of whether it's automating investing and all of that, do that. The other, yeah, go. I was gonna say the other part of my thesis, and this is partially we'll come to later why we started, Carry is I think it's very, very hard for most investors to truly find alpha.
slava (15:52.455)
And how do you think? sorry, go ahead.
Ankur (16:06.35)
in their investing strategy. I think what I spend more time thinking about as well as teach other people to do is think about finding alpha from their tax strategies. Since I do believe you can be smart about your taxes, save money off the top, and then have more dollars to compound or invest in the market with. And that's sort of where I guess I look for alpha more than like how can I outperform whatever the S &P.
slava (16:31.975)
Super interesting. So do you think about it all the fact that like mortgage rates are high or Fed rates, you know, are high and are they flattened and are they going to go down once or three times or six times this year? You know, the fact that our stock markets, whether it's the S and P or QQ, whatever NASDAQ are like all pretty much at an all time high. Does this impact any of your thinking this day, this week, this year, or is it just more long -term buy and hold? Don't tinker.
Ankur (17:00.43)
Like I think about it and I follow it pretty often since again, you know, our customers have assets invested on our platform. I track our AUM pretty much every day. I know exactly what's happened every day. Yet I try, I do very little based on how it's, how things are going. I make, I change almost nothing. And this is very different from how I used to be a few years ago. And when it comes to like something as simple as logging into my own portfolio, probably don't do it more than once a quarter these days. But I will track the overall market.
slava (17:27.719)
Okay.
And then even though you're not changing anything as it relates to the macro, do you have any opinions on what's happening in the next 12 to 18 months in regards to, you know, are we going to have the rates go up even though J -Pal said they weren't going to go up or are they going to start going down or are we just staying here for a long time?
Ankur (17:48.59)
I don't think about it that much. With that said, I do think the election is and will kind of change a lot of what's coming. And what I probably do monitor more is less that, but I do monitor, for instance, what's happening on tax policy. And even for that, the election is such a, is going to be such a big sort of determinant. Like so much of what we help business owners with are things that frankly didn't exist before the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. There's a lot of stuff there that may come back, may not come back.
You have the lifetime gift tax exemption potentially going down next year. I attracted that side of the equation much more than sort of rates and investments and all of that.
slava (18:24.487)
So before we move on to Carry here in a second, you just hit on some interesting stuff there. Can you give us the highlights as to what this election is a decision tree for as it relates to the potential tax consequences? If we go Republican, what are the tax consequences? If we go Democrat, what are the tax consequences in your opinion?
Ankur (18:37.07)
Yeah.
Ankur (18:42.894)
Yeah, so to quickly sort of recap, one of the most generous, and I use the word generous in quotations, because some people may say it's only generous to some people, one of the acts that sort of reduced taxes for the most amount of people was in 2017 when Trump enacted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. And just like you'd expect, the people that benefited more than anyone else were business owners and real estate developers, right? It kind of makes sense when you think about where that's coming from.
But it did a lot of stuff. It lowered the maximum tax rate on C corporations. It gave an automatic deduction to every single business owner. It allowed someone to accelerate some part of a depreciation schedule all the way to year one. There was a lot of things there that lower taxes for real estate developers and business owners. All of that is set to expire this year. But there's a lot of talk about whether maybe it's renewed, maybe it's not renewed. Meanwhile, there's all this talk which...
realistically gets traded away every time of ways that whether it's a wealth tax, whether it is increasing the capital gains tax, whether it is eliminating all the loopholes like backdoor Roth, mega backdoor Roth. Right now that's all being proposed. But I think the outcome of the election will kind of determine which side, which side we move forward with. Whatever it is, it's gonna be watered down either way. But that's one side of it. The other side of it is also like, we're seeing increased regulatory.
pressure from the SEC, especially on anything like fintech. The closer it gets to crypto, the harder it is. There's also indications that with a Republican government, they may change that. So there's a lot of things in flux. TBD, what ends up actually mattering. But when it comes to tax law, there are changes every single year, and we're constantly monitoring that.
slava (20:35.079)
All right, great. Thank you for humor me with all those prediction questions. So let's get to Carrie. I'm gonna just segue into that with a statement you already said, which I think it just maybe sums it all up, which is, you know, I try to find alpha in a tax strategy as opposed to an investing strategy. That sounds really smart. So can you tell us as to what Carrie is, how you got started, what are you offering?
Ankur (20:39.15)
Mm -hmm.
Ankur (20:57.262)
Yep. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the most powerful things in the US tax code is how much it is written to the benefit of a business owner. If someone asks me like, hey, how to reduce my taxes, like start a business. Because that unlocks so many more opportunities for you in the tax code. The goal with Carry is to actually help business owners find and execute on these strategies, right? Cause everyone hears it, but people don't know how to actually do it. So the way we do that primarily today is by helping...
business owners set up tax advantage accounts like a solo 401k, which is a one person 401k plan that has like just really big benefits. You can get a tax deduction of almost $69 ,000 every single year, your dollars compound tax free. You can invest it in any asset class, including alternatives. You can self -direct it. You can take a loan from it. It's just a really powerful account. So we built a really easy platform to be able to set those up. We've since expanded to allow people to also set up self -directed IRAs.
We have other more advanced types of accounts coming soon, like, you know, defined benefit plans, certain types of trusts. But what we're trying to build is basically this machine that you can come into initially targeting business owners will help you find strategies to reduce your tax bill, help you implement these strategies and actually be an end to end platform that someday can potentially even help you file your taxes for you.
slava (22:17.991)
So do I have to be a business owner to work with you or do you help us become a business owner to then create these opportunities?
Ankur (22:25.486)
You don't have to be a business owner, but business owners get the most value because they're eligible for a solo 401k. And in general, as a business owner, the playbook of ways where you can save money and taxes is just much wider. With that said, we have a lot of people that are not business owners who may be using Keri to set up a self -directed IRA, invest in alternative assets from a retirement account. So we do have that as a pretty healthy demographic. But in the first few years, I think we're focusing on business owners with the caveat that like,
If you have a side hustle, if you make any money on the side, if you have any freelance income, that also counts as being a business owner. It doesn't mean, you know, that's all you do.
slava (23:04.839)
so can you just expand on that? So if I have a side hustle or such, what does that mean? So what's the over under on let's call it revenue or whatever, or what are the.
Ankur (23:13.965)
So to be eligible to, for instance, a solo 401k, right? To be eligible to set up a solo 401k, all you need to do is have a business that has net income in the year. So theoretically, if you have one small freelancing contract, even for me, my solo 401k, I was able to contribute dollars because Twitter sends me like $50 a month for tweeting, right? Like that is enough to kind of contribute and say I'm a business owner. And that's sort of the thesis we have is that,
Firstly, people starting a business, those numbers have been going up, up and up, but a lot of people are getting to this point where even if you have a full -time W2 job, you're doing something on the side that qualifies you as a business owner.
slava (23:55.111)
Okay, great. So what are some of the mistakes that people are making today that you would give advice on to help improve? Like what would be the three most common mistakes, for example?
Ankur (24:10.062)
Yeah, so I think in general, the biggest problem that people have is no one thinks about it. No one is like proactively like, you know, most people aren't happy with their CPAs because they say their CPA, if they have one, does not do anything proactive. They're saying, but my CPA basically comes in at the end of the year, files my taxes for me, and we kind of rinse and repeat, but there's no step of anyone proactively strategizing. Okay, what can I actually do?
to reduce my tax bills. That is a sort of underlying problem. We're trying to solve it in multiple ways. One, we're trying to eventually build tools and technology to kind of almost put people through a decision tree and tell them, have you considered setting up a Roth IRA? Or if you're above the limit, do a backdoor Roth IRA instead.
slava (24:55.975)
What's a backdoor Roth IRA for the audience?
Ankur (24:57.934)
That's a great, so that's a great, so a Roth IRA allows people to put in about $7 ,000 a year into a retirement account. It grow, your money grows tax free. And at the end, when you retire, you don't have to pay a single dollar in taxes. So it's a great account. It protects you no matter how high tax rates go in the future. However, if you make over, I think 160 ,000, something around there, you are technically ineligible from contributing to a Roth IRA because you earn too much money.
But because it's the US tax code, there's a loophole for everything. So you can actually do something called a backdoor ROT IRA, which is a multi -step process of first putting in dollars into traditional IRA and then converting that to a ROT. And it doesn't matter how much money you make, actually anyone can do that. So it's things like that. There's so much nuance in the tax code where all of these strategies are available to you. You just have to kind of know how to do them and make sure you don't mess them up.
slava (25:52.967)
The traditional, you don't pay any taxes until you exit, right? But the Roth, you pay the taxes upfront, but then you don't pay any taxes on the gains, right?
Ankur (25:58.414)
the
Ankur (26:02.286)
Correct. Correct. But if you have a 401k plan at work as well, you actually don't get a tax deduction with a traditional IRA. So it's actually, your assets grow tax free, but very often you don't get a tax deduction on either side with a traditional IRA.
slava (26:17.831)
So are you looking, so if I was to sign up with Carry on behalf of my listeners, so let's say I'm asking, are you my accountant or am I using accountant and using Carry in conjunction?
Ankur (26:29.902)
So we are typically not your accountant. We have a small program called Carry VIP, which is a high end service. In that case, we're actually your accountant and filing taxes and stuff. But the core platform, the self -serve platform, we're not your accountant. We create these accounts for you. We allow you to invest. We allow you to add your accountant to the account. We generate tax forms for you, but we're not filing taxes for you. It's only with Carry VIP, which is a very small hand -selected service, where we're also doing that.
but for the majority of our customers, we're not their account.
slava (27:02.855)
And how long have you been around now with these services? Okay, great. And it's probably been like one or two tax cycles. Do you have like case studies that you like to reference in terms of like, we worked with Jane Smith and, you know, XYZ?
Ankur (27:05.038)
We've been around 18 months.
Ankur (27:16.75)
Yeah. So I think, I think, I think what's been really encouraging to see is, you know, on our website, for instance, we have like tested, like actual testimonials, like a lot of them are like tweets and things that, you know, like you can literally find when someone talked about us, where it's people who didn't realize how like, like a small thing can make a massive difference. I'll give you a very specific example, right? So if you make a high amount of income as a business owner, let's say over a hundred thousand dollars a year or more, everyone recommends you set up an S corporation.
The reason an S -corp is great is it bifurcates your income into a salary and profits, and you only pay self -employment taxes on your salary. So as a result, you can end up with $4 ,000 or $5 ,000 in less taxes. So when most people read that, they're very tempted to lower their salary to the smallest allowable amount because they're like, this will have the least amount of self -employment taxes.
But actually it's worth having us or an accountant run the numbers for you because for every single person, there's an optimal W -2 salary amount that will save them the most in taxes because as your salary goes too low, you may not get your full QBI, Qualified Business Income Deduction, which is again, part of the 2017 Tax Cuts Act. But having someone figure out exactly what the W -2 salary should be is likely worth at least thousands of dollars in taxes. And that's just one example I can give.
give you many such examples. But there's a lot of nuance with this stuff where the difference between someone who knows what they're doing and someone who doesn't is have a minimum thousands of dollars if you make a lot of money substantially more than that.
slava (28:54.599)
And this is exactly why the service needs to exist.
Ankur (28:56.942)
Yep. Yeah. And I think like, but also I think that's what's kind of powerful about America as a country. Take a step back. You look at, I think the tax code of a country tells a lot about the country itself. And the fact that our tax code is so strongly in favor of entrepreneurship, being a business owner, starting something. I think that's kind of a cool thing.
slava (29:18.663)
Awesome. How do you see alts fitting into these tax strategies?
Ankur (29:25.998)
So two, two sort of perspective. I think, again, it goes back to like, for the majority of people, we've built easy tools to index the market, like Robo advisor, risk level, whatever. But what's cool about these accounts is you are allowed to invest in any asset class. So we want to make that available. So our vision with the platform we're building is we want to make it as easy for you to like buy shares in Apple as it would be to invest in a startup.
or do a real estate transaction or any other sort of long tail of transactions. Obviously that's hard tech to build from a compliance perspective or regulatory perspective from an actual technical perspective. But our vision is you want to be agnostic to what type of asset you want to buy. So for instance, we have people using their retirement accounts to invest in startups and crypto and all of these insane like private credit funds. And if you do that with the Roth IRA, it's actually quite powerful since...
the asymmetric upside that alternatives do have, if you actually end up hitting one of these, you'd end up having a large amount of dollars that can grow in compound. Everyone who's read about how Peter Thiel grew his Roth IRA to $5 billion, and we see a lot of people trying to make these asymmetric bets from tax advantage accounts.
slava (30:45.255)
And do you provide the Roth IRA infrastructure to work with you guys?
Ankur (30:50.509)
Correct. Yes. We provide a Roth IRA or from a solo 401k will let you invest in any asset class. So we see a lot of that.
slava (30:58.311)
Okay great and what are the prices?
Ankur (31:01.006)
So we're a flat fee. We charge either $29 a month for our basic plan or $49 a month for our professional plan. And then no other fees. We have no AUM fees, no trade fees, nothing else. So it's all flat fee.
slava (31:13.799)
What's the difference between the two levels?
Ankur (31:15.886)
The professional plan is where you get support for all of the alternative investments, the alternative IRA and stuff like that, as well as with our professional plan, we pair you with a financial planner who can also help answer any questions you may have.
slava (31:29.383)
Amazing. Is there anything else I haven't asked about Carrie that you feel should be covered?
Ankur (31:33.454)
Nope, I would encourage people to check out carry .com, take a look at it. Again, we're still very early, so feedback is always welcome.
slava (31:41.127)
Great. Next, you obviously are massively successful, already had reported good exits. So what is it that you listen to? What is it that you watch? What is it that you read on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that helps make Ankar Ankar?
Ankur (31:59.438)
So when it comes to like consumption of media, I would still say this is probably not a good habit and I wouldn't recommend it, but I probably get all my news and information from Twitter, which is unfortunately how I spend. It's like my one social media vice. I don't think I spend much. I have not had to talk for six months. Don't spend much time on Instagram, but Twitter is sort of where I get all my news and information. There was a media consumption. Otherwise I read a lot. Like, you know, I think I'm probably on track to read 60 or 70 books this year.
part of my like pretty much daily routine. I would say probably as much fiction as nonfiction. I tend to believe that your brain develops in a better way when you're reading all kinds of things. And very often it's, you know, it's not necessarily reading more business or investing books, but you know, reading fiction and reading for the sake of loving to read that I think is a big part of at least how I look at it.
slava (32:53.671)
And is there one non -fiction or fiction book that you recommend from the last year?
Ankur (32:58.926)
Yeah, there's fiction. I think fiction, one of the best books, one of the best authors I actually really liked was this author named Ishiguro. He's a British Japanese man. It's fiction. What happens is I tend to find one fiction author and then just sort of binge, binge everything. What I did with, and on the nonfiction side, I had a similar, similar phase where I think I read every Michael Lewis book in a span of like six weeks or something.
yeah.
slava (33:31.111)
Nice. And anything that you, any podcasts you like, any TV shows that you like, or anything you'd like to listen to regularly.
Ankur (33:38.286)
I don't really listen to podcasts. The only TV I typically watch are sports primarily or when I'm on a flight. But yeah, I think reading is definitely what I spend most time on.
slava (33:50.151)
What sports are you into?
Ankur (33:52.174)
I'm a lifelong cricket fan. My goal is to actually parlay all of this professional success into owning a cricket team. And then that would be sort of the lifetime dream. But outside of that, I'll also watch a little bit of everything, but cricket is easily number one.
slava (34:07.527)
I love it. I love it. I mean, sports teams is like one of the hottest assets these days. It's like growing like significantly.
Ankur (34:12.718)
I, it's, yeah, it's, it's too big a rant for now, but people should look up the crazy ways you, you, people use sports teams to generate tax deductions. The whole thing. It's kind of an insane racket where you take a player's contract, you consider the player's contract to be a depreciable asset. So you take big depreciation losses because you're running back is now your three into their contract and they're the value of their, their contract is worthless. It's crazy.
slava (34:37.959)
Amazing. Is there a tweet thread about that from you?
Ankur (34:41.358)
There isn't, but there's a great ProPublica article that I encourage people to check out. Google ProPublica athlete sports team depreciation and you'll find it.
slava (34:50.727)
Perfect, last question. We ask everybody this and this is probably the most exciting part, which is we ask everybody a prediction of what they would invest in today that three years out will be performing super well. And the more specific you could be, the better. So don't just generically say, you know, startups. So what would you invest in today? So when we bring you back a couple of times between now and then, that you will be a big winner.
Ankur (35:13.006)
I think the asset I'm most bullish on is shares in the Vibes Company Incorporated, which is the legal name of Cary. So I'm quite, quite invested in that specific asset and think it will do quite well. Our good friend Evan, who's running compliance for us now, also reminded me to tell everyone nothing I say here can or should be considered as investment advice. So we have that.
slava (35:36.487)
Amazing. Thank you so much. This has been great. We've covered a ton of ground just looking down at some of my notes obviously from Teachable to working with spearhead to obviously the exits Being able to be 50 % stock where you've learned not to tinker and then obviously There's all the play stuff that you're doing with the alternative investments and other interesting stuff mostly focused on venture I love the fact that you weren't charging fees on either the
Ankur (35:52.846)
Yeah.
slava (36:06.407)
venture fund or your own opportunity fund that you've been doing. But also you try to keep it simple. Thanks for the education on the opportunity zone. Super helpful. And I think this is the takeaway from the whole talk, which is find alpha in the tax strategy, not in the investing strategy. You brought to the platform here that we have a lot to understand with the president decision, which is depending on what happens there, there are definitely some potential.
Ankur (36:31.854)
Mm -hmm.
slava (36:34.887)
tax consequences and carry sounds totally awesome for so many people. Whether it's the solo 401k, whether it's the self -directed IRA or others, the tax system is there to support entrepreneurs and business owners, which we should all be taking advantage of. So thank you very much for all of that. And obviously we love those personal nuggets, whether it's the 60 to 70 books a year, that's incredible. I don't know if I've read that many in life. Doing Twitter.
Ankur (37:00.014)
To be clear, to be clear, my maximum is 50, but I'm on track for 60 to 70 this year. So it'll be, it'll be a first.
slava (37:05.255)
Okay, fine, fine. Now that you've clarified all the 50 of you, okay, gotcha. You love Twitter and soon you'll have a cricket team in the next couple of years or decades, however fast we can get more customers with Carry. And Ishiguro, all right, we gotta check him out. So thank you very much, Ankur, for your time.
Ankur (37:08.014)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ankur (37:22.35)
Thanks for having me. All right.
