295: VC For the Rest of Us | Shuttle | Scott Ashmore and Rob Halligan

0:05 Money never sleeps, pal. Hey there, I'm Pete Townsend and This is Money Never Sleeps. We look inside the minds of entrepreneurs and at the crossover of startups, enterprise, finance, technology, and life as we know it. This week, I sat down with Scott Ashmore and Rob Halligan, Co, founders of Shuttle, for a conversation that hits the sweet spot between gritty founder resilience and an incredibly timely mission. These two lifelong friends went from dabbling in crypto together to building a platform that's opening up access to a world that's traditionally been locked away behind velvet ropes. Venture Capital Shuttle enables busy professionals to Co invest alongside well known venture capital firms regardless of their knowledge, network or net worth. Since launching in December of 2024, they've already enabled their customers to invest alongside 15 VC funds. What really stood out in this chat was their unfiltered take on the founder journey, starting with a product that didn't scale, pressing pause and making the tough call to get regulated before they could go live.

1:07 It's a story of grit, guts and building the tool they wish they had when they were just getting started with investing. In this episode we get into what it means to take the private out of private wealth. Their two year grinds get regulatory approval, designing seamless UX for a new generation of digital first investors, and the rise of retail as an LP channel for VC funds. This is the story of two founders who aren't just building tech, they're flipping the script on who gets a seat at the venture table. So let's dive right in with Scott Ashmore and Rob Halligan from Shuttle. All right here on Money Never Sleeps. All right, guys, listen.

1:51 Wonderful to have you both on the show, Scott Ashmore and Rob Halligan from Shuttle. Thanks for jumping in. So let's get started with the story right in the back story. I know that you 2 are long time friends, but wanted to kind of get into that a bit and see how that happened. So Rob, maybe kick it off and just kind of give us your origin story and to the point of where you met Scott. Yeah, me and Scott go back coming up on 1/4 century now. I think we're about 23 or 24 years since we first met, about 12 years old, and have been hanging out ever since. Certainly didn't know we'd be building the company together all these years later, but it seems to make sense. To be honest, I like to think we make a pretty good match. So yeah, young kids out on our bikes and their skateboards and run into each other. A mutual friend of ours that I was hanging around with lived close to Scott, and that's where the connection was made. And then all these years later, I think it was probably about 10 years ago and I started dabbling in the world of cryptocurrency, which was kind of an early catalyst we weren't aware of at the time that started all of this. So I've been a soft French here for the guts of almost 20 years. And I was working in London and a friend of mine I was working with was deep into crypto.

2:56 He was like literally working on Bitcoin. And he introduced me to a couple of crypto exchanges and I just got hooked immediately. And that kind of set me down the path of investing. And obviously things just escalated from there. You just you expand your kind of desire of things you want to get into. So yeah, the interest of investing just crew exponentially from there. OK, good. And when did the penny drop? Really. So 2016, we started looking at cryptocurrency. I had started working at Salesforce the year before, so I was in investing in the employee stock purchase plan and the pension and whatnot. And that was I guess my first kind of step into any kind of investing. And then cryptocurrency came around.

3:37 Myself and Scott started investing together in cryptocurrency in a bunch of different coins. You did quite well. We started looking at platforms that were coming available at the time, the likes of E Toro, Mrs. kind of before the gyro and Revolute and whatnot. But it was that inflection point in public markets had happened and it was starting to become democratize for the sake of a buzzword. And we started exploring what else is out there. And I think the thing about cryptocurrency, one thing it did do for all of the craziness that happened back in those earlier days, and obviously there's still some craziness now, is that it birthed at a kind of new generation of investor. I think it drew a lot of people in. Now, unfortunately, people definitely did get burned, but I think a lot of people have hung around and a new generation of investors come out the back end of it, People who are a little bit more pro risk, willing to look at alternative options and opportunities.

4:28 And that was definitely the same for us. So we started looking around and see what else is out there. And we wanted to look at private market opportunities like venture capital and private equity and all these interesting things. And we realized quite quickly that that is a world that we don't belong to, right? Historically is being reserved for very wealthy or the well connected and we didn't see a way into that nor did we feel typically welcomed in there. We kind of let it die for a little while and forgot about it maybe and continued with what we were doing. And we were investing more in public market equities and funds. I was working at Salesforce, Scott was in London building consumer experiences for the big giants of the world, but also a lot of startups. I was selling into a lot of venture backed tech companies in the UK at Salesforce and was very close to a lot of very interesting companies that were growing, raising capital. Some, some were exiting and that was a kind of typical thing that an ongoing conversation every day across the floor amongst my peers and colleagues.

5:32 And the one particular client that I thought I was going to be selling a contract into at the end of the fiscal went quiet on me. And there was only towards the end of the year that I saw a Tech Crunch article flash up that they had been acquired by work Day. And that was kind of another catalyst and aha moment. I wonder how did the employees do, how did the founders do off the acquisition? And why can't someone like me who has relevant skills and experience in a similar industry, get access to opportunities like this? And then me and stock came back together on and thought there's other people like us out there. There has to be. And let's go figure it out and see, does a platform like this exist? And if not, maybe we can look at building it. It's an interesting perspective because with that moment where you realize that perhaps the founders, employees of the acquired company might have done OK with that. Did you have a certain relationship with some of these users of sales force, these clients of sales force that you got closer to them to start to understand their journey a bit? Was there any of that in this that kind of gave you an affinity for the upside of early stage startups? Yeah, for sure.

6:45 And not just me. I mean, this was a, this is a conversation every day I'm working on a floor of hundreds of salespeople all selling into interest in companies. And you get emotionally attached to these businesses because you could be working with them for a year, 2 years. And then even if they move to somebody else's territory, you know the names, everyone you're familiar with, the different companies that those conversations are now continuously ongoing with other account owners, whoever is managing the relationship after you or before you. So you get quite familiar with these companies. And as a as an account executive, I think particularly selling a solution like Salesforce, which is a very broad solution that can plug into every department of a company. You get a kind of front row siege to the growth of these businesses.

7:29 You get very tight with their executive team and their management team get to learn about their objectives, their challenges, where they're going over the next 1224, sixty months and building solutions to help them get there. And it's impossible not to get very attached to those businesses. But as a result, you're also listening to the news about they've just raised their series ABC. They've just hired 100 new people. They're entering this new geography. So you're seeing all of this happen and hearing all of this and getting kind of connected to their journey as a result. There was just this massive interest in seeing these businesses grow and thinking I'd love to play or even share in that upside in a different way than just to selling them technology.

8:11 I get it. I get it. It's a really interesting entry point into Venture. You need that empathy, you need that founder empathy, and it's awesome that you got that through Salesforce. Scott, for you, was there a foundational experience that's a little bit varied here or was it pretty much along the same lines as Rob? Like Bill for consumer products and experiences for some of the big tech companies in the world, but we also worked with a lot of startups. I would be in charge of building these products for startups and I would build the product for three or four months and then I would just have to say goodbye to it. So like you've built this product, like Rob said, you've become emotionally invested in these products and then you just have to say goodbye to them. You put in all this work and then you've just got to let go of it.

8:51 So it felt like I want to be the owner of these products. And so I think those more probably my foray into being a vendor, it's like I don't have to start keep building products for somebody else. I want to build products for myself. And and it just have happened that I was building products for venture backed companies on big venture backed tech companies. So it kind of naturally led me towards that path. Yeah. That's uncanny that it's like Rob had kind of the commercial side figured of this to some and that Scott you had the product and engineering side covered to this at from your inspirational standpoint for doing this, it makes perfect sense, right. But in hindsight, it's kind of I mean you guys are pals.

9:32 So you already had that covered in terms of the relationship. And probably if one person who had this product experience in building UX and building products for venture backed startups that didn't know the person who had worked with the commercial side of it, with startups through their CRM and through their customer tools, that you probably wouldn't have been able to come together if it was 2 randomers, right? It was a fact that you already had a trusted relationship as friends that allowed you to get started with what became Shuttle. A lot of questions are already answered and things that don't even need to be thought about when you start a company with a very close friend, because that trust is already built and you know each other so well that you can just skip all of that dating period and they've gone and just get cracking. OK.

10:25 And tell us what is Shuttle today and give us an insight into the origin story of when it all started and some of the early days and decisions that you made about it. Yeah. So for those who aren't familiar with us at all, we enable busy professionals to build wealth by Co investing with well known venture capital funds regardless of their knowledge network or net worths. So that's the one liner and how this kind of came about really as myself and Scott, we were investing together and we wanted to explore these new opportunities, but didn't have a way of doing that and we couldn't find a way of doing it that suited us. Like a traditional crowdfunding platform didn't speak to us whatsoever.

11:10 We didn't like the model. We didn't think their incentives were aligned with the investors and it just wasn't a fit for us. So we said, well, surely there's other people like us out there who might be thinking the same way. Let's, let's figure this out. We were able to realize that it's people like us that are probably going to be interested. So people may be working in tech or tech adjacent industries who are maybe a bit closer to the coalface and seeing these companies. Because if you work at a tech company, whether it's startup or big tech, you'd probably have stock options, which means you're invested emotionally and monetarily in the company's success and maybe a bit closer tied to, you know, their fundraising and their growth and things like that. So we weren't then we surveyed and spoke to to go to 300 people working across big tech and late stage scale ups and startups to ask them, what is this stuff?

12:05 Do you invest if you do with you know, or would you be interested in other opportunities and why? And the data that came back was just a resounding yes. People were interested in wanting to invest in startups. They would invest in the VC fund if they had their opportunity. They understood the illiquidity of the asset class and they would use applications that simplified the access points and the process. So that was enough validation for us to kind of kick off that journey, a journey we had no idea what was it was going to look like and went down the route of starting to build and also get licensed by the regulator, which was the biggest kind of hurdle to get over. And thankfully we were successful in that late last summer.

12:47 OK, very good. And you've been candid about some of the early meandering, perhaps, that you might have done to find your way to this point where you are now. Was there a turning point in all of this for you that made you realize that the initial route to market that you had selected perhaps wasn't going to work and that you needed to do it differently? Yeah, and so typical of green, ignorant and naive founders when they're starting their journey. We thankfully what we did do right was we validated the opportunity and asked people, do people want this? And then what we continuing in that guys is we asked we started connecting with lots of people in the startup space, investors, mentors or their founders and stuff like this.

13:33 And we spoke to tons and tons of founders about their fundraising journeys. And I guess the one thing that we hadn't learned yet or we hadn't fine-tuned was our filter for when you listen to people's advice, knowing what to take on board, what to scrap, and you know, which directions to follow. And as a result, we probably put too much weight into what people were saying and ultimately ended up building the wrong thing. While it was still geared towards allowing people to invest in startups, it also had a bunch of other unnecessary elements tacked on, I think it's fair to say. So he spends quite, quite some time kind of building that out now. It became revenue generating. We launched are we left our old roles, our old jobs in February 2022 and we launched our beta and we had about 5 or 600 people on that somewhere.

14:21 And then at the end of the summer we started generating kind of micro revenues, but it wasn't related to the investing side of things. And then around Scott, I think it was maybe October, November time we realized thankfully we had the wherewithal to realize and admit to ourselves that what we have built and what we're building isn't going to scale long term. This isn't the thing we've gone off course here. If we want to build what we had originally envisioned them, what we think we want to build, then we have to scrap it and we need to go head first into regulation, as painful as that might be. So that meant going to the customers we had just to just signed up and saying sorry, shutting this down. We're going to be scrapping basically all of this and won't be operating right now or for the foreseeable until we get a license from the central bank. It was just, yeah, really difficult decision, obviously, Rob said.

15:12 We had some revenues coming in, but I remember and we think we just got back from web somewhat and we had an investor coming over from Spain to visit us and we got a little meeting room together. And I just remember being incredibly nervous because we just sit down and talk to him and say, look, we don't think this is working. We need to do something else. I'm just thinking about, hey, they might react to that after like investing money in the business. Fair play to him. He was just like, he totally got it and he was like, good guys, I invested in you if like it's not the idea I invested in. So just do your thing, but I trust what you can do. That was Scott. Did you have to throw out a lot of the product that you had built? We did have to throw out a lot of the product that we built. We managed to repurpose some like we had these all these kind of feedback tools where you could give feedback on startups, pitch checks and stuff like this.

15:56 And we just kind of repurposed all that to help us run our own internal dividends process on companies that come into our system. So there was a lot of reuse. So we have to change some things, some things just to say goodbye to. But we did get to reuse some stuff. All right. Did you guys have full agreement on this as a direction to go or were there some negotiation discussions between the two of you to figure out the way to go? If there was definite discussions, we talked for a few days about what's not working, what is working, what it was always like. We both knew this isn't working in its current state and we need to refocus on really who was our actual ideal customer and serving the customer as opposed to serving multiple different types of customer. So we knew what we needed to do, we just had to get together and figure out exactly what the next steps were. I think it was more of a case of getting over the fear and to pull the trigger on it more.

16:47 So it just took a couple of days for us to kind of let that idea settled in our heads. It wasn't that there was certainly no clash between us like 111 to go one way and one the other. We both knew. But we just, it just took maybe 2223 days for us to actually say, you know what, OK, scrap us, we need to go again. And thankfully, I think it was a kind of a stiff iteration as opposed to a full pivot. We were still the direction that we wanted to go was still there. We had just kind of gone off course, built a bit of a unnecessary tooling around the idea. So I think it was a bit easier than a complete shift in in direction, thankfully. Yeah, I've gone through that once in my career.

17:29 And the decision to go in the right direction, no matter how fearful the course ahead may be, that decision can be liberating, right? Did you feel that there was some some things to let go of that actually felt really good to let go of, to go in this new direction? As hard as it was, just because of the time and energy and effort that's gone into, even if it was the wrong thing, so much work had gone into what we've built and people really liked the tool that we had built. And so we've gotten so much good feedback from it. So it's just kind of like that initial fear. But once we made that decision, definitely felt like, OK, we can leave all of that behind and take we can take all of the learning from those last several months and bring it with us and leave all of the bad stuff behind and all of the stuff we don't want.

18:17 So that's kind of a liberating feeling. I. Think it was incredibly exciting just being able to shift focus to the ultimate vision and thinking purely in the future direction. But also we knew we were both stepping into what was going to be an incredibly long, a difficult regulatory process with the Central Bank of Ireland. So that was like, I mean, completely unknown to ourselves. Like we probably thought of the time like this will be probably 3 months and we'll be done. But as we know it was going to take almost two years. But I guess that's the benefit of naivety of being a vendor. Yeah, well as well, you know, the fact that the European crowdfunding regulation was brand new, right. And the other recent, well not recently, but in the past new regulation, the was it PSD 2 with the the Payment Services Directive, the second version of that, they introduced a new regulatory licensing called an account information service provider, AISP.

19:15 And David Heath, the founder of Circuit, he taught himself that and he did his own regulatory submission around that. It took him a good year, but he saved a big chunk of money doing it that way. But it was a brand new regulatory licensing in Ireland, and he was the first one to do it. And so he had to figure it out himself. And there's an element of that. Did you guys have to really dig in to truly understand the regulatory framework, the new regulatory framework? We were two founders with no money, very little cash in the bank, no knowledge of regulation, So we were out. I fit on our own trying to figure this out.

19:55 Now, we'd worked with solicitors and whatnot who were helping us, but because of the lack of budgets, it meant that they could only be used very sparingly. It was up to us to draft all of that and figure out the regulation and why we should be gone then using this particular license and where that's going to get us and everything. So yeah, a very steep learning curve I would say. Yeah, it was incredibly difficult. It took us 12 months just to draft the application. So before we submitting the application, it took 12 months, and that was purely just just learning. The regulation itself is this huge document. You've got to understand each individual section within that document. And then there's a lot of Gray areas, a lot of things you just have to figure out in your own.

20:36 We would draft huge amounts of work and like submit them to our solicitors who would then say to us, guys, this is crap, you need to start it all over again. There needs to be way more detail. So this constant back and forth of us thinking, well, we've done a great job here and then being taken back to earth, no, this is good enough. So yeah, 12 months of back and forth. And then we submitted in December 2023 and we got authorized in August 2024. So yeah, there's an 8 bunch of back and forth that the search Brian Kaft, we submitted. So yeah, just incredibly long process. The closer you get to the authorization date, the more difficult and complicated it becomes, and the more stressful it becomes. I think it's worth noting as well that 12 month application phase, the level of detail in the application you have to put in text.

21:22 Like every single thing that is on your platform, like every button. What does it do? What policies are in place? Where do the customers find the terms and conditions? What's in those terms and conditions? Every single piece of every single journey needs to be documented in text. We are two young founders who haven't necessarily built all of it yet, right? So some of it is kind of future States and you're kind of going, well, we need to build this now as we go. We need to have payment service providers plugged into the technology to manage the payment flows and the KYC element and the CDD element of the platform. We need to have all of this technology that we're not necessarily going to build ourselves because we're not a payment service provider when we don't have an EMI license or whatever it might be. So we also have to kind of wrangle those relationships and get them place for the regulator as we're building. So it's building the plane as you're flying or whatever that saying is.

22:17 That was kind of a lot of the time that went into that first year and we had some major issues with building the payment infrastructure into the platform and setbacks on that as well that kind of pushed things out with that. So that was it, a testing year I would say is. Yeah, it's a difficult way to do it. Did you guys, while you're going through this whole 2 year struggle to get the regulatory licensing done, did you have an engagement process with a market? You're building partnerships with VCs in order to get access to deal flow. You have relationships with founders historically or those that you've met along the way that you've stayed in touch with.

23:00 And then you have this user base that, yeah, out there from a market perspective, it totally feels like they're there, right, because of this new generation of investor mindset. But how did you kind of bring all those pieces together while doing the regulatory side to make sure that when you did get the seal of approval that you were ready to go? It was incredibly challenging and I wouldn't say we brought them all together necessarily. We met lots and lots of VCs throughout the process just building relationships, coffees, video calls, initial pipeline into the first kind of opportunities that we were putting onto the platform. But we also started a kind of weekly newsletter that was geared towards our ICP, our ideal customer profile and this have called the old sophisticated investor.

23:44 And we would say that a weekly just talking about private markets is really about educating people and we grew that to range 1200 people. That was our initial cohort of customers. She was just constantly networking with VCs, going to events, meeting for coffees, while also trying to deliver contents to our audience at the same time that was going to resonate with them. And very few people have exposure to the really inner workings of venture capital. We needed a route to give these people education where they could get comfortable with the other class before actually just diving straight in and making their first investment. And I think that year leading into our launch was like really beneficial for just helping people holding their hand get away familiar with venture capital. So by the time we launched, they were ready to commit their photos. So I think that was really beneficial.

24:25 It's a fantastically patient yet determined way to do it. You mentioned Scott, was it the unsophisticated investor? Was the name of the newsletter you were doing the market now and that you're serving, like you've said, the tech savvy, the digital native, but now increasingly sophisticated and probably sophisticated from their technology demands rather than being that far up the curve with venture capital, which would point to a level of sophistication, right, Because it is an opaque market. It is a difficult to understand market. So you've got that sophistication there in terms of their tech demands and that from UX perspective, Scott, you've got some specific challenges there to keep things clean and simple.

25:11 Like I'm using a new CRM myself called Folk and it is so clean and it is so simple and it is such a joy to use and it almost becomes like habitual to use it. And getting that type of UXUI for people is a big lift. How is this developed for you in terms of owning the product? I think it's really important to note when you're building in consumer finance, there is no such thing as an MVP. You can't release this shitty products for people that just doesn't work and has bugs. When it comes to consumers and their financial, especially, investing the product that they use the first time has to be incredibly simple, seamless, slick, because that's what they've come to expect from the likes of Revelry to Gyro and other public market platforms. They work really well and the UI and UX is just really well thought out.

25:58 So if a customer comes to our platform and has this bad experience, they're going to churn immediately. They're not going to tell the friends, they're going to just forget about it. So we've got a huge amount of effort into our user experience and just making sure that simplicity was there from the store. It can be difficult because there's a lot of things that are actually going on under the hood when it comes to investing in private markets. There is paid distributed shares across all the different customers. How much allocation is available? Just tracking that along the investment journey, when you open up around, there's a lot of stuff that's happening behind the scenes and we have to manage that without letting the customers see just how complicated things are on the back end. For them, it's just a matter of a couple of clicks and they're best in this company. They can see it in their portfolio and then we can show them how it's tracking over time.

26:39 Simplicity is absolutely a non negotiable, sure. It just has to be as simple as possible. Rob, did you just leave Scott to that or were you out there gathering input and ideas from the market and kind of feeding that back through? Yeah, No, definitely the latter. Like well, Scott definitely owns the product and does all the engineering and more commercial where we come together and where our roles blend. I think a lot across the product is kind of in the design phase and how it should look and how it should feel. 2 core values of ours in the company that we try and live by is simplicity and trust. And likes what Scott said about consumer applications, they need to be good from the jump because it's all about building trust.

27:20 It's hard to build, it's easy to lose. And if someone comes onto your platform and it's below standards, below par, then that trust can be gone and wiped and never gotten back. So we build with that in mind, like, well, how can we build trust with these users from the second they get onto our platform? Something I think we've seen in kind of more public market investing platforms is, and maybe it's because they've been around for a lot longer, is a lot of them have grown over time. Some of them are really beautiful and great UX's, but some of them have grown a little bit like clunky and bloated. I think that's fine because people are familiar with public markets and they're more used to them and they're using them more regularly. But with something like investing in venture, which is can be brand new for a lot of the people coming onto our platform, it needs to be incredibly simple.

28:05 So we kind of build with the idea of like reduction, like, hey, what can we take away here? Like, how can we make this cleaner and slicker and reduce what's on the screen without losing any of that sense of robustness that the platform should have and that should give people trust? I think as well it's not just a product problem, it's a legal problem too. Like we've got to work with our lawyers to make sure customers don't have to sign E signature documents through docu so on. So it does all happen on platform to check boxes. So working with lawyers and we've got to work with them to make sure that we have the most seamless experience possible on the platform that is legally compliant with what we want to do is quite difficult sometimes as well. So not just an engineering problem, it's also a legal problem too.

28:51 Oh yeah, definitely tons and tons of stuff when you're taking this first big, not first big step. You guys are well on the journey now, but in putting that regulatory umbrella over your business. Anytime yeah, as a two guys who didn't come from the world as that world as well, you're and you're also kind of dumbfounded along the way as well like how why are you asking us to do it like this and makes no sense. Yeah, getting over that could be frustrating. I hear that looking at Shuttle as essentially Co investing alongside VCs in early stage startup deals, right, or in in later stage startup deals as well that what you're essentially doing is bridging retail capital with institutional level deal flow.

29:31 I've talked to people about you in the past week or so in prepping for this interview and saying, listen, it's like on your website taking the private out of private wealth And there is a certain type of investor. When you start talking to you and you've identified this type of investor with who you're building for the digitally native investor that has a bit more expectation and a bit more ability to wear some risk, that is compelling. And that when you tell that story around, Rob, how you got interested in this space through working with early stage founders from a commercial perspective, and Scott, how you did as well from the product side. All of that makes sense when you bring it together with this model of connecting the dots between VC deal flow as well as retail investors.

30:22 What makes the model work and how do you scale it without really diluting the quality of this bridge that you've built between these two worlds? What makes the work is probably alignment. We're not trying to reinvent investing. We're plugging into kind of what already works and the funds that we're Co investing with are their experienced, are vetted there. This is what they do and they are invested in companies that people are familiar with and many others that they might not be. And I think that means that the retail investors that are coming on to shuttle, they're not guessing, they're riding alongside the same professionals who are backing these great companies, the next generation of great innovative companies and being able to play their part and have skin in the game as well.

31:08 So I think that's what makes it work, why people have that interest. And I think that is maintained just through selection, right? It's about making sure we're aligned and with the right PC funds, with the right companies for our community. It's not just about plugging any deal into the platform. We work on quality over quantity and and not volume. And then I think how do you scale that? I think it goes back to like the technology and the trust piece, like we mentioned, like it's, we automate all of the admin and compliance that that helps make things seamless, right? It's that seamlessness, it's that smoothness, taking all of that heavy jargon failed process out of the picture and main and we keep, if we keep aligned to that goal, I think is how we can keep pushing this along and the relationships that we're building will continue to grow.

32:01 We'll build more relationships with more partners and which will increase the scale of the opportunities on platform, which will ultimately pull more people in. I think that's really where we go with this. It's staying true to kind of how what thinking was from the start, aligning with the right people, keeping it simple, building that trust in the market. I think if we can stick to those things, that's how we can maintain kind of the quality going forward. Is there a platformification really of the VC relationships and the vetting of those VCs that you guys can undertake? There are all different types of AI tools that are looking at founders and looking at startups and looking deep into LinkedIn, looking to see if someone had just recently flipped their profile on LinkedIn to stealth, right?

32:50 And that has a particular background that would suggest that they're going to be a very good startup founder. And then they start getting an inbound flow from high profile VCs to say, hey, I see that you're starting something. Would you like to talk about how you're going to fund the business, right? And that's from the founder perspective, but there's tons of signals out there on the VC side on are they deploying capital now? When was their last fund? What is the check size that they write? What are the themes that they're investing in? What are the stages that they're investing in? What do the partners actually like? What do the partners eat for breakfast? OK. And there's all these data points out there.

33:32 Are you guys building something that can give you that signal and to point out perhaps good quality VCs to pursue some deal flow from to put in front of your retail investors? Yeah. And we're definitely working on some internal tools, experiment with AI and how we can best leverage it. But I think there's a lot of people already doing that and solving that problem really well. What I think with those with the opportunity and how we scale this, because I think retail investors are especially kind of the mass affluent segment is really going to exponentially grow in terms of adoption of alternative investments. And there's not really anybody at the moment who's building the infrastructure, the technology that's going to be able to pool all those people together and have them invest in private market asset classes.

34:18 So if you think about a VC fund or a solo GP, they might be small, might have a 20 million fund or a 10 million fund and they would like to raise from 1000 people who are retail investors. For them to do that is a possible right now they just there's no way you could handle all that administrative burden from accepting all those investors into your fund. So we think the big opportunity for us is creating technology like we already have done to a degree that makes it just ridiculously simple for those folks to accept that retail capital through our own infrastructure and we'll handle all the messiness and they just have to accept the capital. So I think that's the big opportunity for us is being able to build the infrastructure that enables us to pull together thousands of thousands of hundreds of thousands of people and unlock that LP Channel 4 phones could be venture capital, private equity, real estate, private credit. That's where we think the opportunity is really exposing and these retail investors to funds in a way that's just seamless for the funds.

35:14 I think we're all like we're already seeing fund managers who kind of forward thinking fund managers who want to engage a broader audience, not necessarily just for capital, but for community and inciting distribution. And while they're still going to raise capital from ultra high net worths LP's or institutional LP's, I think there's a lot of value in the retail channel as a new LP channel. Institutional PS move slowly. Due diligence can be drawn out, investment committees as it can be quite rigid and they can demand preferential terms and side letters and all this type of stuff. And asset managers will benefit from kind of faster, more efficient ways to raise capital that's not necessarily constrained by the red tape that can't surround maybe individual in ultra high network individuals or institutions and then we can provide that with the infrastructure that we're building.

36:07 You can and because it's an area that VC is just an asset managers in general just kind of stay away from and the back office side of it's a nightmare when you're dealing with retail investors. If you can be that, I don't want to say a foot on each side of the river, but that and I don't want to call you a marketplace either, but you have this dual proposition. You have a proposition to retail investors, but you also have a proposition to alternative managers, alternative asset managers, VC's, private equity, those that focus on these asset classes that you think are going to be attractive to your base of retail investors. They don't want to go there, but you provide that coverage for them. Exactly, we have the regulation, we build the infrastructure and when pooled and structured correctly, retail capital offers speed and efficiency and flexibility that institutions can't match.

36:59 We can help battle managers close faster without the typical investment committees and rigid mandates and is, well, when Paul Jahana worked in investor commits to a fund, obviously that's not all committed upfront, right? There is capital calls that happen over the first few years that they're deploying retail investors are going to be deploying smaller amounts. And so that capital can all be called upfront. That's coming from the retail channel as opposed to being called over the course of several years. And there's a massive benefit to that for asset managers. There's interest that can be earned on that capital on both sides of the party for argument's sake that it speeds things up and makes things less of an administrative burden for the asset manager as well.

37:39 So there's a lot of benefits there to the retail channel being able to access these after classes as an LP and we can provide infrastructure that makes that simple. And looking across Europe and thinking about some of the macro themes here that you can have a pretty good handle from where you guys are sitting on the demographic that is Ireland. Although there's a bunch of different mindsets here, a bunch of different pockets of ideas about how people invest. When you look across to the UK, you kind of can find some similar mindsets and similar attitudes towards investing and there's a nice, a nice bridge there to pursue.

38:21 But then when you get across to Europe, there's all different types of mindsets around this, given that the diversity of the European population across different borders. So is UK and then to Europe the next market? Are you looking at US? What do you think about as being the right approach? We're obviously regulated to operate across Europe, so we'll definitely be targeting kind of tech hubs across Europe shortly. I think the mindset is very similar. Like if you find big VC backed tech companies, later stage growth companies, the people working in those companies have a similar mindset like Rob alluded to earlier, they're exposed to this or they kind of know what they're getting into. So yeah, we will be targeting tech hubs across Europe and the UK is definitely a next step for us. We're already in the process of drafting open reps the application and hopefully we'll I've got submitted in the near future and be authorized to operate there by the end of this year.

39:11 So yeah, UK is definitely the big next step and US for sure. Eventually we want to move it to the US too. There's a few players over there. The market is definitely more mature there. So this problem is being solved to a degree, but it's still mostly for accredited investors with a net worth of over 1,000,000. It's a different set of regulatory rules. I'm just on that from a macro perspective to macro element that we feel in, in Ireland, it's never been harder to buy a house, cost of living, job security is on the floor. I think people recognize that pensions are shaky and that'll work hard and have a pension and that will do is people across Europe have realized that's no longer the case. And I think those macro elements are felt not just in Ireland, but across many parts of Europe.

39:54 And I think that generation of investors that we're going after I think feels that and has recognized and like you mentioned earlier is more sophisticated and educated than ever when it comes to their finances. I think that cohort of people exist across Ireland, across the UK and across Europe, so we can find those people. You're right, and it's always been, you've got me excited about this now. There's always been this stigma about the traditional conservative European private equity VC mindset. If someone says they're a precede investor in Europe, they actually mean their seed, right? Whereas in the US, they say their precede, they really are precede, right? Or maybe they do mostly precede in a bit of seed. I could see how Shuttle could be the vehicle to lift kind of the opportunity there across Europe to find these pockets of investors, retail investors across tech hubs. And also when the tech hubs are the VCs, right? When you look in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, you name it, and kind of mobilizing those communities, I can really see this. That's just my advice, but I'm sure you guys are already thinking that direction in terms of advice. What is the best startup advice you've ever received? Does a person we've worked with for a long time got called Amy Leonard?

41:21 He actually runs Baseline, the workspace on Thomas St. now with Fiona. Oh yeah. Great people, great people. So we sat down with him one time in the CHQ building. And up until that point we gotten so much advice from other people just telling us, hey, we should do things and what we should build and so on and so forth. But the first time we sat down with them, and I think the first thing he said to us was, I just want to preface this with I don't know your business. You guys know your business better than me. Don't listen to my advice. Be very careful with the advice you do listen to. And that kind of reshaped how I thought about listening to people's advice from that point on. He went on to absolutely slate what we've been doing. I never walk away from that meeting. They think, oh, God, that was brutal. Maybe that goes a bit of an assault. But literally an hour later, I was thinking way. That was tough advice, but it actually made me really deeply think about what we're doing and are we doing the right thing? And so, yeah, that was some of the best advice I've gotten. OK.

42:17 Outside of shuttle, Rob, anything that you think is an exciting trend in private markets right now that you're intrigued by? I think the rise of secondary markets is quite interesting because we're seeing way less companies IPOI think there's probably we're down nearly 50% publicly listed companies over the lot in the last 30 years. I think it went from 8000. I think it's like 4 or less than 4 1/2 thousand now companies aren't IP owing, they're staying prime for much longer. A lot of the value is being soaked off while they're private. I think Google like IPO would a market capital like 600 million or something like that and Stripe it like a $90 billion company and still private. So a lot of that value is being soaked up while they're still private.

43:03 So the rise of platforms that are allowing people to access secondary share sales is really interesting. And people to be able to still get access to these really interesting valuable companies before they IPOI think that's really cool like equities and over in the US as a few others Forge don't see as much of it in Europe. Hopefully that will change and maybe something we'll look at too, but I think that's really interesting. Yeah, it absolutely is. But is there anything that you think people are listeners should know about Shuttle that we haven't talked about yet? What's important to note is we're not venture capitalists. We're not investors.

43:44 We're two guys who were investing in public facing stuff, just buying some stocks and phones and cryptocurrency who wanted access to better opportunities be for the same reason other people do. They want to create financial stability. They want to create some kind of financial freedom at some point in the future, whatever that looks like for them. That's how we're approaching this. We're building the tool that we wish we had back then. Because of that, our customers should be able to relate to us a lot more. And maybe they think you see someone building a a fintech platform or in a wealth tech platform and think they might be to finance Bros who come from that background when we're not.

44:26 We're ultimately our own customer building the solution that we wish we had. That is strong founder market fit, founder problem fit even below that. I love it. We're going to round this one out, guys, with the last question that I ask everybody on this podcast. What is one thing that people would not expect to know about you? Scott, we'll start with you. I think there's sort of a joint story here that's quite interesting. A bit of time that myself and Rob were doing a road trip through America. We were traveling back from Las Vegas, journey all the way to Vancouver. We got lost in the desert and we ran out of money and shortly began to run out of gas. So we would go from gas station to gas station. We started off by selling our friends goods to get some money to pay for gas.

45:16 This is back when there's no such thing as Google Maps. Like we just, we had a map and we had to figure out where to go. So yeah, we started selling our friends goods to to buy ourselves gas and these gas stations as we went through America. And eventually we just had to start begging people for money to get us home. Very scary journey. We would be going through the middle of nowhere in America. Bullet holes in every side we went past. But we eventually made it all the way home after I think it was over 20 hours of trying to get from Las Vegas to to Vancouver. It was a pretty funny journey and a pretty a few post calls along the way. Wow. It was pretty wild. We were 19, we didn't have iPhones, we had an old Motorola flip phone and a paper map, and we left Vegas.

45:58 I had to get back to Vancouver because my flight was 24 hours away from Vancouver back to Ireland after a summer in Vancouver. I remember falling asleep leaving Vegas and waking up in the middle of the desert because our friend had just picked the road that looked like the shortest route. And yeah, it led to us running out of everything and selling our stuff and begging for our way home. So maybe that was our first testing, our first training when it came to fundraising and begging people for money to get us out. No, that works, and I think we got to get in touch with Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis to see if they want to star in this as a sequel, another sequel to the Hangover series.

46:39 One of my favorite lines is like, they end up at a hospital looking for somebody and they asked the doctor if they know where something is, where a certain property is, and he says yeah, it's on the corner of get a map and I don't give a fuck. Yeah, it's it was hangover. Ask for sure. Wow, that's awesome. Well, listen guys, thank you so much for coming out to the show to tell me the shuttle story and to tell our listeners the shuttle story. What's the best way for people to get in touch with you? Can't just reach out? We're very accessible. Reach out to some LinkedIn. You can find our details on our LinkedIn profile as well. e-mail us LinkedIn messages, reach out to us on social. Whatever works, we're always happy to help and chat with anyone who's interested.

47:22 Wonderful. Thank you guys. Thank you, Pete. Thanks, Pete. Bye bye. That does it for this week, folks, and thanks to Scott Ashmore and Rob Halligan for opening up their mind to help us figure out why they do what they do. If you like what you heard, please leave us a rating and a review on Spotify, Apple, or on Money Never sleeps dot IE slash rate. Thanks to Conan Brophy from Create Sound for mixing and editing this episode. Conan is an excellent media man to work with on your own podcast. As for me, I'm an early stage startup investor in the next version of the Internet and I lead the Techstars Web 3 accelerator. There are plenty of links in the show notes on moneyneversleeps dot IE on how to get in touch with us, so don't hesitate to reach out. Finally, till next time, thanks for listening.

48:03 See you money. Never sleeps well.