The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 73

 

Episode 73: Trains, Space Planes, and E-Scooters

Guest host and software developer Matt Phair joins AJ this week to talk about e-scooter manufacturer VinFast's brand-new IPO filing, SpaceX's tender offer, ChatGPT and artificial intelligence, Amtrak's new Airo trains, and more! In podcast news, it's easier than ever to drop us a message: Record a quick question for us at memo.fm/theliquidityevent and you may be featured on an upcoming show. This is the second-to-last episode of the year, dear listeners. Get ready for a bangin' 2023!

Read the Full Transcript:

Speaker:

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered tax or investment advice. Welcome to The Liquidity Event, a show about all things personal finance with a laser focus on equity compensation. Hosted by AJ and Shane of Brooklyn FI, each episode will take you through the week's news on FinTech, IPOs, SPACs, founder wins and fails, Crypto, and whatever else these nerds think is interesting. Learn more and subscribe today at brooklynfi.com.

AJ Ayers:

Hello, and welcome to the Liquidity Event. We're your hosts, AJ.

Matt:

And I'm Matt.

AJ Ayers:

This is Episode 73 being recorded on Tuesday, December 20th, airing this Friday, December 23rd. How are you doing, Matt?

Matt:

I'm doing great. I'm doing great. Ever since I started listening to the podcast, this has been a mission to be on it, so super excited my time has come.

AJ Ayers:

Amazing. Well, we're very happy to have you, Matt, as a developer that we work very closely with here at Brooklyn FI. Today on the show, we've got lots of great stuff for you. We've got SpaceX tender offer, we've got ChatGPT, which I'm completely obsessed with. We've got an exploding aquarium of fish and some news on the nuclear energy front, so very exciting episode here today. And Matt, where in the world do I find you this morning, or morning for me in Palm Springs, but where in the world are you?

Matt:

Well, like any stereotypical American developer, I'm in Belgrade, Serbia.

AJ Ayers:

Oh. So how do you say good morning?

Matt:

Dobro jutro.

AJ Ayers:

Ah, perfect. Yep.

Matt:

My Serbian is terrible, so any Serbian friends who hear this, I apologize for butchering your language there.

AJ Ayers:

Amazing. And how long have you been in Serbian?

Matt:

I've been here almost a year. That's crazy. I moved here the 1st of February of this year.

AJ Ayers:

Amazing. And because this is The Liquidity Event, we always like to ask, what are you drinking? Or for you, it's the evening, right? What time is it there? Is it 7:00 PM?

Matt:

Yeah. So it is... Yeah. Well, so right now it's almost four o'clock, so it's a little bit too early for alcohol. But every time that I watch the show, I'm always a little bit jealous because you guys have something so interesting like a nice cocktail or something. So what I did, I figured I'll have half the beer.

AJ Ayers:

Oh, okay.

Matt:

Yeah. I've still got to get some work done this afternoon. So this here is a local IPA. It's called Hope, Hope. But it comes from Dogma. They're a really good brewery here that I love.

AJ Ayers:

Cool. Dogma Brewery.

Matt:

So that's what I'm drinking and water.

AJ Ayers:

I'm drinking coffee. It's 6:00 AM here. But I did get this. I am enjoying my new lavender purple Fire King mug that I got in South Korea recently. So for the mid-century modernist glassware heads like myself out there, that's one for you, anyway.

Matt:

Is that an official term, glassware heads? Is that an official term you identify with?

AJ Ayers:

No, but I feel like if you live in Southern California, you kind of have to.

Matt:

Yeah, I guess so.

AJ Ayers:

Let's dive into some news. I don't necessarily have a deep dive, but I did find this IPO filing sort of interesting. The company's called VinFast, and they are a Vietnamese electric vehicle manufacturer. What's really interesting about them is, like many countries in Southeast Asia, the electric vehicle market is not necessarily cars or trucks, it's scooters. And so, they've actually been manufacturing e-scooters since 2019. And so, I thought this was interesting because we see a lot of electric vehicle companies filing to go public with no path to profitability and not even tech that's fully developed, whereas this company has, what is it, 145,000 scooters on the road already. So they are a Vietnamese company filing to go public on the US exchanges. I forgot which exchange they're going. This could be a big IPO. They just filed, so we probably should see the pricing happen, at this point, I would guess in 2023. So that's one that I'm watching earlier next year. Are there many e-scooters in Belgrade?

Matt:

I don't think so, but here there's a lot of the little mopeds that people use to get around.

AJ Ayers:

Okay.

Matt:

So here, I think there's still a lot of cobblestone street, at least here in the city center, so probably an e-scooter would be a little bit annoying. But I will say, in American cities, I've used them before. When they first came out, maybe just the hipsters for spinning a fidget spinner, having a vape while they ride around on their e-scooters. But then I use them a couple of times. They're actually really convenient.

AJ Ayers:

Yeah, they're great, right? I love the e-scooters.

Matt:

Yeah.

AJ Ayers:

Speaking of convenience, that was a terrible segue, I'm sorry. Sorry. Oops.

Matt:

I'm so interested to see where this is going.

AJ Ayers:

Oh, speaking of convenience, it really could go in any direction, but I'm going to go in order. We've got SpaceX tender offer. It's valued the company at $140 billion. So SpaceX, Elon Musk's space, really cargo shuttle exploration satellite company. They do a lot of different things, right?

Matt:

Yeah.

AJ Ayers:

Their MVP was what? Was getting the satellites up, and then they started building ferries basically to get the astronauts up to the International Space Station.

Matt:

Yeah.

AJ Ayers:

But SpaceX, interestingly, is still a private company, right? That's kind of the news here. And the fact that they're doing a tender offer means that they have hopefully gone to a few different third-party auditors who actually come up with a valuation of this company, which makes them the most valuable private company, which I thought was interesting. So I'm calling them the SpaceX, you the real MVPC, the most valuable private company out there. Thoughts on this, Matt?

Matt:

Yeah. So I was surprised when I saw they're the most valuable private company. Honestly, I didn't even realize that they were private. I'm not super up to speed with that industry. But yeah, I thought it was interesting for a couple different reasons. One was the article talked about investment into Starlink, and my first thought was they obviously have a huge first mover advantage. But if this becomes the norm, if it becomes really common to have that, I wonder what limitations we would have for other competitors? Because you could imagine if there's a hundred different companies trying to do this and all of them want 10,000 satellites in low earth orbit, I feel like there's a threshold where regulators or whatever are not going to want that much.

AJ Ayers:

Right.

Matt:

I don't know. I was curious if they'll end up being kind of a monopoly in that space at some point.

AJ Ayers:

Yeah, it's like the Manifest Destiny of space, right?

Matt:

Yeah.

AJ Ayers:

According to my limited knowledge of astrophysics, space is infinite, but the orbital real estate around the globe in which you can put a satellite that can provide internet, that can beam it right back down to earth is limited and potentially already monopolized by Elon Musk, which was a very, very smart move on his part. And say what you will about the man, we've seen him over and over again make really smart, innovative moves way earlier than everyone else.

Matt:

Yeah, I agree.

AJ Ayers:

We're not going to talk about his Twitter nonsense today, by the way, folks. I'm calling that outright. There's some news there. Google it.

Matt:

Yeah. But actually, it's something I'd like your expertise on.

AJ Ayers:

Yeah.

Matt:

So this company got gigantic without going public. If you don't need to raise a bunch of money, what are the reasons to go public? Why would they have wanted to go public? Because in my mind, not really understanding the space, it seems like there would be a lot more benefits to staying private, where you're not always answering to shareholders.

AJ Ayers:

You're exactly correct. Right.

Matt:

Yeah.

AJ Ayers:

The reason people go public is they need money, and also that they do have some duty to their shareholders to create that value, right? So the reason to go public is that you have all these investors who gave you a bunch of capital to build your product or your service or whatever it is, those people expect a return on investment. So as a company, it is your duty to provide them a return on their investment. So at some point, we're heading towards there has to be some kind of acquisition or liquidity event. Welcome to The Liquidity Event. So that's a good reason.

Why are they still private? I don't know. As we saw a bunch of news with Tesla shares falling, Twitter not doing so well, is this just an ego play for Elon Musk to be like, "Oh, by the way, I'm still relevant. I have the most valuable... You may be distracted by my waning public companies, but by the way, I'm still in charge of this incredibly innovative company."

But tender offers, at Brooklyn FI, we love tender offers, right? It's an opportunity for not just your big shareholder players, your DC funds, but your average everyday employee, it's a great chance for them to get liquidity out of the company. So I think with this valuation of $140 billion, each share is $77. So if you're an employee, you're a rank and file engineer who started at SpaceX a couple years ago, you got some stock options, I didn't look at the exact history, but let's say for hypothetical sake, your strike price is $20, now you're able to sell it at $77. Liquidity events are happening at SpaceX, so hopefully we'll see some new millionaires come out of this.

Matt:

I think that would be nice. And maybe they'll hire you. They should definitely hire you.

AJ Ayers:

Okay, okay.

Matt:

If I was a SpaceX engineer and I was right now.

AJ Ayers:

All right, all right, all right. All right, Matt, give us a segue. It's your first segue on The Liquidity Event. Segue me up.

Matt:

All right. This is probably not going to go over smoothly, as I'm making it up as I go. But all right, so we've got some satellites. Speaking of innovations in technology, we have, oh, that could go to two different ones, though.

AJ Ayers:

See, it's harder than it looks.

Matt:

It is hard. It is hard. All right, so speaking of innovations in technology, one of the ones I was really excited to talk about, and now you're playing around with it is ChatGPT.

AJ Ayers:

Oh, my God.

Matt:

I-

AJ Ayers:

Anyway, sorry I didn't interrupt you. Go ahead. Tell me about ChatGPT.

Matt:

Oh, no. So yeah, ChatGPT is one of those things in my industry, which I guess we haven't really talked about what I do. So I'm a developer, but my background has been in machine learning. So in my industry, everybody's been talking about this for a while. Our language models, our ability to basically make supercharged chatbots and be able to learn a lot of information from text, has made a ton of progress. And now we're getting into really good generative models where these models not only can have this back and forth and chat and understand texts, but they can also generate things really, really well.

So artists and writers for a while, I feel like have been pretty nervous that this is coming for their jobs because it's gotten really advanced. But recently, developers are starting to think the same thing, because now it's to a point where I can say, "Hey, write a function that does X, Y, Z, and give it some approaches that I want it to take. Give it a language." And it will generate that for us.

AJ Ayers:

Sick. Yeah.

Matt:

Yeah.

AJ Ayers:

I have been reading headlines about this for what, the past, really, it's been on your radar for years. It's been on my radar for about three weeks, I think, since when... So they have an open-source AI bot. All you need is you give them your email and your cell phone number, which I was like, "Hmm. Goodbye, information. Goodbye."

Matt:

Yeah.

AJ Ayers:

"Goodbye, my information." So I was playing around with it this morning, and got completely distracted. Being who I am, the first thing I typed in was, and today is my fourth wedding anniversary, happy fourth anniversary, my love. I said, "Write a wedding anniversary poem in the style of System of a Down, one of my favorite bands.

Matt:

I love that.

AJ Ayers:

And one of my favorite karaoke songs, Chop Suey! Honestly, it wasn't great, except I did like the bridge, which I will read one lyric, which is, "We've grown and we've learned, we've given and we've taken. Our love is unshaken. It's never forsaken." I thought that was a pretty good attempt-

Matt:

Ooh, that's good. That's good.

AJ Ayers:

... at System of a Down. But then, it got really insane when I asked it to write a blog post about, "Should I early exercise my stock options?" And within seven seconds, I had four reasons that, as a stock options expert, I vetted, and the writing was pretty good. So that was kind of a wake-up call, scary moment for me. What have you used it for?

Matt:

How-

AJ Ayers:

Oh, go ahead.

Matt:

Oh, I was going to say, how was the quality? If somebody on your team wrote that post that you got back, would you be like, "What is this? You totally missed the mark."

AJ Ayers:

No, it was perfect.

Matt:

Okay.

AJ Ayers:

I would have added a little paragraph to intro it, but it was minimal edits, like 90% nail on the head.

Matt:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, it's crazy how good it's gotten. So I think the fear of developers being replaced at the moment is still a little bit over-hyped. So it's an amazing tool, and I completely think at one point this technology, you'll be able to say, "Hey, build me an app that does all these things" and it will do it. But we're a ways off in that.

So I've used it basically just playing around, and I've used it to generate some functions. But what I've noticed is there's certain languages, some of the ones that are really popular, so Python or JavaScript, it does amazing, perfect performance. Some of the other ones that are a little bit more complex, like when you need something to go really fast, some of the stuff that we're working on, it needs to be really fast. It completely... It's confidently incorrect. It says, "Here, this is exactly what you need to do," but then the code is completely raw.

AJ Ayers:

It's garbage. Yeah. It's so early, right? The idea is they're releasing it as a learning tool and there's all these disclaimers like, "This is not private. We are using all of your data. We're tracking everything you do to get smarter." That's what AI is. It gets smarter as you use it more.

What is really interesting, and I think there's been lots of headlines about people testing this out and giving it funny prompts, and in some cases solving complex problems. But this particular article talks about how do you monetize AI? And they have some kind of revenue where it's a penny per API call plus 2 cents per image or word generated. So there is revenue here.

But what I found really interesting is the structure of this. So the company's called OpenAI, the bot is called ChatGPT, right? So they have this thing called a capped profit structure, which I've only heard of before, I've never actually seen implemented in a company. And essentially, I'm butchering this a little bit, but they originally started as a non-profit organization, decided they needed to raise a bunch of money, became a for-profit organization, but now have sort of reverted back to this hybrid where they're for-profit, but once investors make 100X their investment, it's capped and everything after that goes into this non-profit entity, which is really unique. And in the personal, it reminded me of something that individuals have access to, which is a charitable remainder trust or a CRT. And essentially, the way that works is you say, "I've got a bunch of money." Yeah, CRT is hilarious, right?

Matt:

I saw an acronym there.

AJ Ayers:

So good, love financial planners. The way a CRT works is you're in your sixties, you've got a bunch of money. You want to live your life, but you don't necessarily want to give it all away to charity right now, so you create this trust. You avoid taxes, congratulations, and basically, you live off of the amount that you need to live your life. And then when you die, the remainder goes to charity. So I thought that was kind of a similar structure to this capped profit. Yeah. This honestly blew my mind and I want to spend the entire rest of the day just playing with this bot.

Matt:

Oh, I agree. It's so fun. And especially when you try to trip it up and you ask it weird questions. It's surprisingly good at catching when you give it funny props.

AJ Ayers:

Yeah. You know what it did? It failed. I said, "Write a strongly worded email to JetBlue Airlines requesting a credit for my poor experience." And it whiffed on that one.

Matt:

It said, "No, we're not going to write something mean" or it said-

AJ Ayers:

No, it said "error."

Matt:

... or was just nicer than you wanted it to be?

AJ Ayers:

No, it just didn't do it.

Matt:

Oh.

AJ Ayers:

Oh, wait, maybe it did.

Matt:

Oh, really?

AJ Ayers:

Oh no, it did. No, it just took a long time.

Matt:

Good.

AJ Ayers:

Okay, so here was my prompt. "Write a strongly worded email telling JetBlue Airlines I was dissatisfied and want a credit." And here's what it came up with. I'm not going to read this whole thing. "Dear JetBlue Airlines, I am writing to express my extreme frustration with my recent experience with your company. I was looking forward to my flight, but instead I encountered numerous issues that left me feeling disappointed and disillusioned. Firstly, I arrived to the airport to find that my flight had been delayed, which is true. While delays are a common occurrence in the world of air travel..." Oh my God, this is amazing. It's like they're inside my head. It knew.

Matt:

It is good.

AJ Ayers:

Yeah, it knew my flight was delayed. It knew that's why I was pissed off.

Matt:

And so, while I have it, I've got to jump on this.

AJ Ayers:

Yes.

Matt:

And speaking of efficient transportation and not needing to write strongly worded emails, they're revamping some of the Amtrak trains.

AJ Ayers:

Yeah. This is fake news, because they're revamping the Amtrak trains, which are already 50 years old. The revamps which are going to take the company into the future, these trains look the same. They look a little bit fancier, a little bit more high tech, and they can go up to, drum roll please, 125 miles an hour.

Matt:

What?

AJ Ayers:

Which is, gosh.

Matt:

Half the people are going that fast down I95 anyway.

AJ Ayers:

So have you ever ridden one of these bullet trains in Japan or China, the Shinkansen, the super fast trains? Have you ever rode one?

Matt:

No, I have not.

AJ Ayers:

Or ridden one?

Matt:

No, but I'm going to Japan in April actually, so I'll get my time. I'm super excited.

AJ Ayers:

Amazing. So the Shinkansen, I think they can go up to 300 miles per hour, and their cruising speed is like 200 miles an hour. And Amtrak is excited about their... Anyway, train travel globally is so far ahead of Amtrak. And then-

Matt:

Agreed, yeah.

AJ Ayers:

And I'm like a seven-year old boy. I'm just fascinated by trains. And I was reading about a... So the super fast bullet trains use this technology called Maglev, which stands for magnetic levitation. So the trains actually float above the track, which is why they can go so fast and the ride is so smooth. It would take, I don't know, trillions of dollars to get the US rail network retrofitted for this. So Amtrak's like, "All right. Let's make the trains go a little bit faster." That's their innovation. I don't mean to shit on Amtrak. I don't love Amtrak.

Matt:

Yeah, yeah. I used to take them a lot. So I'm originally from Maine, but I lived in Boston for years. And they have an Amtrak line that runs from Portland, Maine to Boston, and then they also have one that goes down through New York and DC, which is the one that's getting these new tracks.

AJ Ayers:

The Keystone? I love the Keystone.

Matt:

Yeah. So they're nice. They're convenient. Generally, my biggest complaint with those is they take longer than the bus. If you take the bus between those locations, generally it's a faster trip than if you take the Amtrak. But I've always thought the Amtrak is more convenient.

So I love the idea that they're making them better, especially trains in the US are not that good. But my first thought when I was reading this article is, even imagine they had those Maglev trains. Imagine they put that, they took in a vacuum, they had something going 600 miles an hour. My thought is that still wouldn't be a huge improvement, because when you take those lines, they're going in and out of the cities and they're crossing over streets. There's so many periods where they need to slow down to 10 miles an hour to cross a street. There's so much stop and go that I would think they wouldn't do their top speed that much, right? So I love that it's going to be a smoother ride and in general the cars are going to be nicer, but I'm not sure how much the speed is actually going to contribute to-

AJ Ayers:

It doesn't matter?

Matt:

... the time of the trip.

AJ Ayers:

Yeah.

Matt:

Yeah.

AJ Ayers:

Yeah. There's been some pretty serious accidents recently.

Matt:

All right.

AJ Ayers:

Amtrak needs some help. Yeah. I just remember always getting delayed. I went to school in upstate New York and we'd always take the train down when we could afford it. We often took the Megabus. But when you take the train down, it'd be delayed like four hours and you're like, "Why don't I just drive?"

Matt:

Yeah.

AJ Ayers:

Anyway.

Matt:

So all right, segues, what do you got?

AJ Ayers:

All right. Speaking of cool technology, wow, it's too early for me. Matt, you put this article in here. We love science and cool shit on this show. Tell me about a recent discovery in a lab in, was it California, I believe?

Matt:

Yeah.

AJ Ayers:

What's going on over there?

Matt:

Yeah. So we've been working on fusion energy for quite a while. Obviously, it's going to be a huge breakthrough for us, but it's really, really challenging and complicated to be able to do fusion energy. So if we take a huge, heavy element like uranium and split it, we've been able to do that effectively for a long time. But taking two light elements and then combining them, getting a lot of energy out of that is super complicated. And for the first time, we've had what they're calling ignition, which is we're able to create this fusion reaction in a reactor, and we get more energy out of it than we put in. So we're still probably 30 years away from having this be our standard go-to energy. But it's a big breakthrough and it's a good proof of concept for us to have more renewable and a really powerful, sustainable version of energy in the future.

AJ Ayers:

Yeah. Basically, the only thing I took away from this article was they reproduce the power of the sun. Cool.

Matt:

Yeah.

AJ Ayers:

That's pretty good.

Matt:

Yeah. But that's also what makes it so hard to do, right? Because you think in the sun, you have all this heat and pressure that's taking light elements, combining them into, fusing them into heavier elements. Yeah. We get this near infinite source of energy from the sun, so why not recreate that?

AJ Ayers:

Yeah. Why not use that instead of polluting our planet? But yeah, it seems like all this technology is... We're so behind and it's just like, "Are we going to be fast enough to catch up with global warming?" is kind of the deal.

Matt:

Yeah.

AJ Ayers:

Book recommendation for you and listeners. I just read this on my recent vacation, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. He's the guy who wrote The Martian. So Project Hail Mary, it's sort of like a near future, global warming is taking its toll, and it's about harnessing the energy, harnessing the power of the sun, and essentially it's high science. I didn't understand half the shit in the book, but it's very much on topic for harnessing the power of the sun and figuring out how to create renewable energy.

Matt:

Do they use Dyson spheres?

AJ Ayers:

I don't remember.

Matt:

Those are my favorite. We'll probably never actually get them, but it's the idea where you have a bunch of satellites that are orbiting around the sun that basically encapsulate a star and are able to extract all the energy from it? It's going to be-

AJ Ayers:

That's how my vacuum cleaner, right? My Dyson vacuum.

Matt:

Exactly the same concept, exactly the same concept. Your Dyson vacuum cleaner-

AJ Ayers:

Five out of five.

Matt:

... scale it up a couple billion times, you have it, you have it

AJ Ayers:

Five out of five stars for the Dyson vacuum cleaner. Speaking of innovation, I feel like all of our fucking segues are about innovation. I have nothing to say, but I just need this headline marked in this podcast. The Berlin's giant AquaDom aquarium containing 1,500 fish exploded in the lobby of the Radisson Hotel. What?

Matt:

This so insane. That's not something you think can happen.

AJ Ayers:

No. It's this giant aquarium. It's literally the largest free-standing vertical aquarium in the world or some shit like that. But the poor fish all died. But this huge glass thing just exploded.

Matt:

Yeah.

AJ Ayers:

That's awful.

Matt:

And also crazy, nobody died. I cannot imagine the sheer amount of force that comes out of that.

AJ Ayers:

Yeah. It was a million gallons of water.

Matt:

Yeah. I've been there before in person.

AJ Ayers:

Oh, really?

Matt:

And it's awesome. It's impressive.

AJ Ayers:

You've seen it? Wow.

Matt:

I have seen it, yeah. So I'm having my memories of when I was there, and I cannot fathom that giant thing, just like a water balloon.

AJ Ayers:

I wonder what the insurance situation is on that. Do you think that insurance companies were able to ensure a giant freestanding 52-foot aquarium inside a hotel? And will they pay out?

Matt:

I guess you can kind of insure anything for a high enough premium.

AJ Ayers:

Hello, fish.

Matt:

I'm also curious about all the buildings around it.

AJ Ayers:

Yeah.

Matt:

So if you're one of the nearby buildings and you have insurance, does that cover something as insane as, say the aquarium next door exploding?

AJ Ayers:

I'm a flower shop owner. "State Farm, how can I help you?"

"Yeah, I'd like to lodge a claim."

"Your policy does not include giant aquariums exploding and for the fish damaging your merchandise."

Matt:

Yeah. Exactly. And speaking of insurance fraud, which they would definitely think that that was.

AJ Ayers:

Yes.

Matt:

FTX.

AJ Ayers:

Yes, FTX. Well, that was wire fraud. FTX was wire fraud. But yeah, we've got more news coming out of FTX. We've got this article, FTX CEO's bewilderment that the company used QuickBooks for its accounting echoes a scene in Breaking Bad. Yeah, you can't make this shit up, is sort of what I've learned from this FTX unfolding situation. Yeah. So Ray, who is the CEO who took over, just a refresher, he was the guy who kind of unwound the Enron kerfuffle. And he's basically saying, "This is way worse." If the QuickBooks marketing team doesn't jump on this, they're idiots, because the transcript from the... He's testifying in front of Congress, and they go, "They use QuickBooks?" he added, referring to the accounting software, QuickBooks. Congressman Wagner asked for clarification. "QuickBooks, very nice tool, not for a multi-billion dollar company," Ray said. That's your tagline, right?

Matt:

Uh-huh, definitely agree, definitely agree. So I am curious, what are the reasons that giant companies don't use QuickBooks or some version of it, right? Because it seems like Intuit is such a huge company that they would have a solution for a giant company to use.

AJ Ayers:

I believe that they do have a solution for a giant company, it just ain't QuickBooks. QuickBooks is a basic-

Matt:

All right. That's their intro tier.

AJ Ayers:

Yeah. As Ray said, "QuickBooks is excellent tool, not for a multi-billion dollar company." QuickBooks is great if you have to invoice a couple thousand people. Think about the sheer number of transactions that a crypto exchange has. You can't use a software as basic as this. Companies like that need to build their own in-house tools.

Matt:

Yes.

AJ Ayers:

Sure, they're maybe pulling some things off the shelf, but they need armies of developers to basically build software. And when we have homegrown built accounting software, we often have Furrha, right? Because it's easy to hide transactions based and things like that from their consumers.

Well, on that note, this show has been brought to you by QuickBooks and Intuit. Thanks so much for joining me, Matt. I know you've been a long time listener, and you and I hang out all the time-

Matt:

Oh, yeah.

AJ Ayers:

... as we try to shape the future of Brooklyn FI and build some software that's pretty cool. But yeah, thanks for joining and always appreciate your insights. This has been The Liquidity event. This has been Episode 73. You can always email us at liquidityevent@brooklynfi.com.

Ooh, exciting news. For those of you who have never left us a voicemail, which was nobody, because we realized the voicemail tool was unusable, we have a new way to leave us voicemails. You can go to memo.fm/theliquidityevent. No sign up required, no email. Leave us a voicemail, we will play it on the air. Show notes for this episode can be found at brooklynfi.com/episode73.

You've been wonderful. See you next week, guys. Thanks, Matt.

Matt:

Thank you.

Speaker:

Thanks for listening to The Liquidity event, hosted by AJ and Shane of Brooklyn FI. Head on over to brooklynfi.com, where you can subscribe to the podcast or YouTube channel or if you want to learn about their full service financial planning, tax, and investment firm specializing in tech professionals and creatives on the path to financial independence. We'll see you next time on The Liquidity Event.