I think as a result of broken money, P.E. has almost become a little parasitic. I think that that's the connotation that exists in the market today. Certain private equity funds, if you're able to load a company up at debt and the company has free cash flow, they can decide to take that free cash flow, bankrupt the company, and they don't care. And the entrepreneur is in a tough place because they really have not had other options. And the alternative should be a permanent capital vehicle. And so we came up with Orange Juice. Orange Juice is a permanent capital vehicle that acquires, improves, and holds companies into perpetuity. Almost reminds some folks of like the Berkshire Hathaway model, right? If Warren was a Bitcoiner. Yeah. Within the first seven days, we had over 100 businesses reach out. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the show. Joining me here is Nico Lechuga. He is a Bitcoin entrepreneur, a founding member of Ego Death Capital, which is a Bitcoin only venture firm and a co-founder of Orange Juice, a holding company. We're going to be learning all about you guys just announced it. So I'm so excited to learn more. Nico, thanks for joining me. Thank you so much for having me, Natalie. Well, for folks that may be not as familiar with you, give us your coin story. Tell us your background. Okay. So coming into the space, I would say a number of years ago, I was at a conference. It was a conference called Summit Series actually in Southern California. And Summit would have these conferences. They do them now too after COVID, but they'd have these conferences around the world over a multi-day period. And they bring around entrepreneurs from around the world there. and they do a lot of programming that's around it. So there's dinners, there's speaking engagements, the dinners and the meals are kind of planned and they want you to be sitting with people that you would interact with. And so my wife and I miss the dinner time that we're supposed to be at. So say 6.30, we end up showing at 8.30, we sit down with a different table. And lo and behold, at the end of the table, who I end up meeting at the end of the night was Jeff Booth. Oh, nice. And so I slid down to the table And I had probably had one too many tequillas at that time period. And Jeff's talking to me about this theory that he has in his head that he wants to put down on paper about how we live in an inflationary environment and technology is deflationary and these forces don't go together. And he wants to write this book for his kids. Oh, my gosh. And that was Price of Tomorrow. That was Price of Tomorrow. Yeah. So Jeff and I and my wife, Lauren, ended up spending a lot of time over the next three days together. Oh. And we developed a very, very close relationship. I got an advanced copy of the book. At that point, I think we talked and it made a lot of sense from a portfolio allocation of having Bitcoin as an exposure from an asset. And Jeff and I would go back on this. And then I think what became more and more interesting to me was certain network upgrades that allowed you to program on top of Bitcoin. And that was the birth of EgoDeath Capital. Wow. But before that, you were in what, private equity? I started my career in private equity, yeah. So I left, I went to NYU for college. And then after college, I was at a boutique shop, one of the partners with Ghanian, which was like super, super interesting because you had this guy that was educated in the UK, but had exposure to Western Africa. And with 50 discrete nations, like you have all this broken money that exists in that continent. It was really my first exposure to currency being broken, nations manipulating currency. I think about it a lot now of like you're almost ready to listen to Bitcoin. And so for me at the time period, we're looking at a cocoa deal in Ghana. So Ghana is like one of the bigger cocoa producers in the world. And how it works is they're a licensed buying company. So figure there's like three dozen of them that then buy from farmers and they sell to Ghana's like Cocoa Board. And the margin is set by the government. But you're buying from the farmers in Ghanaian CDs and you're selling to the government in U.S. dollars. And so you have this super inefficient transaction where you have to have this currency hedge that's in place and like a foreign trading desk to like make that happen. And it became a question at the time period of like, well, why? why does this exist? We all want dollars anyways at that time period. Isn't there a better system? And it's been fun to be working in the Bitcoin space now and see some of those systems come to fruition. That's so crazy. I mean, when I hear private equity, I hear almost a negative connotation because private equity firms have been buying up these small family businesses, and all of a sudden they jack up prices. Sometimes they load companies with a bunch of debt, and then all of a sudden they're filing for bankruptcy. Toys R Us is one of those infamous stories. Can you talk about what you think of the industry as a whole? Because I think as a result of broken money, PE has almost become a little parasitic. I think that that's the connotation that exists in the market today. I think that PE had started as a means to buy businesses. When we think about the life cycle of a business, you have venture funding or investment that comes into it, and then you have off-roads that you're looking for. So if a business gets big enough, the business can IPO. But if the business is not big enough, then it really has two options. One is it can sell to a competitor. So think of like someone that's rolling that up and it sits underneath the stack of the other companies that they have. And the other one is you could sell to a private equity fund. And so the private equity fund at the beginning served a real issue within the market of the company no longer has enough capital, firepower, and the private equity fund has more access to financial tools to be able to propel it over the next like three to five years. The problem is that I think what you've gotten into is that the incentive structure isn't always correct. And certain private equity funds have almost become victims of the tools that they have access to. So if you're able to load a company up at debt and the company has free cash flow, they can decide to take that free cash flow, the excess free cash flow after the debt service costs, give a preferred issuance back to their shareholders until the end of the life cycle of fund, bankrupt the company, and they don't care. And the entrepreneur is in a tough place because they really have not had other options. There are great private equity funds that are out there, and they've definitely served in the capital stack, especially in the United States, to propel companies forward. But yes, there is a pretty negative connotation right now. I mean, it's very lucrative. Coin Stories is brought to you by Speed Wallet, my favorite Bitcoin lightning wallet. Buy Bitcoin with a card, Apple Pay, bank transfer, or cash, then send it or spend it all in one app. And with Speed Streaks, buying a little Bitcoin every day earns you real Bitcoin rewards. $100 or more every quarter just for building the habit. Download Speed Wallet at speed.app slash coin stories and use code coin stories 10 for bonus stats on your first buy. Ledin just introduced their lowest rates ever. The larger the loan, the lower the rate on all new loans, refinances, and renewals. Your Bitcoin stays custodied, never lent out, and you can repay any time with zero penalties. And for all my Goldbug listeners, Ledin now supports tokenized gold with gold-backed loans coming soon. Get a quarter percentage point off your first loan at ledin.io slash Natalie. Are you familiar with the PE guy on TikTok and Instagram? No. Yeah, we just bought a limestone on E74th. Yeah. I'll have to send it to you. the videos he just kind of makes fun of pe guys that are very wealthy and you know flaunting their wealth around their communities so like one of the things that we were like as you and i know we'll get into this with orange juice is like um so private equity funds are victims of uh the clock right so the the fund has an ephemeral life and typically with a private equity fund like a venture capital fund for ego death. We have a 10 year fund life. And the reason for that, for a VC fund is companies from their inception to finding a liquidity event typically takes six to nine years. For a private equity fund, when they're buying that company, what they're looking to do is ideally like I buy your company and in the next three years, I want to improve it, grow it, and then sell it for a higher price point. So I have a friend's private equity fund. He bought chalula for 200 million dollars he sold it i think three years later for 800 um but and that that's a great story it continues to go on mccormick bought it um he spun out a private equity fund out of that deal but on the other side of it is like the the the the stereotype right like i i'm sure you see like the midtown uniform with like the investment bankers and so the private equity stereotype is even worse because there are funds that will internally markup assets, drive the assets under management up, take management fees on those assets, and there's no liquidity for investors. And it's kind of just like moving money from one person's pocket to the other. Yeah, it's pretty disappointing. I mean, I really do think that something like Bitcoin will solve some of these issues just by addressing the incentives. But okay, let's talk about the headline of July, which was that orange juice is now out there. A lot of interest since you made the announcement. Can you just talk about like what it is? Because it almost reminds some folks of like the Berkshire Hathaway model, right? Yeah. So that's exactly right, Natalie, if Warren was a Bitcoiner. Yeah. And so when we think about like, if we go back to when we're talking about private equity funds and where they sit within the stack of companies' life cycles, we really think like EgoDeath Capital, the opportunities that you see are based on the experiences that you have. And so the experiences that we consistently had at EgoDeath is we have about 180 LPs. The majority of them are first generation money. So they have created businesses, their own wealth themselves. And it's probably why they've come to Bitcoin earlier. It's like seeing someone that was part of the real estate crash in 2008, why they're in Bitcoin. They watched the market implode. They watched the government step in. So people that have created that, they've seen their wealth be inflated away and they've eventually come to Bitcoin. consistently what we would hear um as you we have great relationships with these these individuals these entrepreneurs is i want to spend more time in this in the space um and there's no real way for them to do that historically without them being a programmer this is like pre-ai vibe coding but even then like you need less personnel um so we're like okay that that's a thing let's log it it goes on a board. The second part of this is background in private equity, the other individuals at EgoDeath all being entrepreneurs. And the understanding that, not that private equity is broken, but that there should be an alternative. And one of the alternatives, you almost have to go back to first principles of how the fund structure is and the vehicle is created. And And the alternative should be a permanent capital vehicle, in our opinion where you offer entrepreneurs that have small and medium businesses starting in the United States and hopefully expanding around the world an alternative to private equity where they are able to continue to operate their company. They are given a growth upside that they would otherwise have. They're given the toolkit that unless you're a billionaire with a publicly traded company, you don't have access to. And their equity will compound and grow in a diversified tax incentive way. And so we came up with orange juice. Orange juice is a permanent capital vehicle that acquires, improves, and holds companies into perpetuity and keeps its treasury, the free cash flow that those businesses make in Bitcoin. Okay. So just to simplify, someone out there has a successful laundromat or HVAC business, right? It's cash flowing. Maybe they're getting a little older. Maybe they know that they want to retire soon. They're looking at their options. They could be essentially a part of orange juice and their cash flows would create a Bitcoin treasury. That's exactly it. So in the typical private equity scenario where let's say I'm going to buy your business, you have a laundromat. Your laundromat is doing $10 million in free cash flow. What I would end up doing if I'm a private equity fund is I would utilize your cash flow as I have banking relationships that will allow me to utilize your cash flow to utilize debt to buy your business. And so then the amount of capital, think of like you buying a house and you're putting 20% down and 80% is basically leverage. So it's the same scenario exists with buying a business in the private equity scenario. But now you're under a lot of pressure and debt from there. And the business has to grow at all costs. In our scenario, what we're saying is that the consideration happens differently. So stepping back one second too. So like in a fund structure, you have LPs, limited partners. So those are your investors. You have general partners. Those are your fund managers. You have a management company and you have a general partner and there's like all these three vehicles and they're not designed to be public ever. And they're really not designed for the shares to trade in a liquid manner. If you have a company, so like a Delaware C-Corp, or if you're in Elon's camp, like a Texas C-Corp, those shares are designed at a certain point to be able to convert to common and trade freely. And so it's really, really crucial that you have that set up. So in this, Orange Juice is a Delaware C-Corp and it will buy your laundromat for a blend of cash and equity. So you'll have some cash that comes out and de-risks everything for you. And then you have this equity that you now have in Orange Juice holding company. And as we buy more businesses and more businesses grow underneath Orange Juice, that equity will hopefully be worth exponentially more than what you originally had. and then you have this diversified portfolio. There's a really good analog in the market right now. There's a company called Bending Spoon that just recently went public. Bending Spoon? Bending Spoon, yeah. Did you ever watch The Matrix? Yeah. So you remember in The Matrix where the kid holds up the spoon and he bends it with his mind? Yeah, so basic telekinesis, but it's an allusion to that part in the movie. So this kind of math of the serial acquirer that sits within an acquisition vehicle, the equity actually grows very well underneath that so if you we give consideration to like your laundromat then let's say we buy an hvac company now you have exposure to that let's say we buy um an asphalt paving company or a flower company then you have exposure to that and then what ends up happening is um there's no as long as we blend the equity quite properly and we keep your business existing there's no tax hit so there's there's until you sell that equity so if we take it public at some point, then you have the growing compounding value of orange juice in a public market. This is so cool. And you have the same toolkit that like an Elon or a Jeff Bezos or a Zuckerberg would have, but with a smaller, medium-sized business. And I think the beauty of all of it is that we haven't required you to gut or grow your business for that to happen. We've just required you to maintain that cashflow and we're helping to optimize it. It's so interesting to think how many kind of boring businesses generate a ton of money, right? I mean, like you mentioned it already, laundromats, HVAC, flower shops, like things that maybe people wouldn't even think of, right? What else? I mean, so sitting in the seat of like a general partner at EgoDeath, I've seen investing in our fund, like people that have garbage businesses. I've seen people with like gym franchises, like cleaning services. And as you stack those, those are really good businesses. We have a woman in our fund that's, she's so funny. She's in her 70s and she provides, she's created a radio for like the special operations community that they end up utilizing on their pack, but it's like her business. It's good cash flowing. Wow. But all these weird things. And so what ends up happening is you see that these businesses have existed for potentially decades in a family run operation. And sometimes the kids don't want to take them over. They're doing other things. They're doctors, lawyers. They've decided this isn't for them. and you're stuck with, well, what do I do with this? And in this scenario, like we've provided an alternative for them, which is the market. What percentage of the cash flow will go into Bitcoin? It's a great question. So our intention right now, and this is if we get into like how we view Bitcoin treasury. So treasuries, like in the same way SpaceX has a Bitcoin treasury, right? like he elon keeps part of their money in bitcoin uh orange juice will have um part of the treasury in in um in bitcoin and this comes down into like the leverage piece that we were talking about before with um with the the cash flow so typical private equity buy would utilize leverage on the free cash flow to buy the business what we're going to do is we're going to utilize leverage on the free cash flow to buy bitcoin so let's take the scenario you have a big laundry man or or you have a bunch of laundry mats, you're doing $10 million in free cash flow. We'll put two and a half to three turns of leverage on the cash, and then you'll buy Bitcoin. So you'll buy $30 million of call it Bitcoin at the time period. The coupon, let's say the coupon's high at the time, it'll probably be below this, but let's say it's 10%. So 3 million of the 10 million would be set aside. And that would be the interest payments that you would owe on the Bitcoin that you've just bought. And even if the business were to decline by 70%, which our filtering heuristics should filter out for the part of a business that would have that type of turbulent cash flows, we are still are not impaired. And then on the other side of it, if Bitcoin's price were to decrease from the point when we bought it, it doesn't matter because we still have the cash flow to service the debt for the Bitcoin that we've bought. Okay. But is there any risk to kind of leveraging up and buying such a volatile asset? So from the standpoint of, I would say, if you do not have free cash flow, then there's always risk with leveraging and buying something. In the scenario of this, you're filtering, hopefully, when you've bought the business, that you have an uncorrelated asset that doesn't have any type of bearing on what happens with Bitcoin's price and so should have stable cash flows from there. And then if Bitcoin's price were to decline, you still have the cash flow to service the debt that you've taken out. I think on the flip side of it, if you had taken out debt without the cash flow, this is the crisis of call it the coupon, and Bitcoin doesn't go up, then you can't refinance that debt. You can't take out additional debt and you're kind of in a tough place. Yeah. By the way, I do want to mention you're working with a pretty solid team here. It seems awesome. Jeff Booth. Yeah. Lynn Alden are your co-founders, right? By the way, go read Price of Tomorrow. Go read Broken Money. Go read Stolgard Incident. What's it like building with, I mean, such prominent people in the space who have done such great work to further the Bitcoin mission? I think it's really, really humbling. I like to make myself feel extremely uncomfortable in the room full of very smart people. I feel very lucky to have brought in that we have Jeff, that we have Lynn, that we have Andy Pitt. We brought in Adrian Steckle for this. We brought in Ruben Zweiband for this. Okay. So how many co-founders are there? So with this, we have six. Yeah. So we have the core team of like ego death. So you have Jeff, Lynn, Andy, myself. And then Adrian Steckle has spent his last... How I like to think about constructing teams is like, what are your areas of weakness? and what are we missing? What do I not do well? What can someone do much better than me? So in this, it's like, can I get an operator that has spent years of his life or her life building businesses and not selling them? Well, in this case, that operator's Adrian Steckl. He spent 30 years with Grupo Salinas building a bunch of Ricardo's businesses, being a publicly traded CEO. Yeah. Isn't Ricardo your biggest investor? Yeah. Ricardo's the anchor investor. Wow. And that was intentional too. It was, I tell a lot of founders this, you want to line capital. So with whatever you're doing in your company, your fund, in this case, a permanent holding company, Ricardo is someone that notoriously doesn't sell a lot of assets. He builds businesses and he keeps the businesses. So we have extremely aligned capital from that. We have someone that's been very, very successful with that, you know, big Bitcoin believer. So Adrian has helped Ricardo build his empire for the past 30 years. And then Ruben Zweibann is the latest member of the team. I mean, he's been working on this for a bit in the shadows, but again, one of these individuals that you're like, I'm very, very lucky to be able to work with that. Naval Academy graduate, Oxford graduate, spent 10 years in the special operations community, the military, investment banking, equity research, and most recently running a multi-billion dollar family office. Most Bitcoin wallets assume nothing will ever go wrong, but that's not real life. BitKey is built differently. No seed phrase to lose, a screen now so you can actually see what you're approving, and recovery and inheritance are built right in. No subscription and no extra service. Order BitKey today and use promo code STORIES for 10% off the new BitKey. This episode has been sponsored by BitKey. Are they listening to every call and tracking every tap, seeing what apps and websites you're visiting? It is time to ditch big tech surveillance for a privacy phone. The Bitcoin Way is your guide, helping you choose a device, install a privacy operating system, and regain your sovereignty. They did it for me. They can do it for you. Visit thebitcoinway.com slash Natalie to begin today. With Bitcoin IRA, you can invest in Bitcoin 24-7 inside a tax advantaged IRA Choose a traditional IRA to defer taxes or a Roth IRA for tax withdrawals later Either way you can invest in Bitcoin while saving on taxes Take control of your future with Bitcoin IRA Head to Bitcoinira slash Natalie and get up to a funding bonus I mean, this sounds like a great team and such a good idea. I'm surprised we haven't had a company like this before. Can we just zoom in for a little bit on the venture capital side that you've been working on for the last few years? Just out of curiosity, I mean, what lessons have you learned? because I feel like investing in Bitcoin businesses has some unique challenges, especially because, at least from what I've seen, it's just a tough industry to generate revenue. It's very dependent on price and sentiment and things that maybe other industries don't have to worry about as much. So what are some lessons learned? I think that one of the biggest things that we look back on as we're investing is you have to be solving a real problem in the world today. The fact that that you're utilizing Bitcoin's technology, some part of Bitcoin's technology stack, isn't enough to have a successful business. In reality, that probably makes you a parity product in the market if you're just providing access to Bitcoin. I like to think of it as the analogy to my mom. My mom probably doesn't understand anything that I do. She's very, very supportive and probably doesn't understand, like most of us, if I flip the light switch, how the light like comes on right but we know that i flip the light switch and it comes on and the solution is there like the product market fit is actually perfect um so in this it's for us uh looking at like well what is what is the problem the that you are trying to solve why are you uniquely qualified to solve this problem how is the market like demanding that is the timing right for this um can this make money and the all of those things are incredibly important uh as we think of like different cycles like you saw like a defy cycle an nft cycle and a lot of that was in uh altcoin land and it stayed away from bitcoin but you had i would say components of it um that we shied away from and i like to think about like one of the more recent investments that we made um was a company called is five bell settlement so um former nightig cto uh and exactly like head of business development. Right now, how it works if you want to trade like a big block of Bitcoin in the OTC market is you and I would text over Telegram and you'd be like, Nico, I want to buy a billion dollars of Bitcoin. And I'd say, great. Here's my wire coordinates. Send me the billion dollars. You'd be like, here's my wallet address. And I'd send you the billion dollars of Bitcoin. Right. And we would agree that until both sides of the transaction settled, that the transaction wasn't live. However, we're both completely naked on that transaction. This is done on Telegram? It's done on Telegram. Wow. And for huge blocks, like these guys ended it before NITIG were at Citadel and Millennium. So two of your most powerful hedge funds in the world. That doesn't need to exist like how that is. And so they built actually utilizing Bitcoin's like almost architecture with discrete law contracts. The ability for you and I to lock funds and Bitcoin in this. And you can do this with any type of digital asset or other different assets from there. And none of them are exposed and there's a time lock component to it. I think I met this founder. Yeah, they're really cool. Anthony and Brian. Yeah, yes, yes, yes. OK, this is very interesting. I mean, massive problem. Yeah. You must like, I mean, just get first view on so many interesting ideas and potential solutions. Right. I mean, what's the difference between one that works and one that doesn't? Um, I mean, we're still early in a lot of these companies, like some of the companies that we have are generating tens of millions of dollars, but nothing in the space outside of miners that I've seen, or I'm not going to count like a SPAC or RTO that we've seen over the last 18 months has really had a traditional IPO. And so I think the space needs that in general, because you need the young founders to look at that and be like, that's a multi-billion dollar company that's there, that's sitting. But we do have successful companies under the umbrella. I would say the difference between the founders that we start to see is the one that understands the product market fit has forward-looking vision of, okay, as soon as the product that I have right here well how do i expand and go after more how do i like squeeze more revenue out they understand like they have to make money a lot of that was lost in um i would say from like 2017 on like founders just believed all they had to do was was grow they did have users or like you saw this this metric in like defy which is crazy which was like uh total value tvl like total value that was like locked on one of these dumb platforms. Like we live in a capitalist society. We transact. And if people are willing to utilize your service, they should be paying for it. Right. And if they're not, then we probably have a problem. That reminds me of the Silicon Valley clip. Have you seen it? Where the guy's talking about how we got to be pre-revenue. Once you have revenue, it's never enough revenue. You always got to be pre-revenue. And I think people have gotten conditioned to some of these massive tech companies that like just burn money. They never make it. We've all heard of the many years that Amazon was not really generating a profit, right? Like, I mean, how does that all, how does that all work? So I think with like, with Amazon, so like right now, like you see like Amazon, you hit at, um, Anthropic, OpenAI, like don't, they're not cashflow positive, but they are making money. You have a lot of users that are paying for a service. I think that the part, if you're a capital provider in there, what you're saying is like, does this equation at some point work? So with Bezos, what you're kind of looking at is he's like, I can make the equation work at some point, whether it's with Prime or something else. But there's a lot of cash that's going into or was going into that vehicle before it became cash flow positive. But I think it's very different from even like right now, what we see is I am solving a unique tech problem in this space and like the market will come to me and i will fit this into the market um sometimes that works but generally you're going to see these market demand signals that you have this unique problem that you are solving in the market wants it solved and you should be like utilizing design partners in the market to to do that so like one of the founders that we have right now in the portfolio, he's really, really good at this. So he's a former secret service guy and his co-founder is a former Apple intelligence. And their product like works with law enforcement agencies. And when it's originally, it's just linking in discrete agencies across the United States to like cross collaborate. As soon as you solve that problem, there's a host of other things that you can get into because you're inside of all these organizations and they trust you. And so like it had the kind of like foresight of how to get there and then has the foresight and vision in order to expand it. And obviously the great founders can do that really, really well. And then you combine that with additional capital and we can have a lot of growth. That's super cool. It's fun. So what's your reaction to the Bitcoin sentiment right now? Because were you in Bitcoin before you met Jeff Booth or no? I was not in Bitcoin before I met you. So Jeff Booth kind of orange-pilting? Yeah, Jeff Booth kind of orange-pilting. OK, so, you know, it's a funny side story. Like I visited Jeff in his hometown. Yes. And it's so funny because he's tried to orange pill. He always tries to orange pill everyone. Yeah. And he hasn't been able to orange pill those closest to him. Yes. But he's orange pilled, I mean, millions of people at this point. And I feel like a lot of us Bitcoiners, we have the most trouble with the people we're like closest to. Yes. As opposed to strangers that will watch our, you know, videos online or interviews. They're like, oh, my God, you know, Natalie Brunell? like yeah yeah it's so funny that like those closest to you are the most resistant if you recommend something i don't know if anyone else experiences that but um but anyway um you started your bitcoin journey because of jeff booth um so like what do you think right now of the sentiment because i personally have not seen it as low as it is so i think that like if we were talking a month ago i'd be like the sentiment's terrible yeah um some weird thing happened like i think when we announced OJ last week, there was like all these rumors that Bitcoin Twitter was like unblocked or unshadow banned. Yeah, yeah. I've been a victim of that in our like hot sauce company, but like we shadow banned on Instagram. But it seemed like the sentiment was back, was positive. And so Adam Gebner, who's our associate at EDC and another super smart individual where you're like, I couldn't get the job that I just listed. he's at BTC++ right now in Canada. And so I'm like, what's the dev sentiment right now? Because that's always like one of the first filtering things is you're looking at projects. Like what are the new open source projects? What are the developers excited on? Where is the most kind of like interest? And you can gauge, right? Where things are at. And he's like, it's great. Seems really, really great. Oh, that's good. Yeah. So I think that in the past week, even though we're kind of the same way on price, we're just sideways. But I think the sentiment has in the past week improved in my opinion, but it has been like pretty, pretty low. Well, there's just been so much positive response to the announcement of orange juice, right? Like, are you just getting a ton of offers and a ton of companies reaching out or what's happening? So we had, I think anytime you're launching something, it's theoretical until you do it. So when we start having investor conversations, is completely theory of like, can I raise money? Does this resonate with them? And so we solved that. We raised $40 million for this vehicle. But then on the business side, now a number of investors in that thing were like, I have a business, maybe you want to buy it. So already there, you're like, okay, I'm getting some semblance of that, about five. But we haven't released it in the market. You haven't really tested it. Within the first seven days, we had over a hundred businesses reach out. That's wild. Um, about 30 of them, about 35 of them met like the first filtering heuristics that you have. Uh, and then a handful of them will probably like necessitate deeper due diligence, but send it. So then you're saying like, we're, we're resonating with the market that we saw, which is people are reaching out being like, we have a family run business X, Y, and Z. We've had it for decades. Um, we don't want to sell it private equity. I would like to explore this and can we have a conversation? That's awesome. It's really cool. Yeah. That's super cool. Well, you mentioned your hot sauce. Yes. Yeah. Does your hot sauce have a plan to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet? So we've tried different things with Bitcoin with hot sauce. Yes. Tell the backstory, by the way. Of hot sauce. Of your hot sauce. So your last name means lettuce in Spanish. Lettuce in Spanish. Yeah. And you have I have a hot sauce company called Senor Lechuga Hot Sauce So my wife and I were living in Brooklyn years ago I lived in the city for like over a decade and we were living in Williamsburg And it had this, it's one of those like big buildings that had an amazing rooftop that like no one used. So I would use it because I like to cook. And so we'd entertain a lot. And Lauren's friends were over, and she has a background in like beauty and fashion, whatever else. And a lot of branding. Like she's been the brand architect for both Ego Death and Orange Shoes. So like, those are like her vision of how it looks. But I start making these hot sauces, like messing around in our kitchen in Williamsburg. And we start sharing them at parties and like. Everyone loved them. People liked them. They're like, if you make this, I would buy that. But like, you hear that, like anybody that's doing anything, here's that probably at a certain time. And then it's, do you take the jump? So there was a deli, a family run deli that was literally downstairs. And I was like, I just want to be able to sell it there. Like this will make us like $50 a month. Who cares? This is going to cost me more money than it is. And it's something that I think is interesting. Lauren was seven months pregnant with our son. That's now eight. Wow. And I found a shared kitchen space in New York. I was like, I think I can do this. She's like, you figured out. She was like, what's going to be the branding, the messaging, whatever. So like she created all the labels and how that sits. and I would go outside of my day job at the time period from like 8 p.m. to 2 o'clock in the morning and make hot sauce in the old Pfizer building in Brooklyn. Yeah, it's like once, twice a month. And then we started selling it. We got a early collaboration with like Danny Meyer had a restaurant in the Williamsburg waterfront called Tacosina. And then from that, we did a collaboration with Shake Shack and then Cosmo picked it up for a gift guide. That's huge. Yeah, it was cool. So you have a very successful hot sauce brand. Yeah, we've done a collaboration with Rogan. like is rogan's favorite hot sauce it's joe rogan's favorite hot sauce yeah so we have i brought you a bottle but it has his name on it yeah oh my gosh well that's that's incredible thank you so have so what's the plan with that like are you guys gonna get acquired by i think holding company so like one of the things this is super this is a great question and this is really helpful um because you asked about the vc and investing side of this So certain businesses, I would say, are great businesses if they don't have external capital in it. So I would think of hot sauce is generally like I would sit in the same categories like craft beer, where like people in certain regions of the United States are going to have certain craft beers that they like. And artists, people are going to like grab them when they're in that area. And a hot sauce, you might if you're a hot sauce aficionado, you might have 30. Yeah. And you're going to go through them over a very, very slow time period. For us, it's a phenomenal family asset. We haven't taken any external capital. We've operated profitably since the fourth week. And after month four, I recouped all the money we had invested in it. That's wild. It's great. But I would say it's a great family office asset to have, but it's probably not a great asset for an external person that would want it. So we love it. We're going to keep it. My kids love it. It's the thing that makes the most sense to them that I do. Are you on Hot Ones? I've been on Hot Ones twice. Wow. Is it super spicy? A lot of them are super spicy. The two that we've done on Hot Ones, the first one was like right in the middle of the stack. It was at like the sixth spot. It was a rip on a Mexican adobo sauce with like ghost peppers. And it was cool to like see like Salma Hayek eat that. That's wild. And then the next one that we did, I was inspired by like a Lebanese tomb sauce. And so Chaint added habaneros to that and vinegar and created a hot sauce out of it. And that was the first sauce ever in hot ones that was like the one spot. So like if you have a celebrity on and you're interviewing them. You start them slow. Well, you start them slow, but that first sauce is going to get the most play. Because like if you're in the middle and they don't give you a good reaction, they're going to cut that clip. So there'd be many episodes where we'd be like, oh, they didn't get what they wanted. They show the hot sauce, they bit the wing and like we didn't get a clip. But the first one is like you're going to get a clip consistently, which is awesome. This is so fascinating. Wait, okay. So one thing that I think of, I love the movie or the show Shark Tank. Yes. I've watched it for forever. Yeah. And sometimes they'll come on and they'll have these products and they talk about how difficult it is to get shelf space. Yes. But then I am seeing right now a lot of brands emerge like in the soda category. I'm seeing all these prebiotic, probiotic, right? And then, I don't know, there's been some like health trends, like Siete got really popular and they were kind of a grassroots, probably family-owned business. But then they have this massive buyout. Billions of dollars. The founders are probably super happy. But then in some cases, what happens is all of a sudden, Coca-Cola now owns it. The ingredients start to change. Yeah, it changes. And it becomes not as good or not as healthy. Why does that happen? It's a great question. And I think that... So Siete is a great example. because like post acquisition i think the acquisition was like 1.2 billion dollars uh eva longoria came in like later on in the company and was part of that but the you see it consistently happen over and over i think that part of it is a compression of like pricing and margins um and so the bigger companies are looking at this of well we have cheaper ways to do this so there's like even if you look at like cholua so cholua l caterton bought it for 200 million dollars they They sold it to McCormick for $800 million, 800 change. The ingredients in the last 18 months have changed. In the same way that the CETI food group one have changed. If you add certain seed oils in and you add certain gums in, it's cheaper. And I can change the product. And a lot of people don't understand the natural flavoring. Just because it says natural flavoring doesn't mean you're not eating a chemical. Like if it's derived from organic compounds, it's a natural flavoring. It's one of the reasons like why we created the product. I didn't want any artificial ingredients, any gums, any like coloring agents in it. And so we made this product and some of the things are higher price point. Like we have the truffle hot sauce that uses these black winter truffles. And there'll be time periods in New York City where I'm the biggest truffle buyer. Like we're buying like a very, very nice car worth of like truffles and we're putting them in this hot sauce. And it tastes better. And that's why people love it. Yeah. No. Have you ever seen those images where they show like the Europe version of the ketchup and then the American version? And ours is just filled with high fructose corn syrup and chemicals and preservatives. And then you have Europe and it's like tomatoes. Yeah. Yeah. It's tomatoes, cane sugar. Why is America like this? Like is broken money part of it? because I swear, I feel like I was talking to Jeff Booth about some of this, and I just wonder if Bitcoin, could hard money, could Bitcoin fix some of this? Because obviously the incentive is to make money for a company to always make something for cheaper and sell it for more. So is that just always the destiny of a great product is find a cheaper way to do it and then kind of destroy the quality or can on a Bitcoin standard maybe retain the quality? Yeah, I think it so this gets into like orange juice i think um historically if i buy a company and i buy it at and i'm a big cpg company and i'm buying the company i want it to grow underneath my umbrella and so how do i create growth i can lower price i can bring it to a different consumer i can give it different shelf space um i can increase margins by doing all those things too um with that model the historical model of i'm going to buy an asset for this and i'm basically underwriting future growth or i'm going to burn it off we're going to bankrupt it um that is a problem with the money that you have right uh as it always requires growth with the oj model what we've given the alternative is um nothing in our model requires growth all we want is for your business to continue to stay at the same place that it is, we're going to give you access to probably individuals that you would have never had access to. So the core team that we have right now, we'll be hiring a CTO who will be like a head of AI that's going to be a very big role in the space. Different consulting, private equity background individuals. And think of it almost as like a special team that gets to go in and help you with your business. But we don't want to change the look, feel culture of that thing. We've just provided you an alternative path. And I think that that can be pretty profound. I think that's important to point out because sometimes I'm sure there are investors that come in and they don't, like if a business is generating 10 million, whoa, whoa, whoa, we want to see 11 million the next year or 15 million, 20 million. And at some point it's like, it's really difficult unless you compromise some things. Yes. Yeah. And I would say like part of that is, is the generational mindset. So, um, I, I kind of like straddle a few different roles, right? If you have like the founder, the entrepreneur, or the investor, um, I'll get invited to these CPG dinners with, um, very, very powerful people in the space. Um, and they're super nice, but the, the conditioning of the mindset is much more, um, I would say political, like who's in power in the government. Like whether you talked about the, the two different labels. Like they were talking about coloring at the last time period of, uh, the U S consumer. Like if we take out these artificial colors, it's going to dull it, which then makes it less visually appealing. Forget the health components of it. They didn't, there was not really a, uh, a thread of the conversation from there. And it was more from like a defensive standpoint of like, this is our territory and this is what we've created. Um, versus like, is this good for the consumer. And I think part of the push, like why I really like the people in Bitcoin is there's a lot of questioning of things that have been taken as assumptions consistently. Sometimes we're wrong, but a lot of times you're looking at things that the system has created and you're saying like, that shouldn't exist. Yeah. Well, I love what you guys are building. Super cool. If someone's watching this and maybe they have a business that they would love for you to consider, how do they reach out? So you can email produce, P-R-O-D-U-C-E at orangejuice.com. Okay. So we actually have the URL for orangejuice.com. Or you can go on the website, orangejuice.com, and there is a submission form in there. And we'd love to hear from anybody with a business that this is resonating with. I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join the show. I'm sure that you guys are going to do great at Orange Juice. EgoDeath has done incredible things too. Nico, congratulations. Thank you, Natalie. Thanks for joining me. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for checking out this episode of Coin Stories. This show is for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing should constitute as official investment advice, and you should always do your own research. My inbox is open if you want to share feedback or guest suggestions. Just reach out to us at info at talkingbitcoin.com. Make sure you're subscribed and turn those notifications on so you never miss new content. I'll see you next time.
