His Father Lost His Life Savings. Now He’s Fixing Finance.

So, not knowing how and where to invest cost us everything. As a young person, I just took care of mum, by myself, on the same position. I was like, I cannot let any other family go through this ever again. We have three big VCs.

We have a few smaller ones, but we have three big VCs. That's not how VC worked. That should be the tagline for Australian venture firms. By far.

Australia has never had a lack of capital. What we've have had is a lack of risk tolerant capital. And the capital that does go there goes in bubbles. You've started your own businesses.

You've worked for KPMG high-growth ventures. You've raised half a billion dollars. You've done some incredible things. And now you're not just educating people who are uneducated about how to protect their wealth based off a personal scenario, but you're also impacting the entire world by doing it.

You know, when you describe it like that, that's an insane story. Arjun, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Really excited to be here.

I am excited to be here, because you have done so many different things in so many different startup capacities. And, you know, having a show that's in the startup space and then having someone who's in every kind of possible point of the ecosystem. Ming is in every part of the show. Absolutely.

It's good. So we've got us to talk about. But as we were just about to talk about, we decided to talk about it now on the show. Yes.

We met you where you came on balance to grind. Correct. How long ago? Early days.

I think 20, 22, 2021. 22, when about it was, it was a while ago. I'm wondering whether that was before or after balance to grind came into the Nudge family, because balance to grind was going for a fair few years before it came in. But I think it was, I think it was after.

Was it? Yeah. Because we've been on balance to grind and Nudge have been together a long time now. Yeah.

And still going, still going strong. I mean, when I saw balance to grind and I, then I saw the amazing humans on it. I was like, well, it's great to A be asked to be part of something, to be shared there. And subsequently a few, I saw a few of my friends who I'd been advising, supporting, mentoring, get on it.

I was like, this is like a full circle moment to have people that you've been working with go and, you know, achieve those upper echelons of success and be featured on it too. And look what we are today. You're on the given not show. Goodness me.

I don't know what's better. I mean, but the grind is an incredible publication. I think we've got about, I always exaggerate this, but I think I used to say 7,000, but I think it's about 2,000 articles on there of people, how much celebrity's daily routines and other things. And we've tried lots of different things with it.

But yeah, it's been, it's been a roaring success in its own right balance to grind or BTG, as we call it. So that's where we first entered the group. Indeed. Since then you've been intertwined with just about every single ecosystem thing I can think of, whether it is the TEDx that we spoke about.

You've also been doing, you've done the Blackbird Giants thing, right? You've done just trying to remember my briefing doc on you now because there was so many things. Why don't you've literally been involved in some things? Yes, it's a long list, I appreciate that.

I think when I got into the startup ecosystem, it was very important to actually fully immerse myself in it to really understand every element of it. They always say, you know, if you're going to go into something, you need to be obsessed about it, you need to understand it. And when it comes to startups, there is so much. There's actually building something.

There's investing in something. There's scaling something. There's the technology involved. And my own personal background itself is pretty eclectic too.

I've had the most non-linear career is I'm the bad brown child of my family. The bad brown child? Well, I'm not a doctor. Say that.

Well, I mean, I'm brown. I think I can. I could have worn brown. This is kind of brown.

I was wearing brown yesterday. I should have worn brown. Well, I mean, I'm not a doctor. No, I'm not a lawyer.

No, I'm not an engineer. Which means that you're safe from AI to some degree. Because they're all in trouble. I mean, yes and no.

Most, yes, correct. Which means I have critical thinking, creative skills, etc. Which I think Jimmy Card did a skit recently. Someone asked him, are you afraid of AI?

He's like, well, no, it learns from my jokes. It doesn't know how I come up with that. I do like him, I have to say. He put it extreme.

Oh, yeah. But I mean, it comes to every founder building something, right? Yeah. Large language models can learn from what already exists.

Yes. Then they cannot truly create that sense of innovation that a founder's mind or a creator's mind will come up with. And so I think having critical thinking, the ability to talk to people, the ability to network with people and build relationships, the soft skills that if you will, become far more critical in the age that we're going to. And so I kind of clocked in on that a while ago.

Because I was like, text obviously going to keep going. We've seen the bronze age. We've seen all the industrial ages, the tech age. Everything come from the winner and the AI age.

And that's not going to stop. No. The only thing that stays consistent is the fact that it is run by, created by, and used by humans. And so for now, you've got to just make sure that you're building, talking to, and having relationships with these humans.

And building for these humans. We live on planet Earth. And the only way we keep living on it and keep living on it well is by supporting each other, helping it, I firmly believe, we exist to help each other. And if that's not why we exist, what the hell is the purpose of existing?

That's a great mantra, if you like. So your first foray, was it high-growth ventures? Was that your first foray into startups? In Australia, I think my first foray was actually, when I arrived, to do my masters in entrepreneurship.

So that was 2020. What did they cover in that? I've always wondered. I know it sounds like, you know, you can't really teach entrepreneurship.

Well, I mean, there's things you can't teach. So that's what I'm intrigued to know. And so I'd come from, I can mention this eclectic background of doing so many things, professional careers. And I came from a business family.

But do we have in India a word called jugard, which means resourcefulness. And resourcefulness only gets you so far. In life, you do need to add frameworks to set resourcefulness to actually execute and implement on it. And so I didn't want to do an MBA or a master's in finance.

I have a double major in economics and finance in my bachelor's. And I was like, I need to do something innovative. Something that solves problems that actually addresses people's needs through building needs-based solutions. An entrepreneurship, take the bill, it fits the bill.

However, I applied the world over, was rejected the world over. Really? Yeah. So if you thought that would be great.

Yeah. So my story, my actual story, which, you know, I've shared, but I'll share with you as well, is I did so many things, but the world is geared for a very specific kind of person in academia in professional careers. And I wasn't that person. I don't think I'm that person either.

And it's okay. And it's great. But yeah, I was rejected by every union on the planet. I was rejected by the University of Melbourne as well.

And the way it institutes. I wrote an appeal out to the dean. And the reason why my GP had taken a bit of a hit was my final year of undergrad, I actually lost my father. And so I had to pull out my socks, stop doing the crazy things.

I was doing take care of mom, got a job, et cetera. And so I wrote an appeal. I was like, look, my father passed. Give me a shot.

I'll give you everything I have. Just give me a shot. And I was very grateful after a position to come study. So that's when I made my furry into entrepreneurship, if you were in Australia.

But I arrived in February 2020. So I had three weeks on campus. You write just after me. Literally just after.

Oh no, what am I talking about? I arrived in 1999. It's like 20 years difference. Sorry.

You arrived just before COVID-19. You arrived all that. Oh no, it's not. Let's not get into age.

So you arrived just before COVID. Yeah. So we got three weeks before lockdown. And you're in Melbourne.

We're staying at the city. It was the world's first lockdown city. And I'm like, what do you do? I couldn't go back on.

You had to stick it through. And I was like, you do what you got to do. You push through and you do what you need to. Yeah.

Launch the podcast myself. Yes. What are you doing? Which is relaunching against it.

Which we'll talk about. Which we'll talk about on the path to entrepreneurship. One, the hack the crisis, Australia hackathon, with a solution that service now actually ended up implementing. That's right.

And set up in arm, which is my life's work as the final deliverable of my master's project. Now, having immersed myself even in just those three weeks, I went to every single pitch night. I could stick myself at just meet people. There's a lot.

Talks. There was so many. And Victoria was the hub in 2020 of startups. That was when it was called startup Victoria.

Start a Victoria. I used to come down and we partnered with them at the beginning. And we actually, so in arm won the startup Vic FinTech pitch night, both people's choice and judges when we eventually went to market and start pitching way back when. And the CEO at the time told me it's like, it's always interesting to keep an eye on those that win both because they go and do something.

And I'm like five years down the track. That's a good, that's a good little boost of flight energy. Yeah, I was like, well, it took a bit longer. Yeah.

We went through every kind of trial and tribulation, but we're here. And so, very interesting phase. But I exposed myself to as much as I could in the ecosystem at the time. That sort of led me to my first gig, if you will, as an intern in working on special projects with straight back private equity, where I helped them with their special projects, building systems that they've gone on to iterate and build, which is the Harris family's private equity fund.

Worked with amazing people there, learned amazing things. I then went on to help set up a blockchain ESV CLP. Back in the, the, the Heddy days of blockchain. In 2021, early 2021, the team that builds actually helped build the Web 3 wallet.

They used to work with Vitalik Buterin. And they'd done amazing things. And I just got, got to bring my investment banking kind of career lens to what they were doing. And then was raising capital for private businesses.

So, healthcare education group, which now has been acquired by the Ramsey health group. And I was in strategy with the NDIA. You will note as the NDIS helping secure capital from Prime Minister's office to keep the scheme operational. In every string of those in Australia, at least, and even beyond in my past, everything has an impact string and a capital string attached to it.

But it's never too far away from tech startups innovation. Because at the NDIA and a great fund that's come out of those called Remarkable was a disability tech accelerator, investor, venture fund, et cetera. It was all kind of intertwined. But I looked at this long list of things.

I was like, I was doing these things. But I wasn't with the one thing I loved doing most, which is helping other people. And that's really what my background is ingrained in when I was born in the raised in South Africa. And now based here.

And when I looked at that long list, I was like, hey, I can do a few things. I can get capital to where it needs to get to. I want to help people who otherwise get overlooked to support them to get the capital they need and the advice they need to build those businesses. And I also need to make sure that I find a way to make my own enterprise come to life by learning.

And so, ventures seem like the right place. Yep. Same thing applied everywhere. Everyone said, excuse the French fuck off.

Look at the fucking city. What do you need? What are you looking for? I should be.

That should be the tagline for Australian venture firms. Fuck off. Well, yes, I published a few things. That's a controversial statement.

We both just said it. Yeah, yeah. That's all right. It's, I'm sure that they understand.

Oh, no, this is the problem. They don't, it's weird. No, I think the challenge with Australian VC, if we want an open panel. They risk it for at first is Australia is good at making oligopolis.

We have four big grosses, three big banks, et cetera, et cetera. We have three big VCs. We have a few smaller ones. We have three big VCs.

That's not how VC works. No, you go anywhere else in the world, whether it's Southeast Asia, South Asia, Europe, the States, regardless of the orangutan office. That's not how VC works. And Australia has never had a lack of capital.

We, what we've have had is a lack of risk tolerant capital. And the capital that does go there goes in bubbles. Now, they're, you know, friend of friends, funds, there are friends of this person's fund. They're, I went to Sydney boys' private.

I went to Melbourne. It's a friend culture. I mean, I found that coming from London. And I mean, you come from a world that isn't like that.

So you can recognize those friends in London. No one. And I mean, whilst it's still an incredible ecosystem to building, we have some of the world's in most incredible innovations in Atlassian, in Canva, in your Robin Denheim on the tech council of Australia. Like, there is no shortage of talent and innovation.

It's a shortage of the ability to allocate capital to where it needs to get to. And me having come from investment banking background, I've seen what that looks like on a global scale. I've closed over a half a bill in structured and leveraged finance with investing, setting up India's renewable energy infrastructure across India. Acquisitions with Blackstone, TBG, GIC Singapore.

Like, I know how this works on a global scale. Australia likes being Australia. However, there are a few that go and make a global Melanie from Canva, Scott and Mike from Atlassian. The safety culture, guys.

But I think something happened after them. Well, everyone stopped. And they're just waiting for them to liquidate. And everyone's just going to go, Exactly.

And it's like, it's very interesting that there's been a few. Everyone knows these things, but we're still like, hush, hush, hush, hush. And I'm like, hush, hush isn't going to fund the amazing companies and the amazing founders who are building great things. Sorry, coming back to where we were, we digressed.

That's why I ended up in venture. And KPMG high growth ventures seem like the perfect place. By the way, I was also rejected from that gig because of a system glitch. I then harassed the team for three months after which I was very grateful to offer the position to open them.

We've done a lot of stuff with them. I like them. They're amazing. Amanda is one of most incredible leaders.

That I've ever worked with. I've learned so much about leadership, about sales, about how to do things in, especially in Australia. And the entire team is people who get venture, people who get startups, people who get the, we're all ex-founders, current founders, operators. And because of that, we can connect the dots and get people into the right places.

And so they were looking to expand the businesses in Melbourne. And I was like, cool, I'm in Melbourne. And so I was a boy. And part of the ecosystem for a while, knew almost every VC, every family office who I work with, I advise, support in any way I can.

And that's how I kind of did that for the last couple of years. And I also sit on the board of the iceberg founders. Yeah, absolutely. With the mental health care charity to support LGBTQIA plus folks, migrants, refugees, displaced individuals, access to mental health care support.

And the reason why I did all these things is, hey, YOLO, but be... You gotta, you gotta like expand yourself to understand as much as you can. There's obviously, you know, you get specialists, which is where the world used to be. I think Sam Altman recently said he was like, really good leaders or CEOs are extremely good generalists.

They know a lot, well, they know a little about a lot of things. And then whatever they don't know, they have enough people to go ask those questions about. And from what I'm trying to build with a norm, and where we were, where we're at, and where we're going, that becomes far more important. Well, let's talk about that.

Where are you at? And where are you going? Yeah, I guess. Maybe a good point.

Describe the fact to describe the business first. Let's frame it up. Correct. Good place to start is why we even exist, right?

Deep-lived experience. My father was one of South Africa's leading entrepreneurs in pharmaceuticals, did re-wealth himself, built an entire industry from the ground up. In Ayurveda and Neutraceuticals, post-apartheid. Now, whilst he was great at business, sadly, not the best at managing his own personal finances, got taken advantage of whilst trying to invest and make a difference, lost his entire life savings in the hundreds of millions.

And five years later, lost his life. Goodness. So not knowing how and where to invest costs us everything. As a young person, I had to take care of mum, find myself in the same position.

I was like, I cannot let any other family go through this ever again. And that's why I created an arm to help young people that don't know how and where to invest, to do so with an impact. And we do that by embedding investment literacy throughout the process, which allows us in turn to curate custom microportfolios from around the world for just $10 a month. You can then track your impact, dollar for dollar.

This is trees planted, animals say, renewable gigawatts of energy generated carbon emissions prevented as a direct result of your investment in these companies. Can I ask you a quick question? I know you're run mid-flow. No, so far.

I love that you do that. Do you feel that that is a form? And I don't, I don't, I'm not trying to undermine the importance of what that is because that's real factual stuff that you're reporting there. But it feels like you've kind of gamified it to some degree.

And I think that's what people love. You know, they're not actually going to go and see those trees, but the fact that they can see the trees and how many. You know, there's a kind of mini gamification. 100%.

Is that what you were thinking with it? The reason why we had to go down this route is impact investing is not a new concept. No. High net worth individuals, family offices have been investing in it for the last two decades and minting returns.

Retail investors like you and I are shipped off ETFs. You know, the SMB 500, the Vanguard, this, they're all great. It's always Vanguard. It's always Vanguard.

It depends on, you know, the investments you make are your choice. However, impact has always, impact and purpose people have always assumed, go, don't go hand in hand. One comes at the discount of another or one comes at the premium level. We're debunking that myth.

Our back test on our portfolio for the last three years was 19% brighter. Wow. For context, wow, obviously past returns are not going indicative of guaranteed future returns and we have a full of someone's doing that. I'll give you the disclaimer that you need to put on top of this.

And we just did a recent 10 year back test. That came in at 365%. That's insane. The SMB was at 200, right?

So impact is not something that is independent of profit. No. Purpose is not independent of profit. And that's what we're really trying to show.

But the problem and humans and the interesting thing about humans is we won't believe what we don't see. And even in today's end, it's you can't be what you can't see. And so whilst this impact is reported on in scope 1, 2, 3 emissions or people say we're green. There's a lot of greenwashing and impact washing.

We were like, we need to be objective. We are not subjective. We're not going to put coatings on things. They are what they are.

Tesla is not in our portfolio. Apple is not in our portfolio. Visa is not in our portfolio. Those are the top three holdings of every major ESG fund on the planet.

And the reason why we had to gamify it is we had to show people like, look, your money is doing great. But we know as at a human level, people want to do good with their money. They want to give their money. But they don't believe they can do as well by doing good.

And so that's a cultural issue. Correct. And so if we can show it to them, we start that cultural shift. Yeah.

And my current team, I'm really lucky to work with them and have them. A CMO of mine who's had a history in media, who's building that brand platform of money with emission. Because we're trying to ingrain finance with culture. Finance has historically been this boring thing with all due respect run by middle-aged white men in suits on Collins Street in Melbourne who jargonize everything.

They are long words for everything. But they mean this it's money going from one place to another place. It just is defined differently. It's defined as this is a warrant.

This is a bond. This is an equity sale. This is a cash transfer. This is an electronic funds transfer.

They all mean the same thing. Money going from one place to another, just differently. And that jargonization of finance is what's created this barrier for everyone else to access it, to understand it, to build wealth with it. And that's why we need to ingrain it within culture, which is what Elon is doing.

And so game of buying it is how we ensure the next generation of wealth builders build it by engaging with it. Yeah. They need to engage with everything they're doing. And hence we built it the way we did.

So that we can those, the data exists. The data is always it's listed equities. This data is mandatory and regulatory required to be reported. And so we've gone in and found that data scraped it off, attributed it to the fund, and then attributed it down to every unit holder in our fund.

But that takes time. How long has it been going now? The fund, so we just got approval from ASIC a couple of weeks ago. The apps have just been pushed to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Where the time this comes out, they'll be so let's spell it for everyone so that they can find it on this. Yes, so it's WWW. Well, why web? That's how that anymore works.

Well, that's why it's a worldwide web. Netscape. WWW. www.

inarm. That's i-n-w-a-m.me. So enarm.

me. You can go on the website. Sign up to our newsletter. Our links to the app stores are there as well.

If you fancy just going onto the app store, going to the iOS app lab store, type in our money with a mission, going to Google Play Store, in our money with a mission, it'll be the first thing that pops up. Download it. And the reason why we did what we're doing, we embedded that investment literacy is the brain's cognitive function is at its peak when it learns by doing. And so that's also the problem with education systems.

We've learned independently and you execute independently. In Australia, we've had a sleuth of consumer fintechs, where they either only purely focus on execution, such as Spaceship, which recently got acquired by Etara, or just Education, such as Flux, which just got acquired by NetWealth. That white space, and we acquired the only other kind of impact play in the place, which is Bloom Impact. That white space is where people haven't played before, which is combining education and execution together.

That's our key insight of what we're building here. And the vision is to become the impact engine of the future, where we redirect every dollar of capital across the capital spectrum into impact. So we're starting off with listed assets, moving on to debt markets, green bonds and blue bonds, impact in the workplace, where your employer can allow you to opt in as an employee for a portion of your salary to directly go into an alarm impact portfolio, and impact in private markets.

But none of that matters if we don't put our money where our mouth is. So we'll be reinvesting a significant portion of our own profits back into the impact ecosystem to support women of color, people of color, young people for underrepresented backgrounds with access to capital to build the businesses with future, thereby creating a circular financial economy. And going back to what we were talking about earlier, that's how you get capital from where it sits today to where it actually needs to go.

However, takes a long time. But building the fund, finding the right providers, vendors, building the app, getting the legals of this, it's not a walk in the park. I asked the question of how hard it can possibly be, and that's what every founder does. You can very quickly get humbled, but because of our deep rooted why, there have been three times where we should have probably probably must have shut down.

But we didn't, because of that why. We've had a co-founder separation that everything was black and white, but these things take a toll. Didn't work out. Had a distribution partnership, a major distribution partnership, partnership fell through, didn't work out, sometimes these things don't work out.

Had a vendor that got nasty, got ugly, we lost money, and that vendor has since affected a lot of other companies. We actually acquired one of the companies that they affected. And these things happen, but what it does is it derails innovation, and as a migrant in a new country, not being, I've been told to my face, you're not from here. What do you know about this market?

Have you really? I have, by VCs. By VCs? No wonder you had a little dig against it.

And I'm surprised that I'm, I mean, that's very easy for me to say, obviously with my, I'm bringing it background, but I'm still surprised that in Australia, you were told that to your face by a VC. So I grew up in South Africa, right? We know what racism is. Yeah, you certainly do.

I think we wrote the playbook on racism. I think, I think, I think actually the British didn't wait before anyone else, but yeah, correct. Post-aparte, like I went to school, everyone came from every background, every gender, every ethnicity, every religion, I went to school with people who are African descent, people who are Anglo, people who are Indian, people who are Asian, people who are colored in South Africa, we refer to a different kind. It was a different, they say there as well.

We all bleed the same color blood. It's red. It is. We never, we don't differentiate.

There's no, you know, um, classism of that kind. And then I came to Melbourne. I was the first, I was called an Indian dog walking down the street three times. Jesus.

I've, I've been assaulted on a track. For no reason. Just like, I was called, uh, you know, we obviously ended this out. I was sharing with you.

I was called a fuck with three times by elderly gentleman who, I just pushed me out the way. It's like, get out the way you fuck with. I'm like, so there's thing to be a lot of racism on the trams. I was like, sir, you could have asked me to move nicely.

I did, I did move. And you're like, you fucking fuck with, get out my way. I'm like, so tell me, yeah, how do you feel now having arrived, you know, and struggled for even getting into uni, right? Um, all the way through to, you know, you've done a TEDx speech as we spoke about, you know, a bit of off camera, which we don't need to go and do, because she said it's really boring, but I'm not that I believe that.

But, you know, you, you know, which is the epitome of some people of what they want to achieve. You've started your own businesses. You've worked for KPMG high growth ventures. You've raised half a billion dollars.

You know, you've done some incredible things. And now you're not just educating people who are uneducated about how to protect their wealth based off a personal scenario, but you're also impacting the entire world by doing it. You know, when you describe it like that, that's an insane story. Often you can describe someone's stories in an insane way, but they don't necessarily feel that.

Which is why I ask you that question, you know, and I'm sure, you know, you're young. You've got a hell of a lot more you're going to do. I have absolutely no doubt. But right now, how do you feel?

It's, I don't feel like I've done anything yet. Some people say, isn't that ridiculous, because I've just been over a minute describing what you have done. And I didn't even include half the things that we talked about already. I genuinely, because I think I'm driven so much by being able to see the outcomes.

I know this work could possibly drive and lead. And I cannot rest until I see it. And all these, whilst, please don't get me wrong, I am so grateful to have been able to do the things I've done, and so lucky to be able to say the things I can say. I'm very cognizant of the fact that a lot of people aspire to those things.

But at the end of the day, it's the work that matters. It is. To me, like, yes, there's the TED talk on how money can be a force for good. I'm on the 101 South Asian Australian founders list, which is amazing.

I think they do 101. So in Hinduism, in South Asian culture, in general, 100 is a good number, but we have 101, which is a symbolic token of luck. So similar to Chinese New Year when you get a red envelope, whenever you visit a family in India on a suspicious occasion or a religious event or a suspicious day, you give them a token, which is usually, it's, it's never the full amount because an even number can be divided and odd number can't. So when you give it to someone, you're giving with the intention for them to keep it.

And so they can't really split it in high. I love that. So it's like a token or a tokenized notion of this is for you. So anytime you give someone something, you'll never give them 10 rupees or 10 dollars, you'll give them 11 or 21 or I'll remember this.

I'll remember this visual. Yeah. So when, when the Syraculective decided to make this list, they're like, in order to stay true to culture, we'll make 101. And so it's I don't want.

But the one thing I will bring up, because I think it's important, and I don't think I'm the only migrant that struggles with this is you read out the list of things. Would you believe it if I told you that I still don't qualify for a national innovation or a global talent visa? Knowing the visa system, having worked in recruitment for 20 years here, absolutely, I would believe that. That doesn't shock me at all.

And it's ridiculous. Don't get wrong. I definitely don't agree with it. But I, it doesn't surprise me.

It's like, the whole challenge is it's just a narrative because it's presented as this startup visa or this innovation visa recently, they made it even higher. You have to be a Pulitzer Prize nominee or winner or a Nobel Peace Prize. There is literally one or two of them every year out of the population size of eight. And they're not winning startups.

And then the other clauses, they've revamped them, but initially were 300K minimum invested from a VC. Then no VC is writing, precede or seed checks at that amount. Not Australia. Direct to consumer protection.

Not directly to consumer, and when they wrote the ESV CLP regulations, there are two industries. Those funds can't invest in pure play, in tech and prop tech. So this is literally designed for you not to get it. Well, I did choose the hardest industry to do anything in other than Mettech.

And I think all these rules are great, but they're really geared towards people who are C-suite or high paying staff members. Isn't innovation about not having rules? Isn't that literally one of the definitive ways of describing it? You tell them.

I don't think so, listen to me. We can try, maybe. And hence, I guess, part of the systems that, when you ask the question, how do I feel, the system itself is telling me it's not good enough, right? But hopefully, I'm back not hopefully.

I know you're smart enough not to believe the system. So does that hopefully add up? Well, I make my day job is making people upset because of how things work. So that's why I'm breaking.

I love that description. What's the easiest thing? You know, you've had a lot of struggles, right? I'm hoping there are some things that have come easier potentially being in Australia.

Or it doesn't have to be Australia, it could be anywhere. That you perhaps, we thought we're going to be a little more challenging. So I genuinely saw the regulatory piece, but Australia has the most owners financial regulations in the world, which is the reason why I'm here, so that we can leverage regulatory arbitrage and scale and grow in arm in every country in the world. I've been invited to speak in Davas, alongside the World Economic Forum.

We want an award from the Swiss FinTech Association, delegations to Bangkok and Thailand, 2020, India and Amsterdam. All those regulators prescribe, in general, to the notion of if your regulation compliance is at a standard more onerous than ours, we deem you compliant here. And so our ability to launch here, iterate and then go is that's why I'm here. I thought that would be the hardest.

I had to sign a piece of paper. That was it. Well, obviously there was due diligence involved in all that, but all my ducks were mostly in a row. Yeah.

It was agreeing to accept terms of taking on, you know, being a corporate authorized representative, full AFSL. At the end of the day, once you'd read it, come through something, it was signing a piece of paper. I'd have anticipated it being far more difficult. It sounds like it would be.

I don't take signing that piece of paper lightly. There's a hundred pays document worth of compliance behind that piece of paper, which we comply to, which are above board on in every instance and always will be, because this is people's money we're dealing with. But that was what I thought would be most difficult, but it wasn't. I thought I can understand and manage people professionally.

That was the biggest challenge. And I'm sure you've heard this time, tell me, people, whether it be on the team, whether it be vendors, whether it be investors, whether it be partners, that's been a huge growth curve. It's a drain. Yeah.

I think I'm really grateful to be backed by an amazing board. One specific member on the board, their entire role is making sure I stay sane, which is how I manage my relationships, my people and leadership, et cetera. And this specific gentleman is responsible for standing up some of the world's largest companies. Revolute, Monzo, Addy, and start-up bootcamp spin tech.

He knows what he's talking about. He knows what he's talking about. He knows what he's talking about. And I'm glad that the board said, because they loaded me up.

They're like, the money is hard. Fine. That's hard everywhere. The regulation we comply with.

And I think people are always the hardest to deal with. And the right people to find the right people, which I'm lucky to have now. Very grateful. I know they'll be listening to this.

Please know. I'm very lucky for all you. I knew you'd do a direct camera piece. I just knew it.

And finding the right people to work with them. So can I, I can tell you, obviously, I've been in recruitment for most of my career. And then I've gone into media and then I've gone into private members club. So everything I do is people, which is just a punish in some respects when you can deal with robots.

But I think the thing that I love life in life is people. I think the thing that probably changed my view on people and everyone describes managing people as a drain on, on your energy map is how you, it's like anything. And I imagine you would have had to do this so many times in your life, particularly in what you've told me so far. You have something in front of you that is a problem of some form.

And that could be an individual. It literally just puts down how you frame it. Like if you frame it as a drain or if you frame it as an opportunity to exchange energy in a different way, it's everything just changes. And I think it's, and the people find that harder to do with people because there's so much emotion.

I think, and this is something I actually learned from a man to price makes boss. She was like, I have a job. My job is to make sure this thing runs. Yep.

And if I have a conversation with you, it is about me needing to do my job. And so when you frame it that way, and I kind of try to apply this with my team, and as many aspects as I can, the conversation is about the job you need to get done. And the challenge then is every person receives that information different. So framing that same thing for an alpha leader, you need to, you need to say that, but you need to say it a bit differently.

For a leader who's a bit more empathetic, you need to say that with a little bit softer language and tone. And for someone who's, you know, maybe just reporting to you or more junior, you've got to play the delicate lines of, I have to be assertive as fuck because you need to do the thing that you need to do. But I also need to be empathetic in that I understand you've never done this before, and you're building the skill set. But, and we're giving you the skills to get it, but we got it, you got to meet me halfway.

Like what's going on here? And framing it to ask people about how they're feeling I've found helps to then unpack, iterate, acknowledge and grow. But that takes, I now realize I've said this and it's now normal and I'm growing and building up, but not a lot of people know that. I'm going to share something with you that I watched last night on YouTube.

I don't even know how I stumbled across this video, but I did. It was, you know, when you, yesterday I worked from home because I needed to get through like some, and I had one of those days where I powered through stuff. And as you do that, you slowly decrease the amount of tabs across the top of your browser, right? And the ones that were just small that you don't even know were there, suddenly appear and one of them was a YouTube one.

I thought, I wonder what that is. So I opened it up and this was about 8.30 last night. And it was six minutes and I thought, well, that's good, because they often say one and a half hours.

I think, well, I'm not watching that and I just shut it. But it was six minutes. I thought, I'm going to watch it. And I forget the name of the gentleman, but he was talking about his communication triangle and how certain aspects of communication lead to the next one, which ultimately lead you to work effectively as a team and get the result that you want.

And I'm going to try and remember it because I only watched it once. But the bottom one was trust in that people need to trust each other. And that's not so much trust each other in terms of how I trust you to not hurt me. It's trust each other in that I, you trust each other to talk honestly to each other.

The next one was conflict, which was like, if you trust each other, then you can have conflict in a positive manner. If you don't trust each other, then you have conflict in a negative manner where it could be positioning or politics. But if it's not, it's to get to a result. Exactly.

Oh gosh, I'm forgetting now. The conflict then led you to sort of this level of everybody having an opportunity to listening and hearing, right? And then if everybody gets an opportunity to put their opinion forward, you then go forward with commitment, which is you commit to something now, even if you don't agree with what you commit to, you'll commit to it if you've been hurt. That's all people want.

And then that leads to the result, which I found was fast now. I can't remember that. I think that was right. Someone somewhere who created that video is looking at me going, no, no, no, no, no.

There wasn't commitment. It wasn't this anyway. But I think you get the idea. And to me, you know, I was watching this and I, because I'd had a day at home, I'd been, I had about 280 emails in my to-do list that I'd got through.

It just really hit home with me how ineffective email is as a form of communication. For exactly the reasons you've just said, the way that someone communicates, whether it be with less aggression or more empathy or whatever it is, none of that gets put across in email very effectively. You can try, but ultimately they'll try. You haven't even said the mood you're in when you read it, so the mood, someone whom they write it, you know, we've seen this with text messages as well.

And yet the world has driven themselves towards communicating over text, WhatsApp, Slack, email. And this is, I think, a huge issue in the way that the whole world is going. And no one calls anyone anymore. People go, oh, you used your phone to call people.

People get frightened. I have a friend. Do you think they get frightened? But if I'm phoning them, they'll be like, oh my god, what's happened?

What's happened? I'm like, I'm just calling and say hi. Yeah, isn't it funny? Maybe we need to create something to help this.

Maybe that's some impact if it's investing, we can think about how we're going to have impact on stopping everyone just doing written communication. I think, like none of my conversations are ever written with people. Like, if there's outcomes, they need to be communicated post. Yes.

Do you have children yet? No. So you have teenagers. You can't talk to them.

You can only, you can only text them. And even then, you don't really understand what the reply is because it's a bunch of letters that mean something. Stand with Riz. No.

Like, do you send emojis? I do send emojis, yeah. Do you send? Why would you ask that?

I've never admitted that before. Do you send Jen emojis? No, I do send gifts sometimes. This is not what a 50-year-old man should be admitting on a public forum.

You don't look at day of this. I'm 52. I'm 52 in, oh, three weeks. Well, happy birthday, but you don't look at day of 25.

Maybe that's why I'm like, I'm still emoji, but thank you. But I'm amazed that you don't do any written communication because some people won't receive. They won't ask the phone, right? They just don't answer.

And so, like, the team, and this is something that kind of my CMO led was, every Friday, we have to meet in person. It's just, yeah, until we have an office and we can pay everyone and we do all those things, we need, we actively deliberately find times to be physically in the same space with each other because that makes such a big difference. And that's also taught me a lot around, like, how do I want to build a culture or what kind of things do we need to do? But we're a financial services company, a FinTech and an EdTech all in one.

We're at the precipice of what you call that. We have to work out. We'll work that out later. That could take a while.

A FinTech and EdTech and what? And a financial services company. You're almost, are you a climate tech as well because you're impacting investing, maybe? Like, whenever one challenge I've had with some impact investment funds and investors is, if they choose a lane, we do climate, we do health, we do education.

I'm like, I make sure all of those things get funded. It does not, maybe we just put you a tech company. Yeah, I think we're a tech conglomerate. Tech conglomerate.

Down here, that word, very often conglomerate. Yeah, it's too big. That's why it doesn't have to be because conglomerate doesn't mean big. It just means a variety of different things.

So it's, you don't have to be big. It's just traditionally there. Yeah, we're a FinTech conglomerate. And you need to put AI on the end.

Just simple. Otherwise, you won't get any funding. Conglomerate. See, now you get, you say you're an AI conglomerate and we put this show out, you'll have 50 people wanting to fund you tomorrow.

I'll have A16 to on my door tomorrow morning. I'll be like, you guys are thinking this, did you? You built the internet, but you never thought of an AI conglomerate. No, no one thought of that.

It's a genius. Right, talk to me. Where we're from here. Like we talked about, you've achieved a lot.

You've got this business up and running. You've proven the concept. You're getting towards getting an office. You're here.

You look cold. The cold wasn't made for my people, man. I've done it. I know English, so that doesn't make any sense.

But what's next for you? Yes, this is my life's work. We, our public launches tomorrow in Melbourne, we'll be doing other activations. So what's next is you're flying back to Melbourne?

What's next is, yeah, we'll have a event tonight, which is in Baghdad, but it's not when this comes out. So the 101 South Asian Australianist has a gala. I've made the list again. Amazing.

Is it in Sydney? It's in Sydney. Fantastic. Where is it?

I can't. I'll check my calendar. I have no idea. And go back tomorrow.

Do the launch, the apps hit the stores. The fund is live. We get our first few customers. Next for me is we hit our 1200-ish customer target.

We'll probably be the only DTC FinTech in Australia that has broken even within three months. I then go raise some big bucks, bring the team on board full-time, launch a couple more product features that are on the product roadmap, which our customers have told us they want, and launch in our first global market. Well, by the time this comes out, you'll be live. So for anyone watching who wants to invest in the fund, they just basically download the app as we talked about earlier.

And just go ahead. Do you have like a minimum investment? Do you have fractional staff? Do you have all of those kinds of features?

Yep. So we've explained all of that throughout the app. We encourage about $100 a month. If you can't do that much, we recommend you to consider your situation before you invest in the fund.

And is there an easy exit? So is it like a bamboo or a raise where you can put money in, but you can also pull it out again. So we don't withhold your money. We don't forcefully lock it in.

It's your money. You should have access to it when you want it. You just let us know if you want it back. We need to do a few things because we've gone three to five days.

It's always three to five days, right? Well, so much time it takes to get a new card. Actually, with the tech, we should be able to do it sooner. But for now, it'll take the time.

Three to five days. The reason is I'm working with archaic foundations that have already been laid to build a fund for a new age. These funds have been set up to take money from sophisticated investors and family offices who will write a PDF form and physically fax that identity documents through and initiate a bank transfer. Do we need to explain what a fax is?

Do you think to some of the audience? Well, let's not do that. Let's not do that. I don't want to either.

I don't want to either. But yeah, I think we explain it all. It's $100 a month. The only charge is $10.

We don't charge any effect. Regardless of balance. For me, regardless of balance. And do you have a dividend reinvesting and all that kind of stuff?

The opposite. We take your tax situation. You get a reporting every month. That's correct.

All the heavy lifting we do. And we tell you about that. So you understand what it is. And you don't just receive paperwork and don't know what it means.

Within the app, you learn about every company you're invested in. What the performance was like. What the performance metrics actually mean? Our impact methodology is public because we trust what we're doing.

We know no one's going to be able to pull off what we've done in the way we've done it. And even if they do kudos, yeah, please do that we need as much money going to the right places needed. We have access to about a half a million young Australians or our unique distribution and partnership strategy where we sort to become a habit before we start building their wealth in postgraduate student clubs and affiliations. And we'll be going going hard and just ingraining finance in culture.

We don't want finance to feel like this arbitrary, complicated taboo topic that you can't talk about. If we're going to change how the world sees money interacts with money and builds their wealth and actually capture that next-gen wealth transfer, it's got to be part of culture. It's got to be part of how we deal with our live data. And so yeah, no minimum, well, 100 is what I need to say because that's on our PDFs.

$10 a month, you can take it out if and when you need to, we encourage you to stay invested for three to five years to really see the benefits of your investments. And yeah, go on the app stores, go on our website, go on our socials and our content. We are also a content company because we need to push out content to make people feel relatable to what we're doing. And you can engage with all that and actually learn about money, build your wealth and make your money have a mission to save the world.

Amazing. Action, it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed having you.

I think what you're doing is great. I hope tonight goes well. I'm sure it will. I hope tomorrow goes well.

I'm sure it will. And I hope your first three months goes well. I'm sure it will. And we will have you back on in a year or so and see how it's going.

Yes, when I hit a billion dollars. Absolutely. I have a secret group chat on WhatsApp, which is called Victoria's 21st Unicorn. It happens to happen in the last three years, so maybe we might be it.

Are you the only one on the secret chat? And a few other people on the team. We haven't activated it in a while. I like it.

All right. Well, pleasure and I look forward to watching it grow. Thank you so much. Thanks.