An Introduction to Ring Ventures

Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ

• Where is the transcript for this webinar?

  Speaker 1:
  Okay. Hi to you, Alex. Thank you for joining this webinar today about Ring Venture, a venture capital fund for Aggies. I’m Larry Warnock. I’m the managing partner of the fund. Also on the line today is Taylor Warden. Taylor’s in our investor relations group, and he’s going to be helping me. So you’ll hear me ask him to move slides forward. He also is going to collect questions. So ask questions as we go. You can do it in the control panel in the question tab. Submit your question and we’ll hold them to the end, but you can ask them starting right away. Also, we’ll be sending a recording of this for you to view again, as well as forward on to others. Slide, Taylor.

  So we’re speaking today about the Ring Venture Fund and our views of the associated landscape. This presentation is for informational purposes only and is not an offer to buy or sell securities, which are only made pursuant to the formal offering documents for the fund. Next slide. Please review the important disclosures in the materials provided for the meeting. And we also can send them to you on request. Now that that legal stuff is done, let’s get started. Taylor, next slide.

  So he told me we were going to talk about Ring Ventures. It’s a fund that sources and invests in deals while collaborating with the other funds in the Alumni Venture family, which we’ll talk more about. And you, as an investor, will be investing alongside other Aggies as we put about 20 to 30 companies in a portfolio for the group in this fund. I have a committee of Aggies that help me identify deals as well as score deals as an external process, as well as our own internal process. Those Aggies have a range of business experience, including venture investing, as well as entrepreneurial skills. We’ve got over four and a half thousand members of our community that get our newsletter, watch what we do, stay up to date, and at some point they’ll become potential investors, we hope. Next slide.

  So let me do a little bit more intros. As I said, I’m Larry Warnock. I’m in the class of ’83. When I was at A&M, I was very involved. I was in the Corps of Cadets, Ross Volunteers. I was also the president of the judicial board on student government. I immediately went into the tech industry and have been in tech companies and in venture capital companies my entire career since 1984. That career has taken me to Silicon Valley, to Boulder, Colorado. I’m now based in Austin, Texas. Most recently, I was the CEO of a venture-backed company that had a very successful exit. So I feel like I understand how to interact and work with entrepreneurs and founders. I manage the fund with the assistance of Sasha [inaudible]. Sasha is our principal. She’s my secret weapon on due diligence, a wizard on income statements, balance sheets, and researching comparables in the market. Sasha has a deep background in the private equity space, has an undergraduate degree from St. Andrews and an MBA from Cornell. Jennifer Shara is our investor relations manager. She interacts directly with each of you as you make your investments. If you have questions as you interact with the portal that ultimately you’ll have access to as an investor. She also comes from the investment space with a background at Putnam and is a graduate of Merrimack College. Next slide.

  Part of the team are the advisors and investment committee I mentioned. They have multiple roles, so I’m gonna spend a second on this. It’s important. They help me find deals, they help me score deals, and they help me interact with the broader Texas A&M community. So a real quick intro of them: Clint Bybee is a legend in the venture capital industry, has been a VC venture capitalist for over 40 years, and was one of the founders of ARCH Venture Capital out of Chicago. Fred Caldwell is a very successful real estate developer. For those of you that know Houston and Central Texas, you’ve seen the sign of the Caldwell Companies—that’s Fred’s business. He’s got a great nose for deals and understanding how businesses function. Joyce Sturs is a CEO of a software development company. She’s been in the software industry her entire career, and her company now provides custom development services and has offices around the world.

  Curtis Feeny is also a venture capitalist with over 35 years’ experience. He also sat on the board of the Stanford University endowment that made decisions on how to invest their money. Matt Harris is an investor at Draper and Associates, one of the largest and most successful venture capital firms in the country. Marty Holmes works for the Association of Former Students. He is the Vice President of Programs, and he keeps me up to date and helps me understand the best way to communicate to the Aggie community. Blake Petty is the Director of the McFerrin Center for Entrepreneurship at the Mays College of Business. So he’s an employee of Mays, and we interact quite a bit on deal sourcing and also fostering entrepreneurial activities in the A&M community. Ray Rothrock has been named to the Midas List of venture capital investors multiple times. He was the managing partner of Venrock.

  Venrock is the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family. Brandon Stewart has been an entrepreneur several times. His most recent company, highly successful, was a marketplace for advertising and marketing for small businesses. Also of interest is Brandon was the quarterback of the Texas A&M team the last time we won the Big 12 Championship. And finally, Graham Weston—Graham’s a successful entrepreneur and investor. He was the co-founder of Rackspace in San Antonio, which to this day holds the record of one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the history of the state. He’s now a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in San Antonio. They all are part of the team, and they help us assemble a fund that’s best for you. Next slide, please.

  So let’s talk at a high level about this category. So the category really hasn’t been available to investors like you and I, it was really for endowments and it was really for foundations, but historically VC returns have been stronger than the S and P averages.

  So let’s talk at a high level about this category. The category really hasn’t been available to investors like you and I—it was really for endowments and foundations. But historically, VC returns have been stronger than the S&P averages. If you look at different time blocks, you can see that the asset class, especially the top two quartiles of performers—and that’s important, I’ll come back to that. Why do we think we can track to the top two quartiles? I’ll explain that. But you see the performance is close to 20% on an annualized basis. This is a long-term wealth play. This investment is not liquid. So if you invest in this and you need the money back in two years, I can’t help you. This is the place you park money for eight to ten years that’s going to build long-term wealth that’s uncorrelated with what’s going on in the stock market, with interest rates and inflation. Next slide, Taylor.

  As I mentioned, venture has been the purview of big institutions. In fact, Cambridge Associates, which tracks this industry, recommends about 15% of an endowment or foundation’s portfolio should be in high-growth, early-stage investments—specifically venture capital deals. Through Alumni Ventures and specifically Ring Ventures, we’re now making that available to you. No longer do you need a $5 million commit and future capital calls. For as little as $50,000, you can be into a fund. Strong returns, as I mentioned, and it’s a way for you to have your own portfolio and invest alongside top-tier firms. So next slide please, and I’ll go into more detail on that.

  So we never go it alone. Ring Ventures will not invest solo or be the only venture capital firm. We co-invest—it’s referred to as passive investing. So a large venture capital firm will do the first level of due diligence and decide to invest, and then we’ll fill a hole—15 to 20% of a round, typically. And so we’re drafting behind the very best. So we get to pick and choose. So if the lead investor—the lead venture capital firm—doesn’t have a track record in at least the top two quartiles, we’ll pass. So you’re going to be investing alongside, with this fund, some of the best in the industry and in the companies that you now know about: Amazon, Tesla, Peloton—all of those invested in top-tier firms. And those are the firms we’ll follow. Next slide.

  This is not a wish list. These are the names of the firms that we invest with regularly, and it’s actually longer than this. But every firm on this page, we as Alumni Ventures, have done co-investing with: Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Bessemer, Venrock, Menlo, Sequoia. These are the names behind the brands that you’re aware of—the high-growth, high-potential companies that you read about. Early on, these companies—and Ring Ventures—get in before the rocket ship takes off. Next slide, Taylor.

  Let me tell you about this portfolio. The whole notion of venture is diversification. You already have investments in the public markets—maybe direct investing, or you have a mutual fund. You might have bonds, you might have real estate, you might have some crypto. The whole idea of venture is to diversify further, because those asset classes don’t influence the movement of these. These are the companies that are getting started, that may not come to fruition out in the public markets for three to eight years.

  So it’s a way to further protect your wealth and to build wealth for the long-term. When you invest with us, you’ll be diversified in many different categories. So let me take you through that. First is the sector. What I mean by that is we’ll have some semiconductor companies, some aerospace companies, some business software companies, maybe a few direct-to-consumer—all tech or tech-enabled, all high-growth potential—but we’re not going to just double down on supply chain software. Well, could we have a supply chain software company in the portfolio? Yes, but it would be balanced by other sectors.

  The next diversification is stage. So in our industry, the very, very early, our first money is called seed—S-E-E-D, the seed stage. About 15% of our fund will be in seed deals. About 50% will be in early—referred to as Series A and Series B—and the remaining 35% will be in growth. Still companies way before an IPO, but they already have established product-market fit, revenue, and maybe even aggressive profits. So we’re going to diversify by stage and not just pick a bunch of early companies that are just still creating their idea. But we’ll have a blend in order to protect your investment and have the highest return.

  Also, geography. While we’re Aggies and a lot of us are based here in Texas, our deals will be all over. We have a deal in Tel Aviv, Israel. We have a deal in Philadelphia. We have deals in California, in Houston and Austin, in North Carolina. The deals span geographically because research has shown for true diversification, you should have a geographic mix as well—not just a centralized geography.

  And we’ll diversify by lead investor. Remember that slide of all the names? We’re not going to do all our deals behind Draper, or all our deals behind Sequoia. There’s going to be a blend. So you’re going to get a piece of what they’re thinking across all those different Silicon Valley and East Coast funds.

  And then finally, wise investors invest over time. So the structure of these funds is they’re set up as an annual vintage. You can invest once and be done—never get a capital call. You never have to invest again. But some investors actually invest over multiple years. So they might invest in this year, and then also invest in the 2022 fund. So now they have time as a diversification metric. And instead of that 20 to 30 companies, now they have 40 to 60 companies in their portfolio. So that’s totally your option, but many of our investors do come back in the future to diversify their portfolio. Next slide.

  Speaker 1:
  I mentioned Alumni Ventures a couple of times. I know this can be confusing. Now, all of you know about Fidelity and Vanguard. Let me use that as an analogy. Alumni Ventures is like Fidelity or Vanguard—it’s a management company that has products. Vanguard has an index fund, a pharmaceutical fund, automotive fund, international fund. Well, here at Alumni Ventures, we have a fund at A&M for Aggies, for Yale, for Stanford. Those are products. So Ring Ventures is a fund product in the family of funds by Alumni Ventures. And that’s important. Alumni Ventures was one of the most active across all of these 18 funds—most active venture capital firm last year. We have over 650 companies in our portfolio, and we’ve raised over $630 million since 2014 to invest. So this isn’t two guys in a garage deciding to play venture capital. We’re one of the most significant fund families—Alumni Ventures—in the country.

  And we interact and share deals with all these universities listed in the bottom paragraph. I won’t read it to you, but we’ve got a selection of funds that focus on these universities because those universities’ alumni have wealth, and they spur entrepreneurialism, and there’s networks to help us find deals. So all of those are top-notch universities—except, of course, University of Texas. Must’ve been a typo; I don’t know how it got in there. But there’s a fund for them as well. So A&M and Texas are the only schools in the state that have a fund with Alumni Ventures.

  Investing in the fund, in a tacit way, you’re also giving back to Texas A&M. We are separate from the university. We are not affiliated with A&M. We are a for-profit company that markets to Aggies.

  However, I believe we provide benefits to Aggies in four ways. Number one: first is giving you access to this asset class. For you and I, we weren’t able to invest in venture capital before this model. Second, as I interact a lot with the McFerrin Center for Entrepreneurship for programs of both current and former students. They’ve got a lot of programs for entrepreneurs that are in their forties, fifties, and sixties that have been out of school for a long time. So McFerrin is becoming a hub of innovation in the country, and we interact through donating time as well as resources, contests, and prizes. And as you know, the director of this program is on our advisory board.

  Also, what I provide is a friend in the venture industry. I talk once a week with an entrepreneur from A&M, but it might not be the right deal for us. They might not be the right stage. It might be outside of our purview. But I open my Rolodex. I make introductions—introductions to investors on both coasts or even to private equity firms that are beyond doing venture capital—more mature businesses. So I want to be that friend to Aggies that need access to this type of resource. And I take calls all the time, and I enjoy doing it.

  We also have two programs that take students out of the graduate programs of Texas A&M and make them Venture Fellows and the Venture Corps. Consider those as two different types of intern programs. So we have, for right now, Aggies that are either recently graduated with their MBA or have been out for three or four years, and we coach them, and they assist us, and they learn the venture capital industry as well as entrepreneurialism. Next slide.

  So this Alumni Ventures network—I think we’ll come back to it for a quick second—I want you to understand the significance of the support I have behind me. Ring Ventures is one of the funds. However, we have over 50 investment professionals—peers of mine that I interact with—and we have offices across the country, including one here in Austin. We’ve got support personnel for investor relations, for legal, to make sure that the K-1 statements get out every single year. Our promise to investors is you’ll get a K-1 in March. How rare is that, if you’ve ever done investing before?

  And we have a huge number of subscribers—over 500,000—across all these funds, and we use that network. It helps our portfolio find candidates for employment, potential leads for business, or expertise. So being part of this network or this community benefits our portfolio companies. And as I’ve already mentioned, we’re quite active. Next slide, please.

  We’re already busy. The fund opened in February. It will most likely close in July, and it closes when we hit a target amount of funds. Once it’s closed, you can’t invest in this fund anymore. We’ll have another fund next year—next February, the 2022 fund. But the 2021 fund will close most likely in July. We’re not sitting around and holding the money. We’re active. We’ve already made 11 investments. And I just picked eight, just to give an idea of examples—the types of deals we’re doing and the types of diversification you expect. So if you come into this fund today, you get all these companies. You don’t miss out on the deals. Every investor, whether they invested in February or they invested in July, will have the same 22 approximately companies. Let me just take a second and share a story of these eight that are already in the portfolio.

  Analytical Space. Analytical Space is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They have hardware and software used in satellites. They have a mesh network in space for satellites to communicate to each other. Their target market is the downloading of real-time images from around the world for defense as well as business. More and more hedge funds and companies are using near real-time imaging from satellites. The problem has been that as the satellite is going around the Earth, it doesn’t have enough time while it’s over Atlanta to download the images. It’s moved out of range. It’s got to wait for another traverse. What Analytical Space does is they set up a mesh network. They share the videos with the other satellites, and the satellites take turns downloading. So you get almost real-time imaging. They already have contracts with companies that are already using their service.

  Again, out of Massachusetts, Halo is an investment platform much like YieldStreet. Halo does structured loan financing. So if you’re an investor and you want to get in on a real estate loan that has a guaranteed 8% return for the next three years, that’s called a structured vehicle. Halo lets you, as an individual, invest. So they’re not too dissimilar from us—where we focus on venture, they’re focused on structured products that have a planned outcome, typically loans and debt financing. They’re based in Chicago, Illinois.

  Groq. Groq has made a silicon chip. This is a computer chip that processes artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms faster than any one-time chip on the market—10 times faster than a general-purpose CPU. So as more and more machine learning applications emerge, called tensor processing, they have a chip that’s optimized for that. They’re in Mountain View, California.

  Hello Alice. This is a business marketplace for SMBs—small to medium businesses—that offers resources for startups, whether it’s a restaurant, a tech company, or a shipping company. Hello Alice sources everything from legal services to how to find an artist to make a logo, how to raise venture capital, how to do an HR plan, and they make money through an advertising and sponsorship model. They’re based in Houston, Texas. And the two founders are Aggies.

  Mesa Cloud is in Austin, Texas. I, like many of you, believe that K through 12 education is challenging in this country. Mesa’s doing something about it. They have a platform to help school districts accurately track the progress of students. Believe it or not, it’s done on big sheets of paper and kids fall through the cracks—especially minority kids, but even kids that have promise. It doesn’t matter what their background is. These school districts are tracking this all by hand. Mesa Cloud is addressing that in the K to 12 market and making that data available for universities to recruit the best and the brightest—not just the premier universities, but to find a place for everyone, whether that’s a junior college or vocational training. Putting the math and the science around the data can place these young adults into career trajectories that are appropriate. That’s Mesa Cloud, based here in Austin.

  Mythic is based in Redwood City and has an office in Austin. They also have a microprocessor, but this microprocessor is small and low power. It goes in devices like this [gestures], that do artificial intelligence on the fly. So it’s called IoT, or Internet of Things. They’ve invented a very interesting processor that will change the game for intelligence on the edge—for handheld devices.

  Willow is a direct-to-consumer play in the health market. It actually makes a mobile breast pump for mothers that are breastfeeding. They’re blowing it up. It’s one of the fastest-growing retail products in medical devices today. They’re based in—I believe—Mountain View, California. We were able to get into that round behind some of the most savvy investors in medical devices. It’s a phenomenal product. My 32-year-old daughter just had her first child. She’s a customer, and she raves about it. So an incredible product called Willow Innovation. And again, they’re in the Bay Area.

  And then Venus Aerospace, based in Houston—also an Aggie founder. They are working on a space plane. But before you say, “Oh my gosh, how long is that going to take?”—they’ve come up with a new type of jet propulsion that can be mounted on aircraft for a normal takeoff, accelerate them into low Earth orbit, traverse great distances, and then glide back down.

  Speaker 1:
  We’re talking New York to London in an hour, and they have patents and they’re already building prototypes for successful testing. The other piece of information that’s interesting—but you won’t find on their website—is we know for a fact they’re in discussions with defense contractors, because this same engine is 12 times faster than any air-to-air missile available in the market today. It’s a good technology for us as a country to have.

  So you can see we have a wide range of investments, and you as an investor are going to get a small piece of every one of these, as well as another 12 or 13 more. And then you’re going to watch these grow. In your portal, you’ll be able to read about them, hear about recent contracts, see what they’re doing, additional funding, what their growth is. So you’re part of the new economy.

  If you join this fund, will all of them be home runs? No. You need to set your expectations. Out of those 22 or 23, two or three might go under the wayside—we’ll never hear from them again—but it’ll happen early. And then we look for others to grow and have solid returns for you as investors. But that’s venture capital. When we make some of those early decisions, we are taking a risk bet. But we balance it. Not all of our deals, as I said, are super early or seed stage.

  Next slide, Taylor.

  How does all of this work? That’s a lot of information on the slide—apologize. Let me hit the key points.

  The minimum investment is $50,000 in the fund. And you can do that one time and never invest again. This isn’t an annual commitment. You don’t have to come into the future funds. We don’t contact you and say, “Venus Aerospace needs more money. Send us more money.” That’s not going to happen.

  The investment that you make—we manage that. I hold back reserves, so if Venus does need money, I’m there for them, if they’ve hit the growth criteria that we’re looking for.

  So you have to be an accredited investor, and the $50,000 minimum applies. It’s a 10-year term. We pull out of your fund 2% per year to manage the fund. That’s very typical. 2% is typical for venture capital and private equity. Some VC firms charge 3% or north of 3%, so we’re right in market. That manages and lets us run this management firm.

  Once the exits start to happen—meaning an IPO from one of these companies or someone acquires them—you get distributions immediately. We don’t hold onto the money. We don’t recycle it into 22 more companies. Your 22 are your 22. As they exit, you get a distribution. You get all of your money back before we, as a fund, share on the upside.

  So once you get your investment and your fees back, from that point on, the upside is shared—80% to the investor group, 20% to the fund. So that’s my long-term incentive. I’m incented on picking great companies that are going to have a great exit. And until that happens, the firm and myself aren’t really making any significant money.

  So it’s called a 2 and 20. That’s how it works. We provide K-1s, as I mentioned. You’ll have a portal, and all the gains will be long-term capital gains.

  Next slide.

  The last thing I’m going to mention is an option—an option. You can do it or you can pass. Some investors are very engaged in it. Others say, “No, I’m not interested.” Alumni Ventures has a model called a syndicate.

  Occasionally, across all the funds, we’ll get into a really, really hot deal and we’ll get a bigger allocation—meaning there’s more room to invest than we have as a fund. In order to deploy, we then offer that to you. It’s called a syndication. You’ll get an email that says, “We have this great opportunity to do an investment directly in BlockFi,” and if you want to add BlockFi to your portfolio with an investment of $10,000, invest now. Your portal shows that you’re also in that deal. The whole fund may not be in that deal—but you will.

  It lets people experiment in what’s typically been referred to as angel investing. But these are only deals that we’re writing checks in. So they’ve already gone through the due diligence of the major firm—Alumni Ventures—and Ring Ventures behind it. And then you can come in and see individual check writers as well, added to your portfolio.

  If it’s outside of the Ring Fund, the minimum investment is $25K—let’s say the Stanford fund or the Yale fund. If it’s in our fund, because you’re in something called the Venture Club, you’re automatically in and it doesn’t cost any money. Don’t worry about it. If you’re in that, you can do as little as $10,000 if it’s a deal that I’ve found and is already in the portfolio.

  So it lets you double down potentially on a deal that you’re attracted to. Maybe you’re in aerospace engineering, you really understand what Venus is doing, and you’re excited about it—and you want to deploy more of your own personal capital. Again, that’s an option. You can even opt out of these emails and say, “Quit bothering me.” But our investors sometimes enjoy participating directly alongside us in these investments that we do. And that’s called a syndication.

  Taylor, next slide.

  I think that’s actually it. So Taylor is busily assembling the questions, and we’ll read them. If you notice the URL there on the bottom—avgfunds.com—write that down. That’s a good place to go as a resource to get more information.

  Taylor’s also going to, in the group message or group chat, distribute my email address. This is directly to me. You may reach out to me with questions before you invest or after you invest. It’s [email protected]. Taylor’s going to send that out so you have that.

  Also, you’ll be getting a follow-up email—probably tomorrow—saying thank you for attending the webinar, with the link to this recording. So there are several ways if you want to go farther with follow-up. But before that, I think we’re right on time. So Taylor, hit me with some of the questions that you’ve been filtering.

  Speaker 2:
  Absolutely. Thank you, Larry. So the first question that we have here is: Can I invest with retirement funds? And if so, how does that work?

  Speaker 1:
  Great question, which I did not mention, but it’s in the material. You can use what’s called a self-directed IRA to put money into the fund. If you don’t have a self-directed IRA, that’s okay. We have a relationship with a third-party custodian that will do a rollover from a current IRA. It’s not a distribution. There’s no tax impact of a rollover.

  It will take the money—let’s just use $50K as an example—$50K out of your IRA from Fidelity, put in this custodian account, and the custodian will invest it on your behalf into the fund. As distributions happen, it goes back into that IRA. So all the distributions are treated the same way your IRA gains are.

  And so, for those of you that aren’t going to touch your IRA for eight to ten years, it’s a great way to build wealth and balance your portfolio—because you probably have mutual funds and bonds and maybe indexes in there already. Why not take a portion of it and also deploy that into venture capital?

  Out of sight, out of mind—you can do that with a self-directed IRA. Our sign-up process does it for you. You don’t have to go hunt for a self-directed IRA, figure it out yourself. We have it all automated. It’s just a series of steps—an extra step that you do when you sign up.

  Speaker 2:
  Great, thank you. And I’ll just add, about one-third of our investors do invest with retirement funds through a self-directed IRA.

  Next question we have here is: Why do companies let Ring Ventures into their rounds?

  Speaker 1:
  Well, first of all, we’re frictionless, and we have this network of so many people. So we add some additional capability beyond money. But it’s really, really simple. Oftentimes there’s an affiliation with one of the funds. So I’ll invest in Venus Aerospace—there’s an Aggie on it. Well, it turns out their chief engineer is a graduate of Stanford. And so the Stanford fund will come in as well.

  So entrepreneurs actively reach out to us. Also, what I’ve found is, if they haven’t located a great lead investor yet, we have a Rolodex. So if we like the deal, we will champion them into a great firm that I already know and that I’ll follow. So I don’t have to worry about, “If I give them this firm, will we do the deal?”

  So entrepreneurs hunt us down and work with us because we also can open the door into other venture firms.

  Speaker 2:
  Great, thank you. And we just have another question that came in. You mentioned a deal in Tel Aviv. Are there any geographical boundaries when making investments?

  Speaker 1:
  We philosophically—but not hard and fast—are avoiding investments in China. It’s not a hard and fast rule as a fund. We’ll continue to monitor global political situations. We won’t invest in, of course, anything that’s banned by the State Department, like Cuba or North Korea. But outside of that, we’re looking for great opportunities—whether that’s in Europe, whether that’s in India, Latin America, or, as I mentioned, in the Middle East through Tel Aviv or somewhere else.

  We have strict deal criteria and process that we follow—whether it’s in London or whether it’s in Boston. The only thing I will say is extra special scrutiny on Chinese deals, but we have not declared it a no-go. That said, I haven’t seen us as a fund family do a deal in China all this year.

  Speaker 2:
  Great, thank you. Do I have to be a U.S. citizen to invest?

  Speaker 1:
  You do not. We just need to have access to a tax ID number. If you don’t have a U.S. tax ID number, we have a relationship with an offshore bank organization that will set up an account for you, and they—FBO, for the benefit of—can invest on your behalf. We do have investors, many of them sovereign wealth individuals in the Middle East—a lot of them Aggies, quite frankly, because as you guys know, we now have a campus in Qatar—Texas A&M Qatar. So you do not have to be a U.S. citizen, but there is one extra step through an offshore facility, but we make that introduction and arrangement for you.

  Speaker 2:
  Great, thank you. And a couple more questions coming in here. Can you elaborate on the concept of time diversification?

  Speaker 1:
  Yeah, that’s a good one, and I kind of skipped over a couple of things. So this is the 2021 fund. If you invest in this—or maybe I should say when—you get something. Your $50K: I’ll hold out a little bit of money in reserves for some of the companies, not all of them, but we may make additional investments. So just by its nature, I’m going to be placing additional money in the out years.

  But I think really what the question is referring to is: If you put $50K in this year, maybe you hold off for 2022, and in 2023 you like what you’re seeing, you like the experience with Ring Ventures, you can invest again. So now you’re getting a whole different vintage of companies—another 22 to 24 companies that are unrelated to this first batch. And they’re under the deal dynamics of the year 2022 to 2023.

  So, you know, it’s the time value of money, dollar-cost averaging. All of you that are sophisticated investors know—you don’t put everything in one asset class on a given day and take everything out that next day. Maybe unless it’s crypto—but way out of my league to even talk about that. I simply don’t understand how that thing’s working.

  But diversification over time means that you can come back into future funds. You have first right of refusal. So if you’re in this 2021 fund, before we open the 2022 fund, all the investors get an option period—it’s about 30 days—that says: If you’re interested, you’re guaranteed a spot. You can pass. So it makes wise choice in any asset category to think about a time band as well as an event band. But again, that’s your option.

  Thanks to Taylor—I’m glad I got to go deeper on that. I didn’t.

  Speaker 2:
  Thank you, Larry. And it looks like we have one more question here that came in: When does the fund close?

  Speaker 1:
  So, it’s not a hard and fast date, but based on the demand and activity, it’s going to close in July. You can reserve a spot if you’re not sure you’re going to invest. Don’t reserve a spot—that’s just going to take a spot from someone else. But if you’re 90% of the way there, you can reserve a spot by signing up in the portal, and then you transfer funds a couple of weeks later. You can do that.

  But if you’re not quite there, set up a call with me—I’m happy to answer more questions. We have other resources at Ring Ventures as well as Alumni Ventures that can answer questions.

  But to answer the question specifically—we’re hoping, and I think it will happen based on the demand—to wrap it all up really by July. So this isn’t a decision you have to make next weekend, but don’t put it off to September as well. If you miss this fund, we’ll have another one in February of next year. We’re a long-term investor; it’s a long-term play. So if we miss you in this pass, or you’re just not ready, we’ll be here next year too.

  So, can we invest… do we have one more? Let’s hit it. I want to be respectful of the time. What do you—what do you got there, Taylor? Or not?

  Speaker 2:
  I think that wraps it up, Larry.

  Speaker 1:
  Okay, good. Thank you, Taylor, for your assistance—not only on the questions, but on the slides. So, as I said, we will be sending a follow-up to all of you. Open for a call if you’d like. You can pass this webinar recording around. This is a great opportunity. It’s a great opportunity for Aggies to be able to add venture capital deals into a diversified portfolio. It’s fast and simple, and we hope you do it.