Operators Ep 9 Transcript

Transcript Lindsey - YieldStreet - Final

Delian Asparouhov: [00:00:00] Today I'm interviewing Lindsey Fielding, VP of growth and marketing at YieldStreet. Lindsey worked previously at IBM and Healthy Nation and join YieldStreet as a founding member within its first year. I hope you enjoy the show.

[Music]

Lindsey, thanks so much for coming onto the podcast today. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Lindsey Fielding: [00:00:33] Absolutely. I'm thrilled to be here, thanks for having me.

Delian: [00:00:36] Before we get started, just cause YieldStreet is, maybe a little bit earlier stage than some of the other companies, we brought onto the podcast, it might be helpful to just go through just a quick overview of just what is YieldStreet about, and maybe you could also compare it to some of the other, let's say investing platforms, how they compares and how it's different.

Lindsey: [00:00:54] YieldStreet is an alternative investing platform. Essentially what we're trying to do is change the way investors are able to create wealth by opening access to investments that typically would have lived only in a hedge fund or private equity environment to individual investors. So we have investments across multiple asset classes like Marine finance, real estate, AR, et cetera, that investors can participate in on our platform. And we are really a category creator in this regard and that we were the first to bring this to the market.

Delian: [00:01:38] Appreciate that context. So let's maybe, backtrack a little bit and go all the way to the very start of... I think back in school you started off studying and in the field of like psychology and organizational behavior. Like what, what got you interested in in that field and, did you think that is the goal always in the long term is to now apply this to the world of startups or was that not at all in the cards? [laughs]

Lindsey: [00:01:59] Yeah, that's a great question. And really psychology is all around us and makes up the majority of how we experience life, right? Like the way we interact with each other, I was always fascinated with what motivates people, what are the mechanisms and systems that can influence some beha- someone's behavior and how does their lens of the world impact how they interact with the world?

And it was always incredibly exciting for me to understand things like our sensory systems and how we interact with each other. And really that kind of deep level of experience in that area, I think has been my personal secret sauce as I've moved forward into business world, startup worlds, because there's just so much you can take with you. Even from school, I did a lot of experimental psychology and that rigor around scientific testing and data and experimentation has been critical to a lot of what I've applied to a business context.

And, so really initially I wanted to do the PhD route and go into academia, but then I just realized how applicable of, my knowledge set was to business and caught that bug and never really looked back.

Delian: [00:03:18] You decided to leave the world of academia and went to the most, interesting, fast moving, tech company in the world, IBM. [laughs]

Lindsey: [00:03:24] [laughs]

Delian: [00:03:26] How did you decide on IBM and how did you manage to survive there for two full years?

Lindsey: [00:03:31] So I think what really drew me to IBM was just the global scale that they had. I'm also a big passionate traveler, and the fact that they op- operated literally all over the world was interesting to me. And everyone I ever interacted with at the company was just incredibly intelligent. Their internal motto is actually think. And I think just hammering that into, to all the employees. how can you think bigger and more broadly was, really appealing to me.

I will say that, really before I started there, I had these romcom fantasies of, going for lunch with my coworkers and building all of these, fun relationships and that dream crushed pretty quickly I think on day two, when, I walked into the office that was 70% empty, no one I immediately worked with. IBM was very early on the work from home scale, which I think, is benefit now to what we're currently going through in corona.

But, it was an incredible, what I recognized was that it was an incredible training ground for me to dive into data, to understand structure, but I realized fairly quickly that I'm a builder and I love the ambiguity of early stage projects. I love shorter feedback loops, projects that large scale corporations can take multiple years. and I just wanted to be close to the business.

Delian: [00:04:58] I guess speaking of being closer to the business, you left IBM, and then decided to join a very early stage company, Healthy Nation. how did how did you end up discovering them? Were there some, shocks or growing pains from going from a, an IBM to a super early stage startup? What was that like?

Lindsey: [00:05:14] In terms of finding them, once I had that realization that it was time for me to move on, I started to put myself out there and I went to tons of events. I have the benefit of being located in New York city. And I would go to VC events, panels, et cetera, to try to understand like what's happening in the market, who's out there? And actually I think waiting in lines for a name tag, I met one of the initial founders of Healthy Nation and, we started a conversation and ended up, heading over there.

And, it was pretty freeing to go there from such a corporate environment. the ability to share ideas really free- freely, generate feedback quickly. But I also noticed on the flip side of that there are significantly more pronounced swings as anyone who spent time in the startup [laughs] world intimately understands that like you have these incredibly beautiful high highs, but then, the lows are felt. And even a few weeks in, the immediate kind of director I was working with left the company and I felt like the rug was pulled out from me a little bit. so it really forced me to adapt. It stretched me to learn quickly and really start building that intuition muscle of trusting what I needed or wanted to do walking forward.

You stayed there for a little while and, decided to leave again. Maybe it would be interesting to hear about how did hear about YieldStreet? they were even more early stage of, I believe it was basically, not even, really a totally formed company when joined them. what was attractive about that idea that you wanted to work in the world of democratizing investing or something like that, or, what attracted you there?

Lindsey: [00:06:55] Going back to my psychology roots, FinTech in general, started to emerge for me as a, an interesting industry that had a lot of behavioral psychology around it. many are not good at investing or not prepared for investing. And it seemed FinTech was coming into a very sort of traditionally, traditional area and saying, we care about the user experience, we want to build a more direct relationship. and I thought that was a really interesting playground to experiment with.

Coming across, YieldStreet was actually, again, taking charge of your own career. I came across them, I believe in a newsletter that I was subscribed to and reached out and started meeting with the CEO, Milind Mehere and talking through ideas. And ultimately, two things I really liked that encouraged me to join was that the founders had a really clear vision for what they saw the company doing and that North star of where we were going to go.

The first market aspect that I referenced earlier. Because what we're really doing at the ultimate, at the end of the day is trying to create a paradigm shift in how people think about investing. Most people, traditionally, at least at the retail individual level, their access is limited to various flavors of the stock market, of index funds, ETS, individual equities that they may participate in, but those are all flavors of the same thing.

What we wanted to do was come in and create that shift that there's this whole other world of investing that has existed for decades. And many people have enjoyed, double digit returns for a long time. And why is it that if you look at like a university endowment or private equity firm, there's huge amounts invested in this, but the individual portfolio is nothing.

Not only do we want to shift that mindset to people, demanding access, but saying I deserve that access. And I think yes, we've seen these kinds of paradigm shifts in other industries, if you think about something like Amazon, where, initially we fully accepted that a package would take four weeks to arrive to us in the mail. Now, in some instance we want that in an hour or Uber, where I remember even when I first moved to New York city, it was still, we would hail down cabs and now they're immediate, the car is there for you right away. And those things just become what you demand as part of your operating. And, that was my vision of what I thought we could also accomplish here.

You joined, obviously, I think before they had much, let's say traction with retail investors, and right now you work on growth and marketing. Were you working, in growth and marketing when you first joined or I guess what were some of the early challenges? Like I imagine a lot of it is, I imagine there are plenty of these, projects, you can go after since you guys probably have a team that kind of looks like X hedge fund people that know how to find these.

But I imagine a lot of the difficulty is in the messaging and communication to retail investors are like, "Hey, I know you've been taught and drilled into your head for the past 20 years that, S&P 500 index funds is great to put in retirement, but like actually, here's another area you'd actually should, consider diversifying some amount of your capital to." Yeah. We'd love to hear what were those early days like and what were some of the, experiments and things that work versus didn't?

Lindsey: [00:10:22] Absolutely. And to that point, we're in an interesting position that we need to both excite and educate at the same time, where it's like, "Hey, you probably never knew, our finance existed. but this is a really interesting thing that you could participate in." So that's a continual aspect that we're looking at. And, reflecting back to the very early days, I remember, I came in, I want to say seven or eight months into operations, and I was the first hire in the marketing growth area.

I think there was one junior employee there. But, when I onboarded, there were a few things ongoing, there was an external agency that was just like shooting marketing spend in the dark. And there was a contract [laughs] to do like some inflight advertising that immediately it was about like, let's cut everything down to the core because, especially early on, you need to understand if things are working or not.

Data is so incredibly important to provide that fast feedback of again of how to know if what you're doing is resonating and working. And so we cut that back and really focused initially on digital marketing channels where we could control both the targeting and messaging and do a lot of agile, experimentation. And another thing that I really did early on was focus on the funnel, because if you suddenly do, really big top of funnel, and you're not prepared to flow those potential investors or users through the rest of the funnel to actually become revenue generating, that can create downstream issues. So we really focused on what is that experience that we want an investor to have with us from an initial cold exposure to then becoming an avid investor.

Part of that work on the funnel, it was really important, very early on to get to know the investor base directly. Many were located, thankfully in the greater New York area. So one thing that we did in the very early days was host regular happy hours to hear from these people, meet them, get to know them like, who were they? What did they like? What were they interested in? Why was this of interest to them? And was there a reality of the product market fit aligned with our hypothesis of the product market fit to really dig deeper into that and understand and make sure we were of course correcting and right setting continually along the way.

Delian: [00:13:06] Do you remember like a particular like conversation, with, one of these retail investors where it, significantly influenced either your sort of, framing of the product or, how you guys thought about, potentially offering new features and that, like [inaudible 00:14:24] a lot of times people talk about, not necessarily just, your customers, will say that they just want a faster horse rather than, ask me for a, asked me for a car. but I'd love to understand what was a, particularly, pivotal conversation where, maybe, they didn't necessarily suggest themselves, but you came to a realization of oh, here's what they really need based off this conversation?

Lindsey: [00:13:35] Yeah. I think that's a great question. And I can remember talking with one investor at one of the hours, where, they were expressing just general kind of frustration in not having full insight or control into their portfolio and what they were investing in. we deal with accredited investors who meet certain income and net worth requirements. And so a lot of our investors have investible capital and are, at a point where they want to see new and alternative ways to invest. And really just going through and talking with this investor to understand like what, their frustrations were within their current portfolio and, what they were looking to achieve. And that really helped me understand more about, our messaging.

Delian: [00:14:30] It makes sense. And you talked a little bit earlier where first joined in and decided to really narrow in on what was working. at what point did you feel like, what was that channel or what was that messaging that you like really, doubled down on? And at what point did it feel like, okay, this is, working, I can now consider, experimenting and adding new things or layering new things on top of this? what was that channel of messaging and when was that moment where you thought like you could add more, or more things on top?

Lindsey: [00:14:52] Yeah, for sure. So a lot of the messaging that we really focused on as core was the access angle, right? Because when someone has never had access to so- to this product before, we wanted to make it really clear that this was something new and interesting, that they... I know we're finally able to participate in, and that has worked well for us in vary iteration, various iterations for a while. that as well as the tangibility of the investments was really important from a messaging perspective.

If you think about it, we have the benefit of something like a real estate project where it's, let's say a building in Manhattan that's undergoing renovation from, rentals to condos. An investor can understand that tangibility, that these funds are fueling that construction and project. So we really tried to lean into that messaging, and that's worked for us for a long time.

And I would say something that, really indicated that we were making it so to speak in the early days was I remember we launched a investment that actually so many people came on to the website and crashed the website.

It's kinda like one of those typical traditional-like investment fails, oh sorry, website fails when all the interest kind of piles on. And really from that moment, we started selling out most of our investments in a matter of seconds or minutes, which was really exciting to see that we had started to hit this vein with investors where, the, this demand was soaring, that they really wanted what we offered.

I think a super exciting day for us as a team, because when I first started, we would celebrate, every sign up and then, to go from that, to seeing like a multimillion dollar offering sell on in two seconds, you're really starting okay, we have something here and we're onto something here, and let's really focus on how to rescale and make this as big as we possibly can.

Delian: [00:17:05] On the opposite side of the business from like the retail investors, I think a lot of platforms like yourself sometimes struggle with a little bit of a chicken and egg problem where it's like, how do you convince some of these, developers or, I'm not sure the, exactly the types of clients you guys are going to for sake of finding these types of projects. but I imagine balancing how many projects you bring on board and how much demand you have difficult early on. It sounds obviously start to get easier where you're like, you're selling these out in two seconds, which just means like they got plenty of demand, time to sort of stuff to supply, but what was that balance like early on before you maybe had that level of demand and how did you guys balance that?

Lindsey: [00:17:34] For any platform there's always a continual balance of that duality, and it's like a pendulum sometimes where early on, we were able to generate supply and it would maybe take us two or three weeks to fill an offering. And then over time, as we continue to focus on building investor base and building interest, that started to get shorter and shorter to the point where we had what we called a demand than available supply, and then the focus shifted to how do we, as you said, scale those supply channels to meet the growing interest from the investor base.

Delian: [00:18:17] Is that something that is actually also pretty product and, marketing driven, or is that more like an on the ground Salesforce that is the opposite side of, of the business that maybe, growth marketing isn't just involved in?

Lindsey: [00:18:28] So that's a great question. We do have a full investments team that has experience and, these various asset classes and underwriting and an origination team that functions like a sales team. But we do offer, and I have, B2B marketing resources that help them also think about that supply side funnel too, of how do we build these relationships with various, asset managers in the market.

Delian: [00:18:54] And so it sounds over the course of your autonomy, you'll treat, you've built up a variety of different functions, whether it's the B2B marketing or, the performance marketing or I'm sure variety of different functions, how did given that, I think before this, you hadn't really, built out, teams before, one, how did you learn to, interview and manage and for that team, and also how did you decide where to hire first and how did you thought about how to, how to scale up or when to scale the team over time?

Lindsey: [00:19:16] Yeah, that's a great question. And I think coming into a role like this, I had come from fairly data heavy cultures. And one thing I really leaned into early was, getting around the metrics. and I referenced before that we started a lot with digital marketing. So that was one of my first hires of someone who was really strong in that area where we were doubling down on. I also remember that I had a whiteboard that was near my desk that, I would update each week for the team, so they could see all of the important metrics for the company and how we were tracking week over week and over time, and really trying to set that tone.

I think even though, not having been in this direct area before, it's important to have a level of trust in yourself and your own intuition on from what you're doing and ideas you have and not being afraid to experiment with that, right? there's a difference between, action versus movement. And are you doing activities that you believe are actually going to move the needle versus those that are just ticking boxes or getting things done. But at the same time also communicating all of that, with, people within the company.

So I developed a strong relationship with the CEO and, he had a lot of experience in this area. So building sort of your team and an arsenal that you can bounce ideas off of is incredibly important. We had some, key advisors, who I met with across the company who had deep experience in branding and elsewhere. And then I think you had also talked about hiring. How do you think about hiring this early on?

One of the main things we have always focused on from the beginning and I think is important for any startup is passion for the product and interest in what you're actually trying to build. I've always found that those kinds of people have, a lot of creative ideas that they bring to the table and a lot of resolve to get things done. So that's really something that we looked for and, focused on throughout the company growth.

Delian: [00:21:34] It sounds like some of the teams that you've built up also have to, interface with other parts of the, organization pretty significantly, whether it's, formal optimizations, I'm sure that you're, working with sort of product engineering teams to, create features or change those. and it sounds like with B2B marketing, if you're working with the, investments team.

How do you think about partnering with, different parts of the organization and, how do how do you keep any sort of, brought in a few of you know, what's going on with everybody and you want to see their priorities and then also, keeping a, maniacal focus on your team, your KPIs? how do you think about those, cross team partnerships?

Lindsey: [00:22:05] This is super critical, and our team really sits at the center of a lot of projects and works cross collaborative, co- collaboratively constantly. and so I think developing strong relationships in the organization through doing things like having shared goals and shared information, so publishing, plans of what's coming up. I know we use Slack as an internal channel and other, documentation and so on of what's actually coming up and what's working and creating that kind of culture of transparency of what's happening team by team. So that there's an understanding of what is this overall goal that we're working towards and how can we get there together.

As well as in certain instances, looking for where there's potential for cross functional ownership and creating, like SWAT teams or tiger teams where you may have a smaller group across different teams that are all working together on a project. because we couldn't do what we do without products, without the investment team, without legal, right? Everybody needs to be working and walking in the same direction in order to make everything work.

Also from our executive team, we've always tried to do very regular and consistent quarterly meetings with the entire team publishing monthly overview emails that come from our CEO, et cetera, because it's important to rally everyone around that North star and make sure everyone is on the same page and really resisting any silos being created.

Delian: [00:23:46] It seems like one of the things that I've heard from a lot of different founders is in, this remote world is something a lot harder sometimes to keep that, alignment and mission and vision, in the like hearts and minds of everybody that's like working in the company as consistently is when, people were like in the same office or the things that you guys have adjusted during COVID around maybe, communications from the, CEO or the executive team, the cadence of those, the regularity, the length of those w- all hands, things like that, to help mitigate some of the downsides of the work from home, lifestyle?

Lindsey: [00:24:16] One of the first things I did with my team was establishing a daily stand up every morning. So that's everyone's first meeting of the day where we all hop on video kind of check in and talk through what's happening. And I think that's been really effective to anchor the day, give everyone a chance to be like, okay, let's come together, let's settle in and figure out how we move forward. From an executive team level, we established a weekly all hands every Friday and a sort of Q&A submission, where employees could submit questions that they had that would be addressed on a weekly basis. 

Delian: [00:24:57] And just as a point of reference, like how often were you guys, for example, doing all hands before COVID? Were they also weekly and you just move in to be remote, or did you actually increase the cadence?

Lindsey: [00:25:06] So prior they were, primarily quarterly. And then we move them to every week, especially through the height of COVID because, what I've really found is that like consistent, communication has been really helpful to make sure everyone's on the same page. We encouraged everyone to immediately hop on video calls, video chat, which really, I haven't seen too much of a interruption, if not improved productivity in certain areas of what we're doing.

Delian: [00:25:40] Makes sense. maybe flip the table a little bit of, imagine, somebody on this, that's listening to this podcast is, an early founder, maybe in a related, FinTech field, and they thinking about their first growth and marketing hire, like, how would advise that founder to go about like the interview process?

It definitely seems like it's one of those roles where, I tend to think about roles and it's value creating versus value protecting mindset and like value protecting roles. You want somebody who's done it before, cause you're, you don't, there's no reason to take any risks versus value creating roles. You in some ways don't want to hire somebody who's done it before because like they're probably not risk taking enough, like less risk taking people don't want to just do the same job that they've had before.

Growth and marketing is one of those where I feel like a lot of the most successful growth marketing executives don't have "like growth backgrounds." They're almost like we're doing completely unrelated things, maybe we're a little bit data driven and tumbled into it. And so how would you advise a founder even, go about making their, first hire or go about the search for that first sort of growth and marketing lead?

Lindsey: [00:26:31] Yeah, I think that's a great point. And honestly directly relates to my own experience, right? Like I had no finance background before I started in this role. And that was an advantage because coming as a outsider to an industry that we were trying to disrupt, I, my view, my worldview, wasn't limited by how things are done or what's been done before. And I think it allows someone to be a little bit more creative. So I think that potentially varies company by company, but that's certainly aligned with my own experience.

In giving advice of, how do you hire for this role is, especially early on, you need to find people who have a balance. And I think there needs to be the ability to have structure as well as creativity, because to your point, you want someone who's going to come up with ideas, but also needs to be able to like work on actually building and growing.

And so can they take a five year vision and synthesize that down into immediate execution? And I think that I've always been a fan, especially with, hires who are building out a new functional area or something, doing assignments or, exercises with those candidates of, giving them a problem. And how would you approach this problems so you can understand how they think and how they approach, what you may be asking them to do.

I think for any early stage hire as well, that person should be asking unending questions right? Around, who are the users? What is the product? What is the industry? to demonstrate that key interest in the mission of the company.

Delian: [00:28:19] Speaking of, talking about users, you mentioned early on that is super helpful, doing those, investor happy hours and spending some one-on-one time with the retail investors that are on the platform. is that something that you guys still find is like a valuable channel? even now as you've scaled up is, spending, time with customers or how do you balance still feeling, close to the, market and the customer while obviously now having a lot more responsibilities than you probably did four years ago when you were able to spend time on those happy hours?

Lindsey: [00:28:43] That was something we continued to do having, larger and larger events. it was interesting because a lot of them are limited to New York and something that actually came out of COVID was this year, we had planned to do a lot of branded events and experiential marketing that sort of immediately became, something we couldn't do. And so we pivoted to doing more of a webinar-based strategy where we could reach our investors directly across a number of topics.

So featuring different asset class heads in the business, or, other partners we work with to share that knowledge and more of an intimate setting with our investor base. and that's something that people have really taken to and responded to, and has given us a continued connection with the investor base, even when we can't meet with them in person, as in a way has actually extended our reach, because those are easy to make national.

Delian: [00:29:43] For these retail investors, like how do you balance? I assume there's a little bit of a trade off between making sure that you are spending as much as possible basically educating the investor and really making sure that they know what they're getting themselves into versus optimizing for just basically converting into AUM as soon as possible. How do you guys think about that balance? do you have pairing indicators or ways of making sure that you're not overly just forcing people through the funnel without being properly educated?

Lindsey: [00:30:05] That's a super important question and education is paramount and incredibly important. And I think we really want investors to be empowered to make their own decisions of what they want to invest in. So from the start we always, created and offered additional resources, around how to understand the investments we offer. So we have numerous articles, videos, other infographics, things that people can reference, to allow them to really consider and understand what it is that the products are.

This aligns with some trends that we've seen overall and in FinTech as well, where many people are moving towards taking back control of their own investments and portfolios, right? gone are the days where everyone has a financial advisor that they're just handing over the keys and being like, here, do what you want, right? Like with FinTech people, they want those apps, they want that control and are moving more to DIY.

We always felt that we offer a well beyond standard level of transparency around how things were, what's going on, educational support, that's all easily accessible to the investor base so they can, dive in and determine what's right for them. something we've talked about for a while is that this should be able to be explained to your mom or somebody who has no, experience in investing. And, that's something that, we focused on for a long time.

Delian: [00:31:52] I imagined during COVID, I don't, I'm not sure how you guys were, your portfolio team investments were hit, but, I imagine one of, the difficulties was educating investors on keeping a sort of like longterm perspective through a, short term crisis. were there, particular, activities, messages, events, content pieces that really, resonated the most with investors, or how did you guys go through that process?

Lindsey: [00:32:15] Yeah. So when COVID started, we created materials, relatively quickly that outlined what, our outlook on the market was across all of the areas that we're involved in and also trying to create content across asset classes that, so someone could understand what was COVID creating in [inaudible 00:35:39], what was it creating in real estate? And again, just trying to create that level of transparency and connection with the investor base, that they really could understand where we were at and what was happening.

Delian: [00:32:50] And how do you guys think about competition in the space. There's for sure other, let's say like investment platforms that focus on, non S&P 500 assets, cadre and the world of real estate, it feels like there's, a handful of others. How do you guys think about, the, the landscape of competition and, both, where you guys are. And do you think also in relation to that, do you think longterm that you guys want to expand into some of these other areas that maybe have some more established, companies there today?

Lindsey: [00:33:14] Yeah. So that's a great point as well. so there are other alternative platforms and we certainly do a lot of, competitive intelligence and keeping tabs of who exists. And what they're working on. FinTech has really blown up in the last four or five years where there's really numerous companies, that are coming into this space. probably our closest competitors do different real estate investments, but really my kind of, my philosophy around looking at this, especially from a growth standpoint, is not to limit yourself to a competitive set that's even in your industry.

And so something that we looked at a lot was like, what is the emotional connection and experience that we want to create with the investor base and who is best in class doing that broadly? So we looked at brands like Supreme, our office used to be in the NoHo area, and I would go out for lunch and see people lined up for blocks around the corner for a new Supreme launch that had happened.

And so whether those like kind of passionate brands that are driving culture doing, that are making people so excited about what they offer that they line up for four hours or, creating community. We also looked at companies like REI, where when you go into an REI outdoor store, they offer, gear and camping equipment, et cetera.

Every single associate that you interact with is extremely passionate about what they're doing and what that company offers and could talk to you forever about whatever section you're in, if you're going camping or hiking. And so how do we also create that level of expertise to our investor base across our asset classes, where YieldStreet is a place that it's a community, there's passion and there's expertise.

I think outside of the competitive set as well, can really open up a lot of opportunities and lanes for more creative approaches and thinking. that again goes back to some of your comments on that outsider perspective. I think it's, obviously, as a financial firm, we need to have the legal and underwriting expertise, but where we can, taking the risks is really important in order to stand out.

I call it the sea of sameness in a lot of industries where you see a lot of companies with similar language, similar approach. And it's incredibly important to think about like, how are we different and what is it that we offer that people can really get excited about?

Delian: [00:35:57] So given that, everybody that's, listening in on this call is almost certainly a retail, investor, what would be your, broad advice on how much should the retail investors listening in on this call, listening on this interview, split up their portfolio between, S&P 500 and in some of these, non traditional things, what's your, what's your default recommendation?

Lindsey: [00:36:13] Yeah. So I would view YieldStreet as, a part of someone's overall portfolio. I certainly would never recommend in the kind of key aspect of diversification that somebody invests all in one go. So really we see YieldStreet as opening another door, opening another room that allows you to invest in something new. And so I think people can consider this as a diversification option to their portfolio.

And, also more generally, even outside of investing can look at companies like us or other things that are happening and what are you accepting versus in control of? and that's really, an area to think about potential disruption opportunities to where like different industries that kind of are just status quo or same, what can be opened up to new audiences and new ways.

Delian: [00:37:12] Makes sense. I appreciate that advice. I definitely will, play around with YieldStreet and put it, put a little bit of the portfolio in there. thanks so much for coming on the podcast today Lindsey. really appreciated the time and, fascinating discussion.

Lindsey: [00:37:22] Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun, and great discussion. Happy to be here.

Delian: [00:37:33] Thanks for listening everyone. If you'd like to support the podcast, please sign up for a paid subsidized subscription, which we use to pay for transcripts mics and other improvements. If you have any comments or feedback on what kinds of questions I should ask, who should come on the show or anything else, please do let me know, have a great rest of your day.