Ep 171: Tim Vaino
Why you should start to plan how to manage your wealth years before you get rich + practical steps how to do it
Tim Vaino is the co-founder of FFF (Finance Freedom Fellows), an angel investment syndicate club that is now turning into a wealth management platform for the tech crowd. Along with co-founder Akim Arhipov, they are on a mission to help tech entrepreneurs and employees manage their wealth before and after selling their valuable equity. Tim is also an investment manager with Change Ventures.
On this episode we talk about:
Success of FFF so far
How to Get into the Best Early Stage Deals
Wealth Management for Tech Founders and Employees Before and After Liquidity
How FFF Investment Strategy has Evolved Over Time
Learning from Investing Mistakes
We are on YouTube and Linkedin as well
Watch select full-length episodes on our YouTube channel > https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP6ueaLnjS-CQfrMCm2EoTA
Connect with us on Linkedin > https://www.linkedin.com/company/pursuit-of-scrappiness/
Read the full episode transcript below
Uldis (00:03.738)
Hello, hello, hello, dear listeners. Welcome to another episode of the Pursuit of Scrappiness podcast. Whether you're building a business, running a team, or just starting out in your career, we are here to bring you scrappy and actionable insights to help you become more productive. My name is Uldis Teraudkalns and my co -host is Janis Zeps.
Janis (00:23.992)
Hey everyone.
Uldis (00:26.694)
So before we start, a quick reminder, click that subscribe button on Spotify, Apple Podcasts helps more than you know. And in exchange to that, you will get more than 170 episodes of ageless wisdom, scrappy insights and the shameless tactics to build your business into that unicorn that you set out to do in the first place. Or if you haven't started yet, give you all the inspiration to take the plunge. So click that subscribe, follow us and be first to know that we come
Tim (00:41.906)
It's a shame.
Uldis (00:56.652)
every Tuesday morning. About today's topic. equity options is a big and ever increasing reason why people choose to work in tech, especially since there have already been multiple exits and secondaries in the Baltics where those options have resulted in quite solid payday for the holders. Naturally, the founders are also not in it for the salary. Setting up an option scheme, check. Building a valuable company.
Tim (00:59.862)
Thank
Uldis (01:24.762)
hopefully check, selling those shares for that solid payday check, but what next? What to do with that money? Where to invest it? How to make sure it doesn't burn, but actually grow? Do you have the time and competence to be your own wealth manager? To answer these questions, we have invited Tim Vaino from FFF. Hi Tim.
Tim (01:47.177)
Yeah, good morning. maybe it's not morning for everybody, but hey everybody.
Uldis (01:54.094)
Well, it doesn't really matter morning, day, night, winter, summer, whenever you're going to be listening to this. So Tim is a co -founder of FFF, which stands for finance freedom fellows. But also known known as yeah, yeah, yeah. I noticed when I was prepping, I used the old word, old name, and then I realized that it might be folly, but I think FFF still works and FFF is an angel investment syndicate club.
that is also now turning into a wealth management platform for the tech crowd. So Tim is also an investment manager at Change Ventures. So very, very deeply entrenched in the ecosystem in many ways. So today we will talk about FFF and its angel investing journey and go more into depth about the topic of wealth planning pre -liquidity, post -liquidally.
management for tech founders and employees with the equity options. So let's jump into it. Tim, we last spoke, well, at least on record, we met at Tech Chill two years ago and FFF had just started. How would you characterize this journey and maybe you can share some numbers or other milestones along the way as two years this industry is like, know, like dog years
Let's call it light down.
Tim (03:19.667)
Yeah, well first of all, thanks for having me guys. Always a pleasure and yeah, indeed. When you sent the topics and I two years, I was like, is it really just two years? answering your question, how would I describe it? I would say it's very intense. mean, from zero to almost 400 members with a huge traction among the members. So from 360 people who are.
within the FFF there are 120 people who have invested with us. So the trust level and the conversion level of people is very high. We've done so many things within this time. We started as an angel community, then the market crashed. We realized that it's very difficult to invest deal by deal because we cannot diversify. We cannot create the needed deal flow of the fund, for example, or the portfolio of the funds to manage the kind of risks and
For example, some of the deals would die quickly because of the tricky financial situation. There would be huge impact on the trust level of me and Akim. And we decided, okay, but let's go a bit safer. So for the second year, we started doing secondaries and later stage deals. And this became a hustle in its own because in those kinds of deals, you need to fight for the allocation. You're a small angel community trying to get into deals of,
20 million, 50 million or whatnot with your small 500 or 1 million check and then you need to, you know, sell yourself, prove the value to the the founders and actually win the allocation. So we've won several of those and we lost several of those. But people kind of like it because what we deliver to the market is we delivered a bit of more stable opportunities on the market. If you compare it to the early stage when the market is down, we deliver something that is more
i'm safe to rest that they so we did some second is a beautiful companies locally which most likely will i kill soon so there's clear upside and less risk that companies will die out within the three conditions with its and i u s companies that we tried to have a try not only investing in and then the third year now that it's operating realize that it's not only about the best thing in that in the conduct of but also about managing well friends when you when you think about the
Tim (05:36.674)
when I think about the community, started receiving a lot of questions from the community saying, hey, in this situation, what would be the reasonable thing to do? then within the WhatsApp chats or now the threads within the product that I'll talk about later, we started having those conversations. So for us, it was a natural flow of starting very early and then going according to the marketing conditions and according to the evolution to later stages and then to the reaching this wealth management part.
where we are now. But briefly on numbers, it's 360 people on board. We've done 14 investments, about 10 million invested. We have sent out, keeping the structure, I think about 25 weekly updates where we brief our members and the audience about economical news, tech news, deals and so on. And after this, have now built a product which is fully functioning product.
users on board, subscription being sold and new direction being picked.
Uldis (06:41.47)
now I will have a challenge not to jump immediately into that product as it sounds so exciting, but a bit of patience. You mentioned challenges in getting in some of those deals and by the way, kudos for redefining what angel investing stage is. If you go into free IPO, that means that you basically
Tim (06:47.648)
Yeah.
Uldis (07:06.212)
wherever I spot a good deal doesn't matter the stage or the type we go in it. So great to see that. And I don't know, like are your investments public information? Like can you mention some case where you felt it's a huge challenge to get in and you managed to succeed and maybe why and how?
Tim (07:27.369)
Yeah, well, for example, think one of the hardest for us to get in was SILVE, who was fundraising last year. So they're an anti -fraudulent network for banking systems. And they were raising, I don't remember the exact amount, but it was 10 million plus rounds. And we were kind of interested in the founder. We were interested in the team and we were observing the team for about two years, hoping that they'll be fundraising. And then Akim personally, he was knocking on the door of the founder.
for two years, thinking, hey, are you already fundraising? Is there a way? Can we talk something? And once the fundraising begins, after kind of proving the point that we're actually capable of raising a bigger ticket, because they're not interested in getting 200K on board or 50K on board from an angels, what they're interested is to balance out the proportion of the round. So if there's a big VC coming and there's a fraction of allocation that they would kind of consider closing, then they could look
giving back part to the community and onboard local investors to give them an opportunity to participate in something bigger. But then again, it's also a matter of who are those investors who are coming on board because the round is big, the company is growing, so you need to actually do the validation and not let everybody in. So then it's kind of, hey, can we please get in? This is the value proposition that we will deliver. We have engaged investors who can open up their network if something is needed.
and then proving that, okay, these are the people who are participating, this is the value of this person and he's okay to participate because of this. So it's quite tricky and complex and long process to get into those deals and the fact that we're syndicating never makes it easy from the stance of KYC because you're letting in a syndicate but who's behind the syndicate. So it's a lot of kind of opening up who are the people.
where did they come from, why are they investing and so on and so on. So yeah, mean, it's tricky, but it's very interesting. And the comment that you mentioned redefined angel investment. I think we started from angel investments, but we quickly switched to just investor network, to be honest, because we quickly switched focus on not finding early stage opportunities that would fit small checks, but we switched the opportunity, we switched the focus
Tim (09:43.46)
uniting people to have this collective power to invest in cool opportunities focusing on ROI mostly. So we started thinking from one point that it's cool to plan those small tickets, but what is cooler to plan the tickets and actually in two or three years to get something out of this or, you know, not wait for those 12 years from the early stage companies. So this is, think, where the switch happens. And that's when we started looking at the investment side.
from a different perspective and the community also took it on board. So this is the most important. So there was validation that, I think you're in a good track, guys. Let's do this
Uldis (10:20.908)
That means that you were able to basically increase these ticket sizes from the community that you already had or you also had to expand the community significantly to be able to accommodate.
Tim (10:34.755)
How did the team?
But to be honest, think that the quality of the people that are within the FFF are what is kind of crucial. Even though we started as an angel of investment, when the bigger deal came on board, people started putting way bigger checks. mean, the minimum check for the FFF member was 10K. But for example, when the bigger deal started coming on board, people started investing 25, 50K, maybe even bigger. There were some 70K tickets. So the average ticket size went
because people saw good opportunities, so why would I put 10 if I believe in this opportunity and I have cash, I'll put 50. And this kind of drew the level higher and higher. But this again, only due to the fact that the level of the members of the FFF from the beginning was quite substantial, which helped us a lot.
Uldis (11:44.76)
Yeah, I wanted to ask about how your investment principles have evolved, but I guess we already discussed that it has evolved into going after the best return on investment opportunities and not kind of barrier yourself into this very narrow niche of early stage investing. Have there been any other adjustments or learnings?
Tim (12:06.018)
Well, I wouldn't say it's only about their ROI, but it's mostly about this. when we consider, for example, I gave you, it's not, we don't know if the liquidity will come in two years, but the product is so strong that we believe that one point this will be a success anyway. And there are so many signs already to back it up across the, because it's post Series A team, know, there are so many signs that can back it up, but this
Turn out to be a success and this is a solid team and solid product that we would like to get into this but from the evolution part I mean, I think one one Kind of way we started doing it more and more is to utilize the knowledge of the community when you have unicorn founders when you have top professionals in the community then the validation of the deal and creating investment memo for the deal and understanding the details of the deal becomes
way more easy because you can just open a WhatsApp and being your fellow member and saying, I have this opportunity, but I don't quite get this. Could you explain? And people would be like, yeah, I've built actually this company from scratch and I know the industry. So I will focus on this, this and this, look into this, this and this. And if you want, I can tell you about this, this and this. So for us, we learned to utilize this, which opened up the more easy, but at the same time, very quality packed due diligence methods or kind of validation method for the teams, which also
helped quite a lot to
Uldis (13:34.383)
And in terms of concerns maybe of those people that you're approaching to invest with FFF and now in the context of the new wealth management product, what have been the biggest concerns or challenges that... I should stop using the word challenges.
The biggest concerns of people basically to not start investing. What are the things that you need to convince people about the most?
Janis (14:07.787)
Do they even understand the product? Is it clear and stuff like that?
Tim (14:14.101)
When it comes to forming a syndicated investing, yeah, I on the local region, think, well, in Estonia, I would say that we're quite well known and people know what the FFF is and how do we operate. I think that in Lithuania, after spending some time and working on the brand there in parallel of the fund work that I was doing, it's known as well. I, so the concept is okay and people understand. What people are worried about is, first of
We're smaller normally than everybody else if we go for the bigger rounds. And then the first concern is, are those people going to get in the way if something needs to be decided because we become, you know, we signed the investment agreement, so we're actually investor on the same basis as everybody else. So people are concerned if we're going to get in the way with, you know, companies future, can we start, you know, discussing something that shouldn't be discussed or arguing something that shouldn't be argued about.
The second I would say that people are concerned what additional value can we bring. So if you hear somebody say that, the Angel Syndicate was to come on board, then first I think, why is that you're getting Angel, very small tickets, who are those people? Can they actually do something for me? But then when people start looking into the names that we can deliver on the cap table and they're very successful local people, then this kind of bias is being turned around and this kind of concern gets away.
And I think these are the... and if we can move fast. So this is kind of the third one. When you're fundraising, when you're putting the syndicate together, it might take time. But then again, with FFF, we've been quite fast in all of this. There has been some hiccups. There's always one guy on the vacation when you need to the documents and he's like, I'll be back soon. I kind of signed it now. And you're like, okay, we're going to wait for you. But generally speaking, we've been fast. So this is also a concern that I think we have proven wrong.
Uldis (16:08.612)
and the deals you haven't been able to win, what have been the main reasons, you being small,
Tim (16:15.243)
Yeah, I think one of the most painful stories is, I'm not allowed to mention the name of the company, but it was last summer when we managed to raise. So there was a very cool company. It was not the classical startup company, but there was a huge potential in the company. It was facilitated by KPMG who was running the deal. And we agreed that we potentially can have allocation
one mil to participate which is the smallest ticket and it was summer it was midsummer we just flew to US with the Kim to kind of gain some experience to learn from valley experts over there and then the guy said yeah green light basically you have one week to race and it was from scratch so the amount of creativeness we involved was insane in a weekend just over the weekend we managed to close around 650k from that mistaken
just on the phones, scrolling through all of the magazines, looking for people who understand the trend to approach them and ask them if they would like to participate in this. And then we basically put the money together, think it was 50k left or something like this from the full amount. And then we got a call from the facilitator saying, hey guys, sorry, but unfortunately there was a big fish who came on board, who closed the full tickets.
the founders didn't see a purpose or didn't see it fit for you to be a lit in the deal. So unfortunately we'll have to let it go at this point. And it was like, man, after all this, I mean, it's a learning curve. We were sad for a day or two, but then, know, California weather and a lot of cool Silicon Valley stories got us back on track. And now we're thinking of this.
in a way that we have proven the point to ourselves that if needed, so we can raise this amount with such limited time if the deal is good enough that we have the network, we have the know -how how to actually do this. So, taking positives out of this, but yeah, a bit bitter.
Janis (18:21.067)
It's a cool story that shows how it works also from the investor perspective. It's people when they raise money, of course, in the tunnel focused on just raising money. But I guess you guys also have challenges to get in those deals. And it's a good example to show how it can be sometimes.
Uldis (18:40.75)
And another potential business line for you is training investment scammers how to get a lot of money in a weekend with aggressive sales tactics.
Janis (18:48.319)
in one week. You have to get the course out. I'll teach you how to get one million in one week.
Tim (18:56.646)
Yeah, all those people who are doing courses, when I see somebody doing courses, I straight away get concerned. mean, go do it yourself, man. Earn this money that you promised.
Uldis (19:06.842)
Yeah, that's a good one. So let's go deeper into this whole wealth planning, wealth management. So what to start is pre -liquidity, right? You are holder of options, those options either are vested or are not vested. What should you think about as a founder, as an employee to prepare for that payday someday?
further down the road.
Tim (19:39.036)
Yeah, so just for the context maybe for the listeners, the way we switched the focus and the way we went this direction, speaking, came from the fact that Akim was actually managing one of the family offices in the US of the Unicon founder. And by doing this, we realized that despite the fact that there is differences in the wealth level of Unicon founder in the US and average user of the FFF,
The problems are pretty much the same anyway. So everybody needs to get tax optimization. Everybody needs to understand what to do with this. Everybody needs legal paperwork to be done correctly. Everybody needs taxation form to be filled. And then the issue is that, or the thing we discovered is that hyper wealthy individuals, they open family office and this solves their problems. So basically they spend a lot of cash and then all of the things get
But when you look at the average FFBET member, then the problems are the same, but the pockets are not as deep in most of the cases. So what these people do, they struggle a bit more and they're being underserved. So we started kind of drawing parallels. And then once the market crashed, the members started coming back to us asking questions, which are, we're related to the wealth management, like how do you rebalance portfolio? Have you guys looked into this? Do you have anybody suggest who can help me with this? And then we started thinking, okay, so if the issues are the same, maybe we can address those issues by kind of looking at the
looking at ourselves as being this family office, but not serving one family, but serving family of the FFF, generally speaking, and offer the services of actual service provider being the middle layer, being the middle layer in the middle. So here are the questions how this can be done, and here are the service providers who could solve this, and we will just be connecting and kind of adding value through the FFF to the members.
once we got deeper into this, the first idea was to build the digital family office for tech professionals, and this is the bigger picture still, but after spending some time with the local family offices and, you know, very big thank you to Sten and Talbot family office who kind of brought us down to earth by saying, hey guys, think of starting a bit narrow and pick one direction where to focus on and then grow the service offering. And the other kind of experts we addressed.
Tim (21:53.522)
I realized that the go -to for the Digital Family Office would be to start from the very basics, to start from pre -liquidity planning and what happens post -liquidity for the tech people. And why are we focused on tech people is the fact that we are tech people ourselves, we know tech people, we have been working with the tech people and we believe that tech people have certain patterns that make it easier to communicate compared to maybe some people who working
you classical companies are corporate who never were startups in the beginning. And I think that's when we picked this direction and I started validating so by today we've done I think about 30 different interviews, customer development interviews with C level people, with regular employees of the startups, with founders, with unicorn founders, with liquid people, with non liquid people, actually way more if you combine all of this, not 30 interviews more.
And what we started to realize is that we're hitting the spot because this concern of pre -liquidity and how to manage this is actually speaking volumes to the people. once we started an interview and we started asking, so how was your path? How did you plan the pre -liquidity? How did you start spending cash when it landed on the account? And what were the issues? People patronized had a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of similar problems that they were facing. So nobody understood.
What is the difference if I will take out the options on my personal name or through the holding company? Through the holding company you would save on taxation at least in the moment or it will give you more flexibility and you would save the personal liability. So nobody was thinking about this one for example Weiss liquid. We spoke with lot of people from Weiss and they kind of backed up the story that they were not ready when this happened because cashlines don't do the amount they were like hell okay so now I'm quite rich.
What should I do with this? And then you start improvising. Second of all, it's about the taxation. People didn't understand how taxes are being reported, how taxes need to be looked into, and what is expected from them as now cash holders in order to comply with all of the needed regulations. So this was the second one. And third one is the huge bias of people from starting to invest.
Tim (24:13.353)
in tech as expert angel investor from day one. So you have cash on the account. The first thing you do is you find 10 companies from tech, from the industry that you know, and you think I've built this, I've successfully built this. Now I can invest this as successfully. And then you start putting all of those 10k, 20k, 50 tickets to tech companies. And then when the market crashed like it did in 22nd, you end up with the position where you're like, crap, so am I going to get anything back from this or not? And you're not diversified enough.
So they're kind of similar patterns and we realized that by focusing on pre -liquidity and helping people who did not get to the liquidity just yet, this is the starting point of our product. And this is where we're focusing on because when liquidity hits you and you're not prepared, it's already too late. The inflation will kick in, the panic aspect will kick in and everything that comes along. So at the moment, we're focusing on making sure that our fellows from the tech industry who are not there yet,
are being served, are being educated and are being taken care of when it comes to planning for the liquid event that will most likely happen further down the road.
Uldis (25:24.9)
Is it geography bound somehow, your community and this product? Or is it, yeah.
Tim (25:31.269)
So at the moment, of course, we're focusing on Baltic States, home ground. I'm a strong believer in a sense that for this specific product, this is an outstanding region to go to the market with because we have so many unicorns. There are so many companies emerging. Look at Lithuania, what's going on. There will be tons of cash coming to the market. People will get liquid. Only after vintage IPO, it will create a huge impact to the market when it comes to liquidity cycle.
So I think that at first we're focusing on Estonia, lastly on Lithuania. And once we have proven the concept here and we have tweaked everything because we're just kind of in the beginning of this little baby, we are interested of course in going abroad because, sorry, not on board, but going abroad. Because there are a lot of cases that we see, for example, people are, I'm becoming a tax resident of Spain moving from Estonia. What do I need to understand in order to have a smooth transit and not fudge
everything that comes along. So the more we grow, the more we're going to expand. And ideally, I think that there's potential to be global.
Uldis (26:41.646)
Okay. And so pre liquidity is one thing. So what's next? How do you help people when they have sold those shares and now have some euros or dollars or Zloty?
Janis (27:04.54)
by the way like pre liquidity is such a term it's like you're not broke your pre liquid it's like should be used more
Uldis (27:12.61)
Yeah, I was also thinking you said, we have liquid people and we have non liquid people. I was like, should get a t -shirt or something, you know, non liquid or liquid.
Tim (27:19.905)
But actually, sounds maybe funny, but what we learned, so when we were spending time in the US, we validated the concept with JT Morgan guys. what we understood is that there's a huge... So the audience of old school wealth management, let's say old school, they're not actually old school, but more classical ones, and the tech industry, they speak in completely different language and nobody understands how to communicate.
Janis (27:19.991)
Ha ha.
Tim (27:49.597)
because when you speak with the GPMorgan guys, say, tech industry is very interesting. Like it's very interesting. We understand that there is tons of money, but what we don't understand is that this money is on paper and we cannot actually use it. We kind of get access to that. And we don't understand when is the moment when we actually get access to this. And then the tech industry basically say, yeah, we have money. It's not liquid, but it's not liquid for time being. It will get liquid. And because of the fact
also generation is not trying to attacking this they are not going back and attack those because they think that they're all school this big different language they don't understand how do i operate how the how do i get the money and then there becomes this you know small mismatch of actually services that benefit each other but they don't because they don't know how to get along and then we would like to be this you know middleman who's a translator for both of the sites we have audience and we have
We understand how the audience work. We can do the preparation work. So now the language is tuned and now the second audience who are interested in those are also being like, okay, so now we understand how it works. We understand what is happening. Where is the liquidity further down the road? Potential liquidity. Not everybody's getting it, let's be honest. But basically, and then we can be the middle man who are just connecting the dots and they are interested in us because we serve the audience and they are interested in us because we serve the service provider who are inaccessible. And this comes to the sweet spot.
But sorry, this was just a quick comment. You asked about what happens after the liquidity.
After a while they can
Uldis (29:25.572)
You buy an expensive car, you buy an expensive coffee maker, but I mean, how many expensive things can you buy?
Tim (29:32.271)
Yeah, so it's a cool story. of the,
One of the very known founders in Estonia told me the story that when the liquidity hits there's certain cycle. First of all, the cycle is, yay, have cash in the accounts, I made it. I'm going to buy an apartment, I'm going to buy a car, that's cool. And then you buy an apartment, you buy a car. And then in his case, it was rather big liquidity event as well. So you buy an apartment, you buy a car, and then you're like, okay.
Now what? And then during this time now what? The inflation kicks in, the funds are going smaller and you start thinking, okay, I definitely need to do something because it's not okay that inflation is eating up my assets. But then you start thinking, but I don't know what to do with this because I was working full time at my work. I was dedicating everything that I had towards the company that I was building. So I didn't have enough time to prepare what I will do with the money. Where should I allocate? What is the proportion?
what is the proportion of the portfolio that I should be constructing and what should be happening with this. And then you start going, asking around without fully understanding who to trust, who should be advising and what advice should be taken. And then you end up with the panic state when you are, okay, I need to make the decisions. But then you start doubting if the decision I will make now will be beneficial or it will be so bad that I would rather not take this decision and leave it as it is.
And it starts like playing with your brain, you start panicking, you start getting nervous, and then in the end of the day, you get up, you get together with your friends on Friday at the poker table, start discussing, and then you get to the conclusion that, I think this is the reasonable decision to do because two friends thought the same way, they had somewhat of experience, I'm gonna invest this portion in there. And then you start making this. But ideally what should be happening is,
Tim (31:30.07)
before you actually get this money, you should have good understanding of these are your options. These are the kind of baselines on the market. This is how portfolios are being built. This is how the riskification is being built. These are the asset classes that you could look into. These are the risk of those asset classes. These are the advantages of those asset classes. And these are the service provider who can give you access to those asset classes. So this is kind of in a nutshell what should be happening. So answering the question after.
And very important, I mean, I'm getting carried away, but very important, I'm talking about general case. Of course, there are a lot of people who have spent time and prepared for this and they had substantial portfolio even before this and they know what they will be doing straight after the liquidity kicked in. But unfortunately, as the interviews are showing and the validation is showing, the biggest part of the people in tech, they have not thought about it much.
Uldis (32:25.638)
Well, it takes a lot of time to gain that experience. think it takes a lot of time, effort, and you're building your company or being a senior executive, spending 120 % time building the company. When are you going to learn about portfolio management and why should you? And another thing is that you maybe have been spending last 10 years building some
Janis (32:26.26)
Even the practical things.
Uldis (32:53.946)
bank disruptor company and making slogans about don't trust the bankers and now you're going to give your money to a banker
Tim (33:02.634)
Yeah, but it's a very good point in a sense that with the help of the community that we have at the moment, what we give to the people who are now using the product is the comfort that you don't need to trust the banks per se. What we offer is if the person from, let's say Bolt, who's about to have an IPO within a year or two, is joining our product now, first thing he or she lands to is the community of people who already been there and already done there.
So they don't have to basically trust anybody apart from the fellow peers who have done this, who they know personally, who have worked in the tech companies and who can tell them their experience. So in this sense, we're not aiming to be painkiller as such to solve all of those problems. But what we're aiming to be is very strong vitamin to give all of the people knowledge, access, and potentially kind of direct opportunity to use.
all of the services, not us being those opportunities, trusted service providers, with the track records who have done this for years, who can back up everything that they're promising, but us being this entry level to you have this problem, here's the community, you can validate your thought with this guy because he has done this, or this lady because she has done this, and then if the next step is needed, then this is the service provider.
you can look into or this one or this one or this one. So we're kind of the ecosystem for those techies to get them in the beginning and then go further.
Janis (34:36.398)
This is something worth paying for if you're on the customer side. think just the pain of answering these practical questions. I mean, you might sit and fantasize about how you will spend your wealth in future, but one thing you don't do and nobody does is fantasize how she or he will deal with taxes in future before the problem actually occurs. I don't believe people spend a lot of time on this and it can be big thing to learn.
and even like these practical questions about how you will get taxed and different investments and capital gains in different countries and this identity or not. It seems like if somebody could take that problem away from me or help to solve it, that sounds like a service worth paying for for sure.
Tim (35:25.05)
Yeah. Well, we hope so, but it's also layered. mean, not everything is for money. The community. the first layer is completely free. So we're not charging anything for this. So land with the people, get to know people, ask your questions with the people, get access to the knowledge. And then the next steps where we are offering tools, this is where we start paying the adding subscription based pricing.
Uldis (35:49.678)
Okay. But can you talk about just some like features of the product? So what do I get? Okay, I get community, get advice, but you have an app or what do I see if I go on there or you will have or what's kind of the product like from the fingers perspective and eyes perspective?
Tim (36:13.935)
So yeah, today it is a web -based app which has been adopted to mobile version as well. It contains of three different levels. So first level is the community that I just described. So it is get access and then to get to know and get comfort with the product that we're offering. Second is the private market section, which is the first page of protection level. So within the private markets, we are offering people to invest
tech and private market as such through the syndicate system. we're in the process of acquiring the fund management license, which will make it a bit easier, a bit more transparent for people to invest in tech through the FFF or within FFF because we invest in every single deal as well. And as the third layer, the wealth layer, this is something that is now tailored specifically for know, Tiki family office future potential. So you get access to tax calculator.
You will understand what taxes, how much do you need to pay off from the equity that you have if it will become liquid on this price, that price, what is the proportion that you're getting, what is the logic based on this. You're getting access to pre -liquidity planning, so it is basically a list of things you need to be prepared for while thinking about liquidity with all of the connections to the professionals, so tax advisors, legal advisors who can assist you and who can help
in order to create the solid plan. You can also potentially list the secondaries that you have. So for example, you have bested and you have a right to share from your company, right to sell sorry from your company. So we have built a tool that will allow you to seamlessly make an offering to the rest of the community that you would like to sell those shares and get some liquidity even before the liquidity event of the company is kicking in.
And at the moment, the third feature that we're building out is managed portfolio services. So this is kind of opportunity. Why we started with this is we believe that through managed portfolio services, techies can allocate small portion of their assets to be managed by professionals on the public markets. And at the same time, we have built the front end.
Tim (38:30.408)
which allows people to have huge learning curve and educational process by observing how their money is being managed. So we're working with known providers from Estonia at the moment, Baltic states at the moment, financial advisors and wealth managers. So we're not offering the service ourselves. We're just building the connection and the front end to squeeze maximum data out of this. But for the future, we're thinking about going global. So we are talking with some US funds and wealth managers to
better access because we believe that access is one of the crucial parts here, the access cells and the access is something that people are lacking. So these are kind of three layers and three main features that we're building out now. They're all in process, to being finalized. But even without this, people are buying the subscriptions to kind of get access as soon as the access is being granted.
Uldis (39:27.312)
So basically then you will be able to see everything that is happening to your money, but then it's going to be actually managed by somebody else. as we are now recording this very soon after the big crash on the global stock markets and all financial markets,
Tim (39:36.978)
Professionals,
Uldis (39:52.902)
then maybe it will make you sleep better if you know that it's not the personal investment decision that you made that now has cost you minus 20 % is just the market and it's being managed and it's not your fault so you can go to sleep.
Tim (40:11.621)
This is a very actual comment in a sense that I hope the market will recover because I have some personal investments being done as well. But it's a very interesting point in a sense that with this volatility in the market, it's so easy to make those wrong decisions on the markets. And we believe that the timing at the moment is very good because everything was going down and I think it will go
But at one point when the product is ready and we're ready to unleash the potential, the shift will turn. I mean, it will start going upwards. We already see that there is more kind of action going in the VC space. We see some shares for the past three months, four months have been showing some good stuff before it went down again. So basically I think that first of all, the chance of making a mistake is higher because the volatility at the moment. So rather seek advice from the professionals in order to do something.
And second of all, I believe that when it will be turned around, we'll be in the best possible shape to accommodate all of the people who are looking to get this. with Managed Portfolio, I think that they would have foreseen more than the average user in order to rebalance the portfolio or mitigate the fault that has happened. Maybe not in the full manner, but still they were definitely better prepared because they're professionals.
to react to something that potentially could have happened and happened now yesterday or over the weekend from Friday or whatnot.
Uldis (41:41.482)
At least Warren Buffett seemed to know what's going to happen selling all those Apple shares right before. So yeah, maybe it caused it also partially. So now, obviously with this project, you were always kind of a partial investor and also a founder. But now building out this more product, more features, it I think resembles more and more being a founder.
than being an investor. So what difficulties do you see in building this product as a founder? I'm trying to avoid word challenges still. And more importantly, is there something that you have learned from the founders that you have invested in that helps you now build this product better?
Tim (42:36.916)
Well, yeah, definitely. mean, with all of the experience with working with change, with running the FFF from the investor side, I have definitely learned a lot from what founders feel, how founders feel, what founders do and how difficult it is. But I have never experienced this. And now it's the first time when I actually can say honestly that I understand how bloody difficult it is to build
to keep the focus, to maintain no matter what comments come your way, maintain the kind of vision, maintain the narrative, because you believe in it and there are signs that are proving that you should be believing in this. So I think that the main challenge is to make it super simple on the first stages, because as I said, free liquidity is just the first stage of the product and this is somewhere that we are starting with.
I think that it is a bit difficult to sell the global vision because it's quite big and substantial when you think about, you know, managed portfolio services and that you can allocate and start give professionals to manage your money. Next layer could be legal. So you can be, you can add legal module to the, to the product where people can get access to legal services, taxation, accounting, validation and whatnot.
So basically I think the biggest challenge, one of the biggest challenges is to sell the big vision, starting from very small and managing time because yeah, it's quite a lot going on in my life these days. So I think managing time and finding it for everything that is needed is tricky, especially when you have such a talented beast like Akim next to you whose work ethics are wow.
and you try to maintain the rhythm and kind of, you know, continue the pace. For me personally, sometimes tricky, but at the same time, if it wouldn't be for this, I think we would be way slower and less agile in what we're doing. So I think these are two of the biggest issues today.
Uldis (44:49.252)
Well, I think it's a perfect way how to wrap this conversation. Wishing you all the success. And I think it would be a derivative of the success of the whole community. Getting more liquid and being smart about it. So let's do this together. And thanks, Tim, for sharing. And listeners, you know where to go.
FFF .VC, right? Or what's the domain where they should go to subscribe for their liquid future?
Tim (45:25.091)
It was actually rebranded as well, so now it's fff .club. It's a very close community of cool people as a club.
Uldis (45:34.446)
Okay, well VC is going to redirect you to club, so you're safe. All right, thank you guys. And to the listeners, yeah, and to the listeners, don't forget to subscribe and hear the next episode as we come out every Tuesday morning. Thank you very much.
Tim (45:43.291)
Thanks a lot guys.
Janis (45:45.424)
Yeah, it was super exciting.
Janis (45:53.987)
We thank you. We wish you a lot of liquidity in the future. See you next week.
Tim (45:55.567)
Bye bye.
Please note that the transcript text is AI-generated. We apologize for any potential errors or inaccuracies. Thank you for your understanding.
