How do you build a network that delivers a preemptive $20M round?

Jason Kirby (00:53.142) Welcome to episode 26 of Fundraising Demystified. We're back with season two. And today we have Ryan Eisenman, co-founder and CEO of Arch, a platform that helps investors manage their private market investments. They've recently closed a $20 million Series A raising a total of $25 million. Ryan walks us through the difference between public and private market investing, how it led him to starting the company, and he shares how he launched in 2018 with just a pre-seed of 500K. and didn't raise their seed round until 2021 when they got some traction and we're at a really tight fundraising process. Ryan shares some amazing insights and he's incredibly humble as he enlightens us with his successful processes. And as a reminder, to get notified of our weekly podcasts and newsletters, be sure to subscribe at join.thunder.vc. Now on with the show. Thanks for joining us, Ryan. Ryan Eisenman (00:09.206) Jason, thanks for having me. Really appreciate the chance to be here. Jason Kirby (00:11.922) Now I'm excited to have you and we've gotten to know each other a little bit over the last year or two, and what you're doing at Arch, but I think it'd be great for the audience to know a little bit more about you and what you're doing at Arch. Can you give the audience some background? Ryan Eisenman (00:24.51) Yeah, absolutely. We're building software that helps investors manage their investments, but very specifically focused on private market investments. The reason we're focused on private market investments is twofold. One, more people are investing in private market investments today than at any point in the past. There's more of an interest in venture, private equity, hedge funds, real estate, credit funds, all sorts of other strategies than ever before. So this market is getting bigger and the tools haven't kept pace. And the second big reason is if you invest in public market investments, you don't need us because there's a lot of really good solutions for managing your investments. You can log into a Fidelity account or a Morgan Stanley account and see all your investments in one place. But if you invest in private markets, your information might be spread all across the internet and different funds and fund portals. And we do the unsexy, unglamorous work of aggregating those documents and that data. and then we're displaying it in a central single portal for you so that you can understand everything that you own and how those investments are performing and make informed decisions. Jason Kirby (01:33.714) I know it's a value because I deal with the opposite side of this where as a LP and a few funds and having them not use this technology and not using it myself, it is painful to kind of get the quarterly reports that are often like the previous quarter's performance and like. trying to read these documents and like they're 45 pages and you're just like, just tell me how things are going in summary format. So, you know, I can definitely feel the pain from a very small scale, but you know, for the larger family offices and institutional investors that are leveraging you guys, I imagine it's a very nice to have functionality. So I guess kind of walk us through, how did you get to this point? Why did you start Arch? You know, we kind of get a little bit about what you're doing, but why did you start it? And what was that journey like? Ryan Eisenman (02:19.206) Yeah, my dad was a financial advisor, so I saw a lot of these problems with him and his clients. And I just kind of felt that there was a big delta between what existed in the world and what should exist. And part of the catalyst was I met my two co-founders, Jason and Joel. They were a private investor who had a lot of these problems. He'd sold a company to Facebook, was doing a lot of LP investing, and was metaphorically pulling his hair out, trying to track down K1 tax documents. understand what he owned and what capital calls and distributions would come in and out. And we realized that this is one extremely taxing for the individual and the firm that supports those individuals. And now investment advisors are our biggest client segment. So for investment advisors supporting clients, you might staff whole back office teams. And this is like a huge operational cost of doing business to manage these kinds of investments. And as this market continues to expand, this becomes unsustainable for a lot of individuals and firms and actually keeps people from investing in great venture funds or great other investments. And so there's one part of this, which is we can solve a lot of people's pain, give them better quality of life, and then out of that, provide better data to make more informed decisions. And so that's now the journey that we're on. Jason Kirby (03:43.471) That's great. And then, I guess, what was the early days like? You just recently raised a Series A, pretty sizable, especially everyone's talking about doom and gloom in this market, but here you are, having some success. But you've been working on this for about six years. What's that journey been like? What was it like in the early days? How did you get that first initial capital? And I'd love to kind of unpack your overall fundraising journey from there. Ryan Eisenman (04:07.462) Yeah, we're on the quest to be an overnight success, but 20 years in the making. Uh, so we're six years into that quest, uh, essentially early days, three co-founders, one advisor, and then a venture fund that put a small amount of capital, uh, about $500,000 into the business in early 2018. And then we operated off of that for the first three years, really leanly. trying to sell products to clients, gave it away for free at the beginning to get clients on and to understand like, what do you need to use in order to be successful here? And so we took a highly iterative approach of let's be really lean, try to find a way to product market fit, and then only start investing in the business when the business starts to take off. For us, that initial inflection point was the tail end of 2020 and into 2021. When we started to have clients actually pay for arch to the point where we could start to really take on employees and pay employee salaries out of revenue, which was an exciting kind of initial milestone. So then at that point, we raised $5 million from Calf Ventures and a few others to take our company to the next level and invest in a little bit of sales and marketing, but especially into product and also the client servicing aspect of what we do. Jason Kirby (05:28.431) And so, you know, it took you about two or three years to start monetizing. You know, what kind of scale were you guys at when you started monetizing and you raised that initial five million? Ryan Eisenman (05:37.75) Let's say we had, call it like 15 to 20 real customers who are paying us 150 or so thousand dollars a year in ARR, and total. And they had collectively about a billion in assets on the platform, but we were growing double digits month over month, starting to see a little bit more repeatability in our sales cycle, and could now start to predictively forecast, here's how we can. Jason Kirby (05:46.166) Total or each? Okay. Ryan Eisenman (06:06.926) grow from a couple hundred thousand dollars to the million plus range of revenue. And so that's when we were able to go out with a clear vision, hey, things are working, we have traction, we're a really smart team, this market's big and there's a lot we can do to capture this market and found some great VCs that believed in us then and are still partners to today. Jason Kirby (06:31.734) How'd you find those VCs? How difficult was it to get in front of the right VCs that ended up pulling the trigger? Ryan Eisenman (06:38.082) It took a little bit of hustle. Essentially the way we did it, which is what we recommend to other people that are looking to raise, is find the right kind of warm introductions to VCs at the right moment. Everyone is, whether you're a venture capitalist or you're a startup founder or you're an employee at a startup or you are in a totally different industry, you have a limited amount of time that you can allocate to things. And so you're trying to very quickly decide. what signal, what's noise? Is this a good introduction? Is it about introduction? So a lot of times like the ways that you're routed through relationships matters. And so we found people that we trusted and that we knew investors trusted, got them on board with what we were doing and they were able to make warm introductions and kind of just worked our network outward from there until we found our way to the right people that we're gonna invest. We were initially gonna raise a smaller round and weren't going to bring on the lead investor that we took on in our seed round. And, but then we met them, everything clicked on both sides. They convinced us to raise more and to create a little bit more space for them. So that kind of changed the dynamic of that round and probably changed a lot of the trajectory of our company. Jason Kirby (07:56.79) good problem to have when people are asking you to carve out a little bit more space and hopefully giving you fair terms. This was 2021 when you guys closed this. Ryan Eisenman (08:05.566) Yep, exactly. We went out at the very beginning of 2021. Jason Kirby (08:08.994) Good timing. And then, you kind of talked about the process, but how long, like how much time did you spend on this? And what kind of volume were you dealing with in terms of identifying who to get intros through and getting those intros and the meetings and getting those meetings like timeline, volume, what was that like? Ryan Eisenman (08:10.562) What was good timing, good market. Ryan Eisenman (08:30.506) Yeah, we sprinted when we raised. So it's like, you're not raised, you're not raised, you're not raising, and as soon as you're raising, you're raising. And so we were having sometimes 16 conversations a day, in 30 minute increments, back to back, was kind of, this was in the heat of COVID. So all I was doing was pitching VCs on Zoom, eating healthy food, exercising, sleeping, repeat. It was a very fun period of time. And then each conversation led to a yes, a no, or a customer. And I'm not sure which one I like more between a yes and a customer. As a customer obsessed person, we love any opportunity to solve people's problems in this area. So it was a really fun side product of what we were doing and of the pitch process. that our business grew alongside this. And it was like a great chance to connect with a lot of other people and grow the business in parallel. Jason Kirby (09:36.578) So how many VCs or investors do you think you ended up speaking with? Ryan Eisenman (09:40.979) probably a couple hundred. Jason Kirby (09:43.382) And for you, it makes a ton of sense, because like you said, some could convert to customers. So you turn a no investment into a customer, which I would say is a great use of time. What's kind of the pushback when it came to just like flat out nose or, you know, what do you think led to the nose? What were people hung up against? Ryan Eisenman (10:03.286) Well, there's a lot of things that people are looking for when they're an investor. Some investors have very specific thesis focused. So they can be focused on a different part of the financial services ecosystem. They might be focused on companies with more traction, companies with less traction. So a lot of it is finding the right people at the right stage. And then there's that narrow set of people who are the right investors for you and figure out who is like, or at least their focus is correct, and then figure out who the right investor is. And so there are a lot of people that we talk to that like, this is really interesting what you're doing. We have a problem. We understand the problem. We invest later on, but we'd love to love the opportunity to develop a relationship over the next few years and potentially be in touch in the future. And so we'll always take those kinds of opportunities to build long term relationships with the right folks. And also, we found this to be true since the beginning of the company. that oftentimes you might end up with someone that doesn't become a customer, but then they're a massive advocate for you out in the ecosystem. And so there's like one like pre-seed fund that invests earlier than we were at the time, but then they introduced us to 10 customers. So those are outlier cases, but those are kind of amazing things that happen. But then it's kind of like there's this magic game of karma in the, I think especially... venture and startup ecosystem, where even if you don't do business together, if you treat each other well during the process, oftentimes there's ways that like, people can help each other down the road. We've sent other friends who are raising and other companies are raising to some of the VCs that we haven't had a chance to work with yet. And so we're excited about like the chance to contribute and support the broader tech ecosystem. Jason Kirby (11:56.726) So that's something we don't hear much on this podcast, is kind of the pay it forward, or just the continuous revolving of connections and sharing those opportunities, and kind of the karma element. So, appreciate you kind of sharing that point, and I would say that's a good tidbit for any founder to take into consideration and kind of sharing those connections with others. But also something that came up as you were talking, when coming to these investors, meeting them with them and trying to, you know, they kind of tell you like, oh, we invest later. Well, later just happened. You just raised your Series A. Did any of those actually come to fruition or did you kind of have to go out and get new capital introductions for your Series A? Ryan Eisenman (12:40.99) Yeah, there were definitely people that we talked to during our seed process and in between that as soon as we were raising our Series A, we went back to some of those conversations. And some of them are, you need to think about like who ended up coming into this round versus who made introductions or who wasn't relevant. But it's kind of like everything compounds on everything else. And so the work that we did then and the work we did in between and the relationship building that we've done as a company. makes each round a little bit easier. And then also we know a lot more now than we did two years ago even, in how to navigate these processes and then like who are the right types of fits in terms of investors for us. Jason Kirby (13:25.686) And how much did you end up raising in this round? 20. And kind of what was the inflection point of the business that kind of said, you know, we're product focus, heads down building company. Now's the time to go out and get the series A and a sizable series A, especially in this, in the current market. Ryan Eisenman (13:27.694) I've re-raised 20. Ryan Eisenman (13:44.934) Yeah, a lot of things were going well and a lot of things were working. Team had grown, but team had grown in response to customers and customer traction. And then we'd started to go out market into more B2B sales, bigger ACVs, bigger contract values. And so that's something that I think some VCs really look for is like, can you show your ability to penetrate middle market or enterprise type of clients? We'd also signed our first true enterprise client, which is a bull truck at US Bank. And, and so that was a good data point for us. And it started to build our like sales team and go to market team outside of myself, uh, where I was our initial operations person when we first started doing the back office work and then started focusing exclusively on sales. It was our like initial full first salesperson. Then we brought on a great first AE. And so we'd shown the ability to transition some of these processes to people that can come in and truly be like extensions and owners in the business. And so then that's something I think a lot of investors look for is how can you show repeatability of sales and repeatability of just like the other parts of your business and scalability. And then had started to innovate pretty significantly on the product side in a way that I think shows a lot of what's to come for the business overall. Jason Kirby (15:05.622) And, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think when I was first introduced to you guys, I think it was maybe a little bit after the seed, and you guys, you know, had a very manual process. I believe back then, I guess now with all the generated AI solutions, like, is it now predominantly automated? I guess what, what kind of innovations have you guys made on the product side? Ryan Eisenman (15:27.126) Yeah, predominantly automated. The focus for us as a company was to first, and this fits our iterative nature, first really understand all the processes that we are looking to influence and that we're looking to automate first, and understand them at the same fundamental level as our customers by doing them manually and by being in their seat. And then after figuring out, okay, this is how you get a K1 end-to-end from Sequoia Capital to the accountant supporting our clients. Then you can figure out all the process steps that you wanna automate along that path and what are kind of like, what's the ordering of things you wanna build? And we are certainly not done in terms of what we want to build in the future. Part of the vision and part of the vision that we've unlocked in the last couple of months is as long as there's a human in the loop for managing an alternative and an alternative private investment. And a human in the loop could be as simple as like someone that needs to confirm. that a wire should go out or someone that needs to set up a wire or someone that needs to download data off of a K1 and put it into an accounting system, then we're not done with our mission. And so there's a lot more that we want to build in order to make our client's lives easier and our client service providers lives easier as well. Jason Kirby (16:42.37) That's impressive. And I think, and that's, you know, a standard criteria I see amongst a lot of VCs is wanting to back founders that are so meticulously product focused and like customer centric, which I think you're doing a great job of depicting here. For fun, what were some of the difficult parts? What were some of the hurdles that you had to overcome either in the fundraise process or building the business that, you know, either catch you up at night or were some of the more difficult challenges that you faced in this journey so far? Ryan Eisenman (16:56.642) Thank you. Ryan Eisenman (17:10.91) Yeah, well, in this most recent process, we weren't yet raising when we raised. And we were thinking about raising, we're thinking, okay, now's a good time. We've had some good inflection moments that we should start to craft our story and talk to investors and do the whole thing. We ended up getting a couple of preemptive offers and that kicked off our process real quick because an offer expires if it is not taken quickly. And so. That was a scramble to pull a deck together, pull resources together, pitch people, talk to people, figure out what we want to do, understand how much do we want to sell of the business and how much we want to raise and ultimately worked. But it was a bit of a scramble and it was three weeks of very little sleep and a lot of soul searching. But we also love that process because I think every time you get the chance to just nonstop pitch. venture capitalists and pitch investors, you learn a lot. And like we've learned a ton through these processes because everyone has their own unique angle and unique thought around like what your business today can do in the future. And so in each conversation, you're learning a little bit more of like, okay, what should the next steps be? What does this business look like at scale? If we're at scale, what can we do? And what can we build that's really interesting? And what's resonating with this market of customers and this market of investors and kind of how. does the current market of what's happening in the broader financial services world affect how people perceive the business? So that was an exciting kind of side effect of the process of this time and in the past. Jason Kirby (18:48.734) And so in this particular situation, you get preemptive offers. Basically VCs have been monitoring you, billing, but do you imagine you're probably sending out monthly or quarterly investor updates or keeping people updated? Ryan Eisenman (19:00.802) Uh, semi-quarterly. Uh, it's one of our goals to be a little bit more consistent with it. Jason Kirby (19:05.77) Okay. But you know, still keep keeping tabs on what's going on. So people had the ability to kind of keep track of what you guys are up to. Did you take any of those preemptive offers that kind of kicked off the process or did you shop around and get better terms, better offers? Ryan Eisenman (19:08.297) Mm-hmm. Ryan Eisenman (19:21.758) One of the primitive offers was this group of kind of client investors. It's folks that have been successful in their first career or in their second or third career as investors and as operators. And they kind of actually like kicked off our overall fundraising process. One person of this group was part of a pilot program at a really large bank, really liked what we were doing, talked to this other broader group. some of which we'd known for a while and were some of the first calls we made when we were building software in this space. And then they collectively came together and were like, hey, what would happen if we became customers, in parallel we invest, and then we're able to help you build some of the things that we think should exist in the world. And they are an awesome group to work with. We've really enjoyed the collaboration, the partnership so far. And so they came in as part of the round. Jason Kirby (20:17.946) Awesome. So they came in as a preemptive offer and won the opportunity to invest. But I imagine you kind of that process got kicked off by them and they were still able to get in because sometimes preemptive offers come in, but they're usually kind of not as aggressive, you know, not as good terms, maybe a little bit more aggressive because they're coming in to kind of maybe before you go to market and shop, but it sounds like it all worked out. And when you went out and kind of shopped the process. Ryan Eisenman (20:31.681) Mm-hmm. Jason Kirby (20:47.902) When you're taking these meetings, who's setting up the follow-up? And what's the speed of the follow-up when you're running a process like this? Between you and the VC, what's that communication like? What's the share of data in terms of data room and access? What was that experience like? Ryan Eisenman (21:05.126) Yeah. One thing we've realized is if someone can give you a maybe, a maybe is an amazing place to live. It's actually a terrible place to live. If you live your life in terms of maybes, you'll probably be deeply unhappy. But as someone that's trying to maximize upside and control for downside, the more you can collect data, the better. So if you have a free option to invest in a company or to invest in anything, you'll wait until the end of that. Jason Kirby (21:17.942) That's good science, that's all. Ryan Eisenman (21:32.69) options exploration before you actually decide whether to pull the trigger or not. And so I think it's really important when you're raising to get to know us quickly, to understand, okay, are you a fit for us or not? And have a mutual understanding as part of your process, like, hey, this train is leaving the station, we're raising this round. We'd love to understand if you're the right partner for us. And if we're not, no worries. And we can find other ways to potentially collaborate down the road. But I think that's one of the important things of just making sure that things are decisive so then you also don't spin your wheels on people that aren't gonna get there. Jason Kirby (22:10.682) And then there's like 30 minute meetings and I think you're getting to that point by the end of the meeting with just about everyone of like a yes, no, or maybe. Ryan Eisenman (22:17.918) I think at the end of a 30 minute meeting, you kind of have a pretty good idea of like, hey, is there interest? Is there a desire to follow up? Does the firm want to dig in, do work, understand some of your metrics and multiples and how the business is performing? And then at that point, you share more data, they dive into the data, maybe they come back with questions. And then you figure out like what additional data you need to pull together to get people to a level of yes or no. Jason Kirby (22:43.946) And as you're managing that process, I'm curious to kind of hear from, you know, the signal that you're kind of seeing on their side, if they're on the maybe or the yes side, you know, did you see them dragging their feet? Were they like super responsive? And it's like, you know, every day communicating. What was it kind of the frequency of the, the back and forth in that experience? Ryan Eisenman (23:03.878) Some, like when people were really digging in, it could be like daily questions, daily touch points, and opportunities to learn more about them and opportunities for them to learn more about you. It's important not to forget that it's a mutual process where you want to figure out who the right partner is for your business as much as you want to figure out who wants to invest in your business. And so that was a big part of this also. doing reference checks, understanding brand, understanding what firms can do, understanding how they'll be as a participant of your board if they're gonna join your board. So kind of like all those different components I think really matter. Jason Kirby (23:40.018) And how did you do that process? How did you keep track of, you know, one from a tool perspective, if you used any, that'd be great to share for founders to know there's any tools or CRMs that you used. But also, how did you go about doing the reference checks and kind of validating, you know, if this is someone that you want on your cap table or board. Ryan Eisenman (23:58.986) Just trusted people in the industry. So asking friends who've worked with these firms before know different firms of like, hey, what's their reputation? How have they treated companies in the past? Also people will be pretty candid as well. And you can learn a lot just like in conversations with folks around like what they think their superpower is and where they can really help companies succeed. Jason Kirby (24:22.966) So the common theme I'm hearing here, you know, coming from the warm intros and the connections that you've built, being able to kind of trust your network to kind of give you this feedback. How'd you go about building this, this kind of robust network to have these opportunities and be able to move so quickly? Ryan Eisenman (24:37.55) I think a lot of it's just consistency, which is like, and kind of to an earlier point around, if you invest in other people, they'll invest back in you. We love the opportunity to help people make introductions in their lives, like when other friends are raising or when friends in the venture community are looking to meet companies, the more that like we can stay top of mind and provide value to others. It just like helps us in some ways be top of mind. And then I think that's like how you oftentimes build strong relationships here is by building the community, hosting events, bringing people together, and then you have people that then start to get to know you and know how you operate, and then you can do a lot more together. We've long felt that there are a lot of opportunities where you can open a door for someone much easier than they can open the door for themselves and vice versa. And so I think a lot of progress and... whether it's in the tech world or another part of the world, happens collaboratively when you can help people with some of their goals and then they can help you with some of yours. Jason Kirby (25:45.242) You've been working on ARCH for about six years, but this is your first company that you founded? Ryan Eisenman (25:51.542) Besides a car wash business, yes, first company. And a lemonade stand. Jason Kirby (25:55.911) Nice. And so, was all this kind of community building, relationship building, was that all kind of once you started the company or were you doing that kind of stuff when you're kind of early in your career or back in college? Ryan Eisenman (26:11.066) I think it's been like part of what I just generally enjoy doing for a long time. Like used to host different kinds of dinners for friends or hosted a tech conference for a couple of years as part of this like business and technology fellowship in Israel. And so there are different components of a piece of this that I was doing before just because I really love bringing people together and connecting dots, which I think is like a lot of what entrepreneurship is, it's like seeing where one plus one equals three, where there's opportunity by two people meeting each other or a person finding an opportunity. And so that's something we wanna continue to do more of. Jason Kirby (26:49.895) So that's great. That's a phenomenal way to kind of inspire founders to really focus on building those communities and those relationships earlier because the ones that struggle to raise are the ones that are often kind of more secluded and have less of a broad network that they've had value to over the years. And then, you know, from here, you know, kind of what's next for arch where do you see the future going. Ryan Eisenman (27:13.166) We are just getting started and we want to say that again in two years. I'm going to say that again in five years. We think that there is a lot to build here and there are a lot of customers that we don't know yet and don't know us yet. And so we're really excited to have Fresh Capital, a team that is excited and trained and ready to go to build more product, to serve more clients, to automate more and build things that people haven't seen before. And we kind of think about this as like our Maslow's hierarchy of sorts. If you know the concept of Maslow's hierarchy is at the baseline, we want to save people a lot of time, and then we want to give them really clean, usable data by structuring these processes and then help people with insights, decisions, actions, and outcomes. And I think we're just getting started on some of the top of the pyramid items. I think it can be a bigger part of our story in the future. But there's a lot of things that are painful today that don't need to. that we can continue to automate. Jason Kirby (28:11.898) I think for, you know, just kind of giving you, you know, the private markets is massive and giving you your exposure to it. I always like to kind of paint the picture, you know, in startups, founders, VCs, we all kind of think our little world is so big and like venture capital looks awesome. It's like this tiny little slither of the financial markets and the private markets. I guess kind of like what's your insight in terms of the fact that you guys are working with. Ryan Eisenman (28:17.783) Yeah. Ryan Eisenman (28:26.615) Yeah. Jason Kirby (28:37.182) capital allocators and managers across all asset classes. Kind of what's been your exposure to kind of how venture compares to the other asset classes that are out there. Ryan Eisenman (28:49.19) Well, Vintra is smaller than a lot of the other asset classes, like smaller than real estate, smaller than private equity. I believe even smaller than credit and hedge funds as well, but don't quote me on that. May even not be true. But it's an important part and it's growing and oftentimes companies that start as Vintra companies need private credit and become private equity backed companies and purchase real estate. So everything is like really interconnected. I think one of the big shifts though is like... Jason Kirby (28:59.632) Yeah, it is. Ryan Eisenman (29:18.362) a company or saying private longer, there's more ways that people are allocating capital through alternative managers rather than through the stock market. And so you have like a lot of new interesting nuances around like what types of structures are available and how you can allocate capital to private markets. And then a lot of this is coming down to retail plus instead of just being the largest endowment foundations and pension funds of the world. You can now go invest in. different types of alternative assets. And this gets interesting also where people aren't just saying like, don't confine me just to my mom and pops private equity. I want to invest in baseball cards and music catalogs and other types of more esoteric alternative assets. And so that one makes it more interesting for some folks, but two unlocks lots of other asset classes that are open, even in our industry. So we serve investment advisors pretty as our biggest client segment. There's this massive shift in liquidity in the advisory space where private equity managers are coming in and buying either minority or majority ownership in investment advisory firms. Where these used to be small businesses that were run by sole proprietors or they were part of JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. Now you want to have like this ability for lots of businesses to operate independently. And their cap stack is part of what private equity will invest in. And I think you have that trend happening across lots of other industries. And so part of this could also pair well with like, okay, you have a lot more of an ability to be an internet seller and run a business on Shopify or be a sole proprietor in another vertical because there are tools like ours and other tools that are made available to allow people to run. their operations and their billing and their trading and their reporting and the other things that are key to businesses, whether it's within our sector or outside of their sector, without needing the infrastructure of a Fortune 500 firm. Jason Kirby (31:29.75) That's well said and that was something I was not aware of in terms of the consolidation and the financial advisor space. I think that's pretty interesting. I'm sure I have a couple of friends that would be interested in learning that, that run their own financial advisory businesses. I guess from like a capital allocation perspective, I think there's a lot of founders out there that feel like there's this talk of dry powder out there that they're not seeing it. In reality, in my opinion, it's... just being drawn out over a longer period of time, as opposed to being rapidly deployed like we saw with the last couple of years. But I guess, how are you seeing the shift in terms of capital allocation amongst the LP side of your customer base or financial advisor side? Ryan Eisenman (32:10.75) Yeah, well, I think it's just it's becoming much more accessible to a lot of folks. And you have businesses like Case and iCapital, which some of your listeners may be familiar with and some may not. And their entire business model is predicated on helping people that don't yet have alternative investments or have a few buy more. They have an education component and a lot of what they do is make funds that normally would take a five or fifty million dollar. commitment from an investor and they split it into even like two to five to 10 to $20,000 chunks. So it's available to more people. So there's that part, which is like democratization of alts is a big theme that a lot of people hit on. And so as that happens, and there are 30, 40, 50 businesses in that space, if not hundreds that are doing different, or that have different angles on how you... bring more alternative asset opportunities to different kinds of investors. There is this overall problem that this is part of the problem that we solve is consolidating all the information into a single workflow and a single view. So that's one trend that we see that we think is pretty interesting. And then the data here is getting a lot better, where I think there is a clear need to, if more of your assets are in private markets, understand what does it mean? How are they performing? Are there opportunities for liquidity? Should I make decisions based off of this? And I think that will evolve and change pretty significantly in the next 6 to 12 months. Jason Kirby (33:48.098) I think that's well said. And I think, yeah, because of tools like yours and other just optimizations, as you mentioned, the barrier to get into private markets has reduced so much. Whereas it just wasn't worth a financial advisor's time to take on a client putting in small checks because of the backend paperwork and management that was required. But now because of this and just other platforms that are out there, it makes it a lot more accessible. So that's great to hear. And for... Ryan Eisenman (33:59.18) Yeah. Jason Kirby (34:15.63) But I find it interesting, you know, we'll see kind of how private more exposure to private markets turns out over the next several years and if those kind of legacy returns continue to perform and deliver for the broader investor base that comes in. So personally curious to kind of see how that shapes up because I definitely have some allocation and privates and definitely want them to go up and to the right as much as possible. But it's a kind of a newer world that we're entering in terms of just the accessibility and what that does to the returns. Ryan Eisenman (34:45.362) Yeah, totally. I'm excited to see what happens in the next 5 to 10 years. I think the entire market is going to look quite a bit differently at that point. Jason Kirby (34:53.887) Yeah. There's all kinds of companies I see coming through trying to create the stock market for private, you know, private assets. I'm like, that kind of doesn't make it private anymore, does it? Well, you're right. It's been great having you on the show. Where can listeners learn more about you and what you're doing at Arch? Ryan Eisenman (35:01.923) Yeah. Ryan Eisenman (35:11.29) Our company's website is archarch.co. We linked to our social there, but we're proud of the got K1s handle on Twitter. We think that is just kind of a little bit of the ethos of our company of we want to make things like K1s a lot easier for folks and not a dirty word, especially around tax time. And so we're on Twitter, we're on LinkedIn, we're going to go to all the usual places. Jason Kirby (35:39.846) Nice. And anything you want to kind of mention about Arch and what you guys are up to that the audience might want to know about? Ryan Eisenman (35:46.07) We're hiring actively across all areas of the company, engineering, operations, sales. And so if you want to work for an ambitious company in New York, we love being in the office and working together. Find links to our job posts on our website. And if you don't see a role, just send us a note because we are always adding new ones as well. Jason Kirby (36:10.738) Now it's a great position to be in. You guys raised a phenomenal round, which is a huge congratulations. And thanks again so much for being on the show. And we'll make sure to include those links in the show notes for anyone that's watching or listening. But thanks again for joining us today. Ryan Eisenman (36:26.174) Awesome. Thanks, Jason.