‍Julian: Hey everyone. Thankyou so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have RobPetrozzo, co-founder of Rally, the Pioneer alternative investing platform forBlue Chip and digital collectibles, including classic cars, sports memorabilia,bricken bag squad chips, and NFTs totalling over 400 assets in 19 plusdifferent categories.

Rob, I'm so excited to chat with you andnot only learn. Your founder journey and share that experience, but also whatRally's doing and, and what kind of the overall, I, as, as the NFT and cryptomarkets kind of change and they, obviously there's volatility and all that, butthey've really kind of created a different asset class that people are nowbecoming a little bit more wise to and, and starting to invest and pay a lot ofattention.

And, throughout this transition, I'mcurious to where the current state is and where things are going, but before weget into. What were you doing before you started the company?  

Rob: Julian what's up man?Thank you for having me, dude. I appreciate it. That was a very robust introtoo. You just touched on everything that we've been doing for the last, likesix years in like a quick 10 seconds.

I appreciate it, man. The sound bite.Um, Man. Yeah, good. It's a good sound bite to start. I'm gonna steal that. ButI mean, long story short, for the long, for the, for the length of my career,for, what's going on, starting when I was 17 years old, so going on more than20 years at this point is really been based around design of our products and Ithink.

Over the, over the evolution of tech andwhere digital started to really take hold. I think the last couple years withNFTs are a great example. Physical and tangible products were always the mostinteresting thing to me. And it was something that I always wanna sort ofdesign either sneakers or cars or whatever, like was the thing that I waspaying attention to as a kid.

It becomes where you wanna put your timeand your attention and thinking about like going into like, automotive designor like being, becoming an architect. When I was younger, that was kind of whatI was. Thinking the whole time. And then what happened is eventually I wound uplike finding a little bit of a niche in, in fine art and then in graphic designthat turned into digital design and working with a bunch of startups.

But really I was just trying to sort ofget my foot in the door, getting outta school that wound up being in music. SoI was doing working a bunch of record labels at one point, doing like packagingand CDs and, and things. Kids now have no idea what they actually are. Backthen, it was all about like physical packaging that led into a bunch of likeweb design and you learn a little bit of code and I think everybody at acertain point in like the mid two thousands had like a pirate of copy ofPhotoshop and was trying to sort of, using like dream weaver and these basiccoding tools to make websites.

Inevitably that turned into, into beingin New York where it became like this tech startup really quickly, and thissort of hub for tech startups in like 2008, 2009. It led me to a bunch of greatfounders who were sort of young and ambitious, and I saw what they were doingwithout having to work for a big company or without having to sort of, they weremaking their own rules to a certain degree in New York.

Yeah. And that was super interesting tome, surrounded. But a bunch of startups in the publishing space and in thehardware space and in computer vision in the early days of it, in like the, the2010s, 20 thirteens and now led to Rally myself, my co-founders, max and Chris,like we've known each other for a long time.

We've always wanted to work together onsomething. So this was a place that we kind of put our passions and things thatwe cared about and then make it available to everybody and solve that problemthat we had and then really amplify it and solve it. Hopefully solve it formillions of people at some point in the near future.

Julian: Yeah. It's sofascinating. I was looking at your background in design and you obviouslyworked with not only a lot of artists, but you said a lot of companies andlabels and things like that describe kind of the mesh between technology andentertainment in particular, and I think it kind of bleeds into what's sofascinating about the NFT space being such a unique experience to either haveone.

Have one that's similar to somebodyelse's, but describe the, the mesh between kind of entertainment and that kindof focus with design and when did it start to become fairly regular for, peoplewithin these, these different industries to start utilizing web design andthese online kind of marketplaces to really promote themselves and, and get,gain attraction and, and start gaining an audience.

Obviously, like if we take it back,soldier Boy was one of the first ones to like really have an online  

Rob: first do everything.If, if you first do everything.  

Julian: Everything. Yeah.Yeah. He, he was on, he, he was doing it all. But yeah. Tell me, describe to methe kind of the mesh of the transition between technology and the entertainmentand, and when people really started taking marketing and branding seriously.

Rob: Yeah. I mean, listen,there were, there were like pioneers who've been doing this forever, and thereare certain artists who really want to own, and I'm thinking about this interms of music, but it translates. To fine art and to a lot of different designand a lot of different creative sort of, the fabric of creativity, especiallyin New York, where just like, you gotta make it here and if you make it here,you make it anywhere thing.

Yeah. But I think what happened, likewhen I, I got outta school, it was like the mid two thousands and my, my firstreal, like the first time I got a paycheck from my company was, was working forKanye Westley at the time, which, which was called Good Music. And it stillkind of exists, but this was the first iteration.

Artists were starting to take their ownimage and what they did really seriously and didn't want to put it in the handsof a label or of some sort of corporate machine to dictate what they look likeand kind of what fans, how fans interacted with them. And that was whendistribution deals became a little bit bigger.

Than they were in the previous, in theprevious iteration of, of music industry especially. And when it came to likerap and it came to music where it was really about culture and fashion and allthese things merged together, it wasn't just a packaged up pop or act. I thinkwhat I saw firsthand was that the artists that really understood how to take abudget and make it work for them were the ones that were succeeding.

Yeah. And those are the ones that. Saidlike, I'm not gonna let some label control my image or let some boardroomdecide, how people interact with me and what my fancy, and that's, that was asituation that in 2005, we got a label, we got a budget from Sony and we hadlike a small office on like the 17th floor of the Sony building, which is this,this epic spot on Madison Avenue where every single, like big artist was comingout at the time.

And we had like this little tuck awayspot where everything there was treated like a startup. And it was a relativelysmall budget compared to today's budgets, but it. That, that Kanye and his teamwere in charge of everything from the logos, the touring packages, to themerch, to the album release, to the marketing rollout.

They were kind of using their own moneyto do it and do like the music videos that went with it. And if it wassuccessful, the payoff was way bigger. If it wasn't, it was something where itwas a little bit tough and you had to go back to basics a little bit. And Kanyehad a bunch of hits outta the gate.

So it was like, John Legend and then bigSean came soon after. And names that you know today. Sure. At the time they.Just started. Started sort of getting like their footing and it required a lotof interaction with fans and required like your own little website, not justthe MySpace pages.

Again, I'm dating myself to explain thisand it meant that if you're doing a tour, you gotta do merch. That's reallyunique and don't just throw your name on a t-shirt. Yeah. It meant that, if youwere doing an album rollout there, it was probably a digital component to itbecause that was starting to be big and MP3s were becoming.

So all that together was like the reallyin my mind when independence became cool, cuz before that, in music you had tohave the big machine bond. You had the big label. If you were an independentartist, that meant like you couldn't get a big label to care about you. Noweverybody wants independence. And I think that what we're seeing now is thatthe hands, they're not, it's not just about creators, it's creators withsomething.

It's someone who can build an audiencethat they can then monetize. And the most successful creators now are notpeople. Huge Instagram followings anymore. It's somebody who doesn't need acompany to dictate what they do. So when I look at like the things that, thatthe people around us are doing, or the people that we recognize in the spacenow where it's like a Logan Paul with Prime or some of the other, otherinfluencers who were influencers and now creators that can pick and choosewhere their brand goes.

They don't have to wait for, a giantcable company or like a pharmaceutical company to give them a check to getpaid. They can spin up their own products and their own things, put their ownmoney. And then have a huge group of supporters behind them. I think like Mr.Beast is a perfect example that if anybody would've said, Mr.

Beast's gonna sell, sell cheeseburgersat some point, like three years ago, you just said, I don't know who that is,or What are you talking about? But it makes complete sense and that's whythere's a line out the door now because it's so in tune with his brand. He's sodirectly connected to his audience, I think, with every startup.

And that was kinda like the music dayswere the first, really, the first entry of it for. But now when it comes to astartup and, and what we do here at Rally, the ability to connect withcommunity directly, to take their cues and spin up new product really quicklyand really access like their emotions and things they care about without havingto wait for somebody else to either approve a budget or to go do a hugemarketing campaign or do a huge focus group.

Like we have a really good feel. Forwhat our audience wants. And I think I've been lucky to be around a lot ofpeople, individuals, and small businesses who took that same approach of, put alot of blood, sweat, and tears into it knowing that the payoff would be waybigger if we get this right.

And we're not gonna wait for somebodyelse to dictate what direction we going.

Julian: Yeah. And describewhat, what that means to the longevity of whether it's a brand or an art. Well,I would say artist is a brand, it's like its own entity, right? But describethe longevity it means for, for the brand and, and honestly how that kind oftranslates to.

It's almost like that brand and thosecustomer base kind of funnel into other projects. And even if those projectsaren't successful, it's the experience of it that was extremely unique.Describe what that means for, people coming up, for people who are working onjust maintaining that brand, that image and the longevity, the differentprojects that they can now start doing with the audience that they've gainedand, and what the audience means in terms of monetary sense?

Rob: Yeah, I mean it's, itreally becomes your mote. It's cuz there's, there's viewers and followers andthen there's like real community and audience and I think everybody kinda getsthat confused. But if you're building for fans first and not for themotivations of the business behind it and not for the motivation of the giantbusiness that funded or whatever it is, your relationship gets way different.

And I think that from a longevity stand.If you do things, if you do right by your, by your earliest customers, thosefirst thousand people, they're gonna be with you and they're gonna become yourword of mouth. Yeah. If it's just a commercial and it's like a deal, or youstarted with some sort of promo to get people involved, or you're making allyour money on like a YouTube as a creator and you have no other means of sortof taking your audience with you.

Yeah. You don't own that audience, youdon't own that customer, you don't own the relationship is really the biggestpart. So for me, from a longevity standpoint, like we've always, I stillmaintain a. Conversations, whether it's over text or DM with like our earliestcustomers, and we're talking about five, six years now, and these are peoplewho still have real meaningful feedback about our platform.

And we don't always, I guess at thispoint I would say we can't always act immediately and a lot of what we do isregulated by the S E C and obviously we work inside this financial constructthat's a little bit different than just, spinning up a t-shirt. But at the sametime, there's so many brands around us that I've seen do it from day onecorrectly with their fan base and turn their fans into equity.

Whether that's like actual equity, likelike we do, which we give out. We're selling equity, individual assets, or it'slike the equity where you're a part of this and we're taking what you do andwe're putting it to work and we're making sure that you are happy with theoutcome cuz you're building for your fans first.

Yeah. If you're building for anythingother than your fans, or you're trying to guess what some giant new audience isgonna like, you're gonna lose that. You're gonna lose that trust. So from alongevity standpoint, if you're doing that from day one and you always go backto that, you're gonna withstand every single trend.

There's always gonna be highs and. Youdon't have to worry about getting like de platformed by some other otherplatform that turns off your money system or turns off the conversation, or ifTikTok goes outta business. So doing that where you can bring your fans withyou. If you're building for them, you're doing right by them early.

You stay in the conversation andmaintain contact and build on the things that make sense that they're makingthe suggestions for. You're not gonna lose those people. They're gonna find youno matter where you end up. I think we've seen a lot of, now it's so much, it'sso much more interesting for an 18 year old who has talent, has creativity, hassome sort of product to sell that people.

To connect directly with, with thepeople that wanna make that purchase and want to liberate dollars towards thatmission. It's stupid in my mind to come out now and say, I gotta wait forsomebody else to do it for me. You're not gonna have real fans. You're notgonna have a real business. Yeah. So that's what we've always tried to do isbuild, build fan first and build from the ground up like that.

Julian: Yeah, and it's alsofascinating that the paradigm has really shifted for fans to really acknowledgesuccess and all the accolades and really, I feel like fans and myself included,love the journey. The progress and the steps, the milestones for sure. Pain,the heartache. We almost like take that experience and put it into our own.

But speaking about experience andspeaking about your experience in particular, so you've been working withartists, you're designing a lot of different things for, for differentcampaigns and, and all this branding. What particularly caught your eye about.The, the blockchain fix and NFTs in particular as another way to whether,actually, I'll let you, I'll let you answer that question.

What, what caught your eye about NFTsand what particular did you see the value of it growing and, and what got youexcited about, building around it?  

Rob: I mean, First andforemost, everything sort of crypto got to a point. I think that it became soubiquitous that everyone's waiting on the next thing and once, okay, once that,that post Thanksgiving 2017 happened where everybody was talking about it inthe same conversation you had that meteoric spike and everything kind of dippedafter that.

We had this second mini bull run thatstarted a couple years ago and and ran through Covid and now we're back to likea nice meaningful place where it's not as volatile as it once was. I'll saySure, but it's still something. I think, I think crypto cemented itself as aviable place. Whether it's risky or not, it's, it's got credibility at thispoint.

Mm-hmm. Which it did early on and oncethat happened, I think everybody, myself included, was waiting to see like whatgets built on top of this next, what gets built on top of the blockchain next.That becomes something that is the next moment, is the next thing that, my momis texting me about it and asking me, and NFTs became that really quickly.

So what, what really drew me a was as acreator, as as a designer, as somebody who has seen massive, massivecorporations, steal my work for free and put it out somewhere and it becomes agiant thing and you don't get a single check for it ever. The idea of livingoutside the gallery construct or living outside that design construct forsomebody who's got talent, but needs audience was really interesting to me.

But then the second piece, That NFTsreally opened the door for me. We, we at Rally work in this regulatedenvironment where, we have offering circulars that get submitted to the scc. Wehave a thousand lawyers who are charging us nonstop to go through the process.We have, a very specific stack that we have to build on top of, which is reallyexpensive to maintain the ability to spin something up really quickly and do itfor relatively cheap and let people really interact with.

And whether it's from a speculativestandpoint or it's a utility, they stick with it. If it's something that youcan keep building on top of was really interesting. Yeah. So you have with NFTsand with any of the projects that you've seen come out independent of the onesthat are just, cash grabs or the ones that don't offer any utility that arejust made for art and for speculation purposes, the blockchain and the abilityto spin up projects quickly.

Yeah. At a very low cost allows forsmall teams that are distributed all over the world. That don't have VCs andhuge budgets to make something very impactful. Right. Very quickly. And to dothat super transparently and distribute it really quickly. So that to me was,was automatic as something that we should start thinking about and building onthe side of what we do, just to sort of test what the limits would be.

Yeah. And if it came to putting out aproject which you wound up doing, That we could tie back to physical, then it'slike killing two birds with one stone a little bit. Yeah. So that's like thespeed to market, the ability to spin it up without a ton of money or a ton ofresources and doing something new that gets everybody excited.

Once all those things converged and Ihad, people in my family texting me, asking me about, What bored apes were,that was just an aha moment where it was pretty obvious we had to start payingattention to it more seriously.  

Julian: Yeah, and it's sofascinating and, and I would love to for you to describe the process of thephysical turning in mi minted into an NFT project and what that means and kindof the ecosystem around that.

I have a few questions to, to follow upin terms of. How the, the mechanics work essentially. But describe the process,if you will, of minting something that's physical, say a collectible, and thenputting it on your network to then get other people interested or buy partownership into, describe that process.

Describe, what the what Rally does inparticular, and, and to just illuminate our audience a little bit.  

Rob: Yeah, so we have, wehave like two big buckets of things that we do. One is the actual offering.These aren't NFTs, they're real physical assets. We, we turn 'em into LLCs,into actual companies.

Basically each individual asset, whetherit's a dinosaur fossil or, or it's a, or it's a, Michael Jordan rookie card oreven an nft. What it is, is we'll take like a board ape, let's say, and we'lluse that as the example. We'll acquire it. We'll put it into an llc. We'll getthat LLC sort of, a very specific price.

We'll break it into a X amount ofshares. We'll submit that to the scc. They approve that offering as likeinvesting in a company the same way you might invest in a startup. We open thaton Rally inside the app. Every Friday or so, we run IPOs, which are verysimilar to regular IPOs that you've seen in a standard market.

In a standard equities market. A bunchof people invest in it, and then three months later it trades on our platform.So over the course of that time, people might make offers to buy it. And thatgoes to a vote that our investors say, we wanna sell the whole thing. Sure.They might start trading it on our secondary market and sell their shareswithout having to sell the whole asset.

And then along the way, like we can docool stuff, like when there's an airdrop, which has happened often for a lot ofthese individual NFTs that are on Rally, that becomes a dividend check forinvestors. So really it's about formal for us. It's like formalizing a processthat's been around forever, like the stock markets existed forever.

Yeah. NFTs are relatively new and cryptois relatively new in the grand scheme of things. People kind of understand allthese things and they also understand collectibles and things that are valuablethat they care about. Sure to do it with fiat currency on Rally has become areally interesting sort of wrinkle for a lot of people, especially in the NFTmarket, where everybody, even, even, experts have, you see it all the time onTwitter, they'll get their wallet stolen or there's a really onerous process toget through a minting.

So to do it. Where it has all thedynamics that even the experts in the FT space expect. But it's done in aregulated way where these are, real securities that are, that are qualified bythe scc. And it's something where like, there's a custodian that lives inbetween. Sure. Which is us.

Like the idea of like, of, of having a,a non-cost, completely non-custodial platform means that, you're at the mercyof a med mask. If you lose all your money, you lose your assets, you're kind ofat a low. We do it where there is that customer service layer, but to us, wedon't look at that as a, as a negative.

Like that's a positive for us. You haveso many people that wanna make their first investment, whether it's in an NFTor a collectible, but they don't wanna have to go through a process of turningfiat into crypto, put crypto into a meta mask and a meta mask. Connect that toa, a site that might look a little suspect and hope that they get something outof it.

We've tried to take all of that andshrink it down to a really binary, easy to understand outcome, and it's workedreally well for us over the course of the last few years.  

Julian: Yeah, and it's sofascinating thinking about the, this, the wave of fractional ownership intophysical objects like. And we saw it with fine art and then now it's moved intocollectibles.

And what does that mean for sharing thataudience experience or even getting, I feel like collectibles at some pointkind of lived and died at a shop, but now we've created this onlinemarketplace. At first it was eBay and, but there was a lot of risk in purchasingsomething and it not being authentic.

How has this ability to keep the track,keep track of the authenticity of a collectible, share that experience,broaden, broadcast it to a greater audience, actually increased the value of alot of things that we felt were just going to, kind of waste away into an atticor a closet. How does that kind of revitalize and rejuvenate these kind ofphysical assets?

Rob: That's a greatquestion. I think it's, it's a big part of, of making sure that not just, thep. The way that sort of things went to auction, went to private collections orgot sold at shops, like I said, like a vintage shops or antique stores. Butthat things that are relevant live forever. Yeah. And I think that that's howwe, when we source an asset and we have, we have, like you said, it's over 400assets and it's millions of dollars worth of individual collectibles.

And it's everything from 60 million yearold dinosaurs to, baseball cars and comic books and NFTs. But it's also things.I think a lot of people didn't know existed. So we have, we have one of the 20July, 1776 versions of the Declaration of Independence. So, wow. This reallyimportant document.

I think a lot of people thought there'sonly one, the one that signed, that has John Hancock's biggest signature on it,which is sitting in the, in the rotunda, in, in dc. There's, 19 or 20 otherversions, give or take in private collections. Right now, most of 'em have beenin single families for the better part of, of more than 200 years.

One of those is on Rally. It went publicaround 2 million. It traded up to around 3.7, $3.8 million. It's got a coupleof buyout offers from, from wealthy individuals. Wanted to put it in privatecollections, but I think a lot of what we did with that, Was unearthed and tellthe story around it and explain that there was more than one, and explain that,historical documents are very much treated as a commodity in certainsituations, but they're meaningful now and we believe, and I think a lot of thefandom around it, and a lot of our users believe it will be relevant for futuregenerations, not just the need.

Yeah. So I think a lot of taking theseassets and fractionalizing them and putting them on on platforms like Rally andmaking sure they're displayed appropriately and they go into our museum spacehere in new. And we make sure we're doing social around them, we're doinginterviews around it, is making sure that the relevance that was always kind ofthere under the radar gets distributed a little more widely.

And now you have, you have real fandomthat's being created out of it. So you don't have to be a fan of, of theDeclaration of Independence to be a fan of US history or to be a buff on UShistory and do the research. And now you can have a real piece of this, of thisinsane story that's lasted, more than 300 years and you have a piece of, one ofthe, the founding documents that go.

Is really, really interesting, even for,for a younger demographic, just as much as it is for that older history bookhas been around forever. So it's definitely a big part of, of what we do ismaking sure that the relevance, we do what we can to make sure that the valueis, is clear and explain the comps and the detail around the numbers that gowith it.

But also if something's relevant now, webelieve it to be relevant in the future. A lot of what we do is try and tellthat story as appropriately as possible.

Julian: Yeah. And what doesthat mean? Just like this whole, in terms of how this, so previously we saw thevalue of a lot of these objects only come to light when it goes to auction,right?

And there's almost like this updatedvalue and the time span of that could be a year, could be, two, three years, 10years, 200 years, whoever knows. What does that mean in terms of the, the speedat which these change value at being that. Publicly traded on the website. Andwhat does that mean in terms of how people overvalue or undervalue objectsthat, that we commonly didn't see for, for time, that that had had passed.

What does that mean to the value? Doesit overall kind of increase it, decrease it? What have you kind of seen as, asa common thread?

Rob: I think it's, I thinkright now we're at a point that a lot of markets are trying to find themselves,and this is no different. I think that we've always believed, and I've alwaysbelieved.

That, thousands of individuals whoreally care about an item, care about a collectible, care, about an asset, aregonna be much better at valuing that asset over time. Yeah. Than just one richperson buying it from another rich person at all, and doing that kind ofsecretly, or doing it, but it just changes hands between the two of them and noone ever knows.

I think that we've always sort ofover-indexed these titans and these sort of, these pillars of society and thetwo or three. Funds that have all of these individual assets and have all thealternative assets and all the real estate. Yeah. You always just believe thatthey're the right people to price these assets.

Yeah, that might, that might have beentrue at a certain point when the pool was much smaller. But now liquidity issuch a big part of what we do, and I believe that that's gonna be what changedthe dynamic of these, of these alternative assets and makes it real moreliquidity and more people that. Is what helps find that real price and whatfinds that true sort of, speed to market and finds that that true context forso many of these equities and stocks, they're super liquid and they're in themainstream.

They're in the, in the zeitgeistforever. I think crypto over the last two or three years without question, hasnow moved its way in where that's mainstream. It's at the point that, pensionfunds pay attention to it, whether they enter it or. I think collectibles aregonna be there at a certain point.

Alternative assets like these are gonnabe there at a certain point. It requires thousands and hundreds of thousandsand millions of people who really care about it, to be able to sort of dictatewhere the price goes. Right now, it's gonna be a little bit wacky in the nearterm while tries to find its footing.

But long term, I trust thousands ofpeople and an average or a meeting of those thousands of people than one personwho's sitting in like a Mr. Burns closet desk somewhere, saying, ah, I'm gonnago buy this. I'm buying this dinosaur right now. I will be the one that setsthe price. Like, I don't, I don't wanna believe that.

Nobody wants to believe that in thefuture, right. So I'm excited to see what happens when the messes reallyunderstand what this is in the near future.

Julian: Yeah. And one thing Ihave a question about in terms of the, the, the mechanics of the fractionalownership piece is, What happens? Is there ever the case where somebody has amajority of ownership and what happens if they were to try to say, act upon thatin terms of actually if they have a majority ownership, say over 50%, try tohave that physical object.

And then secondly, how do you decidewhich ones you would sell off? When you go and, do your research, obtain anasset, you're talking to investors, somebody gives you an offer, what makes youdecide what's relevant to sell and what's relevant to keep?  

Rob: Yeah, I mean, thelong, long and short of it is that everything on Rally is always for sale.

We basically have a museum inside theapp and you can scroll through it. And, you might like, 1980s era Ferrari, andwe have some of that for you. You might go into, Muhammad Ali collectibles anddidn't know they existed. Now you want those, all of those, every single assethas a button on the bottom of it that says, do you wanna buy the whole asset?

It says, let's talk. And that opens up,a quick form that talks to us. It explains a little bit about what the lastprice was and how the process works, and if you wanna submit a buyout. Youcould put all your information in. It goes to our team. If it's within fairmarket value, our team qualifies that investor or that buyer as having themoney available, it goes into escrow and we run a quick 48 hour vote with allthe investors.

If 51% of them say yes, they like theoutcome, then it goes to our third party advisory board and we'll complete thesale. Everyone gets paid off. But there are situations, and it's happened aton. We've had, 65 or so buyout offers for individual assets on the platform,of which 43 or 44 I believe have exited.

Mm-hmm. What we see is that theinvestors who come into these assets, people that spend, a hundred, 200 bucks,but thousands of them together are the ones that are, that are investing inthese assets and buying at the IPO and trading those assets. They have strongties to so many of these assets and they have their own, their own, their ownthesis around the value.

And they have their own thesis aroundinvesting, whether it's a short-term or a long-term investment. If you have abunch of people in an asset that are there as long-term investors, and you havesomebody who submits a buyout offer, and they're, if they own shares, they'repart of the vote too.

But if they don't have 50 or 60% of itat that point, then you know, they're beholden to what all the investors wannado. We wanna democratize this where it's for everybody. Yeah. Yeah. And thatdecision making is for every. So we'll see. A lot of times a vote goes toinvestors. They'll say no to the price or to, the asset.

Something that they wanna keep. Theyfeel like it's, it's theirs and they're not gonna be able to replace it in thefuture. They have a long term investing thesis. They'll all vote it down andthe asset will stay on the platform. Then that particular collector who wantedto buy it, we'll start sort of, developing a much bigger position so they canpotentially get in the future.

Yeah. But like any other market, thatmeans you have to bid it up and you have to go get the shares and you seethose. We published the entire order book inside the app and on the website, soyou can kind of see, you can't see names and who people are. Sure. But whensomeone's trying to accumulate a position, you can kind of see it.

And I think our investors have gotten reallysavvy in that. When they see that, they're gonna raise their asks up a littlebit too, and they're gonna sort of have that little mini fight. You see, itstarts to develop on a platform. It's one of the, one of the really interestingdynamics is that if someone tries to do a buyout and can't get it, they'regonna try for a hostile takeover.

Sometimes they're gonna try and getevery share on the open. And if that happens, that's just how markets work. Ithink that we've really relied on our investors and the savviness of theseinvestors who've really developed strong positions in certain assets to be thedictators of whether or not, dictates the wrong word, but be the arbiters ofwhether or not those offers are meaningful enough to get them out of it and getit into private hands.

That's a big part of what we do is weallow people to kind of see around those turns and say, you know what? Peoplearen't really paying attention to this Pokemon card right now, but I've beenpaying attention to this my entire life. I know where this is headed right now.I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stake my claim on this right now, knowing thatin two or three years, the rest of the world's gonna start to get a hint ofwhat I've known this whole time and when that pays off.

It happens in a real way where somebodycomes in to make that buyout offer at a significant premium to the ipo. Yeah.And that intuition is proven right. And that's really one of the reasons thatwe exist.  

Julian: Yeah. So fascinating.Tell tell us a little bit more about the traction. You said you, we describedit, you have 400 plus assets 90 plus different categories.

What's not only been excited about, whatyou, what you've done up to this point, but what you're really kind of lookingforward to into this next year and the next kind of evolution of theproduct.  

Rob: Yeah, I think that,again, like, like we said early on, we, we always try and build to our fans so,hundreds of thousands of users at this point, we're gonna get to a million usersreally soon that we're gonna do that in a way where it's, it's really been wordof mouth.

So a lot of what we've done. Yeah. Tothis point, we, we don't have a true marketing function at the company likethat. Everything has really been word of mouth and we've always relied on.These individual collectibles and these assets as the true celebrities kind of,we don't have like celebrity endorsements, people running around saying like,go buy things on Rally cuz it's a regulated marketplace.

So what we do is we let the assets kindof speak for themselves. So getting into new categories to get people excited,getting into intangible assets, whether it's NFTs or real estate, or some ofthe things that we've started to do now. Get into cash flow producing assets,which instead of just having a trade on our secondary market, you have theopportunity to get some regular kind of dividends and cash flow coming from theasset.

Yeah, all that's on the roadmap rightnow, but really, we want to go in the direction of the public. Democratizingalternative assets is not about just doing it in one or two or 19 or 25 or ahundred categories. It's about finding those things that people don't even,don't even realize right now.

Are, are the assets that we'll betalking about in the future. So we always pay attention to the conversationtoo. We, we, we know that liquidity in our secondary market and in these assetsis gonna be what drives us into the mainstream. The same way. Equity is thesame way cryptos have to this point. But we also know that conversation,liquidity, which I'm stealing from, from a friend Rishi, who, who uses thisterm all the time.

But the idea of, of a conversation abouta thing, whether it's an asset or a person or a movie, when that becomesubiquitous and that's in everyday conversation and you're in a coffee shop andyou hear somebody talking about it, that's when it's time to kind of pass thatthing. That's when it's real. I think that we're starting to see assets likethis in really liquid conversation where it's nonstop, whether it's about anauction result for a watch or it's a conversation around like a sports card.

All of it is part of the zeitgeist now.So, Being ahead of that, making sure that we're in all the asset verticals thatmatter to our users and to future users. Yeah. And making sure that our assetsare the ones that are in the conversation is a huge part of what we're doingfor this year. So that's everything from inside the app to our, our secondmuseum space that we're opening here in New York, in, in a month in May.

It'll be on on Broadway between Howardand Grand. It's like our first big footprint. Yeah. Bridge another one probablyon the west coast. We're gonna, we're gonna really go to places where our usersare and activate those communities to bring these assets to life and keep sortof trying to be ahead of that curve and making sure that they have theopportunity to be ahead of that curve with us.

Julian: That's incredible. And,and if you were to think about whether it's external or internal, what are someof the biggest risks that Rally faces today?

Rob: I think it's likeanything else, like the one, the great thing about being able to buildsomething quick and distribute it really quickly. Is that you get into thehands of, of a ton of people and they get to tell you really quickly whether ornot it works or it doesn't.

Yeah. I think the trade off for that isthe same thing, is that if it doesn't work and you put a lot of time and effortinto something, everybody's really fickle right now, and I think that theyounger generations, they don't have that type of brand loyalty that I did,where when I was growing up it was like it was Coke or Pepsi.

You know what I mean? You weren't. Iwasn't finding like Apop and like 400 other sort of, other startups straight todirect to consumer beverages and, and right. Sodas of America and all these.Now it's, you go into a grocery store and everything looks the same and feelsthe same, but it's a lot of different choices and I'm gonna try every singleone.

I think for us it's the same thing. Wehave to make sure that we're always listening to our users and to our investorsand to the people around us and not making sort of, Random decisions that couldaffect our platform cuz we put a lot of time and effort into everything webuild. So staying ahead of it, staying on that bleeding edge of where thatconversation is and where that liquid conversation is for these individualcollectibles and these individual assets is a huge part of what we're trying todo right now.

Like, we're a great business, we're wellcapitalized, we have awesome, awesome users. Our. 10,000 users are, are peoplewho I know by name at this point. They're still on this platform, so many yearslater. But at the same time, like you do wrong by anybody and you don't, you,you avoid transparency and you do things where it feels like you're doing itfor the benefit of the company and not for the user.

You'll lose them in a hurry and, and youshould like a business that's not paying attention to their users, to theircore users. And their customers who came in on day one are the ones that arekind of in the feedback loop nonstop. When you stop paying attention to them oreven give the hint that you're going rogue, they have all the right in theworld to leave you.

So for us, it's really about continuingto make sure that as the business grows and the company and the headcount grow,that we always maintain those conversations. And that's something that I'm likelaser focused on with everybody here, with myself, with the people around me,that their needs come first hours come.

Julian: Yeah, if everythinggoes well, what's the long term vision of the company?

Rob: I think, I mean, Iwould love to take Rally public on Rally and give it to our breas to start. Ithink that's like for, for me, in terms of like exit lane, that makes a lot ofsense. But also, again, like somebody's gonna win this space.

And somebody's gonna win the, the, theattention battle of, equities has, the Robin Hoods of the world and the publicsand the, and the Fidelitys and the Schwabs and the private wealth managers. Ithink crypto has the Coin bases and the Geminis, and it has, the open seas and thelooks rare, and all the individual platforms that are about distributing the,the crypto distributing, crypto distributing NFTs.

That's gonna happen for alternativeassets, it's gonna happen for collectibles. There's some great auction houses,some that we work with on a regular basis. There's a lot of sort of,fractionalization trying to pop up in a lot of different places. For us, it'sabout getting to that, that level that we're in the conversation, that itbecomes a verb, that it becomes something that people immediately go towards.

So right now, if somebody asked me thathad never seen crypto before, didn't know what Bitcoin was, what ETH was, Maybeheard like Elon talking about Dogecoin or something, and they're asking, wheredo I go to get that? What do I do? How do I buy crypto? I'm not gonna explainthe nuts and bolts of it. I'm gonna say download Coinbase.

I think where we want to get to andwhere I envision this going is that if you have all your crypto on Rob, on on,on Coinbase, you have all your equities on Robinhood, I want you to have allyour alternatives on Rally. And I think that, yeah. We're slowly getting to apoint that people realize now that alternative assets and collectibles are areal investment type, and they're something that should be in a portfolio, notinvestment advice, by the way.

But I think they're not, still not surewhat the easiest way to get those are. Sure. Or where they're the most liquidwe're that right now. But I want to get to a point that it's, it's a, it'salmost non-negotiable that if you ask somebody, where do I go to get X? Andwhether it's a baseball card, an n f t, a comic book, a classic car, adinosaur, the answer is just download Rally.

And I think we get to that point. I'llknow that we have, we have, we've kind of made it a little bit where we'renot.  

Julian: Yeah, I always likethis next section I called my founder faq. So I'm gonna hit you with some rapidfire questions and we'll see where we get. Let's do it. Let's do it. First,first question I'd like to always open it up with is what's particularly hardabout your job?

Rob: That 80% of it is is,is being a psychiatrist. And that's really tough sometimes. Yeah. Yeah.  

Julian: What's something thatyou spend a lot of time on that you would like to spend less and something thatyou spend little time on that you'd like to allocate  

Rob: more to?

Social media. And it's the answer forboth. So I think that I'm a little bit of a control freak with design and withthe aesthetic of our business and a lot of what we do. And, I'm aging out alittle bit. I'm not gonna lie. There's a young sort of, there's a, a group ofyoung kids who really get this at a point that I'm, I gotta be able to hand thereins off.

So that's two, that's a, that's one ofthe same when it's like TikTok and a few other platforms. I give it all to,like, our team, like Will and, and Lisa who run our content, all these peoplewho are sort of knocking things out on a day-to-day, they know it better thanme. Yeah. And then for me personally, like I get wrapped.

Myself, like, from 11 o'clock at nightuntil one in the morning. I'm just trying to catch up on everything thathappened during the day. Inevitably wind up in like a never ending social loop.If I could break those things away and delegate that more, take it outta mypersonal life before bed, that would be a win.

Yeah. And what would take it there? I'mjust curious. I don't know, man. Like Instagram being down for like a weekwhere I could detox from it. I don't know, man. I don't honestly like it. It's,I think dedicating, I think we're seeing we're at a point now where people arestarting to rebel against digital.

I think the future platforms that comeout, there'll be a, there'll be a couple social platforms that I think arestill, there's still some white. Where there's a couple of sort of theseephemeral responses that we have to, certain things that will be wrapped up ina social platform, but I'm getting more to a point where I feel like tangiblegoods, actual physical things and analog is becoming more, way more of aselling point for somebody who's starting a new business.

I really feel like for the next two orthree years, brand new, giant, flashy, shiny apps aren't gonna. Or aren't gonnabe like as, as easily fundable as they were in the past. But one off narrowfunnels with individual product offerings are gonna be really interesting. Andwhat that becomes, I think is relies less on social and more on word of mouththan a physical thing.

And I think we're start seeing more ofthat happen, which I think will lead to a little less of the crazy frantic.Every three second social engagement or like the TikTok videos where it's arandom OUTTA context podcast clip and like, grant thefts, auto playing on thebottom, like frantic, all nonstop.

I think we're getting to a point thatwe're getting away from that, and I hope that's the case at some point soon.That might be, that might be the old man version of me saying that, but it'llhelp me not pay as much attention to social media too.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And to addon that, I think, People are, are focusing more on community and, and becauseof, actually follows into my next question, because of brand loyalty and thechanges there people are really focusing not only about what the, the brandoffers, but how the brand gets to offering that.

The, the, the, the operationalcomponents of it. Yeah. How do they treat their employees? How, how are theythinking about esg? Right. That's so big right now, sustainability. How haveyou seen, I know you mentioned other, your earlier brand loyalty. I wouldn'tsay it's gone. I would say it, it's evolved to really care about the, thedetails and the mission and all these other things that we thought were not asimportant, are becoming more important, but, and, and how it pertains tophysical objects.

How has brand loyalty changed in, in,in, in your eyes, in, in what you've seen?

Rob: I think you have, Ithink what we've seen and happened during the NFT run too is that, you have todox everything. And aggressive transparency is what we kind of say here. Wehave. Yeah, you gotta, it's not about falling on the sword later.

It's about, and it's not about evengetting ahead of like, of bad narrative. It's that your business relies onultra transparency because they don't just care about the product you'reselling. No one's gonna buy a faceless product anymore. And also if somethingshows up on Instagram or on, Talk and it's, it's bs, it's nonsense.

You're gonna see a flood of commentsthat call it out immediately too. And if you're not responding to those, youknow a good answer, you're already done. So I think that we've tried to do thatinternally. We don't always do the best job of it cuz there's so many movingparts with the business or with our, with the company.

But aggressive transparency is the onlyway forward in my mind. And that's something that, You could start at anypoint, even if like you've been building something behind closed doors for ayear, once it comes out, being really clear about what the struggles that tookto get there around, the things that didn't work along the way.

AB testing, more in public, building inpublic. All of that is, is. A non-starter at this point. If you're not doingit, you're not gonna have a successful business. So we try and do that here asmuch as possible.  

Julian: Yeah. One thing thatyou, you mentioned earlier that got, drummed up some curiosity is we work withsome auction houses and I, I'm curious on how you are able to communicate orconvince them, the value of kind of relinquishing the overall control of thatasset and broadening the accessibility to a wider audience, and what are themonetary benefits that come with that in the long term?

I could see that their business outcomesare, you have said asset, you want to auction it off for X amount above youroperating cost. Create some kind of margin where you feel that you've, you'veearned or you've really kind of either returned your investment or, or increaseits value. How do you kind of.

You know what the traditional means.Help them know that, relinquishing that ownership to, to just them broadeningout it, it broadcasting, its accessibility. What does that, how do youcommunicate that long-term success on what that means for that product orservice or even that company and in the assets that they hold or how?

Rob: Yeah. I think a lot, Ithink. Yeah, I think the best auction houses and we work with somebody like,golden Auctions and Heritage and the team of Sotheby's, and they're all,they've been doing it for so long and they have their loyalists, they have thepeople that are, there's only so many people who are gonna spend 10 million or5 million in a year on collectibles.

Those people are not gonna buy itfractional. They're not gonna be on our platform in the same way. I think a lotof our platform, if they're spending two or $300 on an investment, and we haveno minimum, so you can come in and spend 20 bucks and own that share forever ifyou want. And that's fine. Like we, we encourage that.

We, that's why we started the platformYeah. Is to give people access to these incredible assets that our museumquality millions of dollars, but do it at at a price point that's comfortableto them. But with these auction houses, a lot of them do something very similarwhere it's a 20% take, give or take on, on a premium that's get paidafterwards.

If you're giving an asset to an auctionhouse, a lot of times you're signing a non-compete where even if it doesn'tsell, you can't bring it to another auction house for a year. Yeah. There's allthese elements that they work for that, for that core that they go after, whichis big money. Someone who's like, very much based on relationship.

I don't think that's going anywhere. Ithink there's a, there's gonna be a, a group, a big group of the population.That wants to hold a thing, doesn't want anyone else to have it, no matter whatcomes with it, the price they have to pay the premium, they're okay with that.I think that, Sotheby's does a really good job of telling an awesome story, andGolden Auctions does a really good job of getting the best possible sports assetsand making sure that those go get in front of the right people.

That's gonna always exist. But I thinkeven those businesses understand that a business like us, like Rally has toexist at this point. Right? Because the next generation of collector, the peoplethat they're gonna have to replace at a certain point. Are gonna come from thepeople that get an education on a place like Rally.

Start making those investments, havesome hits, have some misses, but develop a thesis around it and become lifers forcollectibles. And I think that they realize that the, those price points, athousand dollars and under are just as important for them right now as themillion dollar and up. And I think at any, any auction house that's worth theirweight is, is not thinking about things in terms of two or three years anymore.

They're thinking about 10, 15, 20 years.And I think that the next generation of that, that 1% of people who wind up atan. House, spending a lot of money or in a bidding war, they're gonna come fromplatforms like this. They're not gonna be like, come outta thin air anymore.And the ability to sort of connect with an audience requires an auction houseor some of the legacy platforms to be in the conversation.

I think we've seen way more of that overthe last two or three years, especially through that covid spike than we saw inthe 20 years that came before it.  

Julian: Yeah. Two questions.What's one of your favorite things that you have in your collection, and what'sone thing that you're surprised on the value that it ended up having in, inyour platform?  

Rob: Yeah. I mean, there'sa few, that's a good question. There's a few. So for, for me personally,looking at all the pla, all the stuff that's on Rally right now, we, when westarted getting dinosaur fossils, that was, that was aha moment for me. And Ithink that it was one where when we, we have like an acquisition checklist anda very specific underwriting.

Standard and, and the way we sourceassets, it has to like meet a very specific criteria, but there's also thiskind of intuition piece that goes with it, which is when I look at something,I'm like, ah, man, that's gotta be worth a million dollars. And then when youfind out it's only worth like 200,000, you're like, oh my God, I had no idea.

How is that not worth a million dollars?And I think looking at, at dinosaurs, having learned about them in, second andthird and fourth grade, and then being like, ah, that's crazy. Those are justthose belonging museums. And then you get sort of into the conversation aboutgetting one and you're like, Damn the, the breadth of information available ondifferent types of dinosaurs and different errors and the bone mass of certainones versus other ones.

And why this triceratops is worth morethan this T-Rex skull, even though the T-rex is the most important dinosaur,like you start getting to the nitty gritty of it. Yeah. And then you startthinking like the, it's a whole story within a story. So those assets. Whichare, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, but, but should be, again,not investment advice.

When you see a 31 million T Revix sellat auction, you start wondering why the other ones aren't also 30 million. Ithink it has that cache of big auction results, a ton of nostalgia andsomething that everybody looks at and says, oh my God, I'm allowed to own thatnow. And that's part of why we built this platform.

So that's. The dinosaurs are like themost interesting thing to me. In terms of the ones that where value w wentcrazy and was something I didn't expect. I think that we have a, we, we havethe world record for the most expensive video game ever sold, and that's onethat might not be broken for a little while.

So we, in August of of, I think it wastwo years ago, we got access to super Mario Brothers video games still sealed.It was the highest possible grade in 9.8, which means it was basically pristineand it was a hundred and. Thousand dollars. We did the IPO for $150,000. Actuallyafter a year, that space got really hot.

Video games became a real collectible. Ithink we're still starting to see like the, a lot of volatility in the space asit kind of finds its footing and becomes a collectible that lives next to comicbooks, into sports cards and trading cards. But we wound up getting a buyoutoffer for 2 million for that asset and it's sold off the platform.

So, 1200% return in a year basically.And, got covered in New York Times and on espn it was every. And that was a, thisaha moment where it was like, all of our thousands of investors got to thatearly. People that knew video games that had a bunch of nostalgia from theeighties and nineties, and people that just saw what was happening in thesports card and comic book space and said, this is gonna translate to videogames.

And they were all right. And as much asI really believed in the space and I've collected, I'm a huge video gamecollector, and I have so many sealed video games in my personal collection,right. None that I worth 2 million obviously. But to see that like everybodythat got in early was right, and to see this massive return, that that was justexploded all over.

Social media was very much an ahamoment. And that we at Rally can source great assets, find an audience thatreally cares about it, and getting on the ground floor and then show bigreturns like that. And that's really. That was a full circle moment for thisplatform. I think a small microcosm of everything we're trying to build inevery individual asset category.

Julian: That's beautiful. Andit's amazing to see that full circle come around and what that really means toa lot of different things that people, say or have a predicted value or athesis around and, and seeing that come to fruition. And there's some peoplethat are right, some people are wrong, but the, the the ecosystem is, isawesome to see it just translate into a completely different space and theaccessibility becomes so widely available.

Pretty sure it kind of changes a lot ofthe paradigms of what we thought, previously. I always like to ask this noquestion. Question. I love how founders extract knowledge from anything thatthey ingest. So whether it was early in your career or now, what books orpeople have influenced you the most?

Rob: I got a lot around me.I've been really lucky in that. My dad, I think has always been a hugeinspiration. He's somebody that he's, changed his career six, seven timessince, over the course of my life. And he's always been able to sort of, takethe same ambition and turn to something successful.

I think watching that from day one,starting with like a small family-owned restaurant that we had, and thenturning into three or four other careers has been really interesting to watch.And it's always been something I look at and say, like, it's still possible todo whatever I want to do, no matter what age I'm at, and no matter whatindustry it is.

And then I've had, like, I've gottenlucky. I've had some really good. Os along the way too, who took an interest inme when I was, super young when I was, I was 21 and 23 and 26 years old, likepre 30, where you have these people who are really successful. They've hadexits, they're building a business, they have a hundred employees, but theyfind the time to have the conversation with me about what I want from myfuture, what I think the direction the business should go in.

I try, I get frantic sometimes and I getreally overwhelmed sometimes, and like, my moods go like this. Everybody herewill tell you that. But I think that in the, when things are. Well, I gotta getbetter refocusing and, and not pushing the stress down. I think I've beenaround a lot of great CEOs two or three, Greg Marsha Kimmi before thisbusiness.

John Lima, who was the CEO e at, atscroll motion, which was like three companies ago that I was at. That alwaysmade sure to find time to get my input and also never push stress down likethey would take pressure and good CEOs do this. They take pressure, they takestress, they ingest it, and they turn it into something positive.

They don't push it down or the peoplebelow them or the people that are, that are adjacent to them to figure out. I'mstill trying to get better at that, but that's a skill that I think the best CEOsand the best leaders have is that they don't, they don't take stress and push adown funnel. They take it and it stops at them.

I think that I've been around a lot ofreally good CEOs who do.  

Julian: Wow. Yeah, it is, itis impressive. And because a lot of the sentiment previously on the podcast, Istill think, as valuable as is to try to stay, keep a medium kind of emotionalstate. Don't go too high, don't go too low.

But yeah, trans transmuting some type ofinformation into something different. I mean, I haven't heard about that asmuch on the podcast. So that's, that's a. That's a pretty interesting one, and,and it, it's maybe set in different ways, but I like the ingestion and, and thetrans transformation of that energy into something else.

Yeah. I feel like that's a little bitmore active than, than passive. So that, that was For sure. For sure. I knowwe're at the end of the show, Rob, I'm sure we can talk for, for much moreepisodes long, but last little bit. I always like to make sure we didn't leaveanything on the table. Was there a question I didn't ask you that I should haveor that you would have liked to answer?

Obviously this comes before we get yourplugs on everywhere we can find you, but anything left on the table?  

Rob: Nah, everything'sthere, man. It's just next time you're in New York, come by. We'll walk youaround the museum. It's opening in in a month, so we'll give you a quickpreview, but that's it. You covered everything.

That was a really good conversation.

Julian: I love that, Rob.Well, it's such a pleasure in learning about your early career and, and alsowhat you're doing with Rally and what it, what it really means for people,honestly who, who want to invest, but maybe they don't have a, an attachment withthe assets that are out there.

These are alternative means that you canreally gain not only, inspiration, traction, assets, and all those differentthings. That that wasn't available regularly. It's amazing to see that, that itis available on Rally and, and to see where things are going. Last little bitis where can we find you?

Give us your plugs, whether yourLinkedIns, your Twitters, your websites.

Rob: Yeah. Where, so go youeverything on Instagram for Rally is Rally, r a l l y. We're on Rally Rd onTwitter. You can find me razo across every platform. And then a lot of people,everybody has my phone number and my DM or something.

A good idea is like dropping my way.I'll make sure you get credit for them too. I always answer. So feel free.  

Julian: Amazing. Rob, it wassuch a pleasure having you on the show. I hope you enjoyed yourself and thankyou so much for being on Behind. Company Lines today.  

Rob: Nah, Julian, thank youbrother. I appreciate it.

Julian: Appreciate it.

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