- 1/19/2024
In this episode, Jason Raznick interviews Anthony Zhang, CEO of Vinovest, discussing wine and whiskey investments, market expansion, risk management, and more. Anthony shares his entrepreneurial journey, challenges, and passion for owning a vineyard. Listen to the full episode and more on razreport.com.
-
-
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Being a West, we provide an investment service for fine wines and spirits.
00:06 The way that we hedge against risk is to be able to offer diversification.
00:10 My wife and I recently got married, but we got a barrel for our anniversary date, right?
00:15 And, you know, eventually when it reaches 10, 12, 15 years,
00:19 we're going to bottle that and send it to our wedding guests.
00:23 Historical returns, right?
00:24 Looking at that for the Scotch market, it's been around 12 to 15% a year,
00:29 but just recently, we made an exit of about 150 barrels for our investors,
00:38 and that was an annualized return of about 30%.
00:40 Hi, my name is Jason Raznick, the CEO of Benzinga, and welcome to the Raz Report.
00:46 As always, before we kick things off, I want to quickly tell you about what Benzinga is.
00:50 Before I started Benzinga in 2010,
00:53 there were very few places to get real-time information on financial markets.
00:56 I thought it was unfair that Wall Street had access to this information
01:00 before the average Joe investor.
01:02 So I created Benzinga to level the playing field for you, the retail investor.
01:06 Benzinga is for the people and by the people.
01:09 Now let's dive into the show.
01:11 Very excited for this week's edition of the Raz Report.
01:15 This is an exciting one.
01:16 You ever want to get access to the same asset classes that the ultra,
01:20 the ultra wealthy, the elite get access to from art,
01:24 from different asset classes that they say you have to have a minimum net worth
01:28 of millions of dollars to get access to this.
01:31 But this company, this company that's, I don't know, probably a few years old,
01:35 Binovest gives you access to wine, now whiskey.
01:39 I'm excited to introduce co-founder and CEO, Anthony Jiang, to the Raz Report.
01:44 Hey, Jason. It's great to be here.
01:47 How are you? When did you start Binovest?
01:49 So we were founded in 2019.
01:52 We launched right in the beginning of COVID in March of 2020.
01:56 Good timing.
01:57 We've been, yeah, I mean, it was honestly the best timing, right?
02:01 Because everyone was locked at home and drinking a lot more wine,
02:06 getting a lot more active with their investments.
02:08 So, you know, they say that success, right, is mostly luck,
02:13 a little bit of hard work in between.
02:15 And we definitely hit that luck timing well.
02:17 No, that's awesome, Anthony.
02:19 I guess one question is before you started Binovest,
02:22 what were you doing?
02:22 So I've founded a few companies in the past.
02:26 Right before that, I was leading a cryptocurrency portfolio management company
02:32 called Blockfolio.
02:33 We knew we were just about to get acquired.
02:36 So that was the jump.
02:38 Did you get acquired?
02:40 Yes, we did.
02:41 We got acquired for $150 million.
02:43 By who?
02:44 Co-founder and I, Brent, Jump Ship.
02:47 So we got acquired by FTX.
02:50 Okay, what's going on with the Blockfolio?
02:54 Did they spin it off now in the bankruptcy?
02:55 So we got a deal of tokens, cash, and equity, right?
03:01 The tokens were worth a lot, now not worth so much.
03:04 Equity is, you know, who knows?
03:06 Cash is cash.
03:08 No, but what I'm asking is, is Blockfolio being sold off in the bankruptcy?
03:12 No, so Blockfolio fully merged into FTX.
03:15 It actually became the mobile app for the FTX trading app.
03:19 Oh, interesting, okay.
03:20 Yeah, we had the president of the US markets on this show here,
03:26 and we had him at our event, you know,
03:27 he built the FTX brokerage app a while ago.
03:30 And so, and then I was chair of the Voyager credit committee, the bankruptcy,
03:34 which meant, which means I had a decent amount of money at one point.
03:38 Good timing.
03:39 Anyway, let's go on to, we had you on before.
03:44 I think it was about, on the Raz Report, about maybe a year and a half ago.
03:47 What's new in the last 18 months with VinoVest?
03:50 So the main thing new has been our new product launch,
03:54 going into the spirits investment space and going into whiskey.
04:00 So just to maybe backtrack a little bit, you know, VinoVest,
04:05 we provide an investment service for fine wines and spirits.
04:10 So what we do is we take wines that we believe will appreciate in value,
04:16 we acquire them, we authenticate them, we store them,
04:20 and then we give our customers an easy way to be able to access exposure into this asset class.
04:26 And then at the end of the day, when the wine is matured, appreciated in value,
04:31 we'll then sell it off into the consumption market.
04:34 So with our whiskey products, we are doing the same thing, except for whiskey barrels.
04:41 So we're actually maturing these barrels, both in America for bourbon, rye, single malt,
04:47 as well as wood scotch in Scotland, and offering our clients an ability to be able
04:53 to invest in these maturing barrels even before they're bottled.
04:57 Okay, so I hear that. And the first thing I think about is trust.
05:03 I don't think you can read it. I didn't have a black marker, but trust.
05:06 So you said that these bottles of wine are stored in vaults.
05:10 How does someone know that they're stored in vaults, or could someone break into the vaults?
05:15 In crypto, crypto and Bitcoin, I believe, fell because of the lack of trust in the market.
05:21 How do you provide that trust to your users?
05:23 Yeah, I totally agree that trust, especially with custody, is so important.
05:29 And with crypto and Bitcoin, it was very, very hard to be able to instill trust,
05:34 because at the end of the day, it's all digital.
05:37 The great thing about our asset class is that it's the farthest thing from it in terms of
05:42 being able to prove trust. I could walk you right to one of our warehouses, and you could stare
05:49 your barrel right in the eye. So we've done warehouse visits with our clients,
05:53 and we offer that as a service for anybody who owns a cask or a case of wine with us.
06:01 So Anthony, CEO of VinoVest, how would you know which barrel that I own?
06:07 I'd be so every single person gets issued an ownership certificate.
06:11 This is going to be able to be your unique identifier for your case or your barrel.
06:17 That identifier is also being able to be a third party verified because we don't own any of these
06:23 warehouses. These are warehouses that are operated by third parties. They're all bonded as well.
06:28 And that means that there are public records that also show the ownership of these casks
06:35 and the IDs of these. Okay. Now I want to... I know we talked about the wine market,
06:41 what you guys have been doing. You mentioned you're entering the whiskey market. What led you guys
06:46 to enter this category? I know spirits in general, but whiskey, I think, is the main focus. What led
06:52 you guys to get into this space? So in the beginning of last year,
06:56 we had put up a wait list for our whiskey product because with a lot of our existing wine investors,
07:03 they've been asking us, "Hey, where are you guys ever going to do whiskey?" And it was always
07:08 something that I planned to do, but I didn't really know when. We were still early on in the
07:13 wine investment days. That wait list over the course of the last year went from zero to over
07:20 15,000 people. So we got to give the people what they want. We raised a strategic round of funding
07:26 earlier last year into our whiskey, into launching our whiskey product and accelerating that in our
07:32 product timelines. And we're able to launch that fully in March of last year. So you had a wait
07:39 list of 15,000, you launched it. Does that 15,000 then buy assets in whiskey? Or how many people do
07:47 you have actively buying? Are they trading? How is it working, I guess? Yeah. So like wine, whiskey
07:54 is a long-term hold because the appreciation really depends on how old the liquid in the barrel is.
08:01 So you buy a brand new barrel, you're really expected to hold it for at least three to five
08:05 years when it gets to a three to five-year-old bourbon, for example. And then a big brand like
08:11 High West or a Whistlepig will come to us, buy that aged liquid, and then turn it into their
08:17 branded product. So how do you guys know how to buy whiskey right? So we look at the mash bills.
08:26 So that's essentially the mix and sort of the recipe for what that whiskey will become. And
08:33 we're able to look at trends on what the big brands are selling. So if we know that, say,
08:38 a high-rive bourbon is really, really popular and that there's demand for it, the brands will come
08:45 to us and be like, "Hey, we're looking for this." We just need it to be aged X amount of years
08:51 for them to be able to actually bottle it and sell it to their consumers.
08:55 So we look at that and we also diversify across different mash bills in case trends change.
09:00 But like, did you hire a whiskey expert?
09:04 We have a really knowledgeable team of folks who have worked in the whiskey industry,
09:10 have owned brands before, and are on our sales and procurement team, yes.
09:15 So are you guys one of the only ones that allow the average person to invest in whiskey like this?
09:23 Yeah, we're certainly one of the only ones. Buying whiskey barrels, aging them, and selling them
09:29 has been around for many decades, right? But really, to your point, right, it's been an
09:35 ultra-wealthy or an institutional play, right? They're buying thousands of barrels.
09:43 And for other folks who maybe only want one or two barrels, it just wasn't really economically
09:49 feasible for them to be able to manage the entire process. And that's where we're changing the game,
09:54 right? Because of the volume that we have, we're still buying thousands of barrels,
09:58 but they're individual investors. People are buying three to five barrels a piece.
10:04 And then we put it in order, which is for a couple thousand barrels to our suppliers.
10:10 And they're still able to get the scale that they need, still only work with one party,
10:14 VinoVest, and we're representing that on behalf of all of our clients.
10:18 Do you have to be an accredited investor to invest in the whiskey?
10:21 No. So how much is a barrel?
10:25 So a barrel of American whiskey is $1,500 on average. Scotch, a little bit higher, right?
10:33 That's usually the scotch barrels are closer to 8 to 10K.
10:38 Okay. So if I invest 10K and I think I'm getting a barrel of scotch, okay,
10:47 how do I know that I got a barrel of scotch versus you guys gave me a barrel of whiskey?
10:52 So we'll give you the same thing, that identifier. You'll be able to see the exact
10:58 location of your barrel. You'll be able to see the age of it, the mash bill of it,
11:04 and really follow its progress. Could I ever come into the warehouse and see it?
11:10 Yeah. So for our high level clients, we even organized trips to Scotland,
11:15 really having a good time, being able to taste out of your barrel too,
11:19 and then being able to also see our facilities in our warehouse.
11:24 When did you say you got, when you launched the whiskey vertical?
11:27 Last year in March.
11:30 Is the whiskey vertical coming to the size of the wine vertical, bigger, smaller, a lot smaller?
11:36 So it's certainly growing faster, right? So still the bulk of our business is on the wine side,
11:42 but we're seeing more and more folks interested in the whiskey barrel vertical,
11:47 both from our existing user base as well as from new users. So we're really building up that brand,
11:52 helping our users and for potential folks realize that being of us, right, we're not just wine only,
12:00 we've expanded wine and spirits. And that's really a big push of what we'd like to do this year.
12:05 Will you ever change the name of the company to be more broad?
12:08 I like VinoVest.
12:10 Yep. Me too. Then the next question is, so you can do this on VinoVest.com. Have you guys thought
12:16 about or exploring partnerships with some of our clients, Schwab's, Fidelity's, brokerages of the
12:23 world? Yeah. So right now we're really focused on democratization, right? Getting the retail
12:29 investor involved. But I think eventually, right, we'll want to be able to move upstream and getting
12:35 listed on a Schwab or a Fidelity is a way to be able to have mass distribution, right? But
12:40 the structure of that product is going to have to change, right? It can't just be
12:44 individual barrels being offered on the platform. It would have to be in a fund format, right? Where
12:49 people are buying shares of a larger pool of whiskey barrels where here you have that direct
12:55 ownership and there's pros and cons to both. Okay.
12:59 So again, around the Raz report, Anthony Jiang, CEO and co-founder of VinoVest. Another question
13:06 I have is, do you guys do any hedging to manage the risk with tangible assets like wine and whiskey?
13:12 Are they influenced by market fluctuations at all?
13:16 So wine and whiskey are remarkably stable because the bulk of the price movements are really
13:24 dependent on just the age of the liquid, right? If you look at say, Johnny Walker, right? Or look
13:31 at McAllen, right? An 18 year old McAllen is always going to cost more than a 15 year old
13:36 McAllen or a 12 year old, right? There's just very, very little possibility for a 12 year old
13:43 to ever cost more than an 18 year old. And the price appreciation is really linear to the age,
13:48 right? It's almost a 1.0 correlation rate. It's about 0.89 or 0.92. So it's really steady. But
14:00 the way that we hedge against risk is to be able to offer diversification, right? We don't want all
14:05 of your exposure to be in one Scotch barrel or one American whiskey barrel, right? We want to
14:10 give you different mash bills, different brands and different countries, right? Because Scotch
14:15 could fall out of favor. American whiskey could fall out of favor, right? But if you have exposure
14:20 to both and different mash bills, then you're protected, right? Just like a traditional stock
14:24 and mock portfolio. - So there's so many questions right now. They're not even on my list. There's so
14:30 many questions. Okay. Well, I could buy a gift of Disney stock for like a nephew that's born, right?
14:38 Can I do that? Can I do that for this? If I want to gift someone a whiskey barrel?
14:43 - Yeah. So we offer that. And actually, for myself, my wife and I recently got married
14:51 two years ago. - Mazel tov. Congratulations.
14:53 Come on. We need some wedding music, guys. It's good stuff. Okay. Any kids yet?
14:58 - Not yet, but we got a barrel for our anniversary date, right? And eventually when it reaches 10,
15:05 12, 15 years, we're going to bottle that and send it to our wedding guests.
15:11 - Oh, that's awesome. That's so cool. That's really cool.
15:14 - It's the equivalent of being able to get your Disney stock and turn it into a bunch of tickets.
15:19 - Right. So what barrel did you get again? - So we got a Highland Park. Right now it's...
15:26 - Wait, is the Highland Park Scotch or whiskey? I'm an idiot.
15:28 - Yes. Scotch. Highland Park Scotch. It's a couple of years old now. So we'll wait a few
15:34 more years and then we will be bottling and enjoying it.
15:38 - That's great. You'll send it to your... Okay. Now, what expected return? So if I put $10,000
15:48 into... So by the way, $1,000, for this whiskey play, $1,000 won't be enough to even buy a barrel,
15:58 right? So I couldn't do 1,000, am I right? - Yeah. It'd be around $1,500 to $2,000.
16:02 - So you can't buy part of a barrel? - You can't buy part of a barrel. So the
16:07 entire barrel is about 350 bottles. We just introduced a lower minimum product called
16:13 a whiskey lot, which is about 50 bottles, and you can get that for about $300.
16:17 - Okay. All right. So now if I put in $10,000, whatever I buy, whiskey, scotch, I don't know,
16:25 what's like an expected return? Or do you guys have that? Are you allowed to say?
16:29 - Yeah. So historical returns, right? Looking at that for the scotch market, it's been around 12%
16:35 to 15% a year, and that's an average taken over the past 15 years. American whiskey,
16:41 we have less historical data on that, but just recently, we made an exit of about
16:48 150 barrels for our investors, and that was an annualized return of about 30%.
16:54 - Wait, hold on. - I don't expect all investments
16:57 to be like that, but I would say... - Hold on. The scotch market,
17:02 you said the last 15 years, the historical return is what percentage?
17:04 - 12% to 15%. - Okay. 12% to 15%. You're saying you
17:08 made an exit of 30% last year, but I thought you started this last year.
17:12 - Yeah. So we had a seven-month exit. So we had an inbound buyer for some of our American barrels,
17:20 and we sold 125 barrels at an annualized return of about 32%.
17:25 - So if I would invest at $100,000, I wouldn't have got 130,000. I would have got like... It
17:30 was like six months, so maybe I would have got 115,000 or something.
17:33 - Yeah. Yeah. - Okay. Now, and you said scotch
17:37 is historically, for the last 15 years, 12% to 15% return?
17:40 - That's correct. - So people... How do I get the return?
17:44 I don't get a check yearly, right? How do I get the return? Is it when you sell the barrel to
17:49 someone else? Is that how that works? - Exactly. Yeah. It's purely based on
17:52 buying at a lower price, selling at a higher price, right? There's no dividends or income
17:58 in between, right? You're just aging the barrel. And then when the barrel is matured,
18:02 you sell it off to a buyer, and then that's when you get your return.
18:05 - I mean, it's so freaking interesting. I mean, you come from a technology background,
18:11 entrepreneurship background, getting this VinoVest, you're allowing people to
18:15 access assets that they probably weren't able to get access to. Do you have to be like an RA? Are
18:22 you guys like a certified something or a marketplace or...?
18:26 - Yeah. So we have alcohol licenses. We're regulated as an alcohol business because
18:31 we're selling alcohol. We have chosen not to securitize or sell fractions or shares of these
18:38 for that reason, but also because we want to be able to allow our clients, many of them who are
18:45 wine and whiskey enthusiasts, to eventually be able to have the benefit of drinking their
18:50 bottles, right? Or bottling it, right? And you can't really do that if you own a fraction of
18:54 a barrel. You can only just sell the share. - So if you were going to fractionalize,
19:00 then you would have to get licenses, I guess? - Yeah. Because then it becomes a security,
19:05 right? You have to put that barrel into an LLC, right? Create shares of it. And then you don't
19:11 actually own the barrel anymore, right? You own a share that represents an interest in an LLC that
19:18 owns the barrel. - So in essence, to grow VinoVest, you want more people to find out about
19:28 you guys so they can invest in alternative assets, correct? - Correct. - And you don't need to have
19:35 like a security license to do that because it's kind of like acting like an eBay or a StockX in
19:40 the sense that it's like them buying and selling assets. It just happens to be this asset is
19:47 alcohol. - That's correct. Because right now, wine and whiskey are classified as collectibles,
19:53 not as securities. - Got it. Okay. All right. That's awesome. As CEO of a company in alternative
20:00 investment space, do you see the regulatory landscape evolving and what impact might it
20:04 have on platforms like VinoVest? This is a question from Aaron Bree, one of our- - Right
20:10 now, I think there hasn't been any sort of major changes in the alternative investment space.
20:16 Not at least in the space that we're operating in, right? There have been some changes in the
20:20 crowdfunding rules. There have been some changes in the credit investor definition rules, right?
20:25 Those are both, I think, net positives for the alt asset space in general that bring more people
20:32 into the space. But none of those directly change the way that we operate as a business. - Got it.
20:42 I guess you have this live marketplace function. How do you see this evolving? Is this something
20:48 that you guys are going to do more on this live marketplace and what is this? - Yeah. We have a
20:52 VinoVest marketplace. This is for both our clients as well as external counterparties like
20:59 auction houses and wine retailers and merchants to be able to buy and sell their assets. So it
21:06 provides additional liquidity for users who may want to sell earlier or maybe there are
21:11 circumstances- - Are people actively using that? - Yeah. So we have a few million dollars of volume
21:18 going through that marketplace every single month. Nowhere near the scale of a stock market,
21:25 of course, right? There's no day trading going on in this marketplace, but we do see this as a
21:31 really beneficial product in addition to our current sort of buy and hold asset management
21:37 business to be able to facilitate liquidity. - Will you just give me a real life example
21:42 of how that works? So if I, and correct me when I'm wrong, if I would have invested in VinoVest
21:47 two years ago, $10,000 in bottles of wine, would I be able to go to the live marketplace and sell
21:53 it or how would that work? - Yeah. So you could sell it. So say you have a case of wine that's
21:58 $1,000, you want to sell it, it's appreciated to 1,100 and you're like, "Hey, I want to take that."
22:05 - How do I know if it's appreciated to 1,100? - We have third-party data feeds coming in that
22:10 show you the prices of the wine. So say you want to take profit at 1,200, right? So you can even
22:16 set a limit order, set at 1,200 and whenever someone hits that offer, you get that transaction.
22:23 - So I recently bought tickets on Ticketmaster for the national championship, Michigan,
22:30 and I had one extra ticket. I put it on the marketplace, it didn't sell, then Ticketmaster
22:35 gave me an offer, said, "Here's instant money for this." So they bought it off me and then they
22:39 resold it for more. Do you have like AI or anything like that, that if I have a thing, like you can
22:45 say, you guys will instantly buy it off the user and then you guys worry about reselling it?
22:50 - So we don't do much of that at the moment, but it's definitely something that to facilitate
22:55 liquidity, right? Especially for people who are in a pinch where maybe you're like, you know,
23:00 maybe you're eight hours to the game, right? You're like, "I just need to get rid of this thing."
23:04 Right? We can definitely consider that in the future.
23:07 - Yeah, because you may find some no-brainer values. Also, bottles of wine, like so if I
23:15 have a bottle of wine at my house, I have from like four years ago, like say it's worth 2,000
23:21 on the market and I'm in a pinch and I wanted some liquidity, do you guys buy people's random
23:25 bottles of wine or no? - No, and I don't think we ever will
23:29 just because of the trickiness with the condition of wine, right? Your wine could have been stored
23:34 in an attic, could have been stored in a freezer, right? And for us at B&O Vest, we only buy from
23:40 trusted parties, which is direct from wineries and we only store in bonded warehouses. So we
23:45 really take the condition and authenticity of our wine seriously.
23:50 - Okay. And do you guys have like robo-advisor like features like where you recommend,
23:55 "Hey, you should invest in this one." - Yeah. So all of the asset management
23:59 business is all based on our algorithms. So if you came in with $10,000, you'd put in some inputs
24:07 onto our assessment and then our algorithm would actually be going out there and creating the
24:12 portfolio for you. So you don't need to be a wine investment expert. You don't need to be a
24:18 wine enthusiast. You just need to know what your parameters are, right? Like what else are you
24:24 invested in, right? How much of your overall investable assets is this representing? And then
24:29 what your expected timeline is, right? Are you a long-term investor? Are you five years? Are you
24:34 10 years? That really helps us be able to create the right portfolio of wines and whiskeys that'll
24:40 be set to mature in five or 10 years so that they're ready from a consumption standpoint to
24:45 be exited. - Yeah. Okay. That's
24:48 interesting. How many people work at B&O Vest these days?
24:52 - So we are a team of 25 folks. - Are you remote only?
24:57 - Yeah, fully remote. Been that way since before COVID too.
25:02 - So what's the makeup? Like what are the majority of people doing at the company?
25:05 - So we've got folks on the actual procurement side on both wine and whiskey. Some live in Europe,
25:13 given that most of the top wines in the world are coming out of Europe. We have a technology
25:19 and data team doing all the things a tech company would do. And then we have got our sales,
25:24 marketing, customer service. So really just a couple of folks in each function.
25:29 - Now that you've been remote for a while, how do you best communicate with your sales and
25:34 marketing team? Do you have daily stand-ins? Do you have a weekly call? How do you get the team
25:38 together and communicate properly? - Yeah. That's one of the biggest
25:43 challenges of a remote company, especially across time zones, right? I think for us,
25:48 number one is on transparency and documentation. We're really big on that at B&O Vest, right? Public
25:55 dashboards so that people can get access to the information that they need without having to ask
26:00 somebody. And then also for folks who can't join meetings, right? We have meeting notes. For really
26:08 big meetings, right? We record the entire session so that people can play that back. And then we've
26:14 got our scheduled calls as well as ad hoc. You can always just call someone up.
26:18 - Do you use tools like Asana or Notion or? - Yeah. We're big on Notion for documentation
26:25 and processes. We also run a lot of our internal ticketing systems through there. We use Slack
26:33 and Google Meets and what else do we plot? And we have some internal tooling as well that we've
26:39 built out. - We don't use Notion. I wonder what we use for internal document and process because
26:45 Asana doesn't really have that in there. I don't know why.
26:48 - Yeah. Asana's good for task management, right? And then project management. And Notion has all
26:54 those tools in it as well, but then it also has the documentation component, which is great.
26:57 - Yeah. But I don't know why Asana would not release a documentation component, right?
27:01 - They're working on it. - I know. I guess that's another
27:06 interview, right? Okay. So, Vinovest, you're a founder of different companies. Do you want to
27:13 be here for the long term or are you trying to sell to a bigger player in the marketplace arena?
27:20 - Yeah. We're really just getting started. And personally, I've always been interested in
27:25 investing, passionate about alternative assets. As you can tell by the wine bottles behind me,
27:31 I also have a passion for wine. So, even if I was out of this job, I'd be spending my time
27:36 thinking about wine or thinking about investing. So, I'd love to be here for the long term,
27:40 grow this into a big and meaningful business. - I wonder if you ever could do offerings on
27:45 Yieldstreet. I don't know if that would ever... - Yeah. Talk to those folks. I've been on the
27:50 podcast there as well. Great people. - Yeah. All right. Now, these questions are
27:57 not to do with Vinovest. It's more about you. How many unread text messages do you have now?
28:02 - Zero. I am very, very religious about getting to inbox zero, whether it be on my text inbox
28:09 or my Gmail. So, at the end of every single day, I can sleep well.
28:15 - So, when you're at text zero, like say some text that you see coming, you click on it,
28:20 but you don't respond back to it. Like at that time, you need to figure something out. Do you
28:24 mark it back as unread or what do you do? - I put on my own personal task management
28:30 system to be like, you know, respond to... - Okay.
28:33 - ...what you see. Yeah. - Your personal task manager system,
28:37 what do you use? Your notepad or... - I use a thing called SANSAMA.
28:40 - What is it called? - SANSAMA. S-U-N-S-A-M-A.
28:45 - S-U-N-S-A-M-A. What is that? - Yeah. Full disclosure, I'm an angel
28:51 investor in the company, but it's a really amazing personal task planning app. It integrates with
28:57 your calendar, your schedule, and also can be used with team features, but I use this just for myself.
29:05 - I use Evernote as a note listing thing, but one thing I found really interesting that you just
29:12 said is when you have a text message, say it's for me, and say I'm asking you like two questions.
29:16 I have an investor who wants to put in $200,000 in buying a portfolio, and you want to be inbox
29:22 zero. You have to respond to me like, "Hey, Jay, I'll look up the info for you. I'll get back to
29:27 you next week." What you do is you don't keep me as unread. You put it in your task management list.
29:33 - Yeah. - Is that right?
29:35 - Yeah. And I'll know like based on the urgency the next day, it'll be, "All right, how can I
29:40 batch small tasks together? How can I do the chunkier ones in different times of the day?" And
29:46 then it works for me. - So you batch the small tasks together,
29:52 and then you... Okay. And SunSama helps you with that.
29:57 - Yep. - This is going to be a
29:59 separate clip. I'm glad I asked this question. All right. What's the best piece of advice you've
30:04 ever received? I can change it. - That's a good one. I mean, I think...
30:12 - Good advice. - What advice would you give
30:16 to aspiring entrepreneurs? - I'd say just believe in yourself,
30:21 never give up. I think as an entrepreneur, you and I know there's more downs than highs, right? And
30:28 then you just have to believe in yourself, take your lumps, and just know that those down feelings
30:34 when you just want to give up or things aren't working, right? Those are things that every single
30:38 great entrepreneur has to go through to get to where they are.
30:40 - Okay. Agreed. What do you do when you feel stressed or discouraged?
30:48 - Give my dog a big hug. I think I'm a big believer in the power of animals. They just
30:56 kind of know things, right? - What kind of dog?
30:58 - I have a 50-pound Sheepadoodle named Duke. - Okay. Love it. So that's what you do. You
31:06 give the dog a big hug. - Yeah. He loves it.
31:09 - What was your most difficult challenge in life?
31:13 - Most difficult challenge, I mean, undoubtedly, it's been my spinal cord injury. For those who
31:20 don't know my personal story, I had suffered a spinal cord injury, became a quadriplegic
31:25 eight years ago now. Still, I'm in a wheelchair. It's still greatly limited mobility-wise, but
31:32 that happened when I was 21 years old. I was still a kid and still figuring things out.
31:38 I'm still figuring things out and learning more about my injury every day. But living with a
31:47 disability like this that impacts so many parts of your life more than just being able to stand
31:52 up and walk is a huge challenge every day. - Yeah. I know people are listening and they're
31:58 like, "What was your spinal cord injury?" - Yeah. So I dove into a pool, instantly
32:05 broke my neck at the bottom. I shattered my C5 vertebrae, which is pretty high up on your neck.
32:10 So everything below my neck is impaired. - And you live to tell about it. I know
32:18 two people that dove into a lake and, well, one didn't live, one... Yeah, same thing. I mean,
32:29 there's all these nerve cell things and regenerative nerve cells, spinal cord thing
32:34 that they're working on, like that they're working on. Hopefully, some of that technology helps
32:39 regenerate nerve cells because that's got to re-enlighten the nerves, right? Is that how it
32:44 sort of is? - Yeah. Unfortunately, the spinal cord is really one of the only things in the body that
32:50 does not really grow back again, right? And the spine and the brain are still very much so
32:58 mysteries to people working on them. And to your point, there are pretty exciting
33:03 initiatives being worked on, right? Like Elon Musk Neuralink, that's a big one.
33:10 There's also been a lot of spinal cord bridges, as you say, where they implant stimulators between
33:17 the broken parts of your spine to try to bypass the broken spinal cord. So there is research
33:24 being done in that area that I'd like to follow. - Yeah, I just know Dan Gilbert, owner of the
33:31 Cavs and Rocket Mortgage, small investor in here, he had a stroke and looking at how stroke recovery
33:40 works in spinal cord and like those nerve cells. But no, I mean, that'll be your next startup,
33:46 solving, figuring out how to monitor or even be alerted so the researchers all find out the same
33:52 stuff. I think there's so much communications that are probably going to be improved that would help
33:56 discovery of the next thing and cure. - Yeah. And unfortunately, there's a lot of animosity
34:02 between different research camps and groups where if they really just all work together,
34:07 I think we'd be in a much better place in the world. But just from my personal experience,
34:12 where I've been deeply interested in my own recovery and the different camps of scientists
34:18 that I've spoken to, they don't really love each other or even like- - That's very frustrating,
34:26 especially, and you're a shining example of how you can be so successful and have injuries and
34:37 live a life and build businesses. Do you get out there and speak on any circuits and talk about
34:44 how you've not only survived but thrived? - No, but it's something that I would love to do.
34:52 I think that having role models is important. There's a ton of people living with different
34:58 types of disabilities that I think are definitely down on themselves or don't think they can achieve
35:05 as much as they could have prior to their injury or maybe they were born with a disability.
35:10 So I think it's important to have representation. - That's awesome, Anthony. All right. Outside of
35:16 business or sports, what is something you want to accomplish? - I'd love to own a vineyard someday.
35:23 Every single time I go wine tasting, I'm like, "Damn, this is the life." It's probably my drunken
35:30 thoughts there because I know economically owning a vineyard is a sure way to lose money, but one day
35:36 I would like to do that. - Yeah. By the way, you know one way to get new users to Vinovest? I know
35:44 it's an investment, but do you give gift cards out? - We have not done gift cards. - I'm just
35:50 thinking about... I was about to tell you about my friend who's the biggest wine expert I know in
35:55 the world. He's a chef. He's run the biggest restaurants in New York and everywhere,
35:59 and he's the biggest wine person I know, but what I was thinking about is... The reason I thought
36:03 about him is because of this charity event. At charity events, give $150 gift cards to Vinovest
36:10 at charity events like in their silent auction or whatever. I don't know because the people who are
36:16 at the charity event bidding, they have money. They don't know about Vinovest, let's arguably say.
36:21 This is their introduction to Vinovest. I feel like you could get your AUM up a decent amount
36:26 if you start looking at charity events around the country and figure out what you could offer them
36:30 to get those people with high net worth, Vinovest, the marketplace to buy and sell your wine or
36:35 something like that. Is that a slogan? I don't know if that's a slogan that you guys use, but
36:38 is that... I don't know. Buy and sell wine, is that a slogan or no? - No, no. We don't have a
36:43 slogan, honestly. - But you can do that with you guys a little bit, right? - Yeah. - We've got to
36:50 go. - It's not about gift cards, especially whenever it's around the holiday season, but
36:54 we've always been just so busy with closing out the year. - You got to get involved at charity
36:59 events. You got to get involved with charity events. That's where your high net worth individuals are
37:03 right there, buying stuff and just put a thing in there, 25,000 a year on charity events. Somehow
37:10 you'll get so much high net worth people to know about you guys, I think with very little marketing.
37:15 I'll reach out to you on that because I go to charity events. Not a lot, but I go to some
37:21 and I've... Yeah, I think that'd be a good thing. All right. Last question is, what was your worst
37:26 or first job? - Okay. First job was actually working for myself. I honestly never had a
37:37 serious job outside of being an entrepreneur and I love it. That's the reason. - That was your first...
37:44 What was the first one? - First business, I was 18 years old, freshman in college and started a
37:50 food delivery business called Envoy Now. And that's the business that really... - Were you
37:55 delivering a bike or what were you doing? - I was delivering on anything that moved. Remember those
38:00 sort of Segway things that were really popular that all the kids were using? We even had a fleet
38:07 of those at one of our campuses. - Oh my God, that's cool. It's my dream to be in a Segway. I saw it at
38:10 the airport recently. That's awesome. That's awesome. What happened to it? - So we got acquired by a
38:16 company that eventually became a part of Walmart. So we grew that, scaled it out to about 23 markets
38:21 over the course of four years. - Look at you, Anthony. When you're 18, see, I had a startup then. I had it going
38:26 pretty well and then I just like, kind of like, borders and a buy-in. I'm like, "Eh." When I got to
38:31 the finish line, when I got excited by it, then I'm like, "Oh, I'm gonna go to the next thing." Then I got
38:35 into online dating in 2001. I should have stuck with that too. That would have been a good one, but
38:40 that was early. All right, Anthony Jing, founder, co-founder of Vino Vest and this whiskey marketplace
38:49 that if you haven't checked out, you have to check out. I'm gonna buy some whiskey in there. Aaron
38:54 Bree's leaving now, so he must be happy with my interview. He helped me get ready. Check it out,
38:59 Vino Vest. Check out Anthony Jing's story. It's awesome. Great team, great site. And, you know,
39:07 look, if anyone has any questions, how can they get ahold of you? You can email me. So I'm at
39:12 anthony@vinovest.co. Perfect. As I mentioned, I get to inbox zero, so you'll definitely hear from me.
39:19 Oh my God. Do you use Gmail or do you use- Yeah, I use Gmail.
39:22 Do you do important unread and important other thing or no?
39:25 I use a tool called Mailman, which helps me batch my messages and helps me delete the spam,
39:33 automatically filter those out. And that helps me a lot with my email productivity.
39:39 Mailman. Yeah, Mailman. Another productivity app that I love.
39:44 I think I know it. One guy that got funded by the guys from Vancouver, maybe? I have to check it.
39:50 I'll check it. I've been using them since pretty much they launched.
39:55 How many years ago, you think? At least three now.
40:00 All right. I'm going to check it out. Mailman is not the one where you delay an email, is it?
40:04 It does delay and batch emails.
40:07 I think that... Okay. So you actually... Okay. Maybe I'll try it again. I think I had it before.
40:12 Yeah. Because that way I have different times of the day where I just block out for emails rather
40:16 than... When they just come in, it's really easy for you to just want to take care of them right
40:21 away. Just look at it. So that way I can know I'm distraction free for a couple hours. I can get
40:26 other shit done. And then I dedicate certain blocks of my day to email.
40:31 Love it. That's your other thing you got to start, Anthony. Time management. I'm about to create a
40:37 time management course starring Anthony Zhang. So are you ready for that one?
40:41 Couple of tools that I've learned along the way, but I'm still...
40:44 Any other last minute tools you want to tell us?
40:46 I don't know. I mean...
40:48 You did good so far.
40:50 I think being busy forces you to be good at time management.
40:53 Got it. Yep. Got it. All right. Anthony, thank you so much. Appreciate your time.
40:57 And go check out Vino Vest.
40:59 Thank you so much, Jason. It's a pleasure.
41:02 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Recommended
1:03
|
Up next
1:02
1:03