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AM/FM RADIO/PODCAST & TV SHOW
With millions of listeners a month, Building the Future has quickly become one of the fastest rising nationally syndicated programs. With a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, and more, the show showcases individuals who are realizing their dreams and helping to make our world a better place through technology and innovation.
Welcome to building the future, hosted by Kevin Horrick. With millions of listeners a month, building the future has quickly become one of the fastest rising programs with a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, ceos and more. The radio and tv show airs in 15 markets across the globe, including Silicon Valley. For full showtimes, past episodes or to sponsor this show, please visit buildingthefutureshow.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Today we have Tony Greenberg.
He's the CEO and founder of Ramparade. Tony, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
Kevin, I'm excited to have you on the show. You have a unique way of, well, I guess maybe a newer nickname called why not? Can you maybe talk about why you've been going by that lately? I think it's fitting.
Well, years ago, it became my burning man name. I had a dyslexic friend who read my name backwards, and he said, why no, t, why not? And I said, and everybody around me sort of said, wow, that's the best name for you. Anyway, you don't look like a Tony. You're not italian. Why not? And most everything that I say, if people have an idea, one of my key monikers in the world is if you've asked me the question and I say no, you've asked me the wrong question.
Got it.
Okay.
Interesting. Okay. That's an interesting way to live kind of your life, right? And that's probably obviously worked out well for you. You've been doing this a long time.
I live my life of service to others, and therefore it benefits myself surreptitiously in a beautiful way.
Very cool. So walk us through growing up and going to university and what did you take and why?
So, Kevin, first of all, let me be clear. I am not grown up. Now that we have that, I want to know if I can not walk you through, but run you through.
Perfect. Yep.
Beautiful. Born in Minnesota and left home at a very early age after my bar mitzvah. Okay. Wow. And wandered through the wilderness and found myself on mountaintops and streams and rivers and everything, and started to become who I am becoming today. At the ripe old age of 16, I went in the jewelry business, carting colored gemstones into jewelry stores on my bike in Minnesota. And I worked as a personal care attendant, supporting people living with CP and paralysis and other things that allowed them to be disabled. At that point, I found a bunch of old eyeglasses and a bunch of back of a cousin's eyeglass store, and I started a business selling vintage eyewear. It was punk rock era in whatever years those were. And I turned them into sunglasses. Then I turned into prescription business.
Then I built a chain of eyewear and then I sold it when I was 28. And then I went into the Internet and the Internet was interesting. I did search engine marketing before there were search engines. We would uniquely do colorless coding in HTML. It would be recognized so I could get Pepsi people to look at Coca Cola ads and vice versa. I lived in Aspen at that time. The Internet started and a recruiter got a hold of me and asked me if I wanted to work. I said yes. And simultaneously I accepted an offer to go be a vp of marketing inside of a now well known Internet brand that I shall not mention.
And then I never got my offer letter, never got my paperwork signed and the recruiter brought me into another deal and that they were selling this thing called bandwidth in they had a vision to be the first Internet data center company and I went there to be a key marketing executive and eventually sales. And we took that public at a valuation of $37 billion in 1996. And then I went and did a bunch of other stuff from helped reinvent conference calling and video conferencing. We were systems like this in 98 before they were invented, and we competed with Webex and were the leader. And then I was involved in stop the US, Tony, stop the US. Uz, not a word. Stop. You can speak clearly. Speak clearly.
Then I participated in the development of YouTube before YouTube was created with short term video. And then I went on to build a consulting firm that supported small companies like Microsoft, Disney, Sony, Yahoo, CBS, Goldman Sachs, doing strategy M, a advisory things of that nature. And then that became a Trojan horse for bringing value to both sides by renegotiating procurement contracts, taking a piece of the savings and procuring things for the largest companies in the world, all over the universe, which led me over time into a variety of other businesses. And eventually, about five years ago, I decided that I wanted to be more of an impact preneur or an impact entrepreneur, and drive only things that created massive levers on society and started building in decentralized governance, in blockchain, in all sorts of impact driven activities. And that's where I sit.
And today there's three areas of the company. Right now we run a grants matchmaking organization and decentralized governance called menagerie is. We have an operating company that oversees my investments. And third, we have a provocative services company that takes fees and cash in exchange for amplifying companies visions and either taking blockchain entities and giving them an enterprise or enterprise to use blockchain. And those are the areas that I focus on. The core tenets of the business are in healthcare, decentralization, energy as impact, digital id, and human transformation.
Interesting. So those are all huge industries with probably a lot of red tape to get through.
Right.
So how are you leveraging newer technologies in these kind of spaces that aren't known to be kind of cutting edge? Right.
Well, thank God I'm colorblind, so red to me is green, so I just run through that shit.
Interesting. Okay.
In a small way, I try to be impactful to the businesses and find areas of efficiency. My whole life I've been working on efficiency and eliminating what I call extractive capitalism. An extractive capitalism exists when margin prevails to drive no value except to the benefit of the owner, of the business, of the shareholder. I'm constantly enthralled with companies that have the balanced three legs of a stool. Value to shareholders, valued to the ecosystem, and valued to the employees. And when those things become perfectly balanced, you have things like Apple that appear right where it's just a shared value system across the entire universe. In many businesses, I get very angry. Yesterday I got in a rant and I got shut down on Facebook because it was somebody selling tofu. And I'm vegan.
For dozens of years they were selling tofu for $10 a pound plus shipping. And they were trying to say that tofu is sloppy and tastes bad and has a magnetic taste and you shouldn't have tofu. And they were selling. They're obviously buying Instagram ads and finding vegan people and trying to sell them some premium tofu that doesn't exist. And I was very angry with them. And I don't like extractive capitalism. I don't like when Uber puts on your screen and they give you the option to go $10 in eight minutes or $12 in four minutes, and they show up in 15 minutes and they charge you to the $12. That's illegal. It's extractive capitalism. I don't like when we steal things from indigenous tribes and use them for our benefit or our harm and there's no reparation that happens.
So I work in reparation around psychedelic medicine and headlands and the Amazon and make sure that indigenous tribal contracts pay them back and are valuable to all points of concern. And so I'm the David fighting against Goliath in most everything I do. Thanks for listening.
Okay, interesting. So obviously you've been an advisor, an investor, you've been doing this a long time. What types of companies? Or how do you kind of figure out what companies to actually work with? Because it's really easy to say some of these things and put some of these buzwords into a pitch deck or on a website. But how do you make sure that the companies you're working with or the projects you're working on are actually contributing to the cause and not just kind of putting it there and not really.
Doing anything about it? Well, when we talk about what's their intention and their mission, vision and values, I show them mine@ramfraight.com values, and I ask them that. That's the only thing they come. I get inbound of many opportunities a month to invest or to amplify or to activate, and I ask them what their mission vision values are if they don't have one. I say, look at mine and tell me, when you does your business start to be of service to the community and to the earth, or does it exist to make money? What are your drivers as a human being? And then I get the answers, and it cuts through the mustard. And they say, well, we give 5% to charity. This is not charity we're talking about.
This is about building businesses endemic to social impact and the availability to amplify your message and to shift. And when they show me their deck, I say, where's the one of what you vision? I don't care about what it is. I want to know when you first million users adopt this, or when your first thousand users adopt this. How is the world different? How have you driven incremental change? How have you modified social justice? How have you enabled free broadband in your region? Are you here to make money or be of service to the universe? And generally, they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. Have a nice day. Or they give me the right answer. But it's very simple. It literally takes me five minutes to know if somebody's mission driven. They all may contact us because they want outsourced business development.
They look at the logos on our web page and they go, oh, my God. If we could only talk to those people, our life would be great. The next thing I say is, tell us that. Your ten dreams. Imagine I'm a magic Buddha. Am I talking too fast, Kevin?
No, you're good.
Am I talking too fast?
Okay, keep going.
Imagine me as a magic buddha. Imagine me as a magic Buddha. You get to rub my belly now, all 140 pounds, right? The belly's not that big, and so I feel it. And I want you to tell me the magic tricks, other than you need money, right? Some of them have 100 million and it doesn't matter. A billion dollars. A lot of my clients, but some don't have money and they have a vision, a mission of vision, values. I said, what do you need from me? Well, we want you to invest or raise money. Well, sorry, goodbye. Click. Tell me the ten things that enable you to flourish and to meet your mission, vision and values. And if they can't, I say come be back when you do. Right. And then all of our business development starts out.
If we're going to help somebody, they share with us their magic tricks. If these things happened, then life would be amazing. And it's not money. What would make you more attractive to capital, right? What would make you more attractive to a target? And we're dealing with a company that has $4 billion in their bank and they literally can't get out of their own way and they haven't established well, it's immobilizing. And for me to look at them, they could be the next Microsoft.
So when I look at these constructs and they think that either they need money or they need the layoff, they don't look at the underlying problems, which is why I look at natural medicine, which is why instead of feeding ssris to people, there's treatments that allow people to overcome depression, overcome this, overcome that have nothing to do with taking pills or going to therapy. So there's an underlying consequence. There's a consequence to everything that has an underlying issue. And so I want to dig in and dig in and dig into the dirt and find what the essence of the problem is. And the problem is not allowing ourselves to be in flow with the universe, to be in flow with our team, to be in flow with our vision, and to be in flow with others.
And we're thinking about how we're going to get rich versus how we're going to create value.
Okay. No, that makes a lot of sense. So you start working with a company, how do you work with them to amplify their brand? Because that's the hardest, or one of the hardest parts. Nowadays it seems to actually get in front of your potential customer and actually market what you're doing.
If they actually get through the 100 days of orientation with us and we're high value, but it's expensive to bring us on.
Sure.
Or we defer at times for wonderful projects or pro bono on other times, but they have to actually know how to create value in the eyes of the customer. When I teach them selling, they have to realize that the most important thing in a sales pitch is when the customer says, tell me more. Sure.
Yeah.
Interesting and makes sense. I have a small article called mastering business development by Tony Greenberg. You can put that in one of those browsers and it'll find it. And it talks about the checklist under which that we make introductions. Which is the introduction more valuable to the customer or to you? If it's to you, then we're not going to do unless you can find a way to be more valuable to the customer. This is not an introduction we're going to make. So there's a process of being steeped into being of service to the customer. There's a product of me knowing that my stock rises when I make that introduction, and that they're going to follow through and have what I call integrity and communication, right? That means how they orient, how they discuss, how fast they respond.
If they're wearing a noise canceling headset, or if they have background noise in an airport and it's just rude. Right? Go into a phone booth. If there's no phone booth that exists, then don't have the call. And if there's no phone booth, then have a noise canceling headset. Getting people primed to remove the friction around what stops them from being able to flourish and raise money and create value are everything from the way they write the email, to the way they think about their mission, vision, values, to the way they wear a noise canceling headset or not, to the things that they say, to how quickly they respond. These are material things that get them ready to talk to somebody who has 100 reasons why to say no to you.
And so teaching those constructs and getting people into the mindset is great, because my entire life, I have been a team of ten, or 20 or 50 that's been guiding Microsoft, or guiding eBay or PayPal down a road, or helping rip CBS and Viacom apart and sewing them back together from a technology perspective, and supporting the people that make these massive things. And when eBay and PayPal bought 17 companies and I had to roll them into one, like, how do we deal with vendors, how do we deal with the ecosystem? Supply chain is the largest business in the world. And I've always worked on supply chain. And so getting sides to talk to each other and removing friction and doing it in an objective way is what I think I've spent my 10,000 hours on. And become a master of the universe.
Interesting. What else do you teach people in that 100 days?
Well, first of all, who they are, what they stand for, what their value proposition is, what their sales materials are supposed to be like, and how to keep the conversation going. So all those things are important. And I mean, there's more. But I think those are things. How they treat their employees, how they operate in the universe. I made a smart decision to spend three and a half years struggling through an arduous process to become B Corp certified because most companies I came across weren't interested in impact creation. And they were hand waving and greenwashing and telling me how they were going to creedy. You. Because they're going to give a free pair of socks to somebody. Right. I don't want to know about the socks.
I want to know why they need socks and why they're wearing them and why you are benefiting them. These amazing entrepreneurs named Mickey and Rada Agrawal, they wrote a book called Belong and they built three amazing startups. Like, just mind blowing. They're impact entrepreneurs to the highest order. And they built something called my apologies. They built a company for menstrual underwear that was black, called thanks, because they thought it was treacherous to the environment for tampon disposal, and it became an international global success. Then they built a thing called tushy because they said, we hate toilet paper going down the tubes and ripping up trees, which is a bidet. And then I'm lucky enough to become an investor in their current company, which is called hero, which is diapers that aren't disposable.
They go into a trash can that they make and mushrooms eat the diapers. And so these are people that built their businesses around impact creation. They're so impressive to me. And I come across entrepreneurs like that all over the universe. And endemic. The structure of their business is centered not around giving a free pair of socks, but actually shifting consciousness and humanity around the patterns that we have that aren't sustainable.
Okay, that's fascinating.
Okay.
So then when you find these really unique companies, then in a lot of cases it's potentially not. Well, I guess that. No, never mind. That wouldn't make sense. It's almost a no brainer to market some of them, then. But sometimes they're category creating, which is going to be challenging in itself. Right. So it's kind of like easy and hard at the same time. Or what are your thoughts around that marketing 101?
You're either creating a new market or taking away a market share from someone else.
Sure.
Within that realm, you have to go back to Michael Tracy's concept that to be an exemplar company, you either have expertise in creating customer intimacy or you're the lowest cost producer or the most innovative. And in any company in the world that's been extraordinarily successful, they've excelled at one of those things, not all of those things. And so trying to help people get to their heart, even large companies that haven't found their heart, it just had inertia and wind at their back. One of my favorite mentors, a close friend, William Quigley, who was the co founder of Idealab, went on to be first checks into everything. Hundreds of companies said. What is the thread in all of the 500 companies? And what created success first had nothing to do with anybody. There was inertia in the market.
Two, they were starved for capital, and three, the CEO had a mentor. That's it.
Interesting. Okay, advice for getting a mentor. It's hard.
Realize that a lot of people don't hear well. I don't take verbal pitches at all. Don't want to hear them, can't absorb them. I move from meeting to meeting, ten meetings a day, talking about disposable diapers to water treatments with positive ions. To this. Everybody wants to tell you their story. I'm here to tell you, I don't take pitches for movies. If you can't write it down on a piece of paper or in a deck, I can't absorb it the way you want me to. So, first of all, there are some people that are oriented by listening and some people that are oriented by the written materials and some people that are oriented around the use case, right? So they say in Silicon Valley, if you can't tell us your concept in 30 seconds, you've got the wrong pitch.
So when you take a look at these things, it's important to know your audience. I also teach my team to ask their potential customer, what is your favorite way of communication? What is your favorite time of day? How do you like to have meetings? What is your favorite media platform to work on? Texting? Email, WhatsApp? How do you want to communicate on LinkedIn? When you start to ask people how they want to communicate with you, the lights go off and they go, wow, this person actually wants to be a part of my world, and they're not here barking at me what they want. They're actually learning how to work within the frameworks that allow it. Easy for me.
When you're in a Microsoft or you're in a CBS or a viacom you've got a thousand people a day that want to do business with you, right? When you're an entrepreneur, no one wants to do business with you. So step in the eyes of the customer, step in the eyes of the systems and the ecosystems that you live in, and you realize you're being of service to them, being of service to yourself. And that's where communication and cohesion starts.
Yeah.
Because the most going to get.
It's interesting. So why do you find. Well, it's interesting to me that stuff sounds so simple, but nobody does that stuff, right? Or very few people do that stuff. So it's really noticeable when somebody does do that stuff, right.
It's like, wow. Yeah, what a pleasure. My whole life is picking up the phone and selling something, and selling is simply enabling decisions. It's nothing more than that. It's not taking a pitch, it's not convincing somebody, it's not conning somebody. It's enabling people on the other side to make a decision. The first thing you have to do is they have to make a decision to pick up the phone and to be actionable. And if I'm not creating value for that person on the other end of the phone, they're not going to hear from me.
And it's why I can call up the top cxos in the largest companies in the world and they pick up the phone and go, Tony, now they may not be so excited to hear from me because they know I want something, but they also know I'm going to give them something. So in the world of value exchange, they know that I'm going to do something valuable for them. But at the end of the rainbow, I'm looking to amplify something I'm doing and so I try to be as fun as possible.
No, that makes sense because obviously you've been doing this a long time. You have a reputation. What advice do you give to people that are just starting out other than the simple things that people can do to start serving the customer or potential customer right out of the gate, which is going to set you apart, right pretty early on.
Be interesting. Allow people to say, tell me more. If you're not interesting, get interesting. Don't get on the phone and talk about the israeli conflict. Get on and learn about the company that you're selling. Okay. And find an interesting question. Write an implication for their business and ask them something smart that makes them stop their day and think, be interesting. That's good advice. Have multiple streams of things going on in your world so that you can be interesting, not just supporting a charity or working at a soup kitchen. Get involved with a lot of things that create value so that they can see you as a human and you can see them behind every corporate executive that you're trying to sell or someone who you're trying to create a believer in. They get to choose between talking to you or someone else. Sure.
So be interested. To become interesting was always what my friend Dr. Steven Scappa would say. In order to be interesting, you must become.
No, that. That's a really good. Yeah. Okay, so walk us through maybe some of the other types of companies you've invested in the past and kind of what they're doing today.
So I'm going to take you from now backwards. So there's three companies that are super interesting. One is called redividor. They came to me because at the intersection of blockchain data centers and impact is me, and they had a vision to flourish impact into communities that are opportunity zones in the US and build data centers. And we developed and coined the phrase energy as impact and started building the business around driving impact to underutilized communities. Right. And that one's been wonderful. It's at Redivider Co. The CEO is Tom. Yeah, I was actually lucky enough to.
Have them on the show a couple months ago.
Wonderful group. So I happened to carve them into the world. We're in the process of raising a billion dollars of debt and a quarter billion in operating capital. It's a large business that starts to shift the tide, driving new power sources. And that one's super fun. Another one that I like, that you may or may not have met, is called Valuesco. And Values Co. Is an amalgamation. Values Co. Is an amalgamation of matching social impact campaigns to advertising, to celebrities and large brands. So in the instance you put in values Co, Time magazine, and they had a big event last night where Time magazine is underwritten with a large blockchain foundation that's looking to flourish the benefit to ecological systems. And they've together, teamed together to find a way to turn advertising actions into social impact campaigns. So they're super interesting.
They're at values Co. And I really like them. Interesting. That's fascinating. Yeah. It's a new form of advertising that drives social impact. Yeah, makes sense. Then a project that's super interesting is menagerie. And so we developed a new type of online experience for decentralized governance that came out of the Dow category, and were running a Dow that was granted $250,000,000 out of a blockchain called Casper. And we ran a grants organization, and were able to Grok and have them underwrite close to $4 million of funding for Xprize foundation, run by Anusha Ansari and Peter Dimandes.
And what we wanted to do was take Xprize, which was solving the world's greatest crisis with the most powerful people in the world, and underwrite the building of technology that would drive them to decentralize and to allow their community and the people that care about their projects to actually flourish. So we launched that at the visioneering event on November 3. It's a year in progress. Our partners are Vatam. We're super excited to use that app to work with otherwarge orgs and other large places that create big impact in the universe. And you can find that at Menagerie is type in ramp ratexprize. And read about that grant. And stay tuned over the next variety of months to see how that rolls out. There's another one called unites Ventures. I'm an investor in with Will pool, former head of Microsoft Windows, and Dave Richards.
They've done an amazing job of funding dozens of underprivileged entrepreneurs india and 13 other countries around the world. You can find them at Capria VC. I have another company that I invested in. Let's see, I'm looking down my list. There's an interesting company called Micromedica Life Sciences, and Paul Stamets, the Mushroom man, created a company to aggregate all of his intellectual property into a company that will drive human transformation using mushrooms. And so I've been lucky enough to become an investor with micromedica. I have another company I'm involved in and an advisor to radical science. And Jeff Chen, who is ahead of the UCLA Cannabis Research Institute, created a next generation way to do clinical trials and shorten them.
They first focus on validating or invalidating CBD, and now they've moved over to shift how validation is done for nutraceuticals, which have been forced to change their labeling due to their preposterous claims. So they're driving impact through transparency on validation of drugs. I have another one called trip T-R-I-P-P run by Nanaya Reeves, who's an award winning leader in XR wellness and doing VR treatments for you and I to stay calm with our breath and using VR to reducing the instances of schizophrenic attacks through the use of VR, which I'm excited about. And that's enough. I could go on and on. There's dozens. Beckson biomedical is taking the miracle drug of ketamine and pairing it with all sorts of other shogun compounds and different ways to deliver medicine into the body. That's at Bexon biomedical and Beckson discovery.
Each one of these has a deep value creation for the world, and I'm happy to be a partner with all of them.
Very cool. Yeah, that's some really interesting stuff across a number of spectrums.
Right?
That's really cool. So I'm curious, though. It seems like obviously we're kind of maybe in a downturn, depending on who you talk to, everything kind of seems a bit doom and gloom right now. What advice do you give to people right now? Or what are you seeing and what is your thoughts on the industry right now? Because you just rattled off a ton of innovation and things happening and you're actively investing, it seems like you maybe see it as a bit more positive than it's being portrayed right now.
Again, I like to quote William Quigley, who's been one of the greatest investors in tech forever. And then he created an incredible system called wax on the blockchain and has been doing a lot of great work. He said, you know, Tony, he says, I've invested in venture my whole life, but the majority of my money has all been made at the bottom of a market. He says, taking the rubble and the Phoenix and family wealth is not created through venture capital. It's created through investments at things at the bottom of the shift of markets. I believe we're going to go through a lot of this decentralization of companies. When they talk about web three, I like to simply say it's like web one, which displaced 40% of margin, right?
We're getting to bypass the 40% margin of the metas and the facebooks and the instagrams and the planning. If you're going to have 20% of your operating cost or 40% of your operating cost of a tofu company selling $12 tofu that cost $2 by spending $4 on advertising, you're going to lose. If you're going to find things that support the environment and indigenous tribal rights and to support extraordinary value. If you're going to create health food products that people can't afford, that don't solve the food deserts in the world like kimball musk is doing with big green dow, you're going to die. We have to look at the age of singularity, which is what Ray Kurzwell said, where computers become merged with animals, become merged with humans, and it would drive the air of transhumanity.
So the essence of singularity would say that AI takes over. You need to create the singularity bill of Rights that drives the disciplines as you operate within the confines of this new terroir, this new thing called AI, which becomes smarter than us now and becomes something that is so pervasive in our lives, where I literally can't live without reshaping my essence and my communication through Chat GPT, I literally am on full time taking my jumbled ideas and organizing them to be able to share them with people so that they're absorbed, heard, understood in the way they want to see them. A picture paints a thousand words, so mid journey or other to speak into something and to create a unique metaphor and a unique simile and a unique analogy so that things can be understood, we've got to realize. I had a wonderful.
Also, I got to be mentored by the founder of intel right when I grew up, a lot of part time in Aspen, Colorado. And he would tell me that people don't understand each other. And when OCR, he built this OCR company called Care Caere, it became one of the big voice systems. Today, Bob Noyce would tell me that it was provocative to realize that people didn't understand what each people were saying, and that gestural sciences and communication and artificial intelligence would actually drive us to have comprehension, not just to ourselves, but to the global market. So today I'm doing an important business deal for humanity in Peru with some things that support the ayahuasca community. And there's important plants and medicines that are being eroded in the Amazon.
And I went and I asked my admin to please set up something that would automatically translate English and put it through Chachi Pt. So when I was having a conversation, instead of a translator, I was actually communicating. And for the first time, and this was literally this morning when I saw it work. I'm like 30 years ago when I met Bob Noyce and he told me that this is what it was and this is what semiconductors would do. And when I knew Steve Jobs, because my father's friend was a guy named Arthur Rock, the guy invented venture capital, put the name on it when they would tell us about what the future was going to be. This morning I've been talking about it, but it grocked.
I'm going to have a natural language conversation with natural large models who will allow me to truly connect with another person. They'll see my eyes and they'll understand my intention, and they'll realize what we're here for. And it literally brought tears to my eyes an hour before we got on this call, realizing it was a five minute conversation with my admin that was going to drive true cohesion between me and one of the Shippibo tribe leaders that were building a business around them that would allow them to license their designs to large consumer brands and to be able to support drug development for their precious medicines that people are trying to chop down their forest and ruin. Like, wow.
Yeah, that's really cool. That's amazing. Really. How do you find those unique opportunities, though? Because that's challenging in itself, honestly, they.
All come to me.
Okay, you're the guy people with, well.
There'S a lot of guys, like, why not?
Right? Why not? Why not come tony?
I hear about everything and I keep my eyes and I study everything and I look at everything and my team is curious and intriguing and I say, tell me more. I just say, tell me more. And it just shows up. I don't have to go searching for anything. I'm lucky. I'm almost 60 years old and this year, and I'm so lucky because I'm in flow, especially in the last five years. And I'm of service and I'm of service to whoever I can and I try to flourish or allow money to thrive and to move through. I have a small foundation that we give a little money to organizations that are driving stuff. But I'm in flow. I wake up every day in gratitude. Sure.
And I say thank you to the world around me and hopefully at the end of the year, the money equals up to more than last year and I can continue to do a better job. So I just say, tell me more. And I say, why not?
Fair enough. That's great. So I'm curious, do you have kind of a range that you like to invest in or a state a company's in, or are you kind of open right now?
I'm happy to say I've outsourced my portfolio management to another group last week, and I'm less interested in writing checks and more interested in getting involved and driving and amplifying incredible projects. And I'm also really involved. I've gone back to some of my Fortune 500 cronies, Fortune 50 cronies, and said, where you are an entrepreneur intra inside of your organization, let me help spout these things. So when we opened up and gave this grant of 100 million tokens or millions of dollars to Xprize, there's 100 powerful people behind every door at Xprize whether it's the trustees and our Elon Musk or Sergey Bren, who's always working out in Dennis beach museum or any of the other fascinating people like Dean Cayman. There's a lot of people inside of it.
So I'm looking for gatekeeper organizations where impact is behind because I speak corporate better than I speak small company. And so I'm looking for sproutings and blossomings of impact inside of corporations. I love talking to chief impact officers. I love talking to chief sustainability officers. I love talking to people that have power within the beast within. Right. And then I'm more interested in that. And then the small projects I'll curate through menagerie grants and menagerie. I can't announce who's going to be a partner of us, but there's a very large company that manages and people that manage filmtroptic distribution from large family offices that I'm doing some work with. But if you have an impact project, go to ramp rate grants marketplace and fill out a grant form. It takes us a long time to get back to you, but we're working it out.
And being a matchmaker for grants is a dream of mine. And so I'm looking for projects where I can unlock money from large family offices and large corporations and blockchain foundations which have flourished and have billions of dollars and match that with large projects. So that's what I think I'm going to ride in the sunset with over the next 50 years.
Interesting. Okay, maybe, correct me if I'm wrong here, but if you go into these large companies and you can basically do you kind of like incubate like an internal team, maybe bring in some external people or. Well, I have a company that would be really good in this enterprise to help you go do X, Y and Z or whatever that is. Is that kind of what your new sweet spot?
I'm missing you. Something's going on.
Okay.
No. I lost you for a minute because you know why. I'm going to tell you why I lost you. It's because the settings on my phone, I should have put phone notifications, but it's because meta, Mark Zuckerberg's company makes calls that come in on WhatsApp prioritization over telecom and telecom decentralizing. Telecom is a huge focus of me with one of my important projects called and interesting. And the way we communicate and the way we receive data, we need to orient again. We need to set up our settings so we're not interrupted. So I mentioned this because it's pertinent to the conversation. Centropynet is amazing company. The token is called Noya, and we're creating real time data streams for web two to web three entities. Take a look at it.
It's a wonderful company with some amazing entrepreneurs I've worked with out of Lithuania, which are where my roots are for five years now. I've worked with them. So go ahead and ask your question.
No. Okay, sure. So I was going to say, when you go into an enterprise, for example, are you looking to kind of maybe take some of their internal team members and, or bring in some external team members and either maybe build something or create something within the company or match one of the companies you're kind of been involved with and say they can help you with X, Y and Z or where's kind of your sweet spot with that?
Absolutely. If we're working with a large corporation, I need a guy to make sure we don't get run over. And somebody has to own me and own us in a small organization. They have to listen to us. And it's amazing how were able to boss around Microsoft. Right, sure. Or eBay and some of these companies that have raised money, maybe a hundred million bucks or a billion dollars in some know just because they've made money doesn't mean they're smart. Yeah.
Which is a weird thing to wrap your head around, especially when you're younger.
Yeah, but I learn from everything I do. But we have to set know KPIs that are around the discipline. There's an interesting guy named Tony Davis, runs something called inherent, I believe, capital, and he's told me that if management incentive doesn't. I think he's kind of like the Carl icon for social impact. It's like a corporate leader. Interesting guy spent time with, on Necker island with Richard Branson, and he said it's very simple to drive impact. You make it 40% of executives comp. So if I can't get people in an organization to rally around bonusing people where incentive drives impact of the project, I'll probably fail in a corporation unless there's a real person that's got a way to go. But I want incentives aligned to outcomes.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We're kind of coming to the end of the show, but I'm curious, is there any other advice you would like to give to people out there, no matter what it is, because you've done this for so long and you've been involved in so long for so long.
Yes. When you listen to this podcast, do it at half speed and send me a note of how I can help and correct me and teach me and tell me more. And for you out there, I want you, when your mind shuts down and your amygdala tells you no, I want you to say, tell me more. And I want everybody that is a CEO to look at my friend and another mentor called Matt Moshari Mochary the Moshari method, and listen to his podcasts with Tim Ferriss and everyone else and read his book, the great CEO within. If you are not using his tool of how to manage yourself and others, you can't be a unicorn like he's helped make dozens and dozens for sequoia. He's literally a puppy mill for billionaires and a puppy mill for impact.
For humanity, the Machari method is the most potent learning system for how ceos how to operate. And it's my greatest joy that I've known him for 20 years. And I can recommend this potent, powerful man and his operating system for humanity and management that will literally shift the way you operate and allow people to feel every way and around you. If I could just follow Mashari method every day myself, I would tenfold my own impact.
Interesting. That's actually really good advice. So let's close the show with mentioning where people can get more information about ramp rate yourself and any other links you want to mention.
Great. So I would love you know, I'm easy to reach on LinkedIn. I like it. If you don't use LinkedIn, it verifies and validates who you are and who you're connected to. And if you don't like it's not a social media application. It's a knowledge management for me, understanding and the ability to create a filter of if you're out creating value. So I love LinkedIn. Connect with me there and then. Other than that, my email is tony@ramparate.com and be ready to be asked the real question, why are you here? How can I help? What have you studied? What do you know? And then my portfolio that I'm most proud of is just put in b labs ramp rate, and it'll give you a list of projects and their impact outcomes, and it'll give you my vibe more than any other page.
Perfect. Tony. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show, and I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your day, man.
Have a beautiful day. Kevin and thank you, Donald Loughlin, for setting this up, who I worked with 30 years ago. Have a great day.
Wow, that's really cool, actually. Very cool, Tony.
All right, Kate. Bye. Talk to you.
Bye.
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