The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 41
Episode 41: Rate Hikers Guide to the Galaxy
Shane’s back from Mexico and the world appears to be falling apart. The hedgefund dude who shorted GameStop and was bested by Redditors walked back a light promise to give investors their money back. Our hosts predict the mid-term elections will dictate student loan forgiveness and borrowers will hopefully see some much-deserved relief. We’ve got a big olde IPO in Bausch + Lomb, the eyecare supplier that will forever make contact lens wearers buy those stupid tiny travel-sized bottles. In other news, the fed hiked interest rates and someone hacked a big merger. And finally, big ups to AirBnB for doubling down on allowing employees to work from anywhere. This one is inflated.
Read the Full Transcript:
Speaker 1:
This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered tax or investment advice.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Liquidity Event, a show about all things personal finance, with a laser focus on equity compensation. Hosted by AJ and Shane of Brooklyn FI, each episode will take you through the week's news on FinTech, IPOs, SPACs, founder wins and fails, crypto, and whatever else these nerds think is interesting. Learn more and subscribe today at brooklynfi.com.
AJ:
Hello and welcome to the Liquidity Event. We're your hosts, AJ-
Shane:
And I'm Shane, back from across the border.
AJ:
Oh, okay. Welcome back.
Shane:
It's [foreign language 00:00:46] .
AJ:
Or should I say, [foreign language 00:00:47] ?
Shane:
[foreign language 00:00:48].
AJ:
[foreign language 00:00:49].
Shane:
You would make it Spanish.
AJ:
[foreign language 00:00:56].
Shane:
Of course. Pathetic.
AJ:
Oh, boy. Welcome back. We held down the fort without you last week. Got best reviews ever [crosstalk 00:01:09]-
Shane:
Anyway, this is episode 41 of the Liquidity Event, recorded on May 4th. May the fourth be with you 20-
AJ:
May the fourth be with you!
Shane:
... 2022. May the fourth-
AJ:
May the fourth be with you.
Shane:
Yes. Happy Star Wars Day, everybody. What's going on, AJ?
AJ:
Not much. I am looking forward to a brief and hilarious family vacation this weekend. My little cousin is getting bat mitzvah'd inside of Walt Disney World in Florida, so taking the fam down there. My husband says, "You owe me." I'm excited. Some people are not.
Shane:
Wait. Nabil's going?
AJ:
Nabil's going. Yeah, it's a family thing. The whole fam's going.
Shane:
You're dragging your husband to Disney World?
AJ:
It's my cousin's bat mitzvah. It's a big event in the Jewish faith. It's her coming of age. It's going to be great. It's going to be lit.
Shane:
You would have to physically intimidate me to the go to Disney World. In my fifties.
AJ:
There may have been some physical intimidation.
Shane:
Incredible. I bet there's a lot of similarities between my Mexico trip and your bat mitzvah.
AJ:
Yes.
Shane:
A lot of good food. It's going to be hot.
AJ:
A lot of good food, a lot of sun.
Shane:
Yeah. Interesting real estate.
AJ:
Hanging by the pool. Anyways.
Shane:
I don't have anywhere else to go.
AJ:
So, last night you called me in tears. What happened to you last night?
Shane:
Oh, gosh. Are we going to do this?
AJ:
You put it on the spreadsheet. For the record, ladies and gentlemen, we have a What Are You Up To and usually we leave it blank, but Shane put in, "biggest social faux pas of my life."
Shane:
All right, I'll try to do this quickly. If our audience doesn't know, I am recently single and I was shooting my shot, so to speak, with this girl who rejected me, which is fine. Which is totally chill, very respectful. But I was thinking about it for a while and then shot my shot, didn't work out, was dejected, rejected. We've all been there. Had an emotional lash out, sent a message to my friend, talking trash about her. Just like, "Fuck her! Fuck him!" But I said something personal, like an inside joke, about her. And there was a bug in apple software and it sent the inside joke, personal note to the girl. I just said to her, "You'll never hear from me again. It's all good. Thanks for entertaining this. Have a good life." And then the next thing that she gets in her inbox is a message for me, essentially talking shit about her. And I wanted to-
AJ:
Classic.
Shane:
... hang myself. I wanted to jump off the Empire State Building. Luckily AJ here is a fantastic friend, and wrote me-
AJ:
Sorry. Wait, no. We have to back up a second.
Shane:
What's that?
AJ:
We have to back up a second because you started out the evening by Slacking me and saying, "I can't believe it. My therapist canceled for the third time." So, ladies and gentlemen-
Shane:
Yeah. Tuesdays are the worst.
AJ:
Here, we have-
Shane:
I'm trying.
AJ:
... a man, hat in hand, saying, "I am ready for therapy," which... Most men that I know have not gotten to that point in their lives. You have gotten there and you have been ghosted by a few therapists multiple times. So instead of being in therapy at the seven o'clock hour, you were texting-
Shane:
Yes.
AJ:
Semi-hateful inside jokes to your boys and accidentally sent them to the girl that you were courting.
Shane:
Right. The group chat message went to the girl that... Yes, privately... Shakespeare could not write this shit. It's truly stranger than fiction.
AJ:
It's a modern-
Shane:
But you wrote me a nice reply to her.
AJ:
... Merchant of Venice.
Shane:
This is like a business lesson as well. If you're going through an intense emotional period and or if your business partner is going through an intense, emotional reaction to maybe an email from a client or a text from a partner, you can step in without emotion and write a appropriate response or put a bandaid on it by communicating. Just write them something to send to that person without emotion that is probably more effective. And if you could do that quickly, then it can really... What do you do with a wound when you put a bandage around it?
AJ:
You heal it. Smooth it over.
Shane:
Yeah. There you go. Different analogy.
AJ:
Bury it deep inside and forget about it.
Shane:
Yeah. A lot less blood loss, so I appreciate that
AJ:
Lesson learned. Yeah. I mean, that's a great business lesson. I think show is about money and finance, but also us two whack jobs, so hopefully, you're entertained by our misadventures. But yeah, having someone else write responses where you are very emotionally involved could be very helpful. I do that for friends all the time.
Shane:
Yeah. And you can do it for your boss too. If somebody in your life is struggling with sending a message, just write it for them. It's a huge value add to your friends and family and to your colleagues. "Let me write just write that for you." Because it's so easy for you, but it's hard for them because they're wrapped up in it. Anyway, you want to talk about Bausch & Lomb?
AJ:
I would love to talk about Bausch & Lomb. Speaking of crying and wet eyes.
Shane:
Speaking of cleaning things up. Good God.
AJ:
Anyway, speaking of a pipeline with various projects and various stages of development-
Shane:
Oh, wow.
AJ:
Bausch & Lomb is being spun out of a massive conglomerate called Valiant, is going public under the ticker BLCO. It's a portfolio of well-known brands encompassing lots of eye care brands, eye vitamins, surgical instruments. Everyone's got eyes. Everyone wants to see. Everyone's got to take care of their eyes. This company is never going out of business because of this fucking product right here. Apologies for the F word. For those who are listening and not watching, I'm holding up a Bausch & Lomb ReNu motherfucking travel size-
Shane:
That's Jim Cramer of you right now.
AJ:
Contact solution thing.
Shane:
So you got to smash a button.
AJ:
Oh, my God. I have bought hundreds of these in my life because contact solution is... Whatever. What's the word? Antiseptic or something, it has to be contained. You can't just move it around from different bottles because it's going in your eyes, so you want to make sure it's really clean. So you have to buy these stupid enclosed bottles over and over again. Really pisses me off. Anyway, this company's going public, highly profitable, strong cash flow.
Shane:
Bausch & Lomb's been [inaudible 00:07:48]... Is this a German company?
AJ:
I don't know. They've been around since the 1850s. They've been around for a long time.
Shane:
Love a late bloomer.
AJ:
Well, yeah. It's a spinoff. It's one of those, "We're public. We're not public. We got bought. We're going public again."
Shane:
Okay.
AJ:
Founded in Canada, or their headquarters are in Canada, actually. In Vaughn, Canada. 20,000 employees, huge company, go on public this Friday, actually. What are we looking at? Deal size. Almost a $800 million deal size. Pretty big IPO. This is news. This would not have been news back in September when it was an IPO deluge. In an IPO desert such as this, we are forced to make sure we bring our contact lens solution for the IPO desert. Looking forward to seeing what happens.
Shane:
This is the biggest IPO of the year so far, right?
AJ:
So far. It'll be the second biggest one, if all goes according to plan.
Shane:
Right. So we have a 160-year-old unicorn on our hands here.
AJ:
Yes, exactly. It's an old-ass unicorn.
Shane:
Do you think Brooklyn FI will be a unicorn in the year 2050? Wait, did I do the math right?
AJ:
I do. I think we'll get there faster.
Shane:
2178?
AJ:
We'll get to this later, but I hope I will be long gone and dead and not preserved in my digital afterlife by that point.
Shane:
I want to live forever. I'm down with that. Just putting that out there. All right.
AJ:
Okay. Anyways, general market update. What do you have for me here?
Shane:
Well, for those of you that enjoy meme stocks, you'll like this next article. We have some waffling from the CIO, chief investment officer, and the founder of Melvin Capital. Mr. Gabe Plotkin is the infamous CIO of Melvin Capital that had shorted Game Stop. Meme stocks got the best of him. His investors lost a ton of money. When the memers purchased up all the Game stock while he was shorting it, pushing prices up, there was a lot of market manipulation happening. This was in response... The memers were fed up with big hedge fund managers destroying companies that they love. They bought up all the Game Stop and AMC stock, forcing the short sellers to purchase at ever-increasing prices. And he got in trouble. He lost a lot of money. In a rising market, he focuses on shorting stocks. That's what his hedge fund does. And he was going to wrap up shop, is my understanding of what was going on, is that he decided after-
AJ:
He was going to shut down.
Shane:
After 10 years of growing Melvin, which is named after his grandfather, which is very cute, as cute as you can be for a hedge fund CIO, he decided that he was going to wrap up. And then he wrote a cryptic email just a few days ago that says, "Actually, I'm keeping y'all's money. I'm keeping y'all's $5 billion and we're going to run it back." Actually, he did The Wolf of Wall Street. "I'm staying! I'm staying! I'm not going anywhere!"
Speaker 4:
I'm not fucking leaving! They're going to need a fucking wrecking ball to take me out of here!
Shane:
Why would you? How do you step off the throne of managing a $5 billion hedge fund that shorts meme stocks?
AJ:
Yeah. Where do you go from there? Yeah.
Shane:
What, is he going to get a job at Starbucks?
AJ:
Yeah. I don't know. You go hang out with Martin Shkreli on your island in The Bahamas, I guess. My favorite thing of this article is... And look, I don't really feel bad for hedge fund investors because these are investors who have... This is not like a retirement fund or this is someone's entire future-
Shane:
Yeah. There's no 401k.
AJ:
These are very, very wealthy people who have five or 2% of their portfolio in the [inaudible 00:11:33] fund. But my favorite was one investor who's like, "I just want my money back." It's like, bro, this is investing. You don't get your money back. It's not like you invest a million dollars and you hope it goes up and if it doesn't... If you don't like the outcome, you don't get a refund. That's not how this works. The people that get quoted in these articles, it does make me wonder, do people actually understand what is the process of a hedge fund?
Shane:
No. No way.
AJ:
Maybe we'll do an episode about that in the future. I don't feel like talking about it now.
Shane:
I would wager 80 to 90% of retail investors, even hedge fund investors, buy a cult of personality and they trust their guy. And that's why you have CIOs and founders and heads of companies, just their vibe ends up what investors go with, is my assumption. For 90%. There's no facts there. That's my hunch, as someone that is in the industry.
AJ:
I'll back you up on that hunch. I'll be your hunchback.
Shane:
Oh, nice! Hey, that was good! All right. Speaking of piggybacking, somebody hacked more people, a big firm. This next article from Bloomberg is about one of my favorite hacks of all time, here. We have an M&A transaction going down between KKR, which is one of the biggest private equity firms in the entire world, they're buying a company, as they do in private equity, and there was a... There's this great article that talks about what junior lawyers do on M&A transactions is they do all the fine details. Just like associates in accounting firms or financial planning firms. They handle the day-to-day data entry and the fine print. All those footnotes in long PDFs are written and reviewed by the grunts, people that are learning how to get to the higher, more difficult esoteric stuff such as managing the projects. And so what happened in this project is that right before the merger was about to go down, there was an exhausted lawyer receives an email that says, "Actually you need to change the wire transfer for that $10 billion to this new account in Hong Kong." And the exhausted attorney's like, "Yeah, sure. I'm not going to be the one that holds up this M&A deal for $10 billion at KKR." So they changed the details and it turns out that some hacker had-
AJ:
That was hacker-
Shane:
Had been sitting there waiting for right before the merger was going to go through and was probably like a bug on the wall. Just like, "Let me wait till this attorney's girlfriend has yelled at him. He's like three weeks into this deal. He's working 100 hours a week..."
AJ:
100-hour work weeks.
Shane:
"Let me just slip this little bank and routing details in here." Boom. $10 billion into a Hong Kong bank account.
AJ:
It's just also crazy because the stock transfer company, Continental, who we deal with all the time when our clients have stock that moves from a private deal into a public market, like when it's moving from a spreadsheet to E-Trade or whatever, they noticed it and they complained to the lawyers. They're like, "Hey, we need to have this formal review process. Wire is a really big deal. We got to make sure that these people are legit." And everyone was really comfortable with each other, so they just rubber stamped it, sent it through and yeah, exactly. I don't want to be the junior associate who held up this deal ahead of the Q4 close so everyone doesn't get their bonus or whatever. That's right. There's a lot of good reasons why these deals, at the very end, want to move over like really quickly. So actual wire fraud, actual wire fraud.
Shane:
Incredible.
AJ:
Also shout out to Matt Levine, this is a Bloomberg article, who writes an opinion column. He's brilliant and funny and a great writer. We read a lot of articles and sometimes I read these articles and I'm like, "Did a robot write... What did I just read?" I have no idea what the content was. I have to read four other articles to actually get the gist of the story. So shout out to Matt Levine.
Shane:
And shout out to the hacker that went to law school that knew how to sit right on the edge of an M&A transaction and then slip in and do the old switcheroo right before the deal closes. Incredible.
AJ:
Yeah. When you think about it, this is something that-
Shane:
It only takes one. Just need one.
AJ:
Yeah.
Shane:
[crosstalk 00:15:51] good.
AJ:
Right. Well, that's like our business. We deal with wire transactions and big accounts. We're dealing with institutions and clients are often frustrated. Like, "I need my money tomorrow." And it's like, "Well, even if we do a wire, that bank is going to have to call you, they need to hear your voice. They're going to email us and say, 'By the way, did your client do this?'" There has to be these layers of security, otherwise, we just end up with fraud, which we see all over the blockchain because there's not that layer of dinosaur actually checking that the person that you want the money to is, in fact, that person and not a hacker in Hong Kong.
Shane:
You know where this would never happen, AJ? Japan. Nobody steals anything in Japan, as you know.
AJ:
That's true.
Shane:
Anyway, you want to talk about Fed Hikes Rates Half Point-
AJ:
Fed hike rates?
Shane:
As Pal Signals Similar Moves Ahead. What a title.
AJ:
Fed Hikes Rate Half Point as PAL Signals Similar Moves Ahead.
Shane:
What are we talking about here?
AJ:
The fed hiked interest rates. Everyone freaked out. I got a text message from my sister, "Oh, my God. Rates are going up." And I said, "Cool." I don't know. Yeah, we have historic inflation right now. Everyone's freaked out about that. This is corrective monetary policy. They said they were going to do it anyway. This makes sense. This is the plan and we're enacting plan. People like to freak out about these things. I'm not freaked out. You have some historical context for us.
Shane:
I do? Oh, yeah.
AJ:
Yes.
Shane:
Well, I mean, there's only two ways to fight inflation, really. And one of them is raising interest rates and that's just what we have to... I'm sorry. There's only one way to fight inflation, and that's raising interest rates.
AJ:
I thought the other way was to learn how to bake your own sourdough bread?
Shane:
We're going to talk about inflation in another article about student loans. But essentially, you raise interest rates and you just dump on the economy and you cause a recession. And then things go back to 0% interest rates. And then you just weedle your way back up. Hard to say where we're going to be in the near term.
AJ:
Hard to say.
Shane:
Anyone listening to this, this just means that if you're shopping for a home, which I have mixed feelings about as a time for buying a home right now, your interest rates are going to go up. Or what you are expected to pay as part... The interest rate, as part of your mortgage, will increase. So your budget just got smaller for a home. So if you're looking at a $600,000 home, you might be looking at a $560,000 home. But we all know that's not going to stop you from going outside your budget, way outside your budget to buy your dream home, which is always just what's on the edge of what you can't afford.
AJ:
Can't put a price on dream, Shane.
Shane:
Nobody has ever bought a house that they can afford in the history of home purchases. What does this mean to you? It means that you're going to buy the same home you're going to buy before, but you still can't afford it.
AJ:
It's going to be a bit of a stretch. Yup.
Shane:
Anyway.
AJ:
So speaking of anyway, how much home can you afford?
Shane:
Right.
AJ:
Well, The New York Times came out with a smashing article called how to figure out if you can actually afford that new home.
Shane:
A smashing article.
AJ:
This was a smashing piece of content produced by the fellows and the ladies at The New York Times.
Shane:
Oh, I can smell the tweed.
AJ:
I thought this was going to be one of their awesome interactive calculators. New York Times shout out, they have this incredible rent versus buy calculator that's informative and interactive. I thought that's what this was going to be. It's not. It's just a, "Make sure your budget's on track. Make sure you're... Don't waive home inspections." It's just common sense, good advice. Not knocking the article. It didn't deliver for me. Anyway.
AJ:
Basically, there's psychological pressure of everything. We just came out of a pandemic. Everyone's freaking out. It was like "Aah, inflation's running rampant. Maybe there's a recession." What do people want to do? They want to nest. They want to own something. They want to own this big asset. And they think they have to get in now. That's good protection for the future.
AJ:
But there's a quote in here that says, "The danger is that you might be creating vulnerability by leaving insufficient flexibility for later." I like that. There's basically a version of that I tell our clients all the time, which is you can afford it, you can do it, it works, but you are tied to this very expensive thing. You can't move if you change jobs, if your kid decides to go to a school out of state, if you have a different partner. Lots of things can happen where you don't want to be in this home anymore for the next 10 years, you're shit out of luck.
Shane:
Yeah. I mean, how many other things do you do for 30 years? And financially, there's no middle ground between a one-year lease and a 30-year mortgage. There's obviously shorter term mortgages, but most of the time, people can't afford them.
AJ:
What's that... I forget which country... It was a Planet Money about this. I forget which country it was in, but it was this weird kind of rent-own hybrid, where there were like seven to 10 year leases. I got to find that article. We'll talk about it next time. It didn't seem very fair or better, but it was sort of that medium term that you're talking about.
Shane:
Yeah. It all comes down to it's an investment, but only one person can utilize it. And it's also a form of consumption because you're living in the house that is deteriorating. So something in between a one-year lease and a 30-year own or longer, I don't know. There's got to be something there.
Shane:
But I also love on this article that's like, "Beware of fixer-uppers if you're trying to stretch your budget because they might not be perfect and you might have to spend more money fixing them than you think." It's like, "Okay." Things might be more expensive than you think on the backside. Also-
AJ:
Yeah. But with a fixer upper-
Shane:
Just a reminder, that if you're comfortable with living mildly less comfortably, then your dollar just goes so much further if you're willing to be a little bit Bohemian and just focusing on the things that really matter like does the wifi work? Can I take a hot shower? Can I go to sleep? Can I sleep well? It's a super power.
AJ:
Most people have slightly higher standards than you do for living. And we're talking about like, oh, it might be a little bit more expensive like a home renovation. It's not like, "Oh, no. It's $2,000 over budget." It's like, "Oh, no. We discovered that the walls have asbestos in them and we need to restructure everything and it's actually $100,000 over budget." So that's where we get into these scenarios where maybe you were uncomfortable renting in your two-bedroom and really wanted that three-bedroom, and buying seemed like the only option because you've got kids, but it can ruin people just in the way that medical debt can ruin families. Owning a home that you can't afford causes a lot of friction.
Shane:
Don't skip inspection.
AJ:
Yeah. Don't skip your inspection.
Shane:
Well, circling back to student loans that we were discussing before, and inflation, the Biden administration has extended the repayment to August, I believe, is now the new... When we're-
AJ:
August 31st.
Shane:
... kicking back up student loans. For those of you listening, that's three months from now, you'll have to start making payments again, unless they extend it again, which, I don't know if that's going to happen. But the midterms are also coming up, so it's my opinion that there's a lot of pressure on Biden to fulfill his campaign promise of forgiving billions of dollars of student loans of borrowers. That's not going to happen until right before midterm election. I don't think that this administration has enough W's to ignore this when it comes to the midterm elections. We're going to lose a lot of... They're going to lose a lot of seats, Freudian slip, come midterms and this is going to be an ace up the sleeve. What do you think?
AJ:
I agree with you. Yes. He's just been kicking the can down the road and it needs to be a huge win as close to voting time as possible. This student loan forgiveness debate, "Well, their loans shouldn't be forgiven because I work six jobs to pay mine off," and all that stuff. And this argument that there are people who are, if we forgive these loans, they're going to go buy Camaros with that money or whatever the boomers are saying.
Shane:
Incredible.
AJ:
What? We're talking about forgiving up to $10,000 a person. These are people who are living close to the edge who made an investment in their education, needed a little bit of help to get that education, graduated school or didn't graduate school... These are the sob stories that we hear. It's like, "I didn't even graduate because I went to a predatory for-profit university and I have these loans." Or, "I had to take care of my family and I couldn't finish my degree and I still have this debt. And maybe I only borrowed $6,000, but because I could never get a leg up, that $6,000 compounded because of all the interest, and now I owe $25,000 and it's just smiling out of control."
AJ:
I don't know. There's the myth of the Welfare Queen in the Reagan era. These people who are defrauding the government and receiving all these welfare checks and living off of that. That was a myth. That was Republican propaganda. These people who have student loans are working, they're struggling to pay them off. It's a national crisis. I agree with you that it has to be forgiven by them.
Shane:
Yeah. I also love this comment that, "If we forgive loans, it might hurt inflation because of the Camaros that will be purchased with the forgiven money." First of all, sick. Everyone should be buying more Camaros in America. Second of all, get fucked. You're telling me that we're not going to cancel student loans for people that did their best to get a high-paying career, fulfill the American dream that they've been preached at and yelled at for their whole lives? And now that dream doesn't exist anymore because all of the machinations of the past 30 years lowered government's contributions to public institutions at the state level because of Republican politics and now we have to get student loans in order to go to college. And now they're out of college and that we're not getting paid as much because of wealth and equality expansion over the past 30 years.
Shane:
Instead of forgiving those loans, we're going to blame that on inflation that would be caused by that instead of the trillions of dollars of propping up that happened during the great recession and the coronavirus that happens with the PPP loans and the economic injury disaster loans that cost trillions of dollars to prop up these businesses and the 401ks of the boomers that have already experienced the biggest wealth secretion possible on earth ever for a generation. It's a good thing that they vote, those boomers. We're going to have to show up, apparently, in the future to do something about this. Looking forward to interest rates and tax rates rising right as they start to slip outside of the high income tax brackets.
AJ:
Right as they retire, the income taxes are for sure going up.
Shane:
Yup. And social security taxes. All right. I'm off my soapbox. What else do we have?
AJ:
You want to talk about Biden's tax return?
Shane:
Talk about it next time. It's interesting. It's not-
AJ:
How about some-
Shane:
It's kind of topical.
AJ:
How about some happy news?
Shane:
Yeah.
AJ:
How about a nice, light happy acquisition story? This comes via Tech Crunch. We've got the company Long Game being acquired by Truist, which is the sixth largest bank in the US. You may be familiar with the two companies that merged to form Truist, BB&T and SunTrust bank.
Shane:
I didn't know that.
AJ:
Some be familiar with SunTrust, which is the custodian behind many of your robo advisors who have your beautiful platforms and make it very easy to invest. Well, behind that beautiful UI is a clunky old bank. And that is often SunTrust. It's one of the more popular ones. Yup. Sixth largest in the US. But you probably haven't heard of Truist. Anyways, Truist acquired Long Game. It's a 12-person startup based in San Francisco, female founded. And they're trying to gamify personal finance. So they're trying to make things like saving for your retirement, paying off your student loans, saving for your kids' college education, budgeting into a video game, which is awesome.
AJ:
I hope this works. I think there have been quite a few wellness and fitness startups that have tried to gamify drinking water and working out, and I don't think they've been successful. But I think there's something about money and gambling and online poker that somehow this will work. I'm excited about this. I would love to... As someone who played Game Boy, on your phone, imagine an app. You get rewarded every time you hit your budget. You save a hundred dollars, you hit your goals.
Shane:
How much money did they make, this 12-person startup?
AJ:
I don't know if it was disclosed, they just were acquired.
Shane:
Oh. Good for her.
AJ:
Yeah.
Shane:
The best gift we got. Other good news, Airbnb is allowing their employees to work remotely permanently. Right?
AJ:
Yeah.
Shane:
I think everybody enjoys the ability to work remotely permanently. At least have that option. Brooklyn FI has that. Work anywhere in the world, as long as you...
AJ:
It was really cool to read this letter and be like, "Yup. We do that. Yup. We do that. Yup. We do that." That was cool. I mean, obviously, we're a small fish. Airbnb has thousands of employees. This is a huge impact and they're kind of a tone-setter for the rest of the tech world. This is awesome. Work from it. Trust people to do the work and they'll trust you.
Shane:
Yeah. Big shift. Did you see the guy that climbed the Salesforce tower today, speaking of San Francisco?
AJ:
No.
Shane:
Some guy climbed the Salesforce tower, the exterior, without a rope. There's all these great-
AJ:
Was it free solo guy?
Shane:
No, it was not that guy, but it was free solo vibes for sure. He was just waving at people as he's climbing up.
AJ:
I wonder if it was my uncle Bruce.
Shane:
Nah, wasn't Bruce. All right, everybody. This has been in the Liquidity Event, episode 41. You can email us at liquidityevent@brooklynfi.com. Leave us a voicemail and we'll play it on the air. Show notes can be found at www.brooklynfi.com/episode41. And those BKFI stands out there can leave us a review if they want to be weird about it. Thank you.
AJ:
It's not weird to leave us a review. Okay, bye. See you next week.
Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening to the liquidity event, hosted by AJ and Shane of Brooklyn FI. Head on over to brooklynfi.com where you can subscribe to the podcast or YouTube channel, or if you want to learn about their full-service financial planning, tax, and investment firm, specializing in tech professionals and creatives on the paths of financial independence. We'll see you next time on the Liquidity Event.