91: Web3 and Four Ways to Fund Your Business with Raghu Bala

Raghu Bala is the founder and CEO of NetObjex that operates Matrix, a Digital Asset-as-a-Service platform that helps enterprises harness the power of Internet of Things, AI, and blockchain technologies in constructing Web3 marketplaces. We talk about the democratization of data, the three primary categories of assets, and why virtual real estate is intentionally made scarce.

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Web3 and Four Ways to Fund Your Business with Raghu Bala

Our guest is Raghu Bala, the founder and CEO of NetObjex that operates Matrix, a digital asset as a service platform that enable enterprises to harness the power Internet of Things, AI, and blockchain technologies in constructing web-free marketplaces. A lot to unpack there. Welcome to the show, Raghu.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Well, it’s great to have you here. And lots of trendy things we’re going to be talking about today. But let’s start with your origin story, how did the idea of creating a digital asset as a service business and, you know, going, becoming an entrepreneur come to you and how do you get here?

Sure, so I’ve been in the software industry for about 30 years and I’ve had prior startups where I was a founder or co-founder and sold them to other companies or public companies and so on. And so this idea came to me about almost nine years ago and I literally incubated it out of my garage with a few other individuals initially. And we started off not as a digital asset as a service. I think every business kind of pivots along the way as changes come about.

We started off as an IoT business and IoT is Internet of Things for those who are not familiar with the term. And basically it involves collecting data from different types of equipment and things like that. So the story here is I was a CTO at a media company. And this media company had both digital websites and YouTube videos and those types of things. But they also had physical magazines. And they were about half the market in the U.S., but 50% of the magazine market, the distribution of magazines that you’ll see at newsstands, at the airport, and things like that, were distributed by us. So if you go to, let’s say, a Walmart or Walgreens, or when you go to the NCAP, which is where you check out, you’ll see those magazine racks, most of them were ours.

So I told the management, the magazine business was actually struggling, because people are starting to read more digitally than on print. And so I said, you know, your magazine rack business, I can kind of turn it around and make it an intelligent rack, something called a smart rack. And at that time, it sounded very odd to them, like, you know, what are you talking about? So my rack actually we proved that you could increase sales by about 14% by just doing some simple things like collecting data, like you know you can figure out which magazines people are picking up and which magazine people are not picking up or if you turn on a small light when people walk towards it, it gets people’s attention and they pick up the magazine and actually buy it.

So we could raise the sales just by doing some simple data collection and some simple activities. So then that company that I worked for didn’t go for it. In the long run, they were more steeped in their own magazine traditions and so on. And so, a couple of years later, a few of the engineers who worked with me and myself, we started to just tinker around in the garage and started NetObjects. And then later on, what I discovered was collecting data is just one part of what is gonna happen in the machine economy.

So if you look at the whole space of technology, and we have gone through many revolutions, PC revolution and this and that, but in the last 10, 15 years, we’ve gone through what is called gig economy, which is like people sort of working for their own, using Upwork or TaskRabbit and things like that. Then you have the sharing economy, which is like Uber and Airbnb and so on. Now we are having the creative economy, which is what you’re hearing in the press about NFTs and so on. And then the upcoming economy is going to be the machine economy, where you’re going to have self-driving cars, robots, drones, and things of that nature, start to make decisions on their own.

So we started NetObjects saying, okay, we are now able to collect data from inanimate objects and so on. That’s one part of it, IoT, then once we collect the data, some decision has to be made that is AI. And then we have to record that information somewhere securely, and that’s blockchain. And so this way, what we have is all these three components coming together to form sort of an intelligent ecosystem. Simultaneously, you know, so anyway, I’ll stop there, but that’s the sort of like origin of the idea. And that’s how we have evolved it over this period of time.

That’s fascinating. So I love how you connected the Internet of Things, which collecting data with the decision-making, AI, intelligent automation, and then storing the information in the blockchain so it doesn’t require human interaction. So what do you call this? I mean, you said ecosystem, but is there another way to call this, you know, this combination of these ideas?

Sure. So right now, the big catchphrase, like you said earlier on, is Web3. So in the Web2 world, so if you look at the Web itself, it’s taken three iterations to get here. So the first iteration was getting people online, you know, people getting email, websites, things of that nature. Then the second iteration was things like people getting mobile phones, smartphones, cloud, big data, and things of that nature. Now in Web3, what’s happened is the world has evolved beyond this first two phases.

And in the first two phases, what also happened, a kind of like, it kind of evolved into this was some companies started to create a lot of market power because they started to collect a lot of data, all of us, Facebook, Google, Apple, and so on. And so the Web3 ecosystem or Web3 movement almost is very much against centralized data repositories and certain companies benefiting at the expense of consumers. And the Web3 ecosystem is all about decentralization, about the data being shared among everyone. It’s being transparent and it’s not opaque. And you don’t need to go to some central authority to figure out what it is.

So this applies to things like even your personal health care information or your credit reports or any sort of information that’s transparent. If you have access, you can get access to it if you want to. And no one person controls it and can benefit at the expense of others. That’s the whole thing. But this Web3 movement, a lot of it is blockchain-based, but AI and IoT are good, what we call accompanying technologies for this, because IoT is a very good way of collecting data, and AI is very important to find anomalies, fraud, patterns in the data and so on, that might indicate something wrong. So, AI is very good in that sense. And of course, there are many, many other uses for AI, like computer vision and robotics and things like that. But so AI is being employed in this way. So, I’d say a good catchphrase for all of this would be like Web3, a short of some other phrase for now.

Web3 signifies a shift beyond previous web iterations, emphasizing the importance of decentralization, transparency, and shared access to information. Click To Tweet

Okay, that makes it much clearer for me. I mean I watched some of the videos on your website, which was enlightening, but this is even better. And it’s a very simple way of phrasing it. So, what saying is that, in the future, we could get to point where our information is not going to be a free for all we can control it it’s going to be in blockchains, and it’s going to be secure and AI is are going to be guarding the information so that we can control it. chains and it’s going to be secure and AIs are going to be guarding the information so that people cannot steal it or or cheat with it. Is this kind of the scenario? 

It’s more democratization of data and you’ll have different systems to monitor things and so on. But, you know, the thing is, the power is with all of us as opposed to, you know, certain companies and organizations controlling things. A good example would be like, like many people have encountered this, where their credit report might have some data, may not be a hundred percent accurate. And unless you go to a credit bureau and you find out and you dig around and you call them a hundred times and then they’ll only change it then, there’s no incentive for them to change it. And who loses, you lose. Or your Carfax report, Carfax is a company, but if you had an accident or whatever and they recorded it wrongly, this happened to me, my wife had a fender bender, but they recorded the same fender bender twice.

And so it counted as two accidents. I’m like, no, it’s not two accidents. Someone hit us, we didn’t hit anyone, someone hit us, it happened once, and there’s only one small scratch, it was nothing. But then they call it like two accidents. It’s like, that’s not right. But there’s no way to change it, very hard to change these things. And that’s because someone is controlling it and it’s very hard to convince that someone, whereas if it’s in the public domain, then you have some amount of power to say, hey, you know what, this is wrong, I’m gonna flag it and so on. So it’s like, you know, like what you try to get to democratization of data is what we’re talking about at the end of the day.

Okay. All right. So it’s going to solve all our problems, but it’s going to solve some of our problems. Sure. Got it. So we’ll talk more about the whole idea of the WEB3 and digital assets as a service and the business you are in.

Sure.

But before we get there, I’d like to talk about your management blueprint. And we had a conversation before we came on the show, and you talked about the four different funding sources that you have experimented with.

Sure.

And you basically figured out, you know, what are the pros and cons for each. So would you mind telling us a little bit about that?

Absolutely. So we actually bootstrapped this company, and initially I had to put in my own funds, and I mortgaged my house, and I also tapped into all sorts of savings, and so on. So obviously the founders’ funds are the first source of revenue, or first source of funding. And for every business, actually, what is the most important aspect of every business for it to continue operations is actually cash flow. So my first source of cashflow is my own funds. Second source of cashflow, I went to actually I went to get funding from investment sources.

For every business to continue operations, the most critical aspect is cash flow. The initial sources, often overlooked, are the founder's funds - a crucial starting point for any venture. Click To Tweet

So investment sources that are many, today actually due to crowdfunding and so on, we have many, many choices actually. So we actually tapped into REG CF, which is a regulation crowdfunding. So you can get up to a million dollars and we have to run through various campaigns. We ran it twice. We got some funding. And then we also tapped into angels and friends and family and that type of funding in the investment. So I want to categorize it as your own funds. Now we are talking about investment funds. So investment fund has got Rex CF, friends and family, angels. We went through all of those.

And we also got institutional capital in the investment bucket. And all of these have got the negative of they take equity. So nobody’s gonna give you funds as an investment without taking equity. So you give up equity. The third is loans. So loans, again, there are many types of loans these days. You can have, you know, you’ve got SBA loans, government loans, and those types of loans, which are long-term loans. You also have very short-term loans, which are revenue-based financing, which is against your revenue.

Short-term loans, they tend to be quite high interest and, you know, not advisable a lot of times, but we had some very rough patches where we even went down to taking those types of loans. And, but the benefit of loans is that you don’t give up equity. You pay them off. As long as the interest is something you can kind of like deal with, then once it’s paid, they are gone. And so they serve their purpose and they don’t own a part of you. And the fourth type of funding, the best type of funding that everyone wants is sales.

Other people, your customers’ money, that’s the best. But in there, there lies one funny thing that everyone needs to be aware of. It depends on when the customer pays. So you can record in your accounting software that, hey, I’ve got sales, I’ve got sales, but if the sales is cash-based, that’s great. It converts into cash flow immediately. accounts receivable and this company will pay you 30, 60, 90, 180 days. Now you have to float your company for that length of time while the money is coming.

So sometimes you can have a lot of AR but not a lot of cash flow. So you could be in trouble even with sales. I just want to warn people that sales does not equate to cash. So it’s a kind of a mirage sometimes. So you have to be careful. And so you can, and sometimes there’ve been cases where someone owed my company money and they went bankrupt. So what, it’s just an AR in my book. I never collected on it, it’s gone. We’ve rendered the services and nothing happened. So those are all the gotchas with sales. But if you can convert it to cash, it’s the best sort of thing because you don’t give up equity, you don’t pay interest. So it’s better than loan or investment, right? So it’s good.

Sales, while lucrative, can sometimes present a mirage. If not managed properly, they can lead to unforeseen risks like customers defaulting on payment or going bankrupt. Click To Tweet

No, I agree. I actually, I had a client 15 years ago who ran a contract research organization. So it’s basically drug research, new drugs that were coming to the market. They were testing it. They were, you know, phase one, phase two, phase three, human testing. And the beauty of the business was that they, their clients paid up front, they were big pharmaceutical companies. They paid them up front so they could grow like nobody’s business.

They didn’t have any capital constraints. And as long as they delivered and the services that they were fine. And he scaled this company really rapidly within four or five years, became market leader and then flipped it, sold it to an Italian consolidator. And that was the perfect business because there was basically no inventory, there was no receivables. So no working capital had to be tied down. And it was mainly services. They used the facilities of hospitals.

So there was no capital equipment that they had to purchase. Perfect kind of business. And that’s, you know, but on the other hand, I had another client who were in the construction business and they were growing fast, but their customers were the insurance companies and they would not pay them until 60 to 90 days. And they basically ran out of cash. And then they went into a credit tie. And then the bank said, we cannot lend you any more money.

And the only solution for them was to downsize the business and basically collect the cash and then just run, you know, grow the business to the extent that they could internally finance it, which was a major constraint. So let’s talk a little bit about the equity, because obviously all resources, we all know that if you have money, we can put it in the business. And, you know, obviously family, you don’t want to disappoint your family members, but it is what it is. But the equity, I mean, there are so many different types of equity, and we touched upon crowdfunding. You mentioned about the reg. Is it CF?

And that is the right ABCD and then the CF which is crowdfunding.

So that’s crowdfunding. OK, so. So tell me a little bit about this crowdfunding because it’s a little bit of a mystical thing. new product, we have this new watch and you’re going to give us this kind of money, you’re going to get the newest watch and this and that. It sounds like pre-sale of product, but then in other cases, you can get a course funded where people don’t get anything else than the feeling that they funded you. So how does this core crowdfunding work?

So, I’ll tell you. Yeah, good question. So, there are two types of crowdfunding. One is product crowdfunding, which is what you’re talking about, like a watch or some sort of gadget that you buy. And basically that is a site like Kickstarter and Indiegogo and so on. And what they do is if you want to manufacture a product and you just 3D printed one sample just to show people, okay, this is roughly what it does. And then you really need funds for manufacturing, tooling, scale, all the machinery, all of the materials. And that might take probably six digits to get going. Any sort of small size manufacturing takes about a few hundred thousand usually.

Crowdfunding encompasses two primary types: product crowdfunding, where customers prepay for a product that is yet to be manufactured, and equity crowdfunding, where investors contribute funds in exchange for a share of the company. Click To Tweet

So now you want to do that, what you can do is you can go to these Indiegogo or Kickstarter and try to run a campaign and basically customers prepay for that gadget. And you use that to manufacture, and then you give them the product at the end of the cycle. Now, the benefit of that is, the people crowdfunding are not taking equity, and they are not charging you interest. So it’s an interest-free cash resource, if you have a nice product. So it’s a very interesting form of funding.

Now, the risk is on the consumer side because you know I don’t know what percentage of companies never manufacture the product at all you know maybe they try they fail whatever I don’t know the statistics there but it’s the interesting concept if you want to launch a new physical product especially it’s not that good for services it’s mainly for products. Now the equity crowdfunding is a second type of crowdfunding. Equity crowdfunding basically, you are giving up equity, you’re telling people, small investors, you can come in. And this includes accredited and non-accredited investors.

So you can come in and you can invest as low as usually $250 or something like that, up to 2000, 5000 and so on. You can set the limits on the floor and the ceiling, but typically that’s what you’re doing. Now this has got to prove an account. It’s okay if you are trying to run a small business. But in the later rounds of your funding, if you want to go and do a series A or institutional capital, now your cap table is kind of messed up because you have a lot of small guys at 250, 500, 1,000, 2,000, and things like that, that the institutional capital guys generally don’t like to see.

So that’s the downside, just be aware of that. So if you don’t want, and nowadays they say you can group it, but still the lawyers that I’ve dealt with, they always don’t like a lot of small investors. But if you want to remain at a kind of a lifestyle business and not really go for institutional capital, it’s a good method.

So, it’s got some limitations. So, it’s not a really good tool to launch high gross business that you want to scale because you’re gonna bump into the problem. I mean, I’ve heard this before, before crowdfunding became a thing, about 10 years ago, I found this investor and he did a private placement. It was a biotech company and he went to people that he knew and, you know, business associates, partners, whatever, and they gave him money. And he ran into the same exact problem that it these people. So he said that when things are good, then these people are happy. They you know, they no problem to deal with.

But when things start to go awry because they don’t understand the business and they get cold feet and then they start to call him all the time and said it was more trouble than it was worth. And then he basically got an institutional person and he bought them all out and he went into the institutional direction. Yeah, yeah. Contact to it. Yeah, so it’s a similar thing. So you also talked about different types of debt. So the two that you mentioned of the SBA on the one hand, which is typically low interest and, you know, the government is not going to go after you unless, I mean, I don’t know, even if you go out of business, they will probably not want to go after your personal assets. Whereas you have got this revenue based where every week you have to show up with a certain amount of cash can be really high pressure.

Right. And in between also bank loans, like a line of credit. Usually the bank loans, what I found is they want personal guarantees and so on. And also you have in between, you have other things like credit card and even credit card that are different types. You have the credit card and then you have a kind of a cash advance type of card like, you know, like Amex without limits. And then you have a card like Brex, which is for startups and Brex. Basically Brex, the way it works is you don’t need personal guarantees, but then you must at least have $25,000 in your account. Once it dips below 25,000, they don’t forward you any more money. But once it’s above, you can use the Brex card to pay your bills and then you can accrue points for other services that you might use like Uber and you know a bunch of other online services other fast services that you can if you’re using them you can get credits for those so by using more you can actually pay off the other services that help you run your company things like that so there are a bunch of alternatives these days.

What about lending clubs are you familiar with those.

I have never used those.

So there’s lending clubs. And then obviously there’s mezzanine financing, which is. Quasi equity and private equity funds often use it as as kind of as a first priority, it’s like a preference share where the mezzanine gets paid out first, they typically want a fixed rate to return. Sometimes they want warrants, which gives them an option of the equity, but typically it’s a high fixed rate, maybe 12, 15 percent. And then private equity makes that 25 percent. Are there mezzanine funds that is available for without a sponsor, without a private equity group?

There are convertible loans, convertible debt. That’s one way. Convertible debt is one way of getting the funding. Also it’s not very popular in America, but outside America, in the crypto world, there is also what we call SAF, like agreement for future token, simple agreement for future token. So that means you launch your token, the person is investing in you for tokens and they are hoping that the token appreciates. So that is, so you have SAF and you also have convertible note, convertible note basically says I’m lending you money. And then when you get your next round of investment, I will convert my note into equity.

At the same price as the same valuation as the next round?

I think you’ll get a kind of a better value. You’ll get more for your money. Because let’s say that when you do your equity raise, your valuation is here. But when you’re going for the convertible, no, your valuation is here. But the guy comes in here, will be able to buy this much, you know, like the equity, which is worth too much at this price. So he’ll be able to convert at a lower price. So he’ll get, you know, sort of like more shares than if he had to buy at a higher price, that sort of thing. It’s baked in. And also if you never go for a next round of funding in your company, thanks, there is provisions for you to pay them back. It becomes a loan. So it’s like a convertible that can become a loan or it can become equity. If it succeeds, the guy want to convert. If it fails, he wants his money back. It’s kind of like, it can work both ways.

Interesting. So we could talk a lot about the crypto world and other things. But let me ask you about your business, the platform as a digital asset as a service. So so is this the back three and the kind of stringing together the the tokens and the NFTs, the AI and the blockchain? Or is this something else?

It’s the same. Let me just explain what we do. So we look at the world of assets as three primary categories. Digital assets, things which are innately digital, which could be music, movies, avatars, any sort of asset that is already in digital format. The second is physical assets, could be smart city assets like containers or fleet of trucks or buildings or anything like that. Then could be the third one is dynamic assets, things which you have to measure, water, energy, carbon credits and so on. You cannot touch it, but you have to measure it sort of thing. So now these three classes of assets have been there for a long time, but what happens is what becomes interesting now with the world of blockchain and so on is you are able to tokenize it. That means you are able to almost take this asset class and put almost a paper, a tradable piece of paper around it. So it becomes a token.

Is it like securitization?

Exactly. It’s securitization of the asset using a token. Now why do you want to do this? A lot of people say, why do I want to do this? Now, the benefit of doing this is a couple of things. And of course, there are more things than this. The first thing is by securitizing this asset, now you can trade it, which is very hard to do otherwise. And when you trade it, you can also trade it, you trade it while you trade it to unlock liquidity. So you create a liquid market for it. And you can also fractionalize it. So I live in California where real estate prices are quite high. And one of the things that has happened in the…

One of my friends who is a real estate mentioned this to me, that in LA County now, they have removed this kind of covenant that says that a single family home has to be occupied by a single family. It no longer needs to be occupied by a single family. That means you can have a multi-generational family occupying a single family home. So what does that mean? Because, you know, like home prices are so high that people cannot afford, let’s say. Now, what happens is, let’s say there’s a brother and his family, and he, you know, has two families living together, brother and their wife and kids, they all can live in a single house or even parents and so on can live in a single house. It’s not single family home now.

It’s kind of like a multifamily home, but they can pay the mortgage together, that sort of thing. Now, if you tokenize this, what happens is the house is tokenized. You can now have fractional ownership. Or even for millennials, let’s look at Millennials like in the past they might have to rent homes in like major metro cities when they start off you know work their working lives after college. Now these Millennials could potentially buy an apartment together. It’s fractional life.

They own each own something like you know maybe four of them own 25% each and then when they want to sell off one guy moves out or something he sells his 25% to some other person who takes over and also the other thing is you can also not only live in the home that you bought as a fractional token you can actually invest and there are a lot of investment websites that have sprung up in the last year which allow fractional investment in real estate so if previously you wanted to invest in real estate and you had to pony up a million dollars to go and buy an investment property, you don’t need to do that now.

You can pony up $10,000 and get into real estate. And it’s almost like a REIT. Like in the stock market, there are REITs. This is a more informal form of REIT. And so tokenized fractional real estate is becoming a very big thing these days. So that’s one reason why people are starting to tokenize various assets and then unlocking the liquidity. And we have done a number of projects in this space, like we have tokenized diamonds. So we have got $6 billion worth of diamonds.

And not that people want to own diamonds in a fractionalized manner, but you can now borrow against the diamond, because diamond, unlike gold, gold has got a price, COMEX price, you can see how many dollars an ounce, you can look it up on any CNBC or something like that. But then if the price of diamond is very different, it’s not as liquid as gold. But once you tokenize it, it becomes liquid. Now you can actually borrow like so much loan to asset value. And diamond’s value is actually usually predicated on cut color clarity and carrots the four C’s of diamonds so like this many asset classes which are sort of illiquid now can become liquid and in some cases allow for fractional ownership.

That’s amazing. So I heard that some celebrities you know people buy fractional real estate close to a celebrity so they can say that he or she is my neighbor and such things, which is very weird. What I don’t understand is how you can, you know, sell art as a token and how do people enjoy it. So let’s say I paint a picture. I know I would pay for that. But let’s say there’s a picture that I own. I digitalize it. You know, I create a high-quality digital version of it, put it on the internet, then why would people pay for that?

So that, I know I’ll try to give you an answer, but I’m not an art connoisseur, so I find it somewhat difficult in some cases, but a lot of people find that to be a very interesting form of collectible, and they think that, they believe at least, that that’s got value. So it’s very hard to assess value in this world. You know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure sort of thing. But people feel that digital art is as good as the painted works. And you could draw it on Photoshop. You don’t even need to be, you know, painted on a canvas.

And they think that that’s… and these artists are now, you know, the new, you know, like the Van Goghs of this era. Okay. So, so you think that this is, this is unique, this is different and it garners so much value and that value is captured by an NFT. And for people who are of a certain age or generation, we might roll our eyes and think like, what the heck is this? But you know, other people feel otherwise. But the same thing has happened to us many, many times before, actually on many occasions.

And we don’t, maybe we have to remember. So when websites and internet came about, you know, domains were available, a lot of domains were available and people invest in domains. I know some people are killing in domains. But a lot of people thought, what the heck, I don’t need to, what is a domain, what’s the big deal? And then later on, there was a land grab for domains and then it became like, wow, this is very valuable to have this because I can build a business or some other brand would want it or whatever it is.

So the same way we sometimes like, you know, we don’t see the value initially and then later on we realize, oh boy, I’ll give you a simple example and something that I went out of character and did myself. So some of you might have heard of Metaverse. So Metaverse is this virtual real estate that’s out there. And there are a couple of sites like Decentraland and the Sandbox, and there are a few others that are coming up. And so on Decentraland, a plot of land costs a certain amount of money.

So I bought two plots of land for like $15,000 and for my company and all my workers said, you’re crazy, what did you spend your money on? Like, this is nuts, this is just virtual real estate. And I said, well, you know, that’s what you think. But I look at it like the same domain type of thing. This virtual real estate is cost and sooner or later it will run out. And so everyone will be after it. So within three months, that virtual real estate appreciated 600% because it’s running out of space.

So we probably don’t have time for this on this podcast but I’d be curious why how can you run out of virtual real estate? Can you not create it at will?

At least they purposely make it scarce. They don’t make it. Even Bitcoin has got a maximum number of bitcoins that can be minted.

It’s the same principle as the Bitcoin. Okay.

Yeah.

So, one more thing I want to ask before we wrap this up, because you come to the end, towards the end of the time here. You wrote a short blog note the other day about the Russian war in Ukraine, and you said that it could create a technology breakthrough in the crypto world. Would you elaborate on that? 

Sure. So, if you look at the banking system as such, they use currently all the banks are connected with other banks, both locally and overseas, using certain mechanisms. Like within America, for example, you use the ACH system to transfer money from one bank to another. But when you cross borders, you use SWIFT. So SWIFT is one of the networks that all the banks are connected to. Now what they’re saying is Russian and Ukrainian banks are going to be off of SWIFT.

So once they’re off of SWIFT, what happens is they are no longer connected to the rest of the world. So how do you move money? And this is already happening right now, where I read some articles and so on, where people are moving money through crypto networks, which are kind of an alternate path to SWIFT. And what happens is, if people start to use this alternate path and find that it’s efficient and it does the job, what happens in the long run is they’ll say, well, I can live off the banking grid, I don’t need the banks, I might as well just, I get used to this other thing and it’s good enough, why do I need the bank? So that’s why I said that this could be a watershed moment where people when they are deprived of something, they find another way and they say they are used to it.

And so that might make this first way obsolete, especially the second way is more efficient, faster, cheaper, and so on. Then they’ll just say, you know what, I don’t need to go back to the world. Like, what makes me want to go back to this? So the banks have to be very careful because by doing by prevent, you know, doing whatever that they’re doing, they they might actually have a back of

They are having the competitors get off the ground. They gain momentum and they’re going to be too fast to catch.

And that’s right. That’s interesting.

That’s interesting. Well, listen, there’s a lot, a lot in there. Very interesting topic may be a little bit tangential to our topic here, the management blueprints, but definitely the four ways of raising money is an excellent blueprint for people and we dipped a little bit into deeper into the kind of debts that you can borrow, the kind of equity that you can raise, and also to be very careful with using revenue, you run up a bunch of receivables, then you could, you know, you could lose the money on the flip side that you gain by raising your revenue. So thank you, Raghu, for sharing all that. So if people would like to connect with you, where can they find you? How can they reach you?

Sure.

How can they learn about NetObjex and your services?

Best is you know for our company the website is www.netobjex.com N-E-T-O-B-G-E-X dot com. For me personally, I welcome people to connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m quite active there and that’ll be the best way to get in touch.

Okay well definitely check out NetObjex. It’s a really good site and there are some excellent explainer videos, short ones, which tell you about the different kind of web-free services, very highly educational, I definitely recommend. So NetObjex with an X at the end, and Raghu Bala, you can find him on LinkedIn, and please reach out to him if you need further information. Raghu, I enjoyed talking to you. Thanks for coming on the show, and for those of you listening, if you enjoyed the show, please don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple podcast and subscribe on YouTube. And next week we’ll have another exciting entrepreneur coming to the show. Have a great day.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• Pinnacle: Five Principles that Take Your Business to the Top of the Mountain
• Stevepreda.com
• Raghu’s LinkedIn
• Netobjex.com
• Buyable: Your Guide to Building a Self-Managing, Fast-Growing, and High-Profit Business
• Complete the Buyability Assessment for Your Business