Are you ready for an open discussion with the best of the best and the best of what's next? Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show. Join in on a great conversation today with some of the world's great influencers as they showcase great advice and techniques that made them the game changers they are today. Now here's Tony DUrso.

Tony:

Welcome. I'm your host, Tony DUrso. I interview some of the most successful people in the world, and I thank you for joining us. This show is dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality. Here's a successful entrepreneur who provides insights and guidance you can use to move along your vision path. Listen to my shows at Tony D-U-R-S-O.com or go to your favorite podcast platform such as Apple podcasts and search for Tony D-U-R-S-O. Now before we get going, please stay tuned for important messages from our sponsors Just ahead. Check out Master class. Now is the time to become the expert in the field of your interest. Listen for my story just ahead on what Class I'm taking, and with an annual pass you get a free one to share. Go to masterclass.com/D-U-R-S-O, and find the right person for your business at LinkedIn jobs by going to LinkedIn.com/TONY to get $50 off. I'll be telling you more about these sponsors just ahead so please stay tuned. Today's show is about the Estate Planning simplified with Cody Barbo and we're going to be talking about fundraising and all sorts of great stuff for the business. Let's see what we can learn today. Oh, also at the end of this interview, I'm going to do a summary recap of what we went over. So stay tuned for that and you won't believe what I did after this interview. Well, after you listened to this, you probably will believe me. I'll tell you at the end. Stay tuned for that too. Here's some info on Cody. Cody currently serves as Founder/CEO of Trust & Will, a modern estate planning software start-up. He also serves on the San Diego State University Alumni Board of Advisors as VP of Partnerships. Here we go.

Tony:

Hi Cody. Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show. So good to have you on with us today.

Cody:

Hey, Tony, pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Tony:

The honor is mine, Cody, and I'm looking forward to talking about estate planning and getting it all simplified. We have entrepreneurs, small business owners. We have people of all walks of life here on the show. This is something I think that applies to everybody. So audience/ success squad, listen up. We're going to talk about estate planning simplified and give you some really good information. Now before we do that, Cody, we want to follow your journey to success. So tell us how did it all start for you? What's your backstory?

Cody:

I am born and raised in Southern California. I grew up in Orange County from 1989 through 2007, and that is when I made my way down to San Diego about 13 years ago to go to school at San Diego State University - go Aztecs - where I took a little bit of an unorthodox path as a student. I didn't just go to school, get good grades, stay out of , but I really took a passion for student leadership and was fortunate my senior year to serve as Student Body President of the Associated Students. The unique thing about that role, and it's a tie into my role and involvement as an alumnus now is that you also serve as the Chief Executive Officer of Associated Students, which is a $30 million non-profit organization. It's an umbrella organization to the university. So to be 21 years old, have a $30 million budget, 80 full time employees, 1000 part-time, managing and operating 7 on and off campus facilities, speaking in front of hundreds, if not thousands of students, faculty, staff, parents, alumni, it was a defining moment for me as a young man, because it's what put me down the path of entrepreneurship. It kind of rewired my brain to think what is possible, how to set a vision, get the right people behind it and to really build an organization and a legacy. The transition from school to entrepreneurship happened almost immediately. So from 2012 through today, I've now started three companies. My first was a social media app. I was straight out of college. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I call it my practice run and we can dive a little bit deeper into that in a second. My second company Industry was quite a bit of success. My biggest success until we started Trust & Will. We had raised millions of dollars for that company. I had 25 employees. I'll tell a little bit more about the backstory of that, but I had an unfortunate ending to that company where I was ultimately let go by the Board. And I want to kind of take time to unpack that a little bit, but silver lining of that departure was that I was in a very fortunate position to go right head first back into entrepreneurship to start Trust & Will, very much the TurboTax for estate planning and for the last two and a half years, myself, my co-founders along with our incredible team have now built a product that over 70,000 Americans have signed up for, and we're only just getting started as a young company in the hopes of completely transforming an industry. So that's my quick story. I'm married. I got a little girl at home. I got a cute dog named Scooter who comes with me to the office every day, and I'm very blessed to live in San Diego with good friends and good family surrounding us.

Tony:

Oh, very cool. We can talk about dogs for quite a while. I have my dog who usually hangs out with me while I interview, but today he's outside enjoying the beautiful Southern California weather.

Cody:

That's my thought today. I'm with you.

Tony:

Yeah, it is. It is. You're in San Diego. I'm in Anaheim, California. We have very similar weather so it's very nice. I think that's why we live in California.

Cody:

I would agree. We pay that sunshine tax,

Tony:

That's right. That's absolutely right. And back to the interview here, you're doing Trust & Will now, which is something we really want to know, and I understand you were in a different industry and we can talk about that. What gave you that vision, Cody for your current success?

Cody:

So for context of the time, so late summer 2017, I'm a few months away from getting married and my wife and I, we had one of those more uncomfortable dinner conversations where we're like, hey, we're getting married. We should probably talk about our finances. Do you have life insurance, which led to the 'do you have a will' conversation? And we should be in each other's wills if we're going to go down this path in life together, and being a fairly financially savvy consumer, especially millennial consumer, I have an app for everything, whether it's investing, managing my finances, setting up life insurance, doing my taxes with TurboTax. I really have built a digital first stack around my greater financial life, but the one area that just really surprised me that didn't exist or wasn't a category leading brand like a TurboTax was estate planning. In my mind, it was go to an attorney and spend thousands of dollars, or go to Legal Zoom and get something that's kind of a Band-Aid solution. It's okay, but it's not really something that's going to be growing with me over time as I get married, have kids, buy a home grow my assets. And I was like, there's gotta be someone that's doing this that's made it easy and affordable. And when myself, along with my cofounders, Daniel and Brian, who are also married with kids on the way now, it was just a very real conversation, not just in our own coffee shop talks, but also in our network. Most of our friends are 30 to 40 years old now. Majority are married. Majority are having kids and majority are buying homes. And while a lot of them have their finances in order, they have life insurance, they don't have an estate plan. And that was the spark to start exploring this industry and why is there only 150 million people in this country that have this set of documents, leaving the other half of the population, another 150 million adults without these documents? What are the repercussions that if you die and you don't have an estate plan, or if you have one, but it's severely out of date, how does that affect you and your family as your assets transfer? So basically it just put us into this two to three month deep dive into a research project of what does the trust and estates industry look like, and if we were to approach this with a thoughtful and intuitive digital offering, how would we introduce this to the everyday family? So I'll take a quick pause, but that's kind of how we conceptualize the idea for Trust & Will.

Tony:

Very good points, very needed. What a huge market, Cody. And you may have mentioned this, but I want to make sure that we pulled it out and we understand because we want to follow your journey here. What's your purpose for doing what you're doing? Why are you doing it for everyone as opposed to just yourself?

Cody:

If you know anyone that's had to deal with probate court, it can be a nightmare. Unfortunately, I have family, my co-founders have family, in fact the majority of team have family members that do not talk to other family members. Typically siblings, after a parent had passed. So parents passed. They either had an estate plan, but it was out of date, or people thought that they were more entitled to certain assets, most commonly the home or some investment accounts. Sometimes it's a family heirloom. And then for those family members that did not have an estate plan that ended up in probate, there's nothing to go off of, not even an out of date estate plan. And what often happens is you have family members and even caretakers like an external caregiver or caretaker that will get an attorney to lawyer up and to sue for what they think they're rightfully entitled to. So there's this really bad stigma around probate. And on top of that, the cost. It's very expensive. It's an emotional toll because you're dealing with the death of a loved one and you're oftentimes unknown to what will happen. What will happen to the house or what will happen to the financial accounts? And we felt that it was almost our duty to build an easy and accessible solution for the everyday family that this isn't something you can only do if you're wealthy, but this is if you have kids, if you have a home, if you have a couple hundred thousand in assets, you absolutely should have at the very least a will, and then as we educate you on the value and benefits of a trust, we can kind of hold your hand and upgrade you to that next set of documents when the time is right.

Tony:

Cody, I've seen the issues that family members have when one of their parents departs and passes and it can get ugly. It's so weird. So I totally see why this is so needed because for some people they're kind of humble, they're kind of like it'll all work out, but yet I've seen some really let's say nasty activities as a result of this. So no, you're not just being kind and humble if you just let it go where the wind goes, because it can be kind of not so good at all. So very, very needed. I see that because I've seen this in friends and associates. We're talking about estate planning, simplified with Cody Barbo and this is really amazing. Guys, you just got to hang in there and really get some of this information, which is designed to help you. You may not need it now, but in the future when you need something like this, I know that this is really going to be very helpful. You can find out more about this at trustandwill.com. There's no ampersand there. It's all spelled out - and - trustandwill.dot com. This is the Tony DUrso Show, where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about estate planning simplified with Cody Barbo, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. Be sure to friend us on Facebook. You can do it right now. Visit facebook.com/Voice America or search for us at keyword Voice America.

Tony:

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Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about estate planning simplified with Cody Barbo. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Cody co-founded Niche. Niche is a private location-based photo sharing application that allows users to create a niche at any location, invite friends and share photos. Pokémon go for content. An app before its time, Niche was dissolved in 2014. All right, and now back to the chat with Cody. Cody, let's get into your vision path here. Now you've kind of given me the idea of how this happened here with your purpose and your vision. So I can go online and I can fill out my trust and will, and just set the whole thing up?

Cody:

Yes. All of our entire experience happens online except for the signature and notary piece. So a question that comes up often is, hey, how is this legal? You're doing this online. These are really important documents, really important decisions that we're making about who looks after our kids, who gets our stuff, who can carry out final wishes, whether it's burial or cremation on our behalf. How is this legal? All of our documents are state-specific. We've raised over $8 million in venture capital from some of the best investors in this country, and we have a 10 year trust and estate's attorney on our team that's taken a very thoughtful and again, state-specific approach to how these documents are created. So once you've gone through the online experience, which with our will takes anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes, with our trust takes anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes, it's really a decision tree. If you've used Turbo Tax, which 40 million Americans use every year to file their taxes, it feels very similar to that flow from start to finish. We have live chat support throughout the entire process to chat with real members of our team. It's not a bot. It's not somebody in another country. It is a team member in our office here in San Diego to answer any questions. And then after you finished, you have endless time. You can have infinite time to review the decisions that you've made, either yourself or with your spouse, and then you print and ship the documents. And in order to make them legally valid, that's where that signature and the notary piece comes in for you to then store the documents in a safe place.

Tony:

When you say state-specific, this is good for any of the 50 United States, as well as United States territories?

Cody:

Including DC, including Washington, DC.

Tony:

So wherever I am - I could be in Puerto Rico. I could be in the Philippines. I could be in Hawaii - I can actually drill down and have what's legal and binding and official for my territory.

Cody:

So not US territories like Puerto Rico or US Virgin Islands, per se. You could create it there, but you'd have to be a resident of one of the 50 States or the District of Columbia. Those are the States and the one territory that we operate in.

Tony:

Alright, that's fine. So we can go on and answer...I'm really interested in this. Is there anything to look out for when we're doing our own estate planning? Do you have resources there to help us because we're going to have questions and usually we'll pay the money to an attorney, a lawyer, whatever, to answer some of these questions. So how do we navigate through that?

Cody:

Great question. It's probably the most important question. So first and foremost, as we have live chat support throughout the entire experience, so there's a chat bubble you'll see in the bottom of the screen. It is persistent from start to finish. It'll be a real member from our team here in our office in San Diego. Second, every single page that you're on on the website, there's a little FAQ that slides up from the bottom and that FAQ is going to answer any questions that you have about the decision you're making. Like what is a trustee? What is an executor? What is a contingent beneficiary? All of those are answered in the FAQ. And then the third is we have our learn centre. So when this goes live, you're on our website. You click the learn centre, the equivalent of a blog, our learning centre at the top, and we'll have amazing content for you to fall back on, to read and research as you're going throughout this experience. The thing that I love most about Trust and Will, and this is oftentimes what's reflected in our five star reviews is the live chat support. And the fact you can go through the entire experience all the way till the very end without payment. So we never want people to feel rushed and have to pay up front in order to start this process. Once you finished reviewing everything with you and your spouse, double checked it, crossed your Ts, dotted your Is, then once you pay is when we release the final documents to you. And even if you see something after the final documents have been received and want to make the changes, you have the full year to come back and make those updates online, and we'll do a complimentary print and reship for you just to make you have that peace of mind at the end of the day.

Tony:

I'm astounded. I really am that this is available. This is so needed. Forget about the contention in the family and workers or associates or caregivers. Forget all of that. Just to have your life organized so, you know what's going on, where's it going, because unfortunately and sadly, sometimes it's not done by a lot of people and it's left for the family members to figure out. And I think that's part of why you get into these families suing each other and doing horrible things to each other because of it. So guys, you may not think it's an issue, but if you're going to leave something to others, it can very well be an issue for them and I've seen really sad things happen. What's that phrase? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It's just a little bit goes a long way on this.

Cody:

Couldn't agree more.

Tony:

Well, thank you very much. Now there was one thing that you mentioned about this in terms of the future. Is there some updates coming, because you mentioned something off air about the scenario of 'two men entering, one man leaving' scenario. Can you kind of take us through what may be the future? What do you think is going to happen?

Cody:

So there's a couple of things that I really am excited to share today. The first is two products in particular that are new for us that just went live here in the first quarter of 2020. Even though we're live nationwide, now in the state of California, we have our attorney tier. So if you're in our trust product, once you filled out the basic section, there's an attorney consultation button at the top. We've had folks that are a little more affluent come through the pipeline, or even some folks, some of our members that just want the attorney, even though they prefer the digital experience. So we're bringing the attorney tier to market. It's again, a premium offering. It's similar to how Turbo Tax introduced Turbo Tax Live with the live CPA service, but we're really proud to start that with the state of California. We'll probably bring that to the top 10 states by population by the end of 2020, and then eventually the rest of the country. We're still a start-up so we're still we're working state by state in that regard. The second is a product that I'm very proud of, we are very proud of called Trust & Will for advisors. We have had in the last two and a half years, as you can imagine, hundreds of financial advisors reach out to Trust & Will saying, hey, look, we work with tens or hundreds of families as their advisor, and one of the things that we often discuss is the estate plan. Do they have one, or do they need one? And we just basically built a product for financial advisors to help on-board their clients into the Trust & Will ecosystem. It's a really, really great way for us to obviously bring new members into our network, but also to give an additional value add for financial advisors that are out there that want to check off that box for their clients that they have a complete estate plan. So those are two products for 2020 that we're really proud of. As we think longer term - two years out, three years out - of where we are headed as a company, we are building the foundation to be the category leader for modern estate planning, and our hope is that over the next several years and in perpetuity, we're able to help tens of millions of families out there create, manage and distribute their estate plans entirely online. We are digitizing the process from start to finish. We in the future will be digitizing assets so you never have to chase pen and paper as you move and retitle assets in and out of the trust. The whole experience is to make this frictionless, easy and approachable, and we're going to continue to invest in our technology and in our team. As I mentioned earlier, we've raised $8 million in venture capital to date. We will continue to raise the necessary capital to build that best in class experience until we have a national brand presence and we can continue to help Americans protect their legacy and not end up in probate court.

Tony:

Cody, while you were going through this, a vision came to me of a seemingly - and I'm not Googling the stats, but a seemingly preponderance of our society today is not as affluent as we would like it to be. And I can just imagine people listening to this now going well, I'll do that when I get my house. I'll do that when ... I win the lottery. I'll do that maybe when my parents pass and I'll inherit their estate. I'll do that when, when, when, and that leaves the question here. When someone does this, it's not set in stone. I'm sure they can add an asset. Hey, I just got this or hey, I just inherited this or hey, I just got another house. How easy is it as well as costly or inexpensive to add on more and build as we grow? Because as we go through life, things are going to change. It doesn't always stay the same.

Cody:

Such a great question. Well, I love to hit on the fact that in the time that we have been speaking just today alone, Tony, you could have already completed your estate plan. The listeners could have already had a complete estate plan just in the time that we've been talking. Now to hit on your point about ongoing updates and maintenance, so one of the things that we really like to take a lot of pride in is that our product is not going to cost you $129 a year for the will. It costs $129 to set it up, but then it's a small annual subscription for those ongoing updates. Or if you set up the trust, which is a $500 product, it's not $500 a year. It's a small annual subscription. Now that annual subscription, what it is going to get you is peace of mind that if life events are changing and I can use myself as the example, I got married two and a half years ago. My wife and I had a baby last month. We'll be buying a home in the next year or two. We'll be having hopefully - I have to confirm with my wife still - another child or two in the next few years. All of these updates should be justified and reflected in that estate plan, and to not have to pay the full price or to not have to go to an attorney and spend thousands of dollars to make a simple update was something that was really important to our team. And what I love about our very customer success driven organization is that we're not going to wait for you to come tell us that this change happened. We are already checking in twice, in some cases three times per year with our members saying, hey, did any of these things change? Did you move states? Did you buy a new home? Did you receive an inheritance or have a liquidity event? Did you have another child? Click this link. It logs you back into your estate plan. You're already in our subscription tier. Make the necessary changes. We'll reprint and ship the documents to you. That's it. You don't have to start from scratch again. Just make the small change that happened in your life. We'll take care of the rest.

Tony:

Can you help explain trust and some of the different trust options for the audience? Cause we all hear this word trust. To some it means different things, but there are different types of trust. So perhaps maybe you could give a little outline of that to kind of bring more of us up to speed.

Cody:

I think that most people know about a will because they saw it in a movie, like this movie Knives Out that came out with Daniel Craig and a bunch of other big celebrities. The whole movie was based on the will, or they know about it through their family. It's generally a common understanding, but trust is seemingly more complex or has a falsehood of being reserved for the affluent, cause you hear the term trust fund baby when you're growing up or you hear trust fund baby in pop culture. But really the most important thing is that a trust avoids probate. You are moving or retitling your assets into the trust. Think of it like a box. Everything from your home to your financial investment accounts, any assets that you own, you're just renaming or re titling into the trust in order to preserve them and protect them from probate. And probate is again where the government is going to take their cut when you eventually pass, whether you have a will or even if you die without an estate plan, you die intestate, you still have to have your assets go through probate. So what we love about our trust product is that it really is geared more towards the homeowner. If you own property or if you own a home, and for most American families it's the largest asset they'll ever own. And for us, we're like let's help them protect that asset from probate. So we don't force people into the trust here. In fact, we try and help people start with the will tier since that's what they're most familiar with, and as they go through the flow of the product, they can quickly upgrade to the trust if it's a good fit for them at that time.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about estate planning simplified with Cody Barbo, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. We're making it easier to listen to the Voice America Talk Radio Network live wherever you go on iPhone, Blackberry or Android. Download it from the Apple iTunes App Store, Blackberry App World or Android Market.

Tony:

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Tony:

All right, we're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about estate planning simplified with Cody Barbo. At the end of this interview I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. And now back to the chat with Cody.

Cody:

The trust that we offer is called a revocable living trust. You can change it throughout your lifetime, anytime. When you get more into the more affluent or higher net worth, you'll have people set up different types of trusts, sometimes an irrevocable trust or an irrevocable life insurance trust, or sometimes grandparents will want to set up a trust for their grandchildren, not their children, so they will set up a generational skipping trust or you have parents with children, both children minor but also adult children with special needs and they want to set up a special needs trust. Those more complex trust types we don't offer today but are something that we talk about internally and would like to offer in the future, but you take the everyday family, again, they own a home. They have up to a couple of million in assets. A revocable living trust is a perfect fit for them and that's the document set, that's what we have when you select our trust tier on our website. Does that make sense?

Tony:

Yes, it does. Plus, there's your chat and also a person if they want, they can actually get an attorney and discuss more about it. It all depends on them and what they have, what their assets are or how detailed to want to go take this.

Cody:

Yeah, exactly.

Tony:

Cody, this is very interesting. You mentioned earlier throughout this interview actually, a couple of times you've gone and gotten venture capital and you make it sound so easy, but for some of us, it's not so easy. It's work and they give away the farm. I've heard of people...I think you mentioned something about this. They're fired or let go by the company that they started. What is that story? I could have it wrong. I have to search, but we're doing the interview. What is it ... the founder of Uber only owns like 1%? I mean, so there's a little scariness to venture capital. You've been through this a little bit. Kind of give us some of your experience.

Cody:

Fundraising - it can be a great thing for many businesses and it can also be a totally inappropriate fit. There's plenty of success stories of companies that have never raised an outside dollar from investors that have gone on to be multibillion-dollar hits. But for the path that we've chosen to go down with Trust and Will, we decided to go down the path of raising outside capital. I'm not worth millions of dollars. I don't have millions of dollars to put into a start-up like this. I'm still young, still building my own financial foundation, but the risk/reward is that if we can convince professional investors to believe in the vision that we have for this company, believe that the market opportunity is big enough, believe that we are the team that can make it happen, that our approach is going to make us the winner potentially in a space that has maybe other players, the way that there's Uber and Lyft or Airbnb and VRBO, Coke and Pepsi, that if we have the right ingredients with the right amount of capital at strategic times throughout the company's journey, we can go from a small start-up as we are today into a public company over the next 3, 5, 10 years, if that's the right path for us or if the path is to get acquired. So the route to raising capital, it's very, very unique. It's not like Shark Tank. I think Shark Tank has done an absolutely wonderful job of introducing the value add of investors if they are the right investor for the right type of company, but as any Shark Tank viewer knows, sometimes the sharks put on their shark hat or their shark fin and they're trying to get to take advantage of an entrepreneur or the deal when they'll just buy the company outright because they think they can make more money off owning it themselves than the founders of those companies. So when we started Trust and Will, we were very fortunate to have a strong network of angel investors and an angel investor is a high net worth accredited investor that's typically writing checks from $10,000 usually up to a $100,000 into a company. It's usually less than 5 or 10% of their total net worth or liquid money that they're willing to risk the same way that they would be willing to maybe risk it in Vegas, but actually put it into a company in the hopes that if that company goes on to get bought or to IPO, that they might get a hundred X or a thousand X return on their investment. And I think that the greatest example in recent times is Uber. Uber is now a public company. Some of the early angel investors that put in $100,000, that $100,000 over the course of the last decade turned into $100 million dollars for them. So to even think that that's conceivable to give a return to an investor of that multiple, it feels really good. But at the same time, you also have to set expectations with investors that if they're putting in their money this early in to a company that has maybe no customers, no revenue, no market validation other than a great team and a great hunger and drive to build something, that it could amount to nothing. And that's the risk and expectation you have to set with angel investors. So we were very fortunate that we raised half a million dollars from angel investors in the first six months of our company's history. That allowed us to put a roof over our heads at home, get our initial products built, get our first round of customers, and basically fund the business for the first year. And once we hit a revenue goal, once we started to understand our business a little bit better, we decided, okay, now we need to go raise more capital, but we need to go and raise a little bit more than angel investors are typically comfortable with. And that's the transition to venture capital. So I'll take a quick pause there. We'd love to talk about the difference between angels and venture capitalists next.

Tony:

I would like to educate the audience a little bit more on that and also there's some serious challenges when you take that money. You know it's do I do it? You know what? Maybe this is just that question because angels require less while the capitalists require more, and it all depends on I think how much you want to give of your company, but there's so many facets to it. Let's just carry on with the conversation and we'll go back to angels and the others.

Cody:

Yeah. Yeah, and I'm happy to recommend some books that I think are really helpful for anyone out there that's thinking about going down this path. The difference between angel investors is in its simplest form - angel investor, it is their money. If they want to make the decision, they can make the decision on the spot versus traditional venture capital, they're usually investing other people's money. They have say a $100-million-dollar fund. They raise that $100 million from LPs, limited partners. Those limited partners can be anyone from high net worth individuals to family offices to college endowments, fund of funds, big corporate companies. There's a way to kind of formulate a certain expected return for those LPs that if they're taking $100 million dollars, they're going to deploy that across 40 companies. They only really need one or two of those companies to return the fund, to return $100 million twice over and they can return that to their investors. Then maybe 10 to 20% of those companies return 10X or 50X and then the rest could fail, but as long as they have one or two companies that can return the fund, another 10 to 20% that give a 10 to 50X multiple, they're in a really, really good position to then go raise more money, get some carry on the outcomes of those portfolio investments and that's where you see firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst. I could go on and on down the list. Firms that have been around now for 10, 15, 20, 30 years that have just had amazing outcomes based on the investments that they've made, and those are companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, fill in the blank. So with venture capitalists it is a little bit more delicate game to play because they typically aren't just investing in your company taking equity. They're oftentimes taking a board seat. They oftentimes are taking a different class of stock. So common stock is usually held by the founders, the team, usually your angel investors are common stock, and then your VCs are getting preferred stock. Preferred stock has preferential treatment that if the company gets bought or goes public, they're going to get paid out first. You have to be very thoughtful of both the governance as well as the economics when you're going to go raise venture capital. And it's almost just as important as who you're choosing as an investor when it comes to VC as it is to choosing a co-founder. Because the average length of a private company's history, it goes and sells or goes public, is about seven to ten years now. So you're going to be in bed with these investors for quite some time and really want to make sure that it's a values fit. They're the right partner and that you've done your homework just as much research as they're doing on your company, that they're the right fit. You talked to other investments they've made, you've gotten feedback from how it is to work with them, and we've been very diligent in working with some very quality investors over the last two years and how we've raised this $8 million now in capital for Trust and Will.

Tony:

That's an amazing amount that you've raised. I once did a fundraise - just angels, family, friends, angels. I raised $3.25 million in six months for a tech start-up company and what I've noticed is the angels, they're not involved in the management. They don't have that say so it's a whole different hierarchy. And if you can go that way, which you did, I see it very successful. It's a better and it's the preferred way to build a company and sometimes that's all you need is just some angels to just get the whole thing rolling.

Cody:

Right, exactly. And that's the thing that's great is there's again a handful of examples of companies that either never raised outside capital or they only needed that first investment. This is where I can go back to Shark Tank is like the Scrub Daddy, this little dishwasher scrub. I think Lori Greiner put in, I don't know, $100,000. That company does a hundred million in revenue now. It's unbelievable what just a small injection of capital at the right time with the right investor can do for a business without necessarily having to go down the path of raising more capital, giving up more equity.

Tony:

While we're on this, is there anything that you would have done differently on your journey through this?

Cody:

Yeah, well I think it helps just to go back to the very, very beginning of the podcast. This isn't my first rodeo. This is my third start-up, my second venture- backed start-up and one of the things that was very important to myself and to my co-founders going into this company versus the previous company is really choosing our investors more so than them choosing us. The last company, I'm still grateful for the opportunity and the investors that we had, but I was younger. I was 24, 25 when we raised our angel and venture rounds respectively. I was still dating my wife, but not engaged or married with a kid and now that I'm a little bit older, a little more mature, I really wanted to think through who is the better fit for us versus us just being a better fit for some investor, and from our angel investors we basically handpicked from our network. With our venture investors, they all came from relatively warm introductions from great founders or great people in our network, folks that we trusted very deeply.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about estate planning simplified with Cody Barbo, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. Follow us on Twitter at Voice America TRN. Get the low down on guests, new shows and your favorites. That's Voice America TRN

Tony:

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Tony:

All right, we're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about estate planning simplified with Cody Barbo. At the end of this interview I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Cody was the founder and CEO for venture-backed Industry. Industry is a professional network and hiring solution for the service and hospitality industry. Cody was unexpectedly dismissed from the company by the Board. Though heart-breaking, this experience led to a new resolve, determination and ultimately to the idea of Trust and Will. And now back to the chat with Cody.

Cody:

I think that's part of the reason why we've managed to do so much in such a short period of time. We've only been a company for two and a half years. We have over 70,000 people that have signed up for our service. We have 17 people on the team. We have about, I think between our angels and our venture investors, about 40 or so investors all in. They're all incredibly talented, well networked, well capitalized, and our hope is that not only can we drive them a return on whatever the outcome of our company is getting bought or going public, but that we can continue to have their support, not just financially, but through mentorship, coaching and expertise and network over the several years or the years to come.

Tony:

Absolutely amazing. And you know, we talked a little bit about the future of the company and some of the things, but what are you looking to accomplish in the next few years? Are you planning to build any offshoots? Other companies? Kind of take us what your future looks like.

Cody:

My first and foremost priority is to be a great husband and a great father to my daughter. That is, I think what most people aspire to do and then the second priority is to be a great leader here at Trust and Will. I'm very fortunate to have two incredible co-founders, this wonderful team we have, the investors that have believed in us to back our vision, and I really am curious to see how far can this thing go? How can we build a foundation today that effectively could serve tens of millions of families over the years to come? And rather than sell early, could we take this company public and have that same recognition nationally that Turbo Tax does and how they service 40 million Americans for their taxes every year? How can we service, again, tens of millions of families for their estate planning needs from the creation of the estate plan, the management of the estate plan, and eventually the distribution of that estate plan with the work that we're doing at Trust and Will?

Tony:

Cody, what personal habits do you have that you believe fully contribute to your success?

Cody:

I've been very fortunate to have wonderful mentors in my life. I think my family first and foremost has been the biggest supporter. I'm very grateful for their support obviously, but I think when I was kind of really getting into the student leadership place in college, but even post-college, going down this path of entrepreneurship, I surrounded myself with great mentors. I took the time to invest in myself, investing in my knowledge and education around start-ups and entrepreneurship, investing in my health, taking care of my health - mentally and physically. And then also relationally. I really wanted to start a family and I'm very fortunate that my wife has supported me now across three start-ups. I don't know how she puts up with it, but she's seen the fruits of my labour come to fruition for our family now. And I've also taken time to mentor a lot of entrepreneurs. I think that it's great to have mentors and to invest in yourself, but if you're not giving back, if you don't foster a mind-set of giving back or being a selfless leader, I think it'd be a shame. So I'd like to see that same success that I've had early in my career reflected in other entrepreneurs out there. So I try and take some time in order to help others. I don't have the angel investment or the capital to make angel investments yet, but that's something that I hope to be able to do over the next couple of years.

Tony:

I have a feeling that's going to happen. Lastly, Cody, are there any great resources you'd love to share with our audience Success squad?

Cody:

Yeah, so fundraising specifically. Fundraising is the single hardest thing you'll do as a founder. It doesn't matter what your background is, the type of business you're building, what your product is that you're selling. Two books that I've found to be incredibly helpful. The first is Venture Deals by Brad Feld. Brad Feld is one of the investors at Foundry Group out of Boulder, Colorado. He is a cofounder of Techstars. Brad is one of the biggest voices and names in tech start-ups. Venture deals is a great book. The second is the Secrets of Sand Hill Road by Scott Kupor. Scott's an investor at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the top firms out of the Valley. Those two books were instrumental in having a better framework for fundraising. And then the second is just having great mentors. If you want to build a great company, you need to build a personal board of directors. That personal board of directors needs to be people that have built companies recently or are currently building a company, rather than somebody who did it 20, 30 years ago and is regurgitating dated news. The time it takes to get something off the ground is so much faster. The amount of capital and resources today is actually less than it was 5, 10, 15 years ago to get something off the ground. With companies like Shopify providing online retail stores being able to put up a shop on Amazon within a couple of days. You can really build that great personal board of directors to help you move a little bit faster if you want to be an entrepreneur.

Tony:

Well, thank you so much. Once again, we talked about estate planning simplified with Cody Barbo and you can find him at trustandwill.com. Cody, I learned so much. I thought I knew most of this. This was great for myself. I hope it was as good for the audience. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you spending some time with us on this.

Cody:

It was a pleasure, Tony. Thank you. Thank you for having me and thanks everyone for tuning in. Really, really nice today.

Tony:

Hey, success squad. Thanks for hanging out with me while I featured an elite entrepreneur who took his vision to reality. I hope this was as inspiring for you as it was for me to do this interview. I learned a lot. The insights are so valuable. So how did you like it? Estate planning simplified with Cody Barbo. Before this interview, did you know there was no easy way to do in an estate plan and set up a trust and will? I didn't realize it was so difficult before. And I hope you follow suit because after this interview, guess what? I went to trustandwill.com, signed up and did the entire estate planning with my wife present. And you probably won't believe me when I tell you, we did the entire thing including listing of our assets and probably some 15 or 20 or so minutes. It went so fast. I couldn't believe it was over. Everything is there - turnkey - and it walks you through all the questions to answer. I did have two questions later and I got responses the next day. Yeah, it really was that fast, and in these days and times, I think it's a necessity to have in place. You probably know some of the horror stories of people who did not have such planning in place and the horrors of probate court and so forth. Listen to this interview again and learn why this is important and then please get your estate planning put in place with this simple system. And did you pay good attention to the later section on fundraising and getting capital infusions to launch your company or to take it to another level? Those are great points to consider and I hope to help you decide better which path to go down when you think about outside funding to build or grow your company. There's so much more I got out of this interview. What did you get? I'd love to know how you use this information to help you in your business or career. Reach out to me. Okay guys. Now grab hold of your vision. Decide you're either going to start something great, or take it to the next level. You have to decide first. It always starts with the decision and you can get my vision map to help you along the process. The free eBook is at TonyD-U-R-S-O.com. I created my empire in just a few years. That's all it took. I had the vision map as my guide. I wrote it all up. So now you can do it too. And once again, check out all of my shows. They are all designed to help you get to the next level in your business or career. Let's help you move on your journey to success. And if you have access to any Apple device, go to Apple podcasts. Look up my name, Tony D-U-R-S-O, and please subscribe to my show. A kind review there will get you tremendous appreciation back in return. Thanks guys. And remember, just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds, and join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso Show. We hope you've enjoyed this week's edition of the Tony DUrso Show with his key influencers. Be sure to tune in again next Friday at 5:00 PM Eastern time, 2:00 PM Pacific time on the Voice America Influencers Channel.