Kyle Samani raises $1.65B in two weeks for Ford Industries, a Solana-native digital asset treasury

two and that's what we're screening for is is individuals that are going to scale to that next step. Fantastic. Uh well, congratulations on the massive fundraising round. Always good catching up with you. Have a great rest of your day. Good to see you. Great to see you both. We'll talk to you soon.

And we have our next guest in the reream waiting room. Kyle Samani coming back on the show for the third time I believe to talk about creating the world's leading Salana treasury company. Kyle, can you hear us? How you doing? What's going on, John? Good to be here. Hey, Georgia and John. We're back. Great to see you.

Good to see you. Always great to You've been busy. You have been busy. Oh, dude. Have I been busy? It's been crazy. Break it down. What's new? Uh, well, I spent two weeks fundraising and in two weeks we raised 1. 65 billion. Is that good? Is that good? Two weeks 1. 6 billion. Congratulations. I'm kidding.

That's uh it's hard to do. It's hard to do. Wow. Uh definitely the most hectic fund raise I've ever done in my life. Um but has been super super fun. Got Were you on the were you on the road or were you holding court just like this? Was did you do Oh, Zoom Zoom in my in my office. There you go.

That's the modern the modern road show. It's just zoom link. Yeah. Uh zoom out. Give us the uh give us the pitch that you gave the investors. Yeah.

So, you know, we think uh look, there's obviously a lot of digital asset treasury companies out there and we want to be not only the top Salana based digital asset treasury, we want to be the top digital asset treasury in the world.

Um, our aspirations is that this this is a uh publicly traded permanent capital vehicle and we have aspirations for this thing to become a $50 billion plus publicly traded company over the next, you know, half 5 to 10 years. Um, and we think the key to that is going to be the team.

Um, the folks I'm working with at Jump and at Galaxy are incredible. Um, I think we have the absolute all-star dream team, not only of Salana Dats, but of all DATs out there. Mhm. Um we bring together that mix of deep trading and technical experience.

Uh that deep experience across capital markets function and being a very large counterparty that trades with almost everyone in crypto and the deep uh VC experience in in Salana core and Salana ecosystem. How do how do people think about uh digital asset treasury companies these days?

There's uh one world where you're like this is a hedge fund and I'm backing a trader who's going to uh pick good entry and exit prices and they're and and it's almost like investing in hedge fund. Then there's another uh which is just uh because of where my money is locked up for a variety of reasons.

Maybe it's in a 401k. I don't have access to this particular asset class and and wrapping a uh particular digital asset in a public ticker gives you access to that. Which are are are those reasonable narratives? Are there other narratives that people are talking about?

Like what what how how do people uh justify underwriting an investment? Yeah, look, I think there's a bunch of reasons you might want to invest in Ford Industries. And and by the way, the ticker is Ford. It's FORD, like the car company. uh NASDAQ listed. Um but I think there's a few.

The first is like you have to believe that we as as the the sponsors of this vehicle can do interesting things to deliver increasing uh sold per share for our shareholders and there's a number of things we can do to that effect. Uh I think the probably the most interesting is actually M&A.

Um there's there's probably going to be 30 maybe 40 of these digital asset treasuries out there not only Salana related but all the other assets too. Yeah. And I don't think the market's going to sustain 30 or 40 of these things. No. And so, uh, there's going to be a ripe opportunity for M&A.

Um, and I think given the caliber of our team and and even just the the knowledge we have with banking across especially Galaxy, like we're in a prime position to execute on that. Um, the second I think really lucrative opportunity is in actually arbitrageing um, capital market structures.

Meaning um, we're working on getting loans from banks, you know, hopefully in the fiveish% maybe 6% range. Um and then we can deploy that into Salana DeFi at you know today probably close to 15%. Sure. Um and arbitrage that spread. Um that's obviously a very sexy story. Shareholders love hearing stuff like that. Yep.

The particularly cool thing about that is also we can even use that to fund preferred share issuance. So Micro Strategy or I guess Strategy now pioneered this concept and they're issuing these uh preferred perpetuals.

And uh you know the problem strategy has is they are paying a 9% coupon but they have no cash flow off of their Bitcoin. Um we can actually produce cash flow both in sole terms and in dollar terms by tapping into the native Salana staking and DeFi ecosystems.

So it actually makes the vehicle as a whole a lot more financially congruent than something like strategy. Um so I think those are like the the best reasons why and look in the long term we're going to be capital allocators across the salon ecosystem and crypto.

Um and in the long term it's obviously a bet on our ability to do capital allocation. Uh is was there an alternate timeline where the groups that kind of came together into into Ford went and did their own treasury? Like did you really have to wrangle people and say like look fall in line. Let's do this together.

Or what what did that what did putting the team and the and the investor group uh look like? Yeah, the the Jump and the Galaxy guys started talking together but before multicoin got involved. Um and they kind of realized they were like, "Hey, we really need kind of a third leg of the stool.

Uh so they they called me and and it was pretty natural fit. Uh I didn't have to spend too much time thinking about it. There were some legal questions that we had to work through um in terms of compliance for Multicoin, but we worked through those and we said, "All right, guys, let's do this.

" And they've been absolutely phenomenal partners. uh t take me through some of the other stories that are happening in uh the crypto world broadly that might be bullish or bearish or you know something to keep an eye on from your perspective uh across stable coins. Uh there's that new Stripe project.

There's a few other uh like chains that are launching L1's L2s. Like what do you think is worth keeping an eye on and and what's your interpretation of the news? Yeah, I think there's a handful. So, one is um Salana ETFs are coming. I think they're going to be here in the next few weeks. Okay.

Um that's obviously like a watershed moment for the rest of the industry. Bitcoin and ETH have always been kind of like blessed as special assets and and and I think Salana is about to get that same that same treatment. So, that's super exciting. Yeah.

The second one, this one's really in the weeds, but um the team at pump. f fun has been they've had a live stream product for about a year now, maybe. Oh, yeah. And this past weekend, it really blew up. Yeah.

Um, a handful of creators started making tons and tons of money uh this past weekend and a lot of uh creators from Rumble and Twitch are now publicly experimenting on the platform. Um, that could really snowball and gain momentum and really kind of change the dynamics around creator monetization.

Um, that's actually funny they this happened over the weekend. I was at the all-in summit last week and I gave a presentation there on internet capital markets. I think that video is going to drop in the next couple days. And one of the examples I actually highlighted in the presentation was uh the next generation.

I talked about entertainment finance and you know Jim Kramer was entertainment finance 1. 0. Yeah. And uh uh in my presentation I highlighted Roaring Kitty and Dave Dave Portoi as being emblematic of entertainment finance 2. 0. Yeah.

And I think we're about to have this just onslaught of streamers who are going to be entertainment finance 3. 0. Um, and it looks like that's a lot of that's going to happen on Pump and all of Pump is built on Salana. So, I think those are Yeah, play that out for me.

I mean, that's fascinating since we're in the live stream world. Uh, we don't give financial advice to talk about specific stock prices, but I could imagine someone comes out and does something that's much we once joked about uh somebody was like, "How do I invest in TVPN?

" And we said, "Well, LVMH, of course, because it's the best proxy. " And then somebody immediately while we were live created created Salana token. we had to kind of disavow it.

But um but I am interested like do you think that there's a near-term world where uh stocks go on chain, they get wrapped and then and then the that live stream pump ecosystem.

You have like a true Jim Kramer type who's like talking about public companies but has some sort of like wrapped exposure to the to the coin that's underlying tied to the public company or something like that. Is that is that something that could happen? Yeah. So it's already a fairly common behavior.

You'll see a lot of the crypto traders, they'll just pull up their Binance screen or whatever they're trading on. They'll just live stream and, you know, trade and talk with their fans and stuff. There's never been a great way to follow along.

Um like like a buy and a sell button like built into the stream kind of a thing. Um I do think that I mean that now exists with Pump for the native token of that that stream. So that's already a thing.

Um, uh, I think you're going to see more of that kind of, uh, streaming products continue to evolve, uh, in the pretty near future. As it pertains to tokenized equities, uh, yes, the team at Galaxy actually announced a deal with, uh, Superstate to tokenize Galaxy's equity on Salana. It went live a week or two ago.

Um, and this is obviously something relevant for Forward Industries for us with our our Ford ticker and, uh, we're working on that. I'm hope to talk about it very soon. Um, and once it's up, we have this tokenized equity, then you'll be able to kind of do that same configuration that you just described. Great.

So, what uh I'm not sure this is correct. So, Ford is already trading. Is that is that That's correct. That's correct. Uh, and but but what is the is it is it what like why why is it trading at you you guys that it's saying is this correct? It's saying the current market cap is somewhere it's 67 million.

Is that is that correct? How does Yeah. So, yeah. So, we closed on the pipe transaction last week, but it hasn't. Billion. Okay. Yeah. Um the the uh the SEC uh has a so the company has issued these shares to all of the investors who came into the pipe including Multicoin, Jump Galaxy, and many others. Yeah.

And uh the SEC has a process by which you have to register new shares that are created and that process takes roughly 30 days. So the the Yahoo Finances of the world and the other kind of major stock screeners only show registered shares. Got it. Updated. Got it. Interesting. Awesome. What a fascinating world.

Well, uh you are you're our resident Salana expert. So thanks so much for hopping on anytime. Congratulations on on putting this together. Uh, it's got to be up there in in maybe I don't know, you know, top top 1,000 road shows ever. The one however much you raised in a couple weeks two weeks. Not bad.

Definitely top maybe probably top five