From the Road: A Blog of a Crypto Vagabond

SPEAKERS

Matthew Sullivan, Elsa Ramon, Bill Deignan

NOTE: This was transcribed using “Artificial Intelligence, aka AI”, which explains why when you read it, we appear to be “Artificially Intelligent”. It’s a lot of words for a computer to digest, so, just listen to the podcast.

Elsa Ramon
No, we’re back. We’re back everybody with so what about crypto? I’m Elsa Ramon. I’m joined by my producer, business partner and friend, Bill degnan, who asked the tough technical questions. And today we’re joined by a good friend and developer of a company called quantum are he Matthew Sullivan is here with us on our podcast today. Hi, Matthew. Elsa,

Matthew Sullivan
thank you for having me on.

Elsa Ramon
Of course, of course, it’s been a while since we talked. In fact, it’s been about a year the last time Bill and I saw you. We were in New York and

Matthew Sullivan
We were outside on the street.

Elsa Ramon
That day, it was in May I remember it was raining and it was so cold. And we had to do the interview outside on the street there. But yeah, so we haven’t talked in about a year about the company and the business and what you’re doing and and just So people know, because what we’re trying to do with the podcast, as you know, is invite everyone. This podcast is not just for the crypto community. Because we’d be in this big echo chamber, right? We all love what we’re doing. We’re all really passionate about what we’re doing. But I want to explain to people that consensus was a trade show our convention, I should say, where all of these blockchain companies and developers and enthusiasts and everybody in between in the space came together to kind of share ideas and share their business and all that kind of stuff. So that’s what consensus was when I say that’s where we were last year, just so nobody feels like they’re out of the loop. Yes. But anyway, I digress. Matthew, it’s great to have you here and I love talking about what quantum Ari is doing. You know, a lot of people who are not in this space here, all these kinds of bugs Words like, you know, mass adoption, real case uses all those kinds of things. And they don’t necessarily know what it means. And I feel like a lot of that turns people off because it’s could be intimidating or they feel like they know how their life is going now they know how to, you know, get a house or or use a bank or you know, and they don’t need to change anything, why change anything if it’s working for them. But quantum Mari took a look at the housing market and people who own homes and came up with an idea using blockchain technology. So why don’t you give us a little explanation of that?

Matthew Sullivan
Yes, I mean, let’s start with the problem. I think one of the biggest challenges when you speak to any of these crypto or blockchain companies is if you ask the question that must not be asked, which is what problem So, normally you have this sort of pin drop silence. Because the answer is, well, it’s not about problems. It’s about technology. But it’s really about problems. And are you solving a problem? Are you doing something that changes the way people work. And the problem that we’re solving is that if you’re a homeowner at the moment, the only way that you can access some of the equity in your home, is by going back to the bank and borrowing money. And if you cannot borrow money, or if you don’t want to borrow money, then you’re in a position where you may have potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of wealth locked up in the equity in your home and you’ve got no way of tapping into that. So we solve that problem. And we enable homeowners to unlock or pull cash from their home equity. With a new financial instrument called a home equity agreement, and they’re able to get a cash lump sum, with no interest, no monthly payments, and no additional debt.

Elsa Ramon
Now, I as a homeowner, and people, especially right now, unfortunately, who are finding themselves in financial situations because of the COVID-19 global pandemic, and, you know, everybody’s watching their funds dry up, and it’s getting scary for families. So something like this might pique their interest. But when I hear as a homeowner, we got to take some money out of the house, and we’ve got to get a second, you know, we’ve got to go to the bank and do all the paperwork. It is a very grueling process. It’s a stressful process. And that’s just kind of what we’ve always put up with. If we We’re in a situation where we needed to borrow against our homes. How is this different? And how is quantum Ray using blockchain technology to make that process completely different than what we now?

Matthew Sullivan
Well, the first answer is that we provide non bank finance. So that means that we’re not a bank, you don’t jump through the same fiery hoops that you have to jump through. If you’re applying to a bank, and we’re much less. we’re much more flexible, and we’re willing to work with people. And the most important difference is that this is not a debt product, so you’re not borrowing money. So rather than focusing on your ability to make even more repayments each month, and you’ve heard of phrases like the debt to income ratio, and that sort of stuff, we focus much more on Well, what what is your House worth how much equity do you have in your house. And as long as we think that you’re gonna be okay, continuing to meet your current obligations, then we can be much more flexible. Many people have paid off their homes, some people in their homes free and clear. They don’t have jobs, they don’t have an income so they wouldn’t meet the bank’s requirements. But they’re sitting on a huge asset. So those are the types of people that we’re able to work with. So we can be much more flexible. And we have a team that’s in house so we don’t have to throw it over the fence to a third party underwriting team. We can if there’s some special circumstances we can be as flexible as possible. So the first question, the second question you had was, how do we use blockchain? Well, when you create a home equity agreement, that’s that agreement actually creates a real estate asset. What we do is we through the platform, we’re building a marketplace so that people can buy and sell at some point in the future fractions or little pieces of these Home Equity agreements. So, in the same way that you can have fractional ownership of art or fractional ownership of classic cars, we’re using the same type of idea to enable these Home Equity agreements to be chopped up into tiny pieces. So if if someone wants to invest into a home equity agreement, you don’t have to be an institution or a multifamily office or a deep pocketed accredited investor. Once we’ve got our platform and our exchange up and running, you will be able to go in and buy, let’s say $100 worth of one of these Home Equity agreements in a zip code that you know, in a location You’re familiar with.

Bill Deignan
So I wanted to ask you on that, will that be sort of tokenized? where a person could trade that, you know, with someone else, maybe even, you know, through different exchanges? Or is it just sort of a security that is only tradable on your platform as you foresee it? In?

Matthew Sullivan
Yeah, the current plan is to keep it within a walled garden. So in and we use the words tokenize and blockchain and you know, we use those very carefully now.

Elsa Ramon
Yes, and please, please feel free to break that down and explain because those are the kinds of words that people hear that they’re like, yeah, I mean, that that’s what I did. You know, when I first started learning about this, I’m like, what does all this mean? I you know, it’s just easier to walk away. So yeah, feel free? Absolutely.

Matthew Sullivan
One of the best way to describe me is that all of that stuff happens behind the scenes. So as an investor You would never know that we use that type of technology. And so it’s very much a it’s a technology solution and distributed ledger technologies which use the blockchain and employ techniques such as tokenization are in fact, a very efficient way of managing the types of transactions that we foresee will be happening. So what I mean by that is, as people exchange ownership of fractions of these Home Equity agreements in the same way that as people exchange ownership of shares or, or other types of securities, you need to keep track of what the trades were, when they happened, who the owner was and who the owner is now. So that’s a that’s a ledger effectively. Now distributed ledger technologies or which use blockchain, funnily enough, are a very efficient, cost effective Way of maintaining a ledger that can grow without having to spend a fortune on buying new servers. So if you compare the new type of ledger technologies to the old type, it’s actually a lot cheaper, a lot more effective and a lot more efficient. So we use that behind the scenes. Now people know about cryptocurrency when Bitcoin was the first major outing for blockchain. So what we’re saying is, let’s not use those phrases, you really don’t need to know that we use blockchain or or, you know, Amazon servers or, you know, we don’t just don’t get into the detail anymore. And that’s thank goodness that that’s happening because, because then we can actually concentrate on on what the product is and what the benefit is, and say, Well, we know it works because we’ve, we found this really super efficient, cost effective scalable technology solution, which means that we can get to market quicker cost down and know that there’s a record of every single transaction that happens, that’s kept in a way that we know cannot be deleted, cannot be destroyed cannot be altered. And so we have this layer of truth. All of that sits behind the scenes

Elsa Ramon
In technology. And I and I exactly I like in what you just explained to, I liken that to say us using ATMs or driving cars. Do we really have to know exactly what is happening behind the face a facade of an ATM, or under the hood of the car, every single detail of the engineering and how it works to deserve to be able to use it and to benefit from it? No, that would be insane and nobody, you know, hardly anyone would be able to drive a car if we were required to know every bit of technology under the hood and how it works. We just know cars changed our lives we can get to and from places so much faster it enabled us to get jobs and, and have lives away from our homes and makes life completely convenient for many of us to do that. And that’s what Bill and I are trying to do here is just take away Yes. If you want to know more about blockchain and delve into the technology of it, that’s great, you know, enjoy learning about it. But on the other side of the technology, there is this benefit here that people need to see and not be worried about having to understand all that stuff.

Matthew Sullivan
I mean, and again, thank goodness we’re no longer having discussions about master nodes and nodes.

Elsa Ramon
And hash rate and all that I

Matthew Sullivan
Wish we have to not furiously pretending we understand but it really is as dull as toast. Yeah. And and you know, thankfully, the world has Although it is sort of suffering from what appears to be temporary insanity, in a before that we are moving towards, what are the solutions? What is it doing for us? What How does it help us? How does this technology improve our lives? And what it does for us is it has enabled us to contemplate doing something that would have been so much more expensive if we had to use traditional database technologies. Because as this thing grows, the amount of money it costs to build a platform where you where you can ensure that there’s no double counting or if somebody presses a button at the same time, in two different locations. How do you make sure that you don’t count that tree twice. So you have to build very, very expensive systems to prevent all of the things that that this sort of blockchain based technology does naturally.

Elsa Ramon
So basically, blockchain is eliminating all of that stuff. We would traditionally turn to a bank for and streamlining it. And not only streamlining it but making it even more secure when it comes to your identity, your information, the information, you’re getting your transaction, your real estate’s everything that’s on the blockchain. It’s, again, it’s

Matthew Sullivan
Just it’s a, it’s a behind the scenes thing is just a really good technology for for us. I mean, it doesn’t work for some other people. So if you want to, there are other applications where technology where blockchain is about as useful as a chocolate frying pan, frankly, but for us, it’s fantastic. It’s a

Elsa Ramon
Deal that I’ve never, I’ve never heard that before. I like that.

Matthew Sullivan
I’m glad I’ve, you know, done something good today.

Elsa Ramon
I digress.

Matthew Sullivan
But but but you see what I mean, so that if you try and squeeze this sort of technology into applications where it’s not relevant, then it just doesn’t work. But for us, we go with this. is great because, and it works for us because it allows us to do things like like, like contemplate or design this exchange, knowing that we can deliver it in a way where we don’t have to go to the market and raise $20 million to be able to build something, we can do it for a tiny fraction of that. So for us, blockchain is a technology solution. And the end result of that is that we have a product A that helps homeowners unlock their equity, but be going forwards. Assuming that we manage to jump through the technology and the regulatory hurdles, we will be able to offer a platform to investors who will be able to buy a fraction of a home that is not for sale. And that’s that’s the interesting thing for us. We’re able to open up a marketplace that doesn’t exist and that marketplace, potentially is worth trillions of dollars. So that’s what the that’s what that technology has done for us. It’s made, it’s made it achievable. It’s made it within our grasp. It’s reachable, whereas before, it would have been this gargantuan task to try and, you know, build this enormous machine to be able to deal with those transactions.

Elsa Ramon
The important thing I want to point out what Matthew was saying is that just to sum it up, basically, we can all be investors now, this way, where that wouldn’t have been a possibility for many Americans living today. You know, I remember a year or so ago, reading an article, I believe it was USA Today, saying that the average American family doesn’t have 400 extra dollars in case there’s a family emergency like a trip to the emergency room or whatever it is. And that was so sad. That was terrifying to me. I know that’s how my parents raised us. You know, they lived paycheck to paycheck and They work two jobs a lot of times, they could never imagine even talking about owning stocks or being investors in anything that that’s insanity. We just needed a roof over the head food on the table and clothes on our backs. And that was it. That’s and that’s how a lot of people are still living. And it seems that the technology behind quantum Mari is allowing people now to say, I’m going to buy fractions of these homes as an investment, maybe $100, maybe a couple of hundred dollars. And I can start building actual portfolio this isn’t just reserved for the people who have stockbrokers and traders working for them.

Matthew Sullivan
So you have it precisely now the only thing I would add to that is that this is work in progress. So what we can do today, if you’re a homeowner, we can help you unlock some of your capital that’s locked up in your equity without taking on debt. That’s something we can do right now. The exchange the fractionalization, the investment side of the business, we haven’t developed delivered that yet. We’re working furiously on that. We’re raising money through Republic, which is a crowdfunding company. And that part of that capital will help us continue and finish the development. So the only caveat is that it’s work in progress. It’s a big task, part of it. We’ve checked that box where we’re operating, we’re helping homeowners but the exchange and the trading and the fractionalization that’s just a little bit further away, but we’re getting we’re very confident that we’re going to be able to make it.

Bill Deignan
So how much have you issued so far? 

Matthew Sullivan
Well we’ve just a shade over one and a half million dollars is the amount of capital that we’ve unlocked for homeowners since we started in November last year. So we We went live with our homeowner products in November last year. And we also work with other companies in this space. So collectively, We’ve helped over 20 homeowners, we’ve unlocked just over one and a half million. And we have, you know, three to $4 million of homeowner applications going through the process right now. And that’s growing on a month by month basis. And again, caveat is COVID has impacted what we’re doing slowed everything down. The investors who buy these contracts are kind of sitting on their hands at the moment trying to figure out what’s going to happen to the US residential real estate market. So, you know, pretty much most things are slowed down to tour walking speed, walking pace, but we expect that to pick up you know, very quickly very soon.

Bill Deignan
So if you found that people are maybe starting to enter a phase of needing to access that

Matthew Sullivan
Cash is a lot more willingness to tap into their equity. Something that Elsa said very much at the beginning was that people see that their home is sort of sacred, and they don’t, you know, they feel the sense of dread that they’ve got to go to the bank and fiddle with these forms. And, you know, and I think, sometime a few months ago, you know, the equity was seen as something that you shouldn’t touch because if I wait a few weeks, my house is going to go up in value. So why would I even consider, you know, tapping my equity now, we’re seeing a real sea change in that there’s a lot more willingness for people to explore alternative options, particularly because the banks have really tightened their qualification criteria. Now the credit score has gone up to 720. If you want to heal org, you know, if your income doesn’t meet this very tight requirement, you won’t get accepted. And there’s 14 million people unemployed. So, you know, all of those things, if you’re a homeowner and you have equity, then our approach which is much more flexible, we don’t mind anything like as much as the banks if you’re not in money. So yeah, and there is people now need money more than ever. So it is a, you know, it’s it’s difficult, challenging, but there is this, you know, this alternative solution.

Bill Deignan
So, then, alright, so I’m still confused on like, the technically what happens in the, let’s say, I took $50,000 out, and then use that for whatever. And then five years from now I sell my house. How does that settled? Like, how does a person you know, how does the investor or your group settle that contract? You know, is it because it’s not a mortgage? Or like how is it in a way It is a debt it only in the in or it’s a liability, so to speak against that real estate asset,

Matthew Sullivan
What you’ve done is you’ve committed to the investor that when you sell your home, a percentage of the current value, together with a share of the increase in value goes to the investor. So categorically it’s not a debt, I understand what you’re saying, you do have an obligation. In other words, you’ve got a contract, you’ve got a relationship now with someone who’s bought some of your asset. So the difference is, with debt, you’re borrowing money, without product, you’re effectively selling something that you owe. And then you’re just settling up with the investor at a future point. And the way it works, it’s all to do with the value of your home. There are a number of different contracts with a number of different providers and we work with all of them. But the common thread or the rule of thumb as it were, is when you sign the agreement, we figure out what your house is worth by sending us an appraisal. And that appraisal is instructed on a third party basis. So everyone knows it’s an independent valuation.

Elsa Ramon
Once we fail, you’re not going to just pick some arbitrary number and say, Yeah, my, I want to take a couple hundred thousand dollars out of my house here, buy it, but you know, you’re validating that it’s actually what we use, we use or

Matthew Sullivan
We use appraisal management companies, which is the same process that a bank or any lending institution uses to make sure that you have that independence that you cannot choose your favorite appraiser. And so the appraisals done on an arm’s length basis. We also triangulate that with other online you’ve come across zelos zestimate. And there are companies like house Canarian core logic that provide independent research about what houses are worth in certain areas. So there’s an As an enormous amount of information available to us together with the appraisal, that gives us a very clear indication of what we think your house is worth, at this precise moment. And what we then agree, as part of the contract is when you sell your home, which can be up to 30 years from today, we get back the original investment that we made. And if your house has gone up in value, then we’ll share an agreed percentage of that increase in value. Now, if your house has gone down in value, we also run the risk of maybe not making any money and if your house collapses in value, for some reason, we also share the risk of potential loss. That’s very different to a debt product where the lender is always going to get his money back.

Bill Deignan
And so what if, and so that, ultimately, I guess, the exit strategy is what did the house sell for exactly And so you’re at as an investor, I guess you’re at the risk of a homeowner, maybe if they’re desperate, you don’t reap the same gains if they sell short, for instance, or just trying to get out of a property. You know, are you you’re sort of beholding to the decisions of that homeowner, correct?

Matthew Sullivan
Yes. But the great thing about us as our product is that we try and align our interests with the homeowner. So if you’re a lender, you have very different interests than if you’re the homeowner, because you don’t really care what the home is sold for, because you’re gonna get your money back anyway, in most cases, because if you’ve got enough equity in the property, as a lender, you know, you, you don’t mind as much, but with the homeowner, and there are ways that we can help the homeowner if the homeowner is in a particularly difficult situation, and we can help unlock a little bit more equity that could prevent from having to sell. And you know, that’s happened before we find people, Home Equity agreements have been used to get people out of foreclosure. Because it’s not a debt product, you’re not adding to the mortgage, you’re enabling them to tap into some of their equity, which pays back all the outstanding amounts that they owe the mortgage company. So they’re two very, you know, their problems system, but they’re, they’re very different term products. But to answer your question, it is entirely possible that the homeowner may find himself in a position where he has to sell the house for far less, but remember, the homeowner is always going to have a big chunk of equity, because we only work with homeowners that have a minimum of 30 40% equity to start with. So it’s not like the homeowner can just hand the keys back they’re going to lose out considerably as well. So you know, but they’re Is that risk? You’re absolutely right.

Elsa Ramon
So I’m what I’m hoping right now is what happened to me when I learned about the technology the underlying technology of blockchain once I understood how it could be applied to these real world, companies like yours, and and services, I, it started to grow in my brain like what else? Wow, this could touch every industry. And so I I don’t know if people you know, who are just learning about all this, realize that this could be applied to a lot of assets like you brought up before artwork, there are companies that are trying to form so that they’re able to sell bits of artwork so that you can invest in artwork if you wanted to, just like they would if they were investing in buying a piece of your home and, and cars and so Don’t want and so on and so on. And you start to see how large the potential is for people to start taking care of each other people who need money, so little bits of their asset and the people who want to invest who’ve never dreamed of investing before can apply little bits of their money to invest and they help each other. And I’m hoping that that’s what resonates with people that when they see these types of services that are the services of the future like quantum Ari, they’re going to see how much it’s going to impact industry worldwide.

Matthew Sullivan
And I think that’s exactly right. Because it’s the it’s, it’s this, it’s the expansion of the social contract. It’s the leveraging of the crowd of, of people who want to be able to help but they want to be able to get something in return. So if there is this concept of a win, win, So let’s fast forward in a couple of years, we’ll see our platforms up and running, you will be able to help homeowners unlock their equity, we won’t need to rely on institutions or family offices to buy these contracts. Because homeowners will be able to club together or sorry, investors will be able to clap together as they can do today with crowdfunding. And they’ll be able to each of them fund a little bit so that this homeowner in aggregate gets what they need. And so there is this ability to disintermediate the existing institutions and bypass banks and other types of slow moving and in quotes old fashioned. If

Elsa Ramon
People don’t, I’m sorry about you, but if it’s still not resonating with people, we touched on it earlier how cumbersome the process can be going through a bank to do all the Get a second on your house to get the money the equity out of your house. But not only that, the enormous amount of fees that come attached with that. So really what you end up with at the end of the whole process is not that beneficial or could not, you know, potentially be not that beneficial. That that’s another thing. I’m hoping people see the light bulb go off in their head that, wait a minute, this middleman, this bank, these all these institutions in the middle, but get cuts of your stuff along the way to the you know, to the goal of getting some of your money out, or whatever the industry is, when this particular case we’re talking about homes. It’s a long road and everybody gets a piece of you before you get to what you need. And the worst thing is eliminates all of that.

Matthew Sullivan
What it does, it will eliminate a lot of it. I mean, there’s obviously a cost involved in the transaction but if you Know, the key word I think is transparency. When you go through a process, you don’t really know where your costs are going. I mean, they’re, you know, there’s the general bucket of fees or, you know, costs associated with the origination of the loan or whatever. So the, what our platform strives and again, this is stuff that we’re building. So it’s not available yet. But we are striving to build a completely transparent platform where you can make an informed decision as an investor or as a homeowner, if you want to go ahead with what we have to offer, because, you know, on a line by line itemized basis, what the cost is going to be either today or in the future at some point when you sell your home. And that transparency means you can decide if this is for you or not. And I think that’s all we really want to be able to do is to completely cut out all of the obfuscation and cloudiness that’s traditionally asserted. associated with these types of transactions, and maybe

Elsa Ramon
Ultimately, well, ultimately I feel like yes, we’re talking about homes. But the bigger picture which you are part of as a pioneer, harnessing this technology to offer the services you provide, or you know, are building right now, the bigger picture is, once we apply this to so many different industries, the power of the economy and the power, being of being able to control our own destiny, much more financially, is enormous potential for that. And that’s the big picture. You and quantum theory are some of the pioneers that are trying to harness that technology to take us there.

Matthew Sullivan
And it’s just the technology is part of it, but it is this. It’s a different approach. The technology creates a change in the way that you expect things to happen. Because if now you can do Do something differently, then you start questioning Well, why was it ever done the way that it was done before. And when you’re shown a new way, or shown a new possibility, there is this initial resistance to change, which of course, is entirely natural. But then you get this acceleration of adoption. And what I mean by that is if we cast our minds back to the world, pre internet, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, before we could do all our banking and all of our travel and everything online, we used to go to the physical bangs on the corner Street, you know, and, you know, I remember when the ATM machines first came out, which I probably shouldn’t say because it’ll show my age, but, you know, it would be a trip and I would go with my father in his car, we would go to the hole in the wall, and magically money will come out and you just think that’s just fantastic because we could do that on a Sunday. So What what happens is with these types of technologies, they’re a piece of the overall exchange, they’re a piece of the overall fabric of change. They’re not there. But it’s the result of that is that we help unlock a $15 trillion marketplace. We enable money to flow from people who want to invest in residential real estate, to help homeowners unlock an asset that is gathering dust that they desperately need. There are obviously going to be charges and costs in that process, but you know, what they’re going to be. And the great news is that, you know, this happens as well as what is currently being offered by the banks. So we like the banks, we like working with them where we, you know, we work hand in glove with them. This is not a competing product. It’s a it’s a complimentary, it’s an a creative product. And so we’re we’re widening the scope of products and the availability for homeowners to do something creative with With their asset.

Bill Deignan
So I’m gonna, before I ask this question, I’m going to state clearly that none of us are financial advisors, nor are we CPAs. But what you know, with that being said, What is the sort of taxable event that may be triggered by doing something like this?

Matthew Sullivan
And again, okay, this is what we understand. But do your own research speak to your tax advisers? So, yes, the research that that, and the advice that we’ve had is that when you unlock equity using one of our home equity agreements, it’s a it’s tax deferred. It’s not necessarily income, but it’s a tax deferred gain. So in other words, if there was going to be a capital gains tax liability, if you were to sell your home, then that capital gains tax liability is deferred. Until the moment that you actually sell your home. But in the meantime, we are able to give you cash that doesn’t have an immediate tax implication. So you don’t need to pay tax on the money that we give you. But you will have to set up finally at the point that you sell your home.

Bill Deignan
So what about the investors? What do they share of that potential? gain that taxable gain?

Matthew Sullivan
Well, then the, again, the investors, what they have is they’ve invested at a certain amount when you sell your home, if your house has gone up in value, then they will be able to share in a magnified percentage. So if your house has gone up by, let’s say 5%, then they might get three or four times that as their return because as part of the agreement, they will get a bigger share of the increase in value. compared to the amount of money that they invested, so the quid pro quo for the investor is, I’ll share in the upside, but I will get proportionately more of the upside. And you will, because I’m taking I’m taking risk. And now the tax position for the investor is entirely different to the tax position for the homeowner.

Bill Deignan
I guess what I’m really asking is, let’s say there is this the ultimate sale of the house, there’s a gain. Regardless of the fact that the homeowner took this equity out, there’s a gain of $100,000. And yet, maybe they have already taken $100,000 in equity out of the house. But when they sell it, now, they’ve got now will they be on the hook for that gain and all of the taxes surrounding it, or is there a shared portion of that wasn’t their responsibility, but again, Yes, it was. So in other words, the content tracks have been designed to be very, you know, tax friendly as it were for the, for the human and for the. So, now, again, I’m stepping slightly outside of my skill set here, but you would, you know, naturally, as a human, if you have to settle up part of that agreement, if you’ve already sold some of your equity, then there’s going to be a rebalancing. So, you know, you’re not going to end up having to shoulder all of the capital gains if you’ve already sold that off, or part of it off to someone else. But, you know, again, this is the point where, you know, tax is one of those things where we sort of, do tend to step back and say, Please do your own research, be sure, you know, I, we just cannot give enough caveats. Really. Of course, of course, of

Elsa Ramon
course, talk to your see always talk to your CPA, accountant, whoever you turn to for that kind of advice, of course. But yeah, Matthew I the company’s fascinating and the director. You’re going and so many other companies are going with this technology is so incredible and so exciting. But what I find really incredible is where you came from, and how you ended up here. And the fact that you have enough kids to have a baseball. You have a large lovely family but you know you have been in business

Bill Deignan
And how many kids do you have?

Matthew Sullivan
This is the Spanish Inquisition now. I have, I know I should have gone to television at an earlier age. I have I have four wonderful children. But I always say I was married before and we have four fantastic children over in the UK who still talked to me.

Elsa Ramon
Even today, we could go for a ride is that grow up

Matthew Sullivan
They still talk to me and it’s you know they are fantastic I’m incredibly lucky but I and I and now for four children

Bill Deignan
Right, it’s kind of young right range yeah ranging from ninth birthday the other day but I have a nine-month-old daughter as well, who has lungs like a vacuum cleaner I can tell.

Elsa Ramon
It’s really incredible to me because all of us know the challenges of being a parent, but also as an entrepreneur, providing for your family as a parent. That’s really tough but you’ve managed that your entire life you have a pretty extensive background, a very impressive background. I just want to know more. I want to our listeners to know more about you and the person behind quantum Ari because it took a lot of experience and growing to get you where you are today.

Matthew Sullivan
Yes. I think the public someone’s just about to walk in then. So I thought I was gonna, BBC mainly. Now I’ve got an easy, okay, because, you know, my wife is the one who’s busy trying to corral the children and the dogs and quiet you know, he’s on the call, say, you know, I have to, you know, just on bended knee explain how marvelous she is. But hey there it was bound to happen at some point.

Elsa Ramon
Of course. Oh, I think we’ve seen throughout this whole lockdown experience, we’ve got to appear inside people’s lives more than they wanted us to doing all these zoom calls. And

Matthew Sullivan

It’s like crying, goodness, that, that that now, you know, we don’t have to be embarrassed that we actually do have children and they come and sit them on my lap and they look you know, is it’s the one that Have it but but now I remember the point, way back when I wanted to be an entrepreneur and it was really just this. I remember I was being a stockbroker, I was a stockbroker. At the time we were breaking the farmers markets. I was just thinking, yeah, there’s, there’s so many pieces, I want to get involved in this. And I don’t want to just be the salesman. In talking about companies, I want to, you know, there’s, there’s a technology piece there, and there’s this piece, and there’s that and we did this. And can I get involved in all of that? And, you know, my boss at the time rightly, say, you said, No, just do your job, please. And, you know, my head was spinning, and you know, and then it’s just this sort of, I’m not sure it’s creativity, but it’s that you just see something you think I could build that I could do that better. Or, I’d really love to get involved where you get, you know, how come you’re doing this because I want to do that. And so I think, really, it’s this ability of becoming congested. To congenitally unemployable, so I was I, I decided at an early age early 20s, I was unemployable. I really could not be of any use to anyone for more than five minutes without going completely off track, and then I just decided I wanted to build my own company really, because I thought I could do better than anyone else. Which is this sort of strange, you know, focus that entrepreneurs have, which I think you need, but then you need to be able to stick with it. So the worst thing is that, you know, the payback, the, you know, the, the, the, the quid pro quo is, okay, you’ve started this thing. So you got to see this through, because no one’s gonna bail you out. If you start something, it’s like, Okay, I’m kind of stuck with this now. So I got to make it work. And that develops into something which is where, okay, so the world’s falling apart. We know we’re the greatest recession known to man but You see what that’s not a problem. We I’m sure we can find a way through this, you know, there’s got to be the bright side, there’s got to be some, you know, you I think you’ve just stopped denial you live in and it’s just this fact that you go well I, you know, it’s just gonna work, you know, you just you just there is no option. So it was a great question a very simple short, very long answer to a very simple question.

Bill Deignan
It’s bad or work for somebody else so pick your poison

Matthew Sullivan
I can work with I do. I love working with people I really love the advice from people I listen. And you know, I’m not bullish too. So you know, like, you know, bullheaded or pigheaded to think that I know everything I know that there’s, you know, everything is you know, people are far more expert than I am. And I’m a good synthesizer, that’s pretty light that I can synthesize ideas and, and sort of see the way through make things happen. But, but you need really good people around you and I am so thankful for the people we have on our team because they are. Thank god far smarter than I am. And you know, you know that they haven’t rumbled yet that you know, I am who I am. So let’s just try and keep that.

Elsa Ramon
Keep that as being very modest. So Matthew, you have such an incredible background and and you were pretty involved with Virgin Atlantic at one point and having the air Richard Branson and some of these notables shows that the trust and the faith in you and the belief that you are a solid entrepreneur and you you have vision,

Matthew Sullivan
Like it was Yeah, that was a way back, but that was fantastic fun. So that was in the late 90s. So we ended up well, the story is that we used to have an office just down the road in Kensington from where Richard Branson random You know, it’s not the virgin group. It’s the Group of Companies in the virgin group of companies. So his, he used to work out of his home in Holland Park. And my boss at the time I was working with the two or three other guys in a very small corporate finance firm. We used to be stopped breaks together, we split up and set up this company. The guy who owned the company Rory McCarthy, great friend of mine, fantastic guy. He had the world high altitude hang gliding record, the world high altitude freefall record, same birthday as me. He’s five years older. And he wrote a letter to Richard Branson saying, dear Richard, we own linstrom balloons. I’ve always wanted to go around the world in a hot air balloon. It’s the last great global challenge. I’d love you to come along as a pilot. What do you think and he wrote back Richard Branson, great boxing theory. Why not question. Yours, Richard. And that that letter And that was the journey where we started. We owned Lynn strand balloons at that time, we bought a majority interest in instrument balloons because every corporate finance company needs to own a balloon company for this reason, and we ended up designing purlins, ran to the eponymous owner of instant balloons designed this hot air balloon, which was a combination of a very large bubble of helium and some, a couple of you know, burners underneath that would fly around the world called a de rozier. And so we set about building this balloon, which was called virgin global challenger. And through that process, we ended up getting closer and closer to Richard and his, the inner circle of his advisors who were all incredibly clever and equally scary people because of their level of, you know, intelligence and ability to execute in every every, every way. And so we became, you know, we worked very closely with them. So we would help them look at corporate finance deals we became for a few years, you know, part of that that group and I was just sort of, you know, mid 20s, late 20s. And just, you know, permanently my eyes was like, open like a deer in the headlines just thinking that this is fantastic. But looking back, it was the most incredible experience and Richard was and still is this incredibly, this real energy of ability and can do and it’s almost tangible. And since you feel this, that anything is possible. It’s it’s tempered by the sort of smart guys around him. So it’s this wonderful balance of real expansion, mixed with solid execution and analysis. So you know, it’s, it’s not see to the pen stuff. It’s, it’s, it’s a real it’s a different environment. I’ve never seen anything like It says,

Elsa Ramon
Yeah, the worst anyone could say is no. All you can do is ask and look where it took you. I love that. I love that story. Okay, what do

Bill Deignan
You think? What do you think he thinks of crypto? Yeah,

Matthew Sullivan
I think it’s just like everyone just think, well,if there’s something that is, you know this in the initial stages, you probably think well, I don’t really understand it, but I know there’s something there. You get faint signals from the future. There’s something that I have to get involved in with crypto. I don’t know what it is yet. But I think it’s it’s intriguing. I mean, crypto is you cannot stop the juggernaut. It may not be in 10 years time or anything like what it is today, but it’s just this evolution. It’s this butterfly coming out of the chrysalis. You know, and we don’t know what the color is gonna be, but we know that it’s going to be a beautiful thing.

Elsa Ramon
That’s the fun part. All right. So I wanted to ask you, what is the roadmap for quantum sorry.

Matthew Sullivan
Well, we’ve been around for a couple of years, we’ve ironed out most of the wrinkles, we’re ready to go. We are working with homeowners, we’re generating revenues with growing it, we’re still on track, the original idea is still there. What we’re doing now is we’re raising money through Republic. So it’s an opportunity for people to get involved as an owner in our company with, you know, a very small, you know, investment. So,

Elsa Ramon
Republic is a it’s a fundraising site, anyone can go public and invest in a multitude of companies. Exactly.

Matthew Sullivan
It’s an SEC registered crowdfunding platform. It’s a fabulous, great guys to work with, but it gives people the ability to invest in companies that otherwise would be hidden, and, and just offer to, you know, to these venture capitalists, but what we’re trying to do there is build an evangelical army of investors and support quarters that can help us spread the word. So it’s not just about the money, it’s about building a movement. You know, we call it the equity Freedom Movement, because, you know, we want people to understand and spread the word that there are other ways of being able to unlock your equity. So that’s happening with just a, you know, a week or a couple of weeks into it. So we’ve got a few more weeks left of that. And then really, it’s just, you know, we’re sort of fasting our safety belts, because we know that when the investors and the market comes back to life again, which will be very soon, you know, we’re going to be very busy people, and we’re doing something that I think it’s going to help a lot of people. And that’s important. And I don’t mean to say that in a trite fashion, but it does. You know, it does help when you really, when you speak to these people, when you’ve got a solution, when they have been turned down by everyone else. And you go yes, we can help you that, you know, that, that that makes that that does, you know, you know, that’s a good thing.

Elsa Ramon
Whoa, whoa, that’s if you could give people hope that there’s a better life or a better way, why wouldn’t you?

Matthew Sullivan
Well, it’s just that there’s another way. Exactly. And there’s there’s an alternative. So it’s not. It’s not just the bank. There’s other things now, other ways of unlocking that thing, that big equity thing that is yours. So that’s the thing. You’ve now got options. You’ve got choices, and that’s going to grow this, this whole shared equity or equity. Non bank equity funding is right at the very beginning. I think even though it’s about 10 years old, you know, we’re now we can see the growing and growing year by year and that’s that’s a good thing for homeowners.

Elsa Ramon
Absolutely, Matthew, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to talk with us. It’s been a year since we talked It’s so good to catch up with you and talk about where you are and see the progress

Matthew Sullivan
is forever. Thank you so much for having me on and No, I appreciate you not pressing the end button halfway through. I would Oh, no, no, no.

Bill Deignan
Oh, already did that. Sorry.

Matthew Sullivan
Yeah.

Well, I don’t blame. You gotta do this.

Elsa Ramon
I could see through with your children coming in the natives are getting restless. So be entrepreneurs slash dad and enjoy the rest of your day. But, again, humbled you’re on the podcast with us and I’m so excited to see where you go in the future.

Matthew Sullivan
Thank you, Elsa. It’s been my pleasure.