Alternative Investing Club & How to Join
Today we welcome Ian Ippolito, he’s the founder and head of an alternative asset investing club called the private investor club. Now, what is alternative asset investing? Not only can you invest in real estate, private debt, private equity, venture capital, but did you know that you can invest in litigation finance? and even music royalties, the private investor club is the premier choice if you're looking for a different way to invest. The club has 4500 plus members with over 8.3 billion in investable assets. This place gives investors access to high-quality deal flow, detailed due diligence, and a special deal that they couldn't find on their own. Now, he has been featured in USA Today, Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal realtor.com, curved, and more.
In this episode, we’re discussing…
[2:44] How he started as a Tech Programmer and Entrepreneur
[4:16] What is the private investor club and how started
[6:59] How do they find investors and the minimum is accredited, investor
[9:19] The investment type: litigation finance and how it works
[13:15] Royalties as an investment type and how it works
[15:52] How to join the club and its advantages due it’s a wide club
[19:02] There’s no fee to join, they want to help their own investors the best
[21:27] Can someone be an investor and then go into being a sponsor?
[22:13] For passive investors that want to know the biggest breakdown into their website
Ian’s Top Tip’s
“The club itself does not run any syndications or things like that. It's a place for investors to invest passively. We take deals from wherever we can find them, we take them from the crowdfunding sites like you're talking about individual syndicators that come and they have certain deals, we look at all of those things together. And that's how we find our deals”
“Litigation finances are like purchasing a stake in a case so it's a lawsuit and the litigation funder can be on either side of the lawsuit. But typically, they are expecting the lawsuit to come out with some sort of benefit to them in the end. And if it does, they're going to profit from it. If it does poorly. Now, this is the interesting part, because of the way the legal kind of arena works. You can't make a loan to a legal firm, it's not allowed. So, they're not allowed to say, hey, well, if you lose, you still owe me the money. This is a loan”
“It has to be structured in a way where if you lose, you don't get back any money. So, there's that binary risk. If you invest in one of these easily could go the wrong way. There are things that they're done to kind of mitigate that risk. One is to invest in a lot of cases rather than one. The advantage is that it has nothing to do with the economy, with the cycles, or with recessions. It's just picking well, and if you pick Well, you know, then you do well. So that's the pages on correlating”
“With COVID-19 we’re at home, we were listening to music, and we were watching movies that have music in them. All those things are things that trigger music, royalties. So, every time you listen to music, or you're watching a video or a show as playing music, money is paid to whoever created that music and a bunch of parties, like the person who wrote the music, the person who performed the music, and you can participate in all sorts of different ways”.
“Especially when times are bad, you kind of want to look at your music, it tends to be a steady stream of income. You can play it in different ways you can kind of invest in like the hot hits the latest. Other ones will invest only in the ones that have been the iconic songs that have lasted for decades. There's different kind of strategies to, to kind of play it but it’s a general idea”
“We do some due diligence on the sponsor themselves, just make sure, they look legitimate. I mean, obviously, we don't want to give access to our club to someone that we can tell, we're going to try to take advantage of people. But in general, we'll put it in front of the club and let people decide. And so, and that's where the club works”
“Rule number one actually, is, anyone that's a sponsor, they cannot participate as an investor, we just cut that all out. That way, we know investors talking about something, it's real, there's none of the backbiting and all that sort of stuff. Someone has to be an investor, so, they can be a sponsor to come in on the investor side, and then they have to be an accredited investor.
“There's no fees or membership fee to join the club. And we don't say, well, we're going to take a fee every single time we refer an investor over to a sponsor, which is most of the others’ work. Because then there's a little bit of a conflict of interest because then we're like promoting certain sponsors. We don't want to be in that position. We just want to be in a place where everything is very transparent.”
“We have people that will be like: I was an investor. But now I'm doing syndications now. I want to switch over. So, we switch them over to a sponsor account. But they can't be both, just because it's too difficult to say, hang on, take off my, my sponsor hat, I got put on my investor hat right now. And then we'd have to like monitor people. And we don't want to have to do that”
Mike’s Top Tip’s
“It's such an entrepreneurial thing to say, I'm creating this entire platform in order to help me find ways to invest. So, that's so awesome. It's so perfect. The things that I've done, this podcast, I'm helping other people, but I'm also getting ideas myself, there's always with the entrepreneur mind. But if you can help a lot of people, but also help yourself, then it's a win-win on everything, every side”
Resources from Ian
ABOUT IAN IPPOLITO
Ian Ippolito is the founder and head of an alternative-asset investing club called the Private Investor Club. The club has 4,500+ members with over $8.3 billion in investable assets. And it gives investors access to high quality deal flow, detailed due-diligence and special deals that they couldn't on their own. Ian has been featured in USA Today, Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal, Realtor.com, Curbed and more.
