IAM527-Co-founder Provides Self-directed Retirement Accounts

Thomas is the co-founder and VP of marketing at Rocket Dollar, a self-directed retirement account provider.

Young's close contact with many self-directed investors led him to identify a strong need for a platform combining the best attributes of a self-directed account while leveraging the best technology of the day to make it easy to operate these accounts.

Rocket Dollar is making it simple and secure for folks to take advantage of their oftentimes largest investable pool of assets, and invest in the things they care about.

• CEO Hack: Book – The One Thing
• CEO Nugget: There's always going to be another opportunity, don't just grab on the one thing
• CEO Defined: Proactively going out for opportunities and being in charge

Website: https://www.rocketdollar.com/

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Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Thomas Young of Rocket Dollar. Thomas, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Thomas Young 0:39

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Gresham Harkless 0:41

Yeah, definitely super excited to have you on. What I want to do is just read a little bit more about Thomas so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Thomas is the co-founder and VP of marketing at Rocket Dollar, a self-directed retirement account provider. Young's close contact with many self-directed investors led him to identify a strong need for a platform combining the best attributes of a self-directed account while leveraging the best technology of the day to make it easy to operate these accounts. Rocket Dollar is making it simple and secure for folks to take advantage of their oftentimes largest investable pool of assets, and invest in the things they care about. Thomas, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Thomas Young 1:19

Yeah, let's do it.

Gresham Harkless 1:20

Let's make it happen. I wanted to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story and what led you to get started with your business.

Thomas Young 1:27

Yeah, so that right when I graduated from college, I went to the University of Texas here in Austin, where we're based today. Just through happenstance, I didn't really plan it, I ended up in this sort of niche part of the retirement industry, which is the self-directed IRA and 401k industry where people were using their retirement accounts to do things like buy rental properties or invest in startups. I worked at a company, like I said, just because of luck, and this guy I met, and it was a lot of things that came together, that I ended up working for this guy. We were selling these accounts at a price point that was high and it was very complicated. It was a lot of paperwork and a lot of tedious processes.

Going through that and working there and learning the ins and outs of the business, I just kept thinking to myself, there has to be a better way to do this and I'm talking about it from my end from the person fulfilling the accounts and setting them up and opening the structures and doing all that. After about two years there, I learned the product, I learned the operations, and I just wanted to do it better. In the process of sort of figuring out what that would be like, and talking to mentors, and some angel investors that I knew in Austin I got connected to my co-founders at Rocket Dollar, Henry Yoshida, and Rick Dude whose is his actual last name, which is kind of funny.

Henry has been in the retirement space for a long time, he had a prior exit from Goldman Sachs and Rick is a super technical guy, so the three of us just started brainstorming about how we could bring this specific product, sort of online, if you will and that's really how it came together. I sort of knew the product, Henry knew how to build a business, how to fundraise, how to structure, how to do how to hire all of these things that you just don't know, as a first-time founder, which I am.

Then Rick knew the tech he had this product before. He knew sort of the levers that we could pull using tech to make it very easy for us on the fulfillment side and letting us scale but also on the customer and providing a good customer experience. So the three of us just sort of decided that we wanted to tackle this and Rocket Dollar was born. Now about 20. We turned to in February, we're at 18 employees and customers in all 50 states. So we're having a good time over here.

Gresham Harkless 4:08

Nice. I definitely appreciate you sharing that. I think happy next, near birthday, I guess I should say, it's February is around the corner as well. It's super exciting, especially to hear how you guys were able to come in. You guys each have your Zona genius, it sounds like and when you guys come together, you are able to build this company and this organization that you guys have, and so many times people feel like you have to create something completely new but a lot of times if you build a better mousetrap, if you find something's not being done in a really great way or there's an opportunity or there's something blocking that ability to grow, you can create that yourself.

Thomas Young 4:46

Totally agree and we're lucky in the sort of niche that we serve that this is a product that's been around for a long time. It's got a lot of legitimacy and a lot of sort of traction with specific circles. But because it has been such a neat product for so long. Really, it's been real estate investors who have known about these things, they're buying and holding single-family homes inside their IRA, which is just crazy awesome. But so it was a nice product.

We have the advantage of a legacy product that needs to be updated and needs to have a new skin put on it while also being sort of the first to try to bring it into the mainstream. So we're in a cool little, if you look at a Venn diagram, we're right in the middle between it exists, it's doable, you can go out and spend $2,000 on an account. But on this end, we're sort of bringing the FinTech sort of slick look and feel to it. The cost savings of good tech on the other end. So we're really happy where we're sitting right now.

Gresham Harkless 5:49

Yeah, it makes sense. I think you're absolutely right, especially that legitimacy. If there is a market, a lot of times you have different ideas, and you're like, Okay, this would be really awesome if it was creative, but you don't have that history that you guys have in the industry that you have, where it says, hey, this is something that is needed. It's been used for years and years and years and we just need to create exactly what that is.

Thomas Young 6:12

Right. Absolutely right.

Gresham Harkless 6:13

Nice. I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper. I know you told us a little bit more about Rocket Dollar. Can you take us through exactly how it works? What, exactly for those who may not be familiar with what self-directed accounts are and how they work?

Thomas Young 6:27

Right. For most people, their retirement account, their IRA, or their 401 K with their employer is oftentimes their largest investable pool of capital. But when you go to open an IRA with the Charles Schwab's or the Fidelity's of the world, they'll give you an account for free. Then all they let you invest that IRA and is it preset sort of menu of their mutual funds and their index funds and their different products, their financial products that they built. But the IRS doesn't say that that's all you can use it for, so the list of what you legally cannot invest in is very short. But you're limited because of these providers.

What we've done at Rocket Dollars, is sort of take the training wheels off of these accounts, and with a Rocket Dollar self-directed IRA or solo 401 K, you can make investments, a tax advantage. So no penalties, no nothing with your IRA or 401k into assets like real estate, startups like cryptocurrencies, peer-to-peer lending, small business lending, basically anything that you can imagine. The classic case study for us as Rocket Dollar when we raised we raised a small friends and family round, right when we started, and about 20% of the capital that we took in to start our business was through our own accounts.

We have investors using their retirement savings to invest in a startup like Rocket Dollar. Since then we've had people that are taking 100k out of their 401k or IRA and investing into a single-family home and collecting tax-free rent that goes right into the account then so it's just a different way of investing your IRA or 401 K, instead of just a self-selected menu of mutual funds. We've really just enabled people to do everything legally within their IRA or 401k.

Gresham Harkless 8:15

Yeah, that's huge. It's always crazy. A lot of times, sometimes you can overthink different concepts, but it's usually just something that you're frustrated with, as you talked about when you were working with a company, where if you start to work that out and figure out how best to alleviate some of that frustration and stress, you can have a phenomenal idea. But again, everybody's already investing, they already have their RAS already have those 401, K's, and they just don't have all those different options. If they're worth, certain organs, certain companies, so great that you guys are able to do that and open up people's eyes and in their pockets, for lack of a better term to those opportunities.

Thomas Young 8:50

Yeah, well, and I mean, it's, how many times have you heard of people in your circle or in your family that had this just amazing opportunity to come by their desk, buying land, where 10 years ago, just whatever, right? Everybody has these investment opportunities that come across the desk that they've had to pass on because they didn't have the money available. Because we have mortgages, we have kids, we've got student loans, we've got cars, we've got vacations, we've got lifestyle, this unreal thing. So you have to pass on a great opportunity.

But at the same time, you've got 150 or 200 or 50, or whatever amount sitting in your 401 K or your IRA, which you could have used for that investment. That's really what we're trying to avoid people missing out on those opportunities that come across because you don't have to you do have the money a lot of times you just don't know that you can use it for these sorts of things. That's really what we're trying to bring into the mainstream.

Gresham Harkless 9:47

Yeah, definitely makes perfect sense. That sounds like a lot of awareness and education as well too. Especially if you don't know about those IRS things you can and cannot do, but it's great that you guys have it set up. It's kind of like an easy button. So people understand exactly how to do that.

Thomas Young 10:02

Absolutely, exactly right.

Gresham Harkless 10:04

Now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce and it could be for you personally or for Rocket Dollar. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

Thomas Young 10:12

Yeah, absolutely. So going back to what we touched on earlier about the product, sort of bringing a product online in a niche world, is that we've really, there's there isn't a whole lot of awareness around these accounts. I would say that our secret sauce, it's not the tech, it's not the product, it's the awareness and it's the content, the educational content that we produce in-house, around our products, and around the opportunities and around the customers that we have. We do case studies, and we do all these different things.

I think that makes us unique, we invest an awful lot into sort of educational resources to bring awareness. But then we also have a knowledge base that has a tonne of information. So when you do have these accounts, and you have questions, you don't have to get on the phone and call somebody, even though you can, when we do have people answering phones or email, you can it's, you can actually just go online and go in our knowledge base and search for your answer. So that's unique to us, I don't think there's anybody in the self-directed space, that is investing so heavily into original content. I think that makes us pretty unique.

Gresham Harkless 11:24

I wanted to switch gears a little bit. I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be an app or book, or a habit that you have, or what's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Thomas Young 11:33

The one thing that just comes to mind immediately, and there's a lot, but the one that just comes to mind immediately is a few years ago, I read a book by Gary Keller called The One Thing, and it's about focusing on the one thing that will have the most impact across your organization, across your life, across your professional life and that's stuck with me because being in a startup, being in a small company there's so many things that you can be doing. But really getting clear and focusing on one thing at a time has been just really important for me.

Gresham Harkless 12:08

Absolutely. Now I want to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice. Or if you could happen to be a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Thomas Young 12:18

I would say opportunities are plentiful, there's always going to be another opportunity, there's always going to be something that comes by, and just because you mess up or you fail, or you don't do something the right way doesn't mean that you failed, it just means that you're just waiting for another opportunity. I would tell myself, like, don't just grab onto one thing, right, don't just grab onto that one idea or that one feature that one whatever, and sort of die on that hill.

Let it flow a little bit, be a little relaxed, and know that things are going to come and go. If you miss one opportunity, there's another one behind it, and that I think would ease a lot of my anxiety, which would in turn have made me more effective. I don't know if that's like this amazing nugget. But that's what I would tell myself.

Gresham Harkless 13:09

Yeah, no, I think it's huge. I think so many times that especially with being a visionary and having a vision for exactly what you want to build and how you want to create it, sometimes we can get wrapped up in wanting to see that work so much so that we aren't pivoting, we aren't making changes, we aren't saying well, maybe we should do it this way or that way. It's a tough balance between having a vision, one to drive home, and rolling up your sleeves and making that happen. But at the same time, you have to be able to say, well, maybe the shoe should go on the other foot. Maybe we should try it this way and that might actually provide more opportunities. So balancing between that if I said that correctly.

Thomas Young 13:45

Absolutely.

Gresham Harkless 13:46

Nice. Well, Thomas, I truly appreciate I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO and we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Thomas, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Thomas Young 13:59

I read a really good article the other day about, I'm not a CEO of my business, but it was an article saying that everybody is sort of the CEO of their life. So you're the CEO of your life, I'm the CEO of my life, and, and taking sort of charge, reacting to opportunities, but not living in a reactionary state and being proactive and going out and finding these opportunities and doing these things.

I think that's what it means to be sort of the CEO of your life and be in charge of what you're doing. Be in charge of being accountable for your work for your actions for your health, I think that's what being a CEO means is just having a handle on yourself, and taking the time to reflect and learn about yourself. I think that's what being the CEO of your life is.

Gresham Harkless 14:48

Yeah, absolutely. That makes so much sense. I think a lot of times whether we're talking about your working out or your job or your finances obviously you have kind of control to be able to make those decisions and we have ownership more times more than we sometimes think. I think that if we have that mentality of that perspective, that helps make everything better. I appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more Thomas, what I want to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional, you can let our readers and listeners know and then of course, how best they can get a hold of you find out all the awesome things you guys are working on.

Thomas Young 15:24

Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me, this has been a fun conversation. This won't air until January but we're recording this Monday after Thanksgiving. It's a great way to sort of jump back into the workweek and wrapping up the year so I've really enjoyed that. The best way to get a hold of me, you can visit us anytime at rocketdollar.com or you can email me directly at thomas@rocketdollar.com. I'm pretty good about responding to emails so if you have any questions about what we do or how we do it, if you're thinking about starting a business and you want to get in touch with with me or anybody on my team, just shoot me an email again at thomas@rocketdollar.com and happy to chat.

Gresham Harkless 16:07

Awesome. Well, thank you so much again, Thomas. We will have the links and information in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you. But I appreciate your time again, my friend and I hope you have a phenomenal rest today.

Outro 16:16

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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