Ep682: Rex Salisbury – Quitting Can Be a Very Important Skill to Exercise

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Quick take

BIO: Rex Salisbury is the Founder & General Partner at Cambrian Ventures, a pre-seed & seed focused fintech fund.

STORY: Rex’s biggest mistake ever was sticking with his initial career too long, even though he knew he shouldn’t have been working that job.

LEARNING: Invest in the skill that you want to move into as much as you. Build networks early in your career.

 

“Make yourself marketable. It’s amazing what you can learn if you invest in certain things.”

Rex Salisbury

 

Guest profile

Rex Salisbury is the Founder & General Partner at Cambrian Ventures, a pre-seed & seed focused fintech fund. He previously was a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he helped launch the fintech vertical. He has over a decade of experience working in finance & fintech, primarily as a software engineer, before becoming a venture capitalist.

Worst investment ever

Rex’s biggest mistake ever was sticking with his initial career too long. Rex attended a small liberal arts college on the American east coast—Davidson. He had a great experience and made a lot of good lifelong friends. Rex studied economics and also got a major in history.

During his senior year, Rex worked in investment banking, specifically for Merrill Lynch. He also did an internship in South Africa and studied formal money lending. After college, Rex went to work in a bank. He believed that since banks are big businesses, there must be interesting work to do.

Unfortunately, the experience wasn’t what Rex had imagined. He hated his job and had begun thinking about quitting from the second month on the job. But he kept dragging on and wasted the first four years of his career doing something he knew he shouldn’t have been doing.

Lessons learned

  • Quitting can be a very important skill to exercise.
  • If you’re considering leaving something like a job, you should quit it sooner rather than later for better life outcomes.
  • It’s incredibly important to have access to good networks early in your career.
  • If you have the unfair advantage of being young, relatively unattached, and the ability to relocate geographically, do it. It will expand your networks.

Andrew’s takeaways

  • If you’re feeling like quitting, take that seriously. Sit down, write about it, talk to someone about it, and start to take some action.
  • Invest in the skill that you want to move into as much as you. That will help you make that transition.

Actionable advice

If you’re interested in a particular area, find other people who are really good at writing and talking about that area. Exercising that muscle over time can help open doors to building valuable networks and relationships.

No.1 goal for the next 12 months

Rex’s number one goal for the next 12 months is to identify individuals building the next big companies that will change financial services and invest in 12 of the most interesting of those.

Parting words

 

“If you feel like you don’t have the skill set to affect some of these changes, put in the work.”

Rex Salisbury

 

Read full transcript

Andrew Stotz 00:02
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community. We know that to win in investing, you must take risk but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. So join me go to my worst investment ever.com and sign up for our free weekly become a better investor newsletter where I share how to reduce risk and create grow and protect your wealth. Fellow risk takers this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests, Rex Salisbury. Rex, are you ready to join the mission?

Rex Salisbury 00:42
Absolutely.

Andrew Stotz 00:46
All right, let me introduce you to the audience. Rex is the founder and general partner at Cambrian ventures a precede and seed focus, FinTech fun. He previously was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he helped launch the FinTech vertical, he has over a decade of experience working in finance, and fintech primarily as a software engineer before becoming a venture capitalist. So Rex, just take a minute and tell us about the unique value you are bringing to this wonderful world.

Rex Salisbury 01:18
My goal is to provide access to networks of networks and connect people who are building interesting companies, in financial services with technology to other folks doing similar kinds of work. So I spent a lot of time connecting people all across the ecosystem.

Andrew Stotz 01:36
And, you know, I think it's an interesting point, because it's just so hard when you're running your own business, you just don't oftentimes even have the time to look up. So it's like when someone comes along the hay. And I know from my own experience, when someone comes along and go, you should be talking to so and so. Let me introduce you. It's like, Ah, it's really, you know, gotta gotta be a great feeling, particularly when you can gain from it too, if you're investing or not. But

Rex Salisbury 02:06
yeah, and I kind of came across my career in venture capital accidentally. And venture capital is an industry where facilitating connectivity is a key part of how you provide value to the companies you support, but then also how you get to understand what's going on in the ecosystem. And what's interesting, and so I accidentally ended up in venture capital because I was basically building community for people in FinTech, FinTech being a portmanteau me and financial technology. So I'm based here in the Bay Area. And basically, you know, just north of Silicon Valley, investing in technology companies that are trying to disrupt financial services. And back in the day, I was a software engineer working in under one of the cofounders of Sofi, to work on a new company and around consumer mortgages. And I was doing back end software engineering, creating what I thought was pretty interesting. And I was like, hey, I want to talk to other people who are building interesting technology in FinTech. And so I started doing small monthly events in downtown San Francisco. For other people like me, who are software engineers, founders, product managers, from companies like Stripe, plaid, lend Credit Karma to talk about something they built and launched recently, in that community just grew over time, to the point where now I have 20,000 plus newsletter subscribers, I have a Slack community I run of 1700 plus FinTech founders, I have a podcast as well, the Cambrian FinTech podcast with Rex Saulsbury. And I just do a bunch of stuff around connecting people. Because what I do now is a job as I invest in very early stage founders, usually two people who have just incorporated, who have an idea, and maybe a few potential customers lined up, but they probably haven't even built a product yet. And the way I get to know those people and get to build a confidence that what they're doing is interesting is I get to understand the ecosystem they're in, and I get to understand the pain points are solving, I get to build the confidence that they have the skill set to build that product, and then also sell that product. And then in supporting them, I do the same thing that I do in finding them, which is provide connectivity to the community and the ecosystem that I've built. So a lot of what I do is, you know, just connecting people all day, and it's a fun way, because at the end of the day, I think the most interesting things in the world are arguably everything in the world is built by people. And the most interesting things in the world that people are building. You can't like go and google them because no one's created a Wikipedia page yet, right? There are these ideas that live inside of people's heads that haven't actually been expressed or you know, gone out and become like super public, but they're the people are building what's next. And in order to get a sense of what that might look like, you have to be in the business of having lots of conversations with people and that's the business that I'm in and it's a really fun place to be if if you're of my temperament

Andrew Stotz 04:59
and what So like what's either a person or a company or an idea that you've either invested in or seeing that you just think is, you know, something that people haven't seen where people are working behind the scenes on solving any particular problem?

Rex Salisbury 05:14
Yeah, that's a great question. So first of all, I'm doing pre seed and seed, and I'm doing b2b fintech. So these are very small companies that are very new. And b2b means they don't sell to consumers, they sell to other businesses, generally. And this is financial services. So anyone who knows financial services knows that it's opaque and hard to understand from the outside. So I could describe to you what a lot of these companies do. And he would probably find it profoundly uninteresting. Well, maybe not you, you will probably find it interesting. But the general audience very well might find it profoundly uninteresting. So all instead, describe the types of companies next probably give you one or two examples of portfolio companies as well. So, companies, you may be familiar with our Credit Karma, their app or a website that allows you to check your monthly credit score, they sold into it. And 2019, I think for a billion dollars, it was one of the first big outcomes in the FinTech ecosystem. My goal is to find two people who are building something like the next Credit Karma, or maybe two people. And this would actually be a better fit for me, because Credit Karma is more of a consumer company, and I will invest in consumer companies. But 10, like I said earlier, to do more b2b, maybe to people who were inside of Credit Karma helped build some key parts of their infrastructure or ecosystem, develop some novel insight into how some broken piece of infrastructure and financial services was a huge problem for Credit Karma. And then they go out, and they build a standalone company that solves that problem, and maybe sells to Credit Karma and sells to a whole bunch of other people. So just as an illustrative examples of types of things that might be broken, that someone in Credit Karma might find is like, oh, it's really hard to underwrite consumers, or it's really hard to onboard, consumers make sure they aren't fraudulent credit, karma actually has a checking account. Now, credit, karma has historically recommended just credit cards, but they're trying to move into auto loans into home loans, it's been really hard for them to move into auto loans and home loans. There are people who own those verticals, they've discovered why those categories are hard, and probably thinking about interesting ways in which you could make it easier for people to get access to better mortgages or better auto loans. And so that's what I like to find is both, you know, had the next great companies within financial services that are building interesting products for consumers. Maybe one example. What's hard is a lot of my clients are also in stealth. So I have to think through which ones are our public right now and have also have interesting stories to tell. One of them that is public right now that I think the audience can understand. Some of you are probably married, if you're married, you, you may have bought an engagement ring, if you bought an engagement ring, you may have gotten ring insurance, when you went to buy that ring, you probably went to a store. But actually more and more people these days by a store, buy jewelry online, that might be an engagement ring, it might might not be if you want to get insurance, you know, you can click a button, you get it shipped to you, maybe they're shipping insurance or whatever, but you want to get insurance, you now have to like get an appraisal, you have to fill out a bunch of paperwork, you have to like email someone else and they're going to ask you some questions. And it's going to, maybe you don't even bother doing it because you like don't know who to go to. That's crazy, like, the person who sold it to you knows everything there is to know about that ring. And that's really the main thing that's been insured. So there should just be a button that when you buy an engagement ring online, you can get insurance with it. And so I'm an investor in a company called oyster that is doing embedded insurance for high growth e commerce categories. They do online jewelers, they also do e bikes as well, e bikes is actually their largest category, similar story, you buy an E bike, it might be a $4,000 purchase online, it's a very important purchase, you're worried about getting death, you're worried about the ebike getting stolen, you're worried about maybe getting injured when you're riding the bike or injuring someone else. Even if your homeowner's insurance covers your eBike, which most homeowners insurance policies do not because they don't cover things with a motor, they're probably not going to cover the risk of injury to yourself or others. And so you want to have insurance for that. And then theft is the other big one. And so oysters same thing, you can click a button as part of that purchase, get access to insurance for a very important product in a seamless way. And so waser is very interesting company building embedded personal insurance products across a whole bunch of different verticals. They're also omni channel, so most of their policies are attached at the point of sale on an online you know, checkout session, but they also have solutions. If you're an omni channel immersion that has a website and an in store presence. They can support that as well. So that's an example of it. Somebody who's trying to deliver you know, a frictionless interesting consumer experience for something that's pretty friction heavy right now.

Andrew Stotz 10:08
Simple, just a little button next to the purchase button on somebody's website. But there's so much

Rex Salisbury 10:13
behind that there's a lot of infrastructure, right? You've got to get we've got to get a carrier got to get an MGA, you gotta do you gotta do claims you got to do under like, there's a whole lot of stuff. So it takes a ton of work to get that simple little button. But yeah, that's the idea.

Andrew Stotz 10:27
I just want to ask one question. That's, it's such a challenge for the companies that I and friends that I know that have companies here in Asia, you know, take Thailand as an example, which doesn't. First of all, English language is not, you know, a leading language, unlike maybe some other countries in Asia. And the second thing is that there's just not a real code base of coders. So when a Thai company wants to set up, you know, they try, obviously, with the best Thai coders that they can get, but it's a pretty small pool. And then they have to go outside and try to either hire an agency or maybe they outsource to India, or they go to Philippines and get some coders or Ukraine or some other places, and then they try to build and I just see failure after failure. And I'm just curious, you know, from, from your experience, what how does it happen in the US? Is it all you know, just, is it a small group of coders get together and start that company? You know? Or is it that they hire 50 coders and put them to work? And three of them end up producing, you know, the value? Or are they outsourcing to India, like we're trying to do here as an example? I'm just curious. Yeah, observations on that.

Rex Salisbury 11:38
So I think ecosystems get really, really good at doing certain kinds of work, right? Like you had Detroit got really, really good at building cars. And if you wanted to start, not that this would have been a good idea, like a new car company, where should you go, you should go to Detroit, because you're going to hire someone to run your assembly line to design your vehicle to order all the parts from all of your suppliers. And they're going to know all these things about how to do it that are maybe not obvious to an outsider. I think people look sometimes at software, they're like, oh, it's not that hard. Like I see a website, I know what a website is, I'm gonna like draw on a piece of paper, what I want, I'm gonna hand that piece of paper to a software engineer, and they're just gonna make it and then we're done. And that's not how software development works. Like, shocker. It's software is a living, breathing product, most of the apps you interact with every day, they aren't static, people are pushing changes into production, multiple times per day, for all these websites, and, and companies. So there's actually a lot going on under the hood. So that is to say, if you want to develop software for something, you have to be in a good ecosystem, or even a good ecosystem with the right connectivity in the right people, it can't be something or just draw a schematic on a piece of paper, and then throw it over the wall. And so in the Bay Area, for a long time, this was one of the very few places you could go in the world or in the US where you could find this really great rich talent density, where not only the software engineers, you know, knew how to do lots of different things. But you have all these other folks, you have product managers who know how to translate business requirements into technical, you know, product requirements, essentially, that then the software engineers can go out and build against, and the product develop the product managers understand how to work with engineers. Now, you also have founders who themselves have been technical. So they understand, like when they draw up and have an idea for something, what can and can't be done. But if you don't have all those components, it can be very hard to just try to do it somewhere else that said, software development practices from the Bay Area have spread globally now. And I think you can find great engineering talent, anywhere. But as I said, before, engineering talent alone isn't sufficient. You have to have the understanding of how you use and leverage and communicate with great, even great software engineers, because there's more than just the, you know, draw something on a piece of paper trying to hand it to someone. And so that's, that's the TLDR there.

Andrew Stotz 14:11
That's a great one. And I mean, Thailand, it's interesting, because what Thailand did is that Thailand created a hub, but not for that it created a hub for automotive automobile production. And the Japanese built an infrastructure that's so powerful, that it's very difficult for someone for them just to shut down and go to another country that infrastructure is so powerful of roads of storage, areas of connectivity between the manufacturing firms, but it sounds like if Thailand wanted to improve on how it could, you know, build out more from a development sense, really have to build out kind of a core place. Actually, what I what I kind of hear from it is like a physical place where people go and a part of the city or whatever, where, you know, it starts to and it's a long process because you probably need to bring in a lot of outside, you know, expertise, and then slowly and steadily build on that. So that ties know that go there when you are a founder and you need, you know, need to figure out how to build it. So that's great, great info. We could talk a lot about that, because I have a lot of questions.

Rex Salisbury 15:22
Yeah, it's not just a software piece to like, if you go back to the kind of origin of Silicon Valley, it's you have people who know how to make chips out of silicon. And so it's that expertise, and that those networks of know how, but then it's also in the culture that you had, like the one of the founding stories of Silicon Valley is a traitor state who leave fair, cheap, fair child, I'm gonna screw up semiconductor and Fairchild Semiconductor, and they go off and they start their own competitive companies. And then like venture capital gets started. So a funding mechanism for these people who are deeply technically skilled. So it's, it's a whole, but it's like a cultural element. It's a financial element. It's like a technical know how element and you have to get all those things to build a really rich tech ecosystem. And venture capital is global, I have a lot of friends who invest in FinTech companies globally. But when you go abroad, sometimes you forget just how much you are when you go abroad. Do you often then remember how much you take for granted about all of these default assumptions you're going to have in a well developed market for building software companies like you have in the Bay Area?

Andrew Stotz 16:29
Yeah. And it's amazing. Well, now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to and then tell us your story.

Rex Salisbury 16:43
So my worst investment ever, it has to do with how I allocated a component of 80,000 hours. So if you're not familiar with this framing, 80,000 hours is about how many years you have in your career to work. So the math there is essentially 40 hours a week, you've got 50 weeks a year, maybe you take vacation, maybe you don't. And then you do over that same period of time. So my biggest mistake ever was sticking with my initial career too long. So I went to a small liberal arts college on the east coast. It's called Davidson, I had a great experience. I have a lot of good lifelong friends. I studied economics, I also got a major in history. I think colleges are bad at preparing people how to think about their careers, and therefore a lot of people just end up kind of doing default choices that are in the ecosystem. And that's what I did. So I ended up working in investment banking, specifically for BFA Merrill Lynch. And I did explore some other stuff. I actually did an internship in South Africa and studied in formal money lending and I actually work shore support in Alaska doing commercial salmon fishing, but was like, pretty clear. To me. That was a fun summer, but it was not going to be a career. Although I ran into people out there, like I came out here in the 80s. And still here, so and you get you actually some of them, like started seafood processing companies. But anyway, so I, I was like, I got to my senior I was like, I don't know what I want to do. But banks hire a lot of people, they hire a lot of Wall Street at one point was hiring over 50% of the alums of ivy League's. And so I ended up going and working in a bank and as thinking of, you know, big bank, big businesses, like surely there's interesting work to be done Surely all, like find something I really like. And so I was there for over four and a half years, I did kind of three distinct roles. And after I did the first one, I was like that, oh, that's not very interesting. Maybe there's something else that's like, the second was like, that's awesome. The third one was like, Okay, this is awesome, not interesting. And really, I should have realized that a lot sooner. And I think the way I could have realized that a lot sooner is just by saying, like looking at the people around me and being like, in 10 years do I aspire to be like these individuals? I want to say like, a lot of these were nice people, many of them are still friends was the answer was no, like, from a career perspective. I did not want to be in theirs. See, like, Wall Street investment bank doesn't have the best culture. People aren't necessarily the most just creative and thoughtful and experiment of it's a very kind of commercial, zero sum mindset. So like it's just was not a good ecosystem to be in. And that was apparent to me. And I've been thinking about leaving ever since my, you know, call it second month on the job. And I did and I just kept dragging it out. And so I wasted this first four years of my life, doing something that I knew I shouldn't have been doing. And I read this or been read but came across a study that I really liked that I think is useful framing for thinking about when to quit, so I think quitting can be a very important skill to exercise and Steven Levitt of Freakonomics aim, who's also the author, or sorry, was also a professor at the University of Chicago, did an experiment on a coin flip where he had a bunch of people agree who were really like on the fence about whether to quit a job, quit a marriage or make some other relatively serious life change, just to pre commit, like, I'm going to flip a coin. And depending on which side comes up, I'm going to do that thing. And so it's kind of a natural experiment, like, let's take the people are quitting a job. So that's most relevant to this story, where you get, you know, 100, people who are thinking about quitting their job, they all flip a coin. And then, you know, probably not 100% of them actually deal with the coin said, but maybe 90 of them or 85 of them did. And then they looked at the kind of self rated happiness with their decision afterwards. And they found that people who were thinking about quitting their job and did quit their job, were much happier than people who are thinking about quitting their job and didn't. This was also true for people are thinking about leaving a long term relationship as well. This was not true for a lot of other categories. I've since forgotten what those categories are. But the takeaway was, if you're thinking about quitting something like a job, the answer is probably no macroeconomic circumstances besides like the realities of life aside, there's a very good chance that you should quit it sooner rather than later. Because there's some, you know, reasonably experimental evidence suggesting that that is a good way to lead to kind of better self assessed life outcomes. So I think that's a really interesting story. Go ahead.

Andrew Stotz 21:39
Yeah. I mean, that's a great study. And it's kind of like forcing the issue. If you're on the fence, maybe it's better just to, you know, do it. How would you describe the lessons that you learned from this experience?

Rex Salisbury 21:51
Yes, I think the lesson that I learned is, I was thinking about quitting my job about four different three different times seriously where I was at the bank, but pursuing other opportunities, I was looking at doing a small tech startup, in the current geography that I was in, I was looking into starting an investment fund that was going to invest in single family rental properties. This was after oh eight, so you could buy properties pretty cheaply, you could rent them out pretty well, they had better cap rates than multifamily REITs. And there's better appreciation potential. So as I like, almost did that I almost did something else. And those things, because I was working full time, I actually didn't invest enough time, and I hadn't, like burned the ships to go all in on it. And so it just drip a drug out longer. And so what I thought was, I always thought I was like two or three months from being done. And then like, three years later, what I realized is like, No, I've got to just quit my job. And that's what I did. So I eventually what I did, and I was at the bank, I was taking online coding courses. In particular, I took Sebastian through and and Peter Norway eggs course, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, which was you do pseudo coding, actually, not real coding, but you learn some of the foundational and you can do a lot of algorithmic thinking, which is core to computer science without actually writing code, you do algorithmic thinking, instead. And so I took that course, this is awesome. And that's how I then started getting into teaching myself become a software engineer. And by the way, that course at Stanford was the first massive open online course and then became, for some of the listeners, you may remember when massive open online courses or MOOCs were a huge craze. That phrase, well, if you probably don't know what that term is, that's okay. Because that traces since kind of died, although it lives on and other in other ways, became Udacity, which was one of the big MOOC providers, there still are other ones, there's Coursera, Udacity. And then what's the other edX is the one that the colleges and universities kind of CO own. So I did that course, and then ended up teaching myself to code. And eventually what I did, which I again, should have done much, much earlier, is I quit my job. I drove to San Francisco. And then I worked my ass off to find a job. And eventually I did. And that's my other bit of advice. So like, first bit, advice, one, but if you're thinking about quitting something, think even more seriously about quitting something. And two networks really, really matter. We talked about how that matters from an investment perspective, and how that's like a core part of my job. But it's incredibly important to have access to good networks. When you are early in your career. When you're later in your career, you've probably already built networks. And so maybe you can, you know, everyone's talking about how you can work remotely now, late on your career when you've built your network. Okay, maybe you can go and work remotely somewhere, right? Because you're gonna know how to build and maintain that network with existing relationships. When you're fresh out of college, you do not have a network, you kind of do you have your You know, your classmates, but you don't have a professional network. And the best way to build that is in person in network rich areas. And if you want to work in tech, there's basically one answer that question, and that's the Bay Area. There is maybe an OK, second answer, in my opinion, which is New York, especially if you're interested in FinTech, because FinTech as expresses both finance and Technology in New York is a very big banking center. So like, I think that's fine, too. So if you're a new college grad, and you are interested in technology, moved to the Bay Area, maybe New York, and that will matter so much more than you think it does. Do not go and work. So I was working out of Charlotte too. So that was part of the problem, do not go and work somewhere else. Now, unfortunately, not everyone can have that flexibility, right? Like the US has immigration law. So a lot of people can actually move here, which is frustrating, to me and to a lot of other folks. And it is good that you can still there are things you can try and do to build those networks. But if you have that unfair advantage to be young, relatively unattached, and the ability to relocate geographically, you should do that. And that will matter. So incredibly much everything I do now, as a venture capitalist, all the investing that I do, all of the folks I know all the people I've had the pleasure of working with, I could never have done if I had lived somewhere else. And so, so much of my success is attributable not to some, like unique genius or skill set on my end, but just being in the right place with the right people. And if you're young, you have this unfair advantage to relocate to network rich areas, more so than a lot of other people do. At least it can still be hard for folks. So that's, that's my thing that's basically moved to the Bay Area, maybe New York, and quit your job sooner if you're thinking about it. Don't make it the worst investment I ever made. Yeah, exactly four years doing a job I didn't like.

Andrew Stotz 27:02
Yeah, it reminds me of when I started my career, I studied finance at Cal State Long Beach. And then I got a job offer from Pepsi, which was huge for me. And I went to work at a manufacturing plant in Los Angeles in Torrance, California. And it was interesting, and I learned a ton, but I just knew in my heart, like, I'm not going to do this forever. So I did my MBA, like you were studying, I was studying. And then I started traveling, and I went to Thailand. And that's when I got interested. So I went out and tried to find a job. And I took a job with an 80% pay cut. And, and I had really I had no money, I didn't have much money I'd paid off. I still had $20,000 in student loan debt. And I had about $2,000 of cash in my pocket. I sold everything I owned, I left America and I came to Thailand 30 years ago, and I never left and it was the best. It was the best decision I think I've ever made in my life. So for the listeners out there, you know, use this as inspiration, not necessarily to say I'm quitting tomorrow, but to say I think Rex, what you've said is, you know, take if you're feeling like you want to quit, take that seriously, sit down, write about it, talk to someone about it, start to take some action. But here, all you have to

Rex Salisbury 28:15
move to a city, go visit a city rent an Airbnb for a month, like try and talk to a ton of people right there. There it was, that's one thing that I did as I was affecting that transition. So there are ways you can take steps towards that.

Andrew Stotz 28:27
And the point also, don't don't miss the point that Rex busted his butt trying to learn to code. While he was, you know, in that process, I, you know, did my MBA while I was at Pepsi. So you know, invest in the skill that you think you want to move into, as much as you can that helps you make that transition. So that's another part you don't want to miss in that story. Or let me ask you what's, what's a resource that you'd recommend for our listeners?

Rex Salisbury 28:57
Yeah, I think resource I mean, the biggest resources, the resources afforded by the networks, in particular geographies, etc, to try and access those to the extent you can. But otherwise, you know, if you're interested in a certain area, the biggest thing is to go out and find other people who you think are really good at writing and talking about that area. I think the tech ecosystem is really good about this in terms of people just writing an ideating and building in public. And if they're like certain trends or topic you find yourself gravitating towards, just do that and go and try and identify who you think the 10 most interesting writers are on that subject. And subscribe to that blog, follow them on Twitter, connect with them on LinkedIn, interact with their tweets, like maybe try writing some of your own stuff and try and get into the conversation about it. I think you'll be surprised if you've exercises muscle over time that it can really help open up the doors in terms of building those networks and those those relationships and for

Andrew Stotz 29:58
the listeners who are in Seeing community for founders and builders in FinTech. I'm going to add the link to your, to your Cambrian hq.com, where you can sign up for Rex's newsletter. All right. Now, last question, what is your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Rex Salisbury 30:17
Yeah, my next big goal for the next 12 months is to identify the next big companies that are gonna change financial services, and are specifically to identify the founders, the individuals who are going to build those companies, because often when I'm meeting individuals that the company hasn't even been formed. Yeah, in fact, the my most recent investment is two individuals who I've run a co founder matching exercise, I had about 250 people participate in this starting in January, and two founders met each other through that a lot of other folks did as well. But I happen to end up also backing this team. And so my goal is to leverage my networks to help identify those individuals who are building the next great companies and in FinTech and financial services, and I do about a deal a month. So the next 12 months specifically, my goal is to invest in 12 of the most interesting of those

Andrew Stotz 31:13
Fantastic, well, listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. Remember, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. If you've not yet joined that mission, just go to my worst investment ever.com and join my free weekly become a better investor newsletter to reduce risk in your life. As we conclude, Rex, I want to thank you again for joining our mission. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Rex Salisbury 31:47
Maybe one quick thing you mentioned that I taught myself to code. I think just moving to a new area is not necessarily enough, you should try and make yourself marketable, too. And it's amazing what you can learn if you invest in certain things. So I spent about 2000 hours teaching myself to be a software engineer, because when I looked at all the companies I wanted to work at, you could see who they're hiring for. They'd have like, one job in finance, one job and product wanting jobs in engineering. I was like, huh, but she was a lot easier to get a job as an engineer. So I did that. So I put him at work too. And so if you feel like you don't have the skill set to affect some of these changes, like put in the work, beautiful.

Andrew Stotz 32:25
And that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. Let's celebrate that today. We added one more person to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the upside.

 

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About the show & host, Andrew Stotz

Welcome to My Worst Investment Ever podcast hosted by Your Worst Podcast Host, Andrew Stotz, where you will hear stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community, we know that to win in investing you must take the risk, but to win big, you’ve got to reduce it.

Your Worst Podcast Host, Andrew Stotz, Ph.D., CFA, is also the CEO of A. Stotz Investment Research and A. Stotz Academy, which helps people create, grow, measure, and protect their wealth.

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