Episode Details

Today, we have a guest who is powering the retail revolution by democratizing access to private investing.

Ken Nguyen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Republic, a multi-asset investment platform for private markets. Republic recently raised a $36 million Series A led by Galaxy Digital, with participation from Nomura, Motley Fool Ventures, Tribe Capital, Prosus Ventures (fka Naspers), and Broadhaven Ventures.

This was such a fascinating conversation. We talked about:

* Ken’s drive for starting an investment platform that could enable everyone to participate in wealth creation in private markets.

* How investing and owning equity is part of the American Dream.

* How Republic has unlocked access to private markets for all investors.

* “Lean back vs lean forward” framework applied to investing (h/t Rishi Garg of Mayfield Fund for the “lean back vs lean forward” framework).

* How community is such a big driver of Republic’s growth and success as a business.

Ken is a pioneer in the private markets investing world and a serial operator who knows how to build businesses.

He's helped grow Republic to hundreds of millions in gross transaction volume over the past 3 years after Republic spun out of AngelList.

After Ken was an instrumental part of building the investment and regulatory infrastructure at AngelList as their General Counsel, Ken founded Republic to create a leading equity crowdfunding platform for both non-accredited and accredited investors.

While their incredible progress on the retail crowdfunding side is remarkable (over 1M users and over $280M in GTV since inception), Republic's platform and vision is so much more than simply a retail crowdfunding platform - they also have an accredited investor platform and they enable investors to invest into everything from real estate to esports and gaming financing to small businesses.

Republic has done the hard things first - they have built the investment infrastructure for private investments.

And they combine that with a Robinhood-like investing experience for the private markets for both retail and HNW investors alike.

They've also been innovative in how they engage consumers by creating a Republic Note, a security token, that has created network effects on their platform for users.

It's been fun to watch this team execute at a blistering pace from the time they started out with the idea of enabling investors to invest in startups at $10 minimums to building out a comprehensive private markets investment platform. 

Ken has been instrumental in that success with his infectious energy, tireless work ethic, and drive to create democratized access to investing for people around the world.

You can find this podcast on Spotify here, Apple Podcasts here, and on Transistor here.

I hope you enjoy.

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This was such a rich and thoughtful conversation that I also wanted to do something different for this episode - share the podcast transcript for those who want to read the text.

Here’s the transcript of the podcast below (Note that this transcript was created by AI software. It is n