How GetDynasty Reached $50K ARR and 2,000 Monthly Free Sign-Ups Digitizing Living Trusts (Interview with Co-Founder and CEO Alessandro Chesser)

Introduction and GetDynasty Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Getdynasty.com. If you are building a company right now when you think one day you might sell for $10.50, $100,000,000 and have a lot of cash, your biggest expense are gonna be taxes. You gotta be thinking about a revocable trust for free today or more importantly, an irrevocable trust over time. This is what the wealthiest people do to shelter. A lot of those gains. You can do it finally with Get Dynasty. It comes from the brain of

00:20Alessandro Chesser who thought a lot about this kind of thing as he was talking to customers building Carta from 0 to $400,000,000 of AR. They decided, hey. Can't build this at Carta. Let's take it out, build it ourselves. They've raised $5,000,000, sold 20% of the company to get going. On their way now to scaling and getting their license so they can officially become the corporate trustee in Delaware. Again, getdynasty.com. Go sign up today. Hey, folks. My

00:41guest is today is Alessandro Chessery. He's the cofounder and CEO of getdynasty.com, a free and easy living trust creator for homeowners. Prior to Dynasty, he was VP of sales at Carta where he took the company from zero to over $400,000,000 in ARR. Before Carta, Alessandro spent nine years in financial services working with high net worth individuals. Alessandro, you ready to take us to the top?

Alessandro's Background at Carta

Alessandro Chesser

01:02>> Ready to do it.

Nathan Latka

01:03Alright. Before we get into Dynasty, obviously, Carta you know, we have to talk about Carta quickly. It's one of the most successful b to b software companies in the in the near term that I can think of and in a very unique space. Was there anything unique there you tested in terms of scaling the sales operation that maybe might not be a standard playbook? You know, standard playbook is, you know, get an AE, have them hit

01:21a million dollar quota, pay them 250 k all in, keep a five to one ratio, give enough leads with the BDRs, that kind of thing.

Carta's Network Effect and Sales Playbook

Alessandro Chesser

01:28>> Yeah. I think we're pretty stand for the most part. I think I we were heavily focused on, you know, creating channels through venture capital firms and law firms. Very, very focused on that. And I think the most important thing was we were trying to create a network effect. And so it kind of was inherently built into the product because for Carta, that's what we did. We signed on companies and we got them to move their cap

01:53>> table onto the system. But every time we signed on a company, we forced them to invite their investors into the platform, which was kind of a unique thing at the time. Cap table management providers weren't actually getting investors to use the product as well. So, you know, we had we created this flywheel where the more companies we signed on, the more investors we invited. The more investors we invited, the more they told their other companies to

02:16>> it gave them more value. Their portfolios got bigger and bigger in Carta, and so just this flywheel of more companies meant more investors, more investors meant more companies. And then we did something similar with the law firms. Was the same thing, we forced companies to invite their law firms, we forced their law firms to be administrators. They didn't want to do that initially, companies were trying to cut out their law firms and trying to save legal

02:37>> expenses, but we we knew that we had to get the law firms using the platform if we wanted the law firms to recommend us. And so it was the same type of thing. Like, your law firm has to be a user. Like, you're still gonna your your law firm is gonna become more efficient. You're still gonna save legal fees, but this is gonna give you the the most out of our you know, this is gonna give

02:57>> you the most benefit from our platform. It's gonna get everybody looped into the same environment. It's gonna keep it as a source of truth, and it's gonna make you more transparent and efficient going forward.

Nathan Latka

03:07So unlike document signing or, you know, sharing a Loom video where there's an inherent value coefficient built in, it takes two people to get value. Right? Two people signing. You guys said, look. We don't have it organically, but we could kinda foresee here and say, look. If you're gonna bring your cap table over, you gotta add your VCs to verify it, and your law firm check the box too. You guys invented that, got it going. And

03:23then did you create a unique experience for the VCs? So when they logged in, they saw their portfolio companies, and so you were basically building products for two sides.

Alessandro Chesser

03:30>> That's right. We we wanted to be, you know, the entire stack in the public markets. You have brokerage account you have brokerage accounts. Right? And so we wanted to be the brokers for the employees and the investors. We also wanted to be the transfer agent, and we wanted to be the central registrar, which is like the DTCC in the public markets.

Transition from Carta to Founding GetDynasty

Nathan Latka

03:46Mhmm. Alright. Let's get into Dynasty. So first off, what year did you launch? What year direct the first line of code for the platform?

Alessandro Chesser

03:53>> Two years ago exactly.

Nathan Latka

03:55Alright. So call it 2022 time frame. And what is a free and easy living trust creator for homeowners?

Alessandro Chesser

04:03>> Yeah. So when we looked at the space initially, we saw that it was broken. Every every living trust that you could get up until Dynasty existed was was paper. You know, you go to the most expensive law firm in The United States, you can get a stack of papers, your output. Or if you go to LegalZoom, Rocket Lawyer, name your online trust creator, you were buying stacks of paper. You'd slide your credit card, pay $500, print

04:27>> out a stack of paper, find a notary, store it in your filing cabinet. Now you have this massive stack of paper, how do you update it? Happens if you lose it? And so we saw the exact same problem that we saw in Carta in the early days. Was paper stock certificates, the paper option agreements. We digitized everything. And so we actually came up with this idea at Carta. We saw this as another set of legal documents

04:50>> that needs to be digitized and democratized. But we realized that we weren't gonna be able to build it at Carta, so we left and we got a lot of the same investors to invest in us and we we kicked off the company.

Funding: Friends-and-Family and Seed Round

Nathan Latka

05:01Interesting. How much did you guys end up raising?

Alessandro Chesser

05:03>> Just under $5,000,000.

Nathan Latka

05:05Okay. So you called out like a seed round?

Alessandro Chesser

05:08>> Yeah. We did a friends and family, and then we just did a seed a few months ago.

Nathan Latka

05:11I I see. Very cool. How much was the friends and family?

Alessandro Chesser

05:15>> Friends and family is about 2. Seed round is about 2.5.

Nathan Latka

05:19Oh, got it. So all in all in, you were about 5 total. Now most folks pre seed seed, especially now with compressed valuations are selling somewhere on the order of 20% of the company. Were you sort of in that same range?

Alessandro Chesser

05:30>> Exactly. That's right. 20%.

Nathan Latka

05:33Okay. And and what makes this I mean, that's a lot of dilution. Right? So you must have a good reason to give up that equity. Right? What makes this so expensive to build? Why do you need $5,000,000?

Alessandro Chesser

05:41>> Yeah. We don't actually. We have a lot of we have, like, three to plus years of runway. We're keeping expenses super low. I think the most the most important reason why we wanted to raise money is because we're becoming a licensed trust company in South Dakota, and that's gonna require us to have a minimum of a million dollars on reserves. It filed via a bond. In addition to that, there's just there's you have to get some

06:07>> insurance. And so it's really just for getting the through the trust company application process. And it's very specific. We're doing it in South Dakota because South Dakota is the number one place for trust. There's different kinds of trust. There's revocable trust, which we offer for free. That's kind of our top of funnel. Lead gen engine, we help that's what 99% of Americans need. A revocable trust protects you from probate court. Because most Americans don't have a

Why Raise $5M and the South Dakota Trust License

Alessandro Chesser

06:32>> trust, hundreds of billions of dollars every single year gets seized by the state governments and placed into probate court. It's the biggest tax on non generation non generationally rich Americans that exist. And so we wanna solve that problem for them. That's our free product. Our paid product is the irrevocable trust. That's the South Dakota trust product. And so we have to become a licensed trust company in South Dakota so that we can serve as a trustee

07:01>> and actually help people custody assets in South Dakota. That gives you two major benefits, taxes and protection. So South Dakota has zero state income taxes, zero state dividend taxes, and zero state cap gains taxes. In addition to that, it's the number one state for asset protection. So if you put your assets in a South Dakota trust, it's gonna protect you from divorce. It's gonna protect you from lawsuits. It's gonna protect you from creditors. It's this whole

07:29>> quote. It's actually on our website. It's own nothing, control everything. You do that with the South Dakota trust. You you don't own the assets anymore. Your South Dakota trust owns them. And so that creates that layer of separation, which gives you the protection and the tax benefits.

Revocable vs Irrevocable Trusts Explained

Nathan Latka

07:45So just don't wanna lose our audience because I want them to listen to you both because you're acting about building a company, but also because I think a lot of my wealthy entrepreneurial friends, they all set up some form of Arabic living trust. So I don't wanna lose people here. Right? Give a very real example. There is a founder right now listening that is doing $2,000,000 in ARR. Think they might sell their company for $10,000,000, right,

08:02all cash sometime over the next couple of years. Why is it why should they be thinking about a trust?

Alessandro Chesser

08:07>> Yeah. So an irrevocable trust specifically Let's do that. So for for revocable trusts, it's just to make sure that your family inherits that $10,000,000 if something happens to you. The irrevocable trust Why

Nathan Latka

08:20they inherit that without a trust?

Alessandro Chesser

08:22>> It would have to go through a probate court system, which means it's gonna it's gonna get logged up in court for eighteen months on average. It's gonna cost your family tens of thousands of dollars. Even if you have a will, it has to be processed through probate court, which means lawyers, court fees, and family friction because your family is gonna show up to probate court and make a claim for your assets and say that they were

08:43>> named in your will, and it ends up turning into lots of disputes, and it really rips families apart. The only way to avoid probate court is to create a revocable living trust.

Nathan Latka

08:52Alessandra, why people are thinking, why can't I just set up a will to prevent that? Why do I need to revoke a living trust to do that? Why can't a will solve that?

Alessandro Chesser

08:58>> A will goes through probate. It has to be processed through a probate court. A will is just instructions for who you want to inherit your assets, but the government will still process that will. And and people will have to actually show up for court and make a claim for those assets. And so that process takes on average eighteen months. If you have a trust, the trust is an actual legal entity. You put everything you own in

09:19>> your trust. Your trust now owns your home. It owns your investment accounts. And so if something happens to you, your successor trustee takes control of your trust and can do whatever you want with your assets based on the instructions that you created.

Nathan Latka

09:33Yep. Yep. Makes a lot of sense. Okay. So so again, let's use that same exact and the more specific you can be, think the more people are gonna sign up from this recording. So why should a founder doing 2,000,000 of revenue about to sell for $10,000,000 all cash? Why should they today, if they're gonna do that in a year, self set up any irrevocable trust?

Alessandro Chesser

09:47>> Okay. So taxes and protection. The first category, taxes. So number one, if you live in a state like California or New York, you're subject to enormous state taxes. Anywhere from 10 to 13% for income or cap gains or dividends. If you put that those assets

Nathan Latka

10:07Alessandro, let's use a real example. Right? When my founder owns a 100%, I sell for 10,000,000 cash. I'm in California. You think I'm gonna pay about 1,300,000 on that at sale?

Alessandro Chesser

10:15>> That's That's right. Okay. $1,300,000 of that $10,000,000 will go to the state of California for income taxes. Mhmm. And so if you if that if those shares were held in a South Dakota trust in South Dakota, there is no state taxes for income or cap gains. So you save $1,300,000 right out of the gate just by having your trust in South Dakota. In addition to that, for any founders that are familiar with QSPS, qualified small business

10:44>> stock treatment, you get up to $10,000,000 in tax free gains federally with QSPS. If you exceed $10,000,000 and let's say you have 20,000,000 for a real example. In example where you don't have any irrevocable trust, you're gonna pay income taxes or cap gains taxes of 40% for that second 10,000,000. Dollars 4,000,000 basically will go in a $20,000,000 sale to taxes. If you The

Nathan Latka

11:15federal federal taxes. Right?

Alessandro Chesser

11:17>> Federal taxes. Right? Forget state. We already we already took over state. And so for federal taxes, if you want to save more money on federal taxes, what you do is you create irrevocable trust and you gift your shares to your children or to your spouse or to your relative your brother. And each of those trusts that you create gets its own $10,000,000 QSPS exemption. So the founders that actually know what they're doing or they have good

11:42>> financial advisors, sometimes they create four or five year revocable trust. They can get like 40 or $50,000,000 worth of tax free gains.

Nathan Latka

11:50Hey, folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latkup. I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it, which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies. Thank you so much for that. After the book, I launched this show and went on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large fund to do non dilutive deals with B2B software founders. So far,

Tax Savings and QSBS Strategy for Founders

Nathan Latka

12:17we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling $150,000,000. Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer. Alright. Let's jump into the interview. Yeah. I I hear folks doing this all the time. I guess my question to you would be, there's a lot of people that realize q s about QSPS and

12:41trust too late, meaning they've already, you know, paid a $100 to buy their 10,000 shares when they started the company. Is is it too late for somebody listening that's already been operating for two years? Is there some way to get these shares in a Delaware irrevocable trust or is it too late? They have to wait till their next company?

Alessandro Chesser

12:55>> No. You can definitely do it. Even if the shares are exercised, you can still do it. That's what and you can't move options into an irrevocable trust. You have to move exercise shares into an irrevocable trust. So you can do it, you just want to create as much space between when you move it into the trust and your liquidity event as possible. And so anywhere, I've seen founders do it like six months before they sell their

13:16>> stock. Like, usually anywhere from one

Nathan Latka

13:18to years. Is that a red flag? Will will the government come after you if you stay safe?

Alessandro Chesser

13:21>> It can't be. If you get audited, it's like too it's the same thing as, like, if I were to move to Nevada, and then I sell all my stock, and there's, like, the more separation you have between how long I live in Nevada and

Nathan Latka

13:31So what's the safe amount? A year?

Alessandro Chesser

13:33>> I would say anything over eighteen months is probably a

Nathan Latka

13:36safe amount. Eight eighteen months. And then everyone else the second thing, the biggest thing I hear from entrepreneurs when we're talking about this kind thing is they say, Nathan, I don't wanna give up control to some random person or my younger brother or my mom or my dad. Right? So I guess help people get comfortable with that. What does it mean to actually give up control so you can take advantage of an irrevocable trust?

Alessandro Chesser

13:52>> Yeah. And so there's two ways you can do it. You can turn over the trustee services to a family member, to a friend or family member, they can be the trustee of your trust, which means they're the ones that are actually going to sign for any investments or any distributions. The other way you can do it is you can assign a corporate trustee company. That's what we're becoming licensed to be a corporate trustee. And so when

14:15>> you assign a corporate trustee, then you work with them directly, and they custody your assets, and they actually make the trades for you and the investments for you. It's kind of a similar situation for the public markets when you're an insider and you're involved in insider trading. Like, you can't make the direct trades on your your shares. And so you have this, like, 10 b five one plan, which allows you to place orders to make the

14:36>> trades. It's the same kind of thing. You set up all the instructions for the irrevocable trust, the corporate trustee is the one who's actually going to make the transactions happen.

Nathan Latka

14:44So let's say you are let's say I I sign up today for Git Dynasty, and two years from now, I have a liquidity event, know, for I'm just making the math easy, $10,000,000. And that and you are the corporate trustee. Right? The Git Dynasty is the corporate trustee. I tell you behind the scenes, hey. I wanna spend 2,000,000 of this to go buy this house. Your the trust is gonna own it, but I'm gonna live in

15:01it, like, sort of full time. Part of the one of the things that I've I've heard from attorneys and counsels, you can't direct the corporate trustee on where to use that money. In other words, I couldn't tell you to go buy the house. So what's the point of having you control? How will you know? Like, are you what are gonna do to go buy random stuff with it? How do I give you guidance on what to

15:15use that money on?

Alessandro Chesser

15:17>> So when you create your local trust, you create you can create a very specific instructions or you can make it very generic. Your specific instructions can say, upon liquidity event, buy houses in these locations. And to find out which houses you want to purchase, work with this advisor. And so you can appoint your brother, for example. And so it's a very indirect way of controlling trust. The other way you can do is you can make it

15:39>> super generic, and you can just say, all the decisions are going to be made by my advisor that I appoint, whoever that advisor is, has full discretion on anything that happens in the trust. So it's just creating that layer of separation. Like you're not going to be able to get the tax benefits if you're directly connected to it. Right? You're not going to be able to get the asset protection. Like if you get divorced, and they

15:58>> see that you're the one sticking your hands in the cookie jar, like you're going to be able to lose those cookies. If you want to create that layer of separation, it has to be somebody else that's making the decisions.

Nathan Latka

16:09Yeah. Austin, let me give you another example here because I imagine my audience is wondering this. Let's say that that liquid event happens. You then buy a big beautiful trust. The corporate trustee then buys a big beautiful house in Hawaii. Right? But but I didn't tell you to do it. I told my adviser, and then my adviser told you to do it. Wouldn't anyone and then let's say I get divorced. Wouldn't my spouse go, oh, it

16:28wasn't his advice. Look. I have an email of Nathan emailing his adviser, and then the adviser sent it to the corporate trustee. That's why they bought the Hawaii house. Therefore, I should get the Hawaii house.

Alessandro Chesser

16:37>> I mean, it doesn't matter. If you're married in California well, first of all, if the house is in Hawaii, it's not gonna be able to be held in the South Dakota shrunps. Real estate is

Nathan Latka

16:45say California.

Alessandro Chesser

16:46>> Yeah. If it was stock, let's say the stock. Stock can be held anywhere in the proceeds of stock. But if you buy real estate with it, wherever the real estate sits, that's where it's gonna be governed. Oh, what that? It's because it's physically. It physically exists. Right? But stock, investment accounts, crypto, that's all digital. That can be held anywhere.

Nathan Latka

17:04And so

Alessandro Chesser

17:05>> if you have a bunch of investments in South Dakota and you get divorced, it doesn't matter what your spouse says in California. That's not relevant my audience

Nathan Latka

17:13though. That's not relevant for my audience they're because not gonna be in South Dakota. Let me ask the second question, which has hurt which some of my wealthy friends I've heard them use their trust for in this thing. What they do is they take a loan against the value in the trust, and then they can use that loan however they want personally, and and the interest is tax free. So for example, I had a liquidity event

17:28and and you had 10,000,000 sitting in that trust, I could show that to some bank, and they might give me 40% leverage on the 10,000,000 and give me a $4,000,000 loan at a 4% rate personally. I can then control where I spend that money, and it is backed up by the trust. Is this something you see entrepreneurs do a lot? Am I thinking about this the right Oh,

Alessandro Chesser

17:46>> 100% always. And the other way that they do it is they don't take a loan from the trust. But if the trust buys real estate, they can rent to live in that real estate. So they're not directly connected. So for example, like let's say I have my daughter, I'll create an irrevocable trust for my daughter, I'll use the proceeds of the sale to buy a house. I'll live in the house, I'll pay rent, that rent goes

18:06>> back to my daughter and the trust that I created for her. And so it's a way of you you get around the taxes and the money just goes back to my daughter for the rent.

Nathan Latka

18:14Yep. Guys, audience, you're probably wondering why am I not hitting us on too hard on the numbers like I usually do on my shows. It's because his actual thing that he's building, I think is very valuable for entrepreneurs. And a lot of people do not understand it. But frankly, the biggest bill you're gonna play your entire life is taxes. So understanding this move, right, is important. And then, Alessandro, I guess this is part of the thesis

How GetDynasty Makes Money

Nathan Latka

18:31is the fact that nobody really understands this is why you're building Get Dynasty. So how does Get Dynasty make money on all this stuff?

Alessandro Chesser

18:37>> Yeah. So, you know, we have two products. We have the revocable trust product and the irrevocable trust product. As I mentioned, revocable is for inheritance planning, irrevocable trust, that's for taxes and asset protection. You're pointing out South Dakota trust, You don't have to live in South Dakota to have a South Dakota trust. Have a South Dakota trust. I can move my digital assets there. So all my founder shares, my previous shares at Carta, my crypto, everything's

19:00>> in South Dakota trust. That gives me South Dakota tax treatment. And so the way that we make money is we have this flywheel where people we have thousands of people every single month signing up for our free revocable trust product that they put their home in it that helps them avoid probate court.

Nathan Latka

19:16Wait. Can we be specific there? How many signed up last month in in May 2024?

Alessandro Chesser

19:20>> Just under 2,000. Doing just under 2,000 a month right now.

Nathan Latka

19:24And and can you just my audience is gonna love you building that wait list. Where are you getting that traffic from? I mean, how are you pumping that up so much?

Alessandro Chesser

19:31>> Close to 80% of our customers right now are just coming from word-of-mouth and organic short form videos, and we're doing a lot of partnerships as well. And so Can you name

Nathan Latka

19:44an example of a partner that's driven you leads?

Growth Channels: Video, SEO, and Partnerships

Alessandro Chesser

19:47>> Yeah. One of the largest mortgage lenders in The US, Guaranteed Rate. And so we're partnering with mortgage lenders because we really were circling in homeowners. Because homeowners are the widest base of mass market customers that have a single problem to solve, right? Have to put their home in their trust. That's the only way they can avoid probate court. And so putting a home in a trust is actually complex. Like, you can go to legalism and can

20:09>> create a trust online. But actually putting your home in it, you're gonna need to see an attorney because they're gonna have to draft a new deed for you. So the way that we're approaching the homeowner from helping homeowners put their home in trust is we're we're circling the home buying process with mortgage companies, with title companies, with prop tech companies. So the next time you buy a home and you go to Guaranteed Rate, you get a

20:31>> mortgage, Guaranteed Rate's gonna say, do you wanna put this home in a trust for free? And that's that it gets embedded directly into the buying process, and they tell you exactly why you wanna do it. Your home goes straight into the trust. There doesn't have to be an Indeed transfer.

Nathan Latka

20:44Alessandra, where are these so again, I'm trying to reverse engineer your growth. I went into Ahrefs. I look at your site structure. You're testing programmatic SEO right now, how to make a living trust in state, which is great. You know, it's early days there, but you're getting referring domains. You mentioned video, though. Where are most of those videos hosted? I go on your YouTube. There's 341 subscribers. I do see a lot of young kids with wealthy

21:03backgrounds saying the secrets of the rich and famous sort of thing. Is that part of your go to market strategy to sort of target millennials?

Alessandro Chesser

21:08>> That's right. And YouTube is small. We're much bigger in Instagram and TikTok. So Instagram specifically. If you look at our Instagram accounts, just get dynasty. You're gonna find a ton of short form videos in

Nathan Latka

21:18That's 16,900 followers. A lot of short form stuff. But you're working okay. You're you're clearly, though, working through a lot of like, other in other words, it's not you on video. It's like this young looking guy who looks like he's my age saying, I'm inheriting 10,000,000. I'm retiring from IB at 25. What do I do next? These are the kinds of things doing well.

Alessandro Chesser

21:37>> That's right. That's right.

Nathan Latka

21:38How are you finding these influencers or or sort of micro influencers, we'll call them?

Alessandro Chesser

21:42>> This market, we actually outsourced to a creator who does the the scripts for us. And then they engage with a marketplace that allows us to get the actual actors. It's super cheap. Like, we get it done for, you know, less than $5,000 a month and get, like, twenty, twenty five videos a month.

Influencer Marketing and Content Production

Nathan Latka

22:00Very cool. Okay. We get it. For 2,000 free sign ups at the top of the funnel each month coming mainly from Instagram and TikTok short form videos. Take us down the funnel. What happens next? How do get to paid?

Alessandro Chesser

22:10>> So they come in, they get in for the free trust, and then they they want some advanced options or they have some questions. They get on the phone with one of our customer support reps, and then we upsell them into we have two paid products. We have the more advanced feature revocable trust product for $99 a year. So we're not necessary we say we're pre revenue, but we actually have about $50,000 ARR, and that's coming from

22:33>> the $99 a year product. The irrevocable trust product, that's in the very earliest stages right now where we get licensed. We can help people create these irrevocable trusts, but we're not really putting a lot of emphasis on that until we become licensed. Because the trustee services, that's where the big revenue opportunity is. It's gonna be Who are you

Nathan Latka

22:50recommending right now for the corporate trustee since you're not licensed? If I sign up today for irrevocable

Alessandro Chesser

22:54>> Bridgeford Trust Company, and they charge $8,000 a year. And we've given them, you know, a 100 plus thousand dollars in revenue.

Nathan Latka

23:02See. So you'll cut them you'll cut them out once you're licensed. When will that be done, you think?

Alessandro Chesser

23:06>> That's right. We're getting licensed in the next nine months. We're working on the application process right now. We're working with the South Dakota legislators. We're building our board in South Dakota, and we'll be licensed in about nine months.

Nathan Latka

23:17Really interesting. Really interesting. Okay. Got it. So that's why you see sort of path to revenue is effectively, you know where your revenue is gonna come from. You're just giving it to somebody else right now. Once you get the license, you're good to go. Why is it better? Why is it I mean, you just raised a bunch of money. You don't you know, nine months in startup plan is a long time to save yourself time. Why

23:33why don't you go buy Bridgeport Trust Company?

Alessandro Chesser

23:36>> Well, first of all, Bridgeport would be very they've been around forever. Think

Nathan Latka

23:39A smaller one that has the that has the license.

Alessandro Chesser

23:42>> Yeah. It actually we actually explored this with our legal counsel. It will take longer to go through the acquisition process. So they're gonna have to do the same amount of work to verify us all our background checks. It's like becoming a bank, basically. It goes through the banking division. I mean, we have to do all the AML and the KYC, we have to have everything, have to do all the same stuff. So there was no benefit

24:02>> to buying. We just decided to go through the application process.

Path to Corporate Trustee License

Nathan Latka

24:05Yeah. I mean, even if you're perfect history though, you can't get a banking charter right now. Is it similar with what you're trying to do? Do they purposely limit these? Or like how many new of these were given out last year, for example? I mean, can anyone do it?

Alessandro Chesser

24:15>> Not anyone could do it. I think they do, like, 10 a year maybe max.

Nathan Latka

24:20So how how are you gonna get in?

Alessandro Chesser

24:23>> You know, we're we have connections with the state of South Dakota specifically. We have, like, a former congressman that's been joining our South Dakota board. You know, we're working our way through South Dakota. We have connections into the governor, right? And so you have to and also, like, we have very powerful investors, right? Bill Ackman is one of our investors. We have the founder of Insight Partners, one of our investors. We have the founder of Carter.

24:44>> We got a bunch of billionaires as investors. And so we're just that was the main purpose for raising capital also. In addition to, you know, satisfying the needs for the South Dakota Trust Company, we needed the connections that will help us get through the red tape over there.

Nathan Latka

24:57Yep. That makes a ton of sense. This is great. Okay. We talked about sort of your growth. We talked about your funding. We talked about how much you sold. We talked about why trusts are important. What else am I missing? Remember, my audience are mainly founders doing between 1 to $5,000,000 of revenue. How should they be thinking about trusts? Anything we missed?

Competitive Landscape

Alessandro Chesser

25:12>> Yeah, so like taxes and asset protection is great. But like, you don't need to rush into that today, especially if you're not going to be selling stock for another five to ten years. I would say the most important thing is for anybody who does not currently have a trust, any type of trust at all, use our free product. You can do it in less than five minutes in the backseat maneuver. You can do it while you're

25:31>> multitasking. We literally have customers who do this while they're in the gym working out. And we know because they go through the selfie verification at the very end of our workflow. And so that's the way we designed this product to be so simple that anybody can do it while they're multitasking. Like do it quick, get dynasty.com, takes you less than five minutes. If you want to see an attorney later, if you want to get our upgraded

25:50>> package later, great. You can always expand on the free one, but at least having a free one is gonna give you some layer of protection. Today, have zero. Some protection is gonna be much better than zero.

Nathan Latka

26:00And who is the closest to you in terms of in this space right now? I'm seeing, like, verify, Velvet, portfolio.io. But, I mean, are those who would you say is your top competitor in the space?

Alessandro Chesser

26:10>> You know, I think we're kinda playing this middle ground between LegalZoom and attorneys. And Yep. You know, the difference is our revocable trust is free. Like, nobody else is doing that. It's gonna cost you money everywhere. We were switching the business model completely. We're using the revocable products as our acquisition. That's the mass market product. Every single American in The United States needs a revocable trust. And then, you know, the the the premium product, that's how

26:36>> we're gonna monetize. So there's not really anybody is doing it from that sense. But the main reason, you know, somebody would not use us is maybe because they wanna see an attorney. They wanna go through that process. Most people don't, but some people do. And, you know, for that, they can they can definitely go see the attorneys.

Nathan Latka

26:51It's funny. I tip I put get Dynasty alternatives in search, and I saw LegalZoom running ads. But I was thinking, oh, wow. They're already on LegalZoom's radar, but no. LegalZoom offers what's called a Dynasty Trust. And so there it's marketing for that. Was that intentional in terms of your name or no?

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Alessandro Chesser

27:06>> No. The South Dakota trust is a dynasty trust. A dynasty trust, the other the other benefit is that it doesn't die. When you have a regular revocable trust and you die, your trust has to be settled. It has to be paid out, which means estate taxes. Estate tax debt tax is about 40%. If you have a dynasty trust, dynasty trust lives forever. It get it gets passed from generation to generation to generation. These are what the

27:29>> richest people have, and that's why they never paid debt taxes.

Nathan Latka

27:32Yep. Yep. Yep. Very cool. Alright. Let's wrap up here, Alessandro, with the famous five. Number one, your favorite business book?

Alessandro Chesser

27:37>> Favorite business book is probably how to win friends and influence others. I think for sales in general, that's the best book you can ever read. It teaches you how to be a good person. It teaches you how to listen to people and not be salesy.

Nathan Latka

27:51Number two, who's the last founder you got coffee with?

Alessandro Chesser

27:53>> Last founder I got coffee with would be my good friend. Founder of a venture firm. His name is Samit Ghajri. He's one of our largest investors from Original Capital.

Nathan Latka

28:05Original Capital. Okay. Number three, what's a tool that you spend the what's your what's an online tool that you spend the most money on?

Alessandro Chesser

28:15>> Right now, we we don't spend a lot of money on anything. Maybe HubSpot, probably the CRM video. Like, we're lean.

Nathan Latka

28:21So Yeah. What are your what are your all in expenses right now? Whole company? Headcount, servers, everything?

Alessandro Chesser

28:27>> Less than $40,000 a month.

Nathan Latka

28:28That's pretty good. Okay. Because you have plenty of runway. Okay. Number four. How many hours of sleep do get every night?

Alessandro Chesser

28:36>> I have two little kids. So I would say I'm averaging five to six hours a night, unfortunately. But

Nathan Latka

28:42hopefully, So get over the hump married, two kids. And how old are you?

Alessandro Chesser

28:49>> 38.

Nathan Latka

28:50Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Alessandro Chesser

28:53>> Something I wish I knew when I was 20.

Closing and Call to Action

Alessandro Chesser

28:58>> You know, don't sweat the small stuff. Like, you know, all this stuff, like building businesses. Once I had kids, I completely realized that, like, that's the most important thing in the world, none of the rest this stuff matters. Everything else can be fixed. Like, but if you have health issues or something going wrong with your kids, like that's a lot harder to fix.

Nathan Latka

29:17Guys, get dynasty.com. If you are building a company right now, when you think one day you might sell for $10.50, $100,000,000 and have a lot of cash, your biggest expense are gonna be taxes. You gotta be thinking about a revocable trust for free today or more importantly, an irrevocable trust over time. This is what the wealthiest people do to shelter a lot of those gains. You can do it finally with Get Dynasty. It comes from the

29:37brain of Alessandro Chesser who thought a lot about this kind of thing as he was talking to customers building Carta from 0 to $400,000,000 of AR. They decided, hey. Can't build this at Carta. Let's take it out, build it ourselves. They've raised $5,000,000, sold 20% of the company to get going, on their way now to scaling and getting their license so they can officially become the corporate trustee in Delaware. Again, getdynasty.com. Go sign up today. Alessandro,

29:58thanks for taking us to the

Alessandro Chesser

29:59>> top. Thank you.