Transcript: Bitcoin Treasury for Business: A Private Owner's Guide

Marty Bent [0:07] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.

Scott Marmoll [0:09] Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

Marty Bent [0:18] I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

Scott Marmoll [0:34] Probably should be. Probably should be.

Marty Bent [0:36] Scott.

Scott Marmoll [0:38] Marty. We're here.

Marty Bent [0:39] We've been working together on something for the last, what, 2 months now?

Scott Marmoll [0:43] Measured in AI years, probably 2 years.

Marty Bent [0:46] Yes.

Scott Marmoll [0:47] But yes, at least a couple of months. Yeah.

Marty Bent [0:48] And so I think we just jump right into it because we're launching the PDF that we've been working on. The Bitcoin Treasury and Exit Playbook, which we've been mulling around again for the better part of 2 months. And obviously what you're doing at Capital B Advisory, what I'm doing at TFTC and 1031, what the Bitcoin price is doing right now going up. I think it's important for business owners to understand, particularly private business owners to understand the opportunity that Bitcoin presents them as a balance sheet asset. So we, banged our heads and our clankers together for the better part of 2 months. We came up with this playbook, which you can go get now.

Marty Bent ⋮ The link to the playbook is in the show notes here, so you can go find those. But yeah, I think that's what we're gonna do today, just walk through the playbook. But before we walk through it, maybe explain what the audience will get out of this if they listen to the end and why you're passionate about this particular part of the market.

Scott Marmoll [1:46] Yeah, I think, Hopefully useful tool. Clanker aside, the content is ours with a lot of thought and detail into it. It's a playbook for— the Bitcoin space has a lot of advice on what to do as an individual, and some individuals are business owners, and those Bitcoiners need a guidebook for what that looks like for their business. Because at the end of the day, the goal on the individual side and the business side is to get as much Bitcoin as possible. I have sort of a decade of experience helping private business owners raise capital, whether that's selling the business, raising debt or equity, and recently brought that skill set specifically to the Bitcoiner business owner sector, which is not to say Bitcoin-focused businesses and services exclusively, but rather just anyone with the mindset of a Bitcoiner.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ should probably get advice when it comes to raising capital or selling their business from someone with the mindset of a Bitcoiner. So that's the idea. Playbook has lots of nuggets of wisdom from the dipping your toes to stacking a little bit of sats with the company cash flow to how do we augment that to should I own this thing at all? When Bitcoin is your opportunity cost, that question gets a lot harder to answer. So that's the attempt and hopefully some good wisdom in there.

Marty Bent [3:13] Yeah, I guess we start out, it's broken up into 4 parts. The first part is the case for a Bitcoin treasury in the first place. Like why, if you're a business owner, whether you're a Bitcoiner or not, should you be thinking about this? Obviously, Michael Saylor strategy been a big meme in public markets over the last almost 5 years, but this strategy applies to private businesses as well and probably is actually better for private businesses.

Scott Marmoll [3:41] It does, and it is, with the caveat that it's a little less financial engineering, right? Like, Saylor's created a magical flywheel that I think people will study for ages. In the private markets, it's a little simpler. The opportunity is similar though, which is accumulating Bitcoin on the balance sheet for businesses is augmenting the performance in the balance sheet, whereas the historical fiat landscape for valuing businesses is all based on the P&L. And so, you start to accumulate this hard asset, it gives you optionality to do other things. First section is Bitcoin curiosity around the Bitcoiner business owner. Okay, what do I do? What should I do to start to explore that?

Scott Marmoll ⋮ Same as when you're first exploring Bitcoin as an individual, you start to get the advice of, hey, I should DCA, I should be careful not to be in a forced seller position over the short term. All these things apply, but in the business owner perspective, there's other factors. A big one being that if you own control, then the difference between doing this on your personal balance sheet and on your corporate balance sheet might be— there might be no difference. There might be major tax implications. And if you have shared equity with family members or early investors or scaled investors, then suddenly the unilateral control to distribute capital is limited.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ But if you own control, then you still have the control to raise cash or to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. So for some folks, it's like, hey, my father-in-law is a minority investor. And if I distribute share, if I distribute cash to buy Bitcoin on my personal balance sheet, I've got to distribute cash to him too, and he's not going to buy Bitcoin with it. And I'm tired of arguing with him at Thanksgiving. I'm just going to buy Bitcoin and put it on the company balance sheet so that he now owns some Bitcoin through that minority equity position. So lots of little factors in there.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ I think at the solo entrepreneur and small business phase, it's really hard to distinguish between the personal balance sheet and the professional corporate balance sheet. But as you get into that $5, $50 million of free cash flow, you're talking about businesses that have different trade-offs between the tax and the shareholder dynamics for stacking sats in the corporate entity versus distributing to shareholders.

Marty Bent [6:02] Well, not only that too, as once you get to those larger scales of cash flowing and then stacking cash on the balance sheet, the opportunity cost of keeping it in cash versus something like Bitcoin is extremely high. And that's something we That's what you describe in the first section as well, is trying to make the case why should your business have Bitcoin on its balance sheet?

Scott Marmoll [6:22] Well, exactly. And I think, do I expect the sort of non-Bitcoiner to crack this book and go, oh my gosh, this is it? Maybe not, but I think it's going to help. And that first section is just explaining, look, if you have $10 million of working capital cash that you keep on hand to fund payroll and inventory and maintenance CapEx, That's a painful necessity because over a year's time, if you're— everyone's experience inflation is different. The CPI number is just one metric, but for most folks, especially in businesses, you're probably closer to PPI. That metric is still totally manipulated. But the reality, I think, for most businesses, especially if they have to accumulate any hard assets on the balance sheet, is like 10% purchasing power loss every year.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ So $10 million of working capital cash gets you $8 million worth of stuff in a year. That's a huge— that's an important piece of the business to have optimized. And there's a lot of different ways to skin that cat, but certainly just sitting on a pile of cash is not the best way to do it.

Marty Bent [7:24] No. And then in terms of bringing this back to board members, family members, I think the way in which we describe the frame is really highlighting that problem that you just described with the erosion of the purchasing power, the cash sitting on your balance sheet, and basically having them recognize that first. So if you do have a board or a group of people you need to convince, I think framing and backing into a Bitcoin treasury strategy is very important here.

Scott Marmoll [7:53] Start with the problem. Exactly. Yeah. I think, and this is true for orange-pilling your friends and family, your colleagues, or in the boardroom, start with the problem. Who does a really good job of this is Jeff Booth, right? He was in 9 chapters of the book, Price of Tomorrow, before he mentions the word Bitcoin, and he paints the problem pretty well. So I agree, it's the same approach there because the odds that even if you are sort of fully orange-pilled Bitcoiner, it's not likely that your $20 million EBITDA business has a perfectly aligned board on this topic or shareholder group. It's common. I see a lot of brothers-in-law that co-own businesses.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ That's a very common dynamic, right? Guys end up brothers-in-law through marrying, and then they start a business sometime in their 30s. And by their 40s or 50s, they've got a really nice asset. One of them's a Bitcoiner, one's not. This is a super common dynamic. I'm actually working with some clients right now that have this dynamic. They're not brothers-in-law, but they are dear friends. One's totally down the rabbit hole, the other one's tiptoeing. So this would be a great tool for that conversation.

Marty Bent [8:59] And then moving into the tactical playbook and frameworks for thinking about how to approach an allocation depending on the scale of your business, the buy-in from board or brothers-in-laws that you may need.

Scott Marmoll [9:15] Right. Yeah, I mean, I think the last thing you want to do is rock the boat. So you want to be careful that you don't kind of— Say, all right, team, we're all in Bitcoin on October 6th, 2025, right? And then suddenly your working capital situation is dire. So the case is going to be different for every single business and situation, but thoughtful approach to what's our runway, what's our burn, what is our cash conversion cycle, and what can we do to safely move some of the value that's trapped in that situation into Bitcoin. And I think boards think about this anyway, because they certainly don't want you sitting on cash, but usually it's, hey, reinvest in the business.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ But if the reinvestment in the business is like a 10%, 15% return on invested capital, you probably want to evaluate other options, à la Bitcoin. It's a lot less work to sit in Bitcoin and clip that success. It's also very hard to sell a board on that when we're at $70-some K and down 40-plus percent, but it's also the best time to do it.

Marty Bent [10:23] It is. No, and we touch on it in the playbook as well, but I think building on what you were just saying there with our experience at 1031, and we've seen this within our portfolio, Grant Gillum, co-founder and a partner of mine at 1031, he wrote this piece I think 2 or 3 years ago, maybe even longer than that at this point, Bitcoin is the 4th lever of equity value growth. And it's something we've highly encouraged portfolio companies to do, particularly if Bitcoin is significantly below the price of the previous all-time high.

Scott Marmoll [10:58] Mm-hmm.

Marty Bent [10:59] And they've raised a round, is put a chunk of that into Bitcoin. Make sure you have enough runway to reinvest in the business and make payroll and all that, but put a chunk in Bitcoin. Build out your company, your product suite as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Run as lean as possible, get to revenue profitability. And you'll find at the end of the day, Bitcoin is this forcing function to make you efficient, to make sure that you're not adding a ton of bloat to your organization. And then on top of that, once you get to profitability and you're looking pretty like when you go back to market and Bitcoin has appreciated, if that takes 2 or 3 years, the value of the business is looking good. And then you have incredible optionality as a founder. So a bit different scale. You're talking like mid-market established companies spitting out cash flow.

Scott Marmoll [11:48] But it's true either way. Grant— I don't know where it was. Grant gave a presentation I watched on YouTube.

Marty Bent [11:54] Riga.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ Yes. And he's got great memes in there. Grant does a wonderful job of balancing Wall Street jargon and memes. I think there's a Michael Jackson Thriller zombie image in there that— gets to the heart of the problem, which is a lot of businesses, if their sort of hurdle rate was Bitcoin, then they shouldn't exist. And yes, you guys at 1031 have lived it. The scale is different in venture, but honestly, I think a lot of the way 1031 thinks about investment is more like a private equity fund. I mean, Bitcoin land doesn't have super copious numbers of $10, $20 million EBITDA businesses, but I think you guys are working hard to change that with the investments you make.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ And whether a business is negative cash flow, like a venture opportunity, or mid-market and cash flowing quite nicely, the math is the same, which is holding a bunch of cash for the long term is for sure not the best idea. Then the question is just, well, what is the right mix? And I definitely think that from the investor perspective, from the 1031 perspective, you guys have probably seen it where having Bitcoin on balance sheet augments the equity value math in a way that's been helpful in otherwise downtimes in business cycles. And you're right, I think it sounds too simple, but really just as long as you're not right at all-time highs, it's probably an okay time to stack aggressively into a Bitcoin treasury for the long term.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ And I think we talk about it in the book, in the PDF here, but you guys have seen that firsthand, right? I mean, some of the 1031 portcos have weathered longer than they otherwise would have because they raised and allocated meaningfully that raise to Bitcoin. And now, it gives them more runway because it's more than it was if they would've kept it in dollars.

Marty Bent [13:50] Yeah. And I think this gets into a good Point of the playbook as well, which is running through the tactical decision tree of, do I lump sum? Do I DCA? In what situation should I do either or? And I think that's very important too, because I think a lot of what we see in the 1031 is a raise and most companies will do a DCA over a set period of time.

Scott Marmoll [14:13] Yep. Yep. And that set period of time is less than a 4-year— if cycles exist, it's less than a 4-year cycle. There's not a right answer on this. That one, I mean, even— well, I'll tell you, on the personal side, whatever— if anybody could just look through all my trades, they should just do the exact opposite. Michael Saylor is competing for top tick king, but I'm pretty darn good at it. But the good news is, if you just wait it out, that trade ends up being a good trade anyway. But that said, I like what Adam Back says about this. It's like, if you take out, what is it, the 10 best days of a year in Bitcoin, you're just down hilariously.

Marty Bent [14:49] Yeah.

Scott Marmoll [14:51] which means time in the market is more important than timing the market. I think the DCA strategy just feels responsible when you're doing it with large quantities. When you get into 7, 8, or 9 figures, it's nervy to be the guy that hit the button to do the spot buy. Because again, even if you're the control shareholder, whether that's at Thanksgiving or at board meetings, someone's going to be yelling at you if the timing was wrong. I think there's a balance there, and at the end of the day, the advice is just advice and the business owner has to decide, but I think that's right. It's like some version of we're gonna size into this over 6 months or 12 months, but also case dependent, right? How intense is your seasonality on cash conversion? It's like, oh, we buy a ton of equipment in the fall. Well, let's not run out of cash in the fall then. So that's always gonna be a case-by-case situation, but—

Marty Bent [15:46] Yeah.

Scott Marmoll [15:49] The sooner you're off zero, the better. And I think for some businesses that'll be the case, but many it'll be, we want to move what is already a personal Bitcoin strategy into the corporate here.

Marty Bent [15:57] Well, I think it's important to elaborate on this too, because we say it in the piece that if you pick a certain strategy, like let's say you want to DCA a certain amount either into perpetuity over a fixed period of time, and let's say the Bitcoin price dumps by 30%, you stop. doing it because you're scared out of the market. Like, that is—

Scott Marmoll [16:17] Right.

Marty Bent [16:17] You have to go into this with the mental framework that there is going to be volatility.

Scott Marmoll [16:20] Whatever plan you set, you have to stick to it. The easy part is buying the Bitcoin. And ask any long-term Bitcoin holder, the hard part is stomaching the volatility. So absolutely, set a plan, work with an advisor to set that plan, be deliberate about establishing that plan outwardly with the key stakeholders, whether that's the management team or shareholders or brothers-in-law, so that you have something other than your own emotions to point to when decisions are being made on that strategy. Because for sure, if you're new to Bitcoin and you started sizing into it in October of this year, you probably have a little heartburn right now. But if you've set a playbook and you're sticking to it, then you can kind of rest easy that we need to see this all the way through before we get heartburn and change our strategy.

Marty Bent [17:14] All right, now let's walk into the spectrum of sort of different Bitcoin strategies depending on where the particular business owner is in their personal journey with their business. Some Bitcoiners that run businesses are like, hey, I'm gonna keep running this for 10 years, so I'm just gonna do a set and forget it DCA strategy over the next decade. Others are later in their careers and looking to make an exit and just sort of framing what options exist to acquire Bitcoin using your business across that spectrum. And for those who are closer to selling their businesses, what does the landscape look like? Why is now opportunistic?

Scott Marmoll [17:55] The Bitcoiner business owner hero's journey, I call it, was similar to the individual Bitcoiner hero's journey. You start stacking some sats, you get excited, You sit in the red for 2 or 3 years, then you're permanently in the green. You continue to stack sats. You start looking around at what else can I sell? You start liquidating IRAs and other positions. A decade in, you sell your chairs. The hero's journey on the business owner side looks similar. The scale is different, but the game is similar. Stacking Bitcoin to the balance sheet, some conservative portion of cash flow, Okay, get more aggressive. Okay, 100% of cash flow.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ Okay, can we borrow money against the business to accelerate that? Can we pull forward accumulation? And then Bitcoiner business owners thinking about the endgame for their business have a different hurdle because Bitcoin historical CAGR, pick your number, 30%, 40%, 50%, makes you really want to own more of that thing. And if you're looking at your business saying, okay, next year if we want to grow 10%, we need to put in, we need to reinvest into the business meaningfully, and we run the math on that, and the return on invested capital there is 15%, for example. In fiat land, that's great, right? Private equity will underwrite that all the time because they'll use leverage and they'll augment that and they'll make nice returns for their LPs.

Marty Bent [19:23] Yeah.

Scott Marmoll [19:24] In Bitcoin land, you're like, okay, I can spend whatever, make 15% return on it with a bunch of risk execution and otherwise, or I could have taken that same cash and just bought Bitcoin. Then it gets harder. So then you start thinking through, okay, the hurdle rate for a Bitcoiner business owner is that Bitcoiner— is that Bitcoin CAGR. And the hurdle rate for the potential acquirers of your business is the fiat treasuries CAGR or yield. And so what we're seeing, and this is in the materials, is that the fiat markets are overvaluing your business because they don't understand Bitcoin. I have a theory that the reason private equity hasn't yet come to understand Bitcoin is because if you take their playbook, which is 5 to 7 years of illiquidity, and you apply it to just buying and holding Bitcoin for 5 to 7 years, It kind of begs the question of like, why does this industry exist at all?

Scott Marmoll ⋮ Why are we allocating capital, paying 2 and 20 to these private equity professionals for them to underperform spot Bitcoin, which is liquid 24/7, tradable 365 around the globe? And if I just don't touch it for 5 to 7 years, I probably outperform 99% of private equity funds. That is your advantage as a business owner because they're going to keep valuing businesses that way. It's their job to deploy that capital. That's private equity fund, LP capital, limited partners, think teachers' pension funds and the firefighters' union and university endowments chasing yield to pay their pension liabilities and other sort of long-term liabilities from insurance funds. And they have to make a return.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ So there is this artificial bid for nice cash-flowing businesses. And you can take those proceeds if you're at that stage in your business and sell all of it, part of it, raise some debt, or just stack a little bit of Bitcoin. But all across that menu of options, depending on where you are as a business owner, you can use it. You can use future performance, either equity value or cash flow, to accumulate Bitcoin at what I think everyone agrees is lower prices than it will be in the future. That's the exciting trade. And so, you can see In the materials, the overall equity valuations across public and private markets for these businesses, the enterprise values rather, is just going up and to the right.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ There are interruptions around COVID and whatever else, and I'm sure what's going on right now in macro isn't great for valuations, but overall, the trend is just up and to the right. So we see inflation everywhere, including in asset prices. That is coming to Bitcoin, but while it's still overstated inequities, you own equity as a business owner. So there's a monetization opportunity, but it is not near as simple as logging into Fidelity and selling shares of Apple Computer. The private markets are very illiquid, clunky. It takes months to negotiate. It's a lot of heartbreak, but dealmaking is a ton of fun. And so that's CBA's pitch.

Marty Bent [22:29] SubFreaks, guess what? Just booked my tickets to Vegas headed for Bitcoin 2026. It's that time of the year, April 27th to 29th in Las Vegas. I'm going to be there. A ton of people are going to be there. You better get your ass there. You know what? It's a bit— people are calling it a bear market. You know, these are the best conferences. I've been going since 2019 when it was in a parking garage in San Francisco. If you want to get the best possible ticket prices, make sure you use our link and the code TFTC. tc, use the code TFTC, you'll get 10% off.

Marty Bent ⋮ You can bundle with a hotel room to save big and make the most of your experience staying onsite at the Venetian. That is where I will be. Ticket prices are increasing, so make sure you get yours today. Join Bitcoiners from all around the world. It's a global endeavor. It's a pilgrimage, if you will, for the ultimate networking experience. There's going to be a ton of people there. You can hear from the biggest names in the industry. Saylor's going to be there. Matt and I and the PubKey boys and the Bugle boys, we're going to have live hot style takeover. That's going to be there too, all in the Venetian.

Marty Bent ⋮ Everybody's meeting up. It's going to be fun. Get there. tc. Use the code TFTC at signup. Subfreaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin Easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a 2-of-3 multisig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device, and Block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family, or maybe yourself, who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken the step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private/public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a PIN, setting up a passphrase.

Marty Bent ⋮ Again, BitKey makes it easy to use, Hard to lose. It's the easiest 0-to-1 step, your first step to self-custody. If you have friends and family on the exchanges who haven't moved it off, tell them to pick up a BitKey. world, use the key TFTC20 at checkout for 20% off your order. world, code TFTC20. Well, let's go into those 3 different scenarios you listed. Sell the whole company, maybe sell part of it, roll it back in alongside the PE sponsor.

Scott Marmoll [24:35] And yeah, so, and then the other one is keep it, right?

Marty Bent [24:37] Yeah.

Scott Marmoll [24:38] So the first one is, hey, return on invested capital in this business is now objectively unexciting to me as the owner. I want to take all of my chips and go home, and my chips are going into Bitcoin. That is the full sale strategy. I think the biggest thing for that plan is exit planning, which needs to happen way before you decide to go to market. I tell business owners, you should work hard for years in advance to make yourself useless to the business. That way, when the time comes to sell, the buyer isn't saying, okay, I need you shackled to the desk here. I like to joke that private equity funds, they buy your company, they don't want you to go to the beach, they want you to drive a really nice car to the office every day.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ And so you've got to work really hard as an owner entrepreneur to do the one thing that you've always most times struggled to do, which is take your hands off and start empowering your team to run the business without you so that when you do go to exit, you really are a passive shareholder because passive shareholders get paid cash, active shareholders get paid in earnouts and other contingencies that tie you to the business. The next category is like, hey, I really like my business. It's got a great return on invested capital. The opportunity to grow here is huge. But I'm tired of betting the farm and I'm overweight in my company and underweight Bitcoin.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ And so I don't want to miss the boat on Bitcoin, but I also am not ready to sell my job away. I like running this business. You are, in that case, private equity's favorite because you're saying, I want somebody to give me some money to take risk off the table, and then I want to go pursue the half a dozen aggressive growth strategies that I've always thought about, but always been scared to go after because I don't want to personally guarantee I can't get the bank to give me that much money, whatever the risk. Private equity is going to eat that alive. They love that because they're saying, hey, there's a bunch of low-hanging fruit.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ The only reason this hasn't already happened in this business is because the owner is tired of doubling down with basically, and sometimes literally signing the deed to his house to the downside case. So in that case, sell a portion of your business to a private equity fund or other acquirer, roll some of your ownership into a minority position, stay in an operator seat and go execute on that next phase of growth and know that you're partnered with people on the balance sheet in the investment, that their job is to make 3x, 5x on their money. And so you're riding along in your minority position with that, but you've also just taken some cash off the table.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ You've likely eliminated personal guarantees in the business, and you're in a position to really chase the next phase of growth with the institutional sophistication that didn't exist before, right? They're gonna help you set up a board, they're gonna give you strategic planning, but you also are gonna have, in a worst-case description, you're gonna have bosses. So there's a balance there. And then the far end of the spectrum would be, don't partner with these folks at all. I think it would be like, this is definitely the case in a lot of Bitcoin companies, is if a Bitcoiner has started a business, they have looked at the risk-reward and said, I think I can outperform Bitcoin here.

Marty Bent [27:41] Yeah.

Scott Marmoll [27:42] TFTC and CBA are both great examples. And like, can you picture a scenario where you would sell equity for anything beyond like an insane valuation? Probably not, because you want to grow and be the beneficiary of all of that cash flow. And so I think in that scenario, if you've got lightning in a bottle, then your goal should be to never give away any equity unless you're at that stage. So I think that's the early stage, right? Stack Bitcoin, grow the business on your own. That mid-stage is really interesting because there's a lot of that happening. And then that final stage, you've really got to make sure that your transaction preparedness puts you in a position to not be a key man or mission critical to that transaction.

Marty Bent [28:22] Yeah. Let's go back to 2 parts, one being the second option. You're still part of the business, roll alongside the PE firm. I think another thing that we highlight in the playbook as well is that you take the proceeds, Buy Bitcoin, you're long Bitcoin, PE fund at the end of your relationship, they get their nuts, and then you have the potential if Bitcoin has a good run during your engagement with the PE firm to buy your company back.

Scott Marmoll [28:51] Yeah. So this would be so fun. I think we'll find this, you know, we're looking for this client at CBA, but I love the idea of using the private equity fund's money to buy Bitcoin on the personal side. watching them make some smart decisions, but maybe some dumb ones too. And at the end of their 5, 7-year process, they're hiring an investment banker to go sell that business. You're a minority owner, and you're like, actually, I'll buy it. And you use your Bitcoin stack, which has probably grown much faster than their investment in your business, to reclaim ownership of your business. I think that would be really interesting.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ I've heard I've had clients who've lived this experience where they sold to a big private equity fund. It didn't go great, whether growth slowed down or leverage was poorly managed or whatever it was, and they end up partnering with other groups to buy back the business and sort of right the course and grow it again. I think entrepreneurs are kind of serial— they're very competitive and they like to win. It'd be a pretty cool win to unlock some liquidity from your business, use it to accumulate Bitcoin at what we all agree are lower prices today than they will be in the future. And then fast forward to that future date and say, hey, private equity guys, nice trade you did there.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ I'll actually take it back. And oh, by the way, it's going to take me half of the cash you gave me 5, 7 years ago because I stored it in Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [30:20] Yeah. And then second thing to bring it up on, You're a Bitcoiner, ourselves, own a business. I alluded to it earlier with how 1031 portfolio company founders typically view their businesses, but Bitcoiners are good business operators, or they should be at least.

Scott Marmoll [30:38] That is the thesis for CBA. So I'm counting on the Bitcoin community to prove me right, which is I think Bitcoiners are by nature contrarians. They have figured out something that requires a lot of humility. Now, I'm not saying we're all humble, but we had to start humble, right? Because you had to say, okay, what am I wrong about? Oh, literally everything when it comes to money. And then you sort of reeducated yourself on the Bitcoin standard. So if that is an archetype, and I think somebody just did some research on the emotional intelligence strategy or whatever.

Marty Bent [31:13] Myers-Briggs. Yeah, Myers-Briggs. Brandon Quiddam did that years ago, but he brings it up periodically.

Scott Marmoll [31:17] Okay. It must have just hit Like, it just bubbled up to me recently, and it's like, you know, Bitcoiners are one of two types. I think my thesis is that Bitcoiners are good business owners because they have figured out something that takes a lot of research and humility to understand. And if you apply that mentality to businesses, my thesis is that, like, being Bitcoin first as an advisor to business owners, I'm gonna get to work with all the best business owners because all the best businesses will be run by Bitcoiners.

Marty Bent [31:44] Yeah.

Scott Marmoll [31:46] And it's also a fun top of funnel because there's no such thing as someone who's like, oh yeah, I used to be into Bitcoin. And so my TAM for people that want to work with CBA because they wanna work with the advice of an advisor that understands Bitcoin is just however many Bitcoiners there are that own businesses, and I'm betting on that number going up forever.

Marty Bent [32:06] Yeah, and I think it will. The thing I wanted to bring up after this is just highlighting that this is real. And not only is it real, it's more real than it's ever been because of the emergence of AI tools, right? Like talking about running lean operations. I think that's one thing we've really bonded over over the last 2 months is banging our heads together, talking about our AI setups and what it's done for our individual businesses.

Scott Marmoll [32:36] Yeah, I owe you a big thank you. So anecdotes about AI and deflation that are useful for this. is primary to my business and it's thanks to you. So I was playing around with OpenClaw like everyone in late February and was trying to hook it up to Maple. Ambitious, privacy-preserving, the right ethos. And you and I were chatting and I'm like, I just, this thing is a net negative to my productivity right now. What am I doing wrong? And you encouraged me, The trade-off is obviously privacy, but you're running a business, so it's not like you have super good privacy on that side anyway. Lean into the frontier models and also lean into the spend.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ Find a way to justify it, right? So if that's— if you're pinching pennies on your AI subscription, that's not the right approach. Find a way to make it pay for itself. And that advice from you was probably in late February. And, you know, the anecdote for CBA is that prior to late February, the goal— So I launched this firm in October of last year. I was previously a vice president at Kenner Fitzgerald. Not on their crypto stuff, but just a middle market investment banker. And so I launched this in October. The goal from October to sort of, I'll call it D-Day for OpenClaw and AI, was to grow the business to a scale where I could justify $1 million of G&A, a team of 5, maybe 3 associates and 2 analysts, or 2 associates and 3 analysts in investment banking to support deal execution for my top of funnel deal flow.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ Enter OpenClaw and Frontier Models, agentic AI in general, and now I'm not sure that CBA ever needs a junior team member. And so like people say, well, you know, where is the actual deflation in AI? Well, I mean, it's $1 million of savings a year for CBA. And I know that you're seeing this on your side too, but it's just, that's happening really quick. Business owners, especially in the middle market that won't, that aren't gonna get disrupted by like, oh, we're a SaaS and we just don't exist anymore. that live in the physical world molecules-wise, their opportunity to layer AI into their stack is like they can probably shave multiple million dollars out of G&A.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ And so let's go after that as a Bitcoin community and make even greater businesses and then use those to accumulate Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [34:52] Yeah. And the anecdote from our side, I think this playbook is a perfect example of it. Like I said, we banged our clankers together. It's not really for the content itself, but it's structuring it in a way like this PDF that we have. I think it's very beautiful.

Scott Marmoll [35:03] And the bigliest.

Marty Bent [35:04] This has been an idea, like partnering with somebody like you to do sort of like a collaboration on something specific in the space, in this case, the Bitcoin Treasury and Exit Playbook for private businesses. But I've wanted to do this for years, but in my mind it's like, ah, I've really, I've got myself, the team has grown. We've added 2 team members. So including myself, there's 6 of us. A couple of them are part-time. Over the last year, we've added 2. And I've never had the confidence or the resources to be like, okay, if I wanted to do something like this, I'd probably have to go hire a designer or somebody who can just run and lead this stuff.

Marty Bent ⋮ And now that's not the case. Like we can sit there, we went back and forth over multiple calls over the course of 6 weeks about how this is gonna be structured. And then we got our final sort of text and the graphics we wanted to put in and boom. Clanker was able to actually format and design the PDF in minutes.

Scott Marmoll [36:00] Yeah, I think that this, it turns you, I think I'm stealing this from you, somebody, I listen to a lot of podcasts. It turns the ideas guy into a results guy, and you've got great ideas, and those can now basically come into existence with a voice message. I know the Bitcoin community is very like pro-privacy, and that there's massive trade-offs running these things on frontier models where they're for sure hoovering up your data. But look, if you're a business owner, who are you kidding yourself? Like, all of your data is getting eaten alive. And I know that's not a good answer. Like, that's a quitter's answer.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ But also, I think if we look at where open source models are today, 6 to 12 months from now, I think it's not unrealistic to say we can self-host some of these things. Now, that won't be cheap, but if you're a business owner getting $1 million worth of G&A value out of running agents through OpenClaw, Hermes, whatever other agentic harness, and you need to spend $30,000 on GPUs. Okay, it's pretty easy to do the math on that ROI. And so you can either sit around and wait for open source models to be ready for that so you don't ever have to violate the privacy, but you'll also be— we mentioned at the beginning, AI is like dog years.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ You'll be years behind if you don't play with these things now so that when you can take an open source model on your own hardware and run it, you're ready because you've already built the— systems and processes around the business to be ready for that.

Marty Bent [37:27] Yeah. And I feel like we're very fortunate at TFTC because we run a media business. A lot of our output is public anyway. And so the input on the back end is just like a lot of source material. If our chats were to get leaked, it's just us being like, hey, literally read everything we've ever written, create our voice, and here's the topics we're interested in. Here's the source material we want to report on. help us format it the right way. And people get, people, it is funny, there are a lot of Luddites out there who are basically, oh, this is all AI slop. I don't think they understand, like, yes, AI is helping with the output, the end output, but there's a lot of curation and context provided before that.

Marty Bent ⋮ Right. And I showed you the sort of hockey stick growth we've seen on, in terms of engagement and what's happening. And I think despite what the Luddites are saying, like, the proof is in the pudding. Like, it's helping us be better at disseminating information.

Scott Marmoll [38:23] Absolutely. If, if you're already a master of your craft, which I'd like to think that you are, I like to think that I am, adding AI to your stack augments it, uh, augments you in the same way that Tony Stark's Iron Man suit augments him. If you are not, then you become a slop cannon. And there is no in-between. And so I think what I've found, actually, great example, I actually launched a side business focused on this. I'm helping folks in the Bitcoin community and now sort of just broader community get these harness setups running on their own machines. And I recommend the Frontier models even though there's a privacy trade-off.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ Every single one of my 30+ customers now has started their own business. I think there might be one exception to that. And in every case, it's— they're not saying, hey AI, how do I make money? They're taking what they're already good at and working with their agent to build something that generates revenue or generates value for the world and bringing that to market. And so it's such a fun project to see folks kind of bear that out. What you see online that is causing the Luddite behavior is people will just get a new agent and say, make me money.

Marty Bent [39:35] Yeah.

Scott Marmoll [39:36] I think you and Matt probably went through this experience trying to have them, having the agents trade whatever marketplace. There are high-frequency funds that have been working on that strategy for a long time. And so there's not a lot of alpha there. But if you have literally anything that you think you're halfway decent at, you can basically build a business around it with a few voice messages.

Marty Bent [39:59] Yeah.

Scott Marmoll [40:01] There's never been a better time to start a business. There's never been a better time to be in Bitcoin. I'm very bullish on all the above, and the intersection of AI and Bitcoin is pretty exciting. I didn't have in my base case for Bitcoin a 50+% deflationary event in AI sort of bringing value to the world. And my thesis is that the only strategy to solve for that, like, we can't have deflation in the economy. Central planners could be laser-eyed Bitcoiners. They don't have a choice. They can't have the value of the money go up. So, they're going to have to print the difference. And so, when I first got into Bitcoin as a gold bug, and I was like, wow, they have to print so much money.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ They have to print so much money. I have friends in the Bay Area, Bitcoiners, San Francisco area that we keep in touch even though I've moved away. They are my original Bitcoin meetup folks. And whenever we're texting about macro, I usually end our conversations with, they are going to print so much money. And, you know, for better or worse, AI accelerates that, I think.

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Marty Bent ⋮ Just resilient shared custody that gives you institutional-grade security while keeping you sovereign. Unchained also lets you trade straight from your vault, access Bitcoin-backed commercial loans, open a Bitcoin IRA where you hold your own keys, and set up personal, business, trust, or retirement vaults. They even offer inheritance solutions built for long-term hodlers. Or opt for the highest-level private client service with Unchained Signature and get a dedicated account manager, discounted trading fees, exclusive access to events and features, and much, much more. com and use the code TFTC10 at checkout to get 10% off your new Bitcoin multisig vault. com. What's up, freaks? This rip is brought to you by our good friends at CrowdHealth.

Marty Bent ⋮ I've been a happy CrowdHealth member for almost 5 years now. My wife and I have had 2 children while we've been on CrowdHealth, and I actually just got the last bill for our 3rd child funded. It was $6,157. CrowdHealth negotiated down to $2,309, and we only paid $500. The rest was crowdfunded. By the CrowdHealth network. If you're sick of health insurance premiums and having to pay deductibles and getting ripped off at the hospital, join CrowdHealth. It's an alternative way to pay for your healthcare. It's not health insurance, it's crowdfunded healthcare. As you can tell, they negotiate prices for you. You pay in cash. It's much cheaper overall.

Marty Bent ⋮ We're much happier. They have incredible perks. com/tftc to sign up. 5 years on CrowdHealth, not looking back. com/tftc. Use the promo code TFTC. once you set up your account, you're going to get $99 a month for your subscription for the first 3 months. All right. We got a bit of an AI tangent. We gloss over it in the piece, but maybe we can do a whole nother one on that. Yeah, I'd love to. Like how Bitcoin optimizes business or AI optimizes business, and then you can use the efficiencies and the productivity and hopefully the revenue and cash flow gains to funnel it into Bitcoin. But bringing it back to the playbook and just tying a knot in the exit decision or the 3 decisions that we talked about, Why moving now as opposed to waiting?

Scott Marmoll [43:36] Yeah. So set aside Bitcoin for a second. The conversation I have with business owners for all of my career in fiat land, in private equity, in fiat land M&A, in private equity as a buyer, in fiat land M&A, because I sort of went both sides of the deal table, it's always, now is an okay time to sell, but I don't want to take the tax hit because I've got X value in the business, and when I sell it, 80% of it's going to be ordinary income, or no, sorry, 20% of it's going to be ordinary income, and the other 80% is going to be goodwill, which will be taxed at cap gains rates.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ Nobody wants to give away— say you sell a business for $100 million and you give $30 million of it to Uncle Sam, that's really painful. And I don't think it's an ethically good thing to do even. So I understand people's A lot of business owners are like, well, I want to delay that. I want to deal with that later. I want to get my house in order, figure out a way to avoid more of that tax. And I agree. There are legal and trust and tax efficiency stuff that we kind of allude to. We are, neither of us, professionals in those categories. I think you should get good advice in those categories.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ But if you're waiting to sell or raise capital or take chips off the table because you think that you'll somehow save money on taxes later, if Bitcoin is your opportunity cost, good luck, because American HODL says this thing's a runaway freight train. Every day you wait, the risk that you never see that price again is real. And so, take the tax hit, see what that looks like, and stack Bitcoin today at today's prices versus waiting 5 years. Assume any reasonable CAGR for Bitcoin, and then run the math, later, even at a more efficient tax rate, you're going to see that you'd have more Bitcoin by making that trade today.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ And this is a fun plug. There's a calculator on the CBA website that helps you look at this, which is just, okay, do I raise capital now? Do I sell equity now, whether it's control or the whole thing or most of it or a minority, and use that to buy Bitcoin at today's prices? Or do I wait? Okay, well, I wait for how long? Okay, what's the Bitcoin CAGR over that timeline? How much Bitcoin would I get if I waited? And that calculator, I built it with my clanker. It's pretty hard to get that calculator to show you that the better trade is to wait.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ And now, obviously, as an advisor who makes transactions happen, that is self-promoting, but it is also just mostly true, which is if you look back on when you should have bought Bitcoin, yesterday was the best day. Today is the next best day. Any form of waiting usually ends up being a mistake.

Marty Bent [46:19] Yeah. And then getting into the technical details, I think that's important. We can wrap up the 4 sections there, but then we'll get into some examples which you provide at the end, some case studies. But in terms of what this looks like, not what this looks like in practice, but that's, I think, one of the underappreciated aspects of businesses getting into Bitcoin. You can convince them like, all right, I'm in, I'm gonna DCA, I'm gonna lump sum, I'm gonna do this, that. But what do you actually do? Who do you work with? Who are your counterparties?

Scott Marmoll [46:50] So I wanna be careful not to like pick favorites. There's a lot of good services out there. A rule I would suggest folks adopt is look for businesses, services, and advisors that are focused on Bitcoin only. In optimizing for more than just Bitcoin in the crypto world, usually corners are cut and shortcuts are taken that are dangerous. And if someone doesn't understand that Bitcoin is the signal amidst the crypto noise, then you have to doubt the rest of their advice. And so start with that as a filter. And then I think there's several categories. So there's tax, right? You definitely want— well, you have to pay your taxes.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ You should do that every year. You probably have advice for that already. But I think tax efficiency for a transaction, whether that's raising capital to invest in the business, acquire a competitor, take chips off the table, sell outright, there are things you can do ahead of time with tax attorneys to be more efficient with that tax implication. Legal, from a structuring perspective, you know, when you transact, regardless of the type, you'll be making representations and warranties that create scenarios where if what you said or disclosed during the transaction was untrue, that can have real recourse. And so you want to make sure that the attorneys helping you document your transaction are top-notch.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ Attorneys are painfully expensive, but sometimes it's money well spent. I'm curious to see how AI drives that cost down because a lot of what they do is just pattern recognition. So I'm excited for discounts in that category and I'll help businesses find them. So yeah, legal, tax. If it's Bitcoin accumulation, then you gotta think about custody for sure. And there's no one-size-fits-all. I think on one end of the spectrum, like a cold card in a desk at the CEO's office is a way to do it. But like, who are your shareholders? What is the risk profile? When do you need to move the Bitcoin? You could look at multisig setups where your board has a distributed set of keys, But then you run into this problem of like, okay, well, when we cycle out an employee, a C-level employee or a board member, we have to like do a key rollover ceremony that can get messy.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ There are businesses and service providers that, that cover that space. What else am I missing? Trading. So obviously, like if you're going to deploy a Bitcoin accumulation strategy, you need to have an exchange acquire the Bitcoin for you, take your cash and give you sats for it.

Marty Bent [49:21] Yeah.

Scott Marmoll [49:23] I'm trying to think of what else did we cover in there. There is a whole checklist that folks can go through, and I think it'll depend where you are.

Marty Bent [49:31] I mean, being M&A prepared, like you just don't— I think we touched on this earlier, but it's like, it's just not going to happen tomorrow if you don't have it ready.

Scott Marmoll [49:37] That's right, yeah. You can't log into Fidelity and sell shares in TFTC, and I can't in CBA. And so I think there's a lot of work to do there. It doesn't start when you decide you're ready. It starts well in advance. And so getting good advice on what that looks like, building a playbook and working towards it, whether that's a 12-month, 18-month, 3-year plan. Just a regular way M&A process could take you 6+ months. And then what you need in that checklist will depend on where you're at. And so this will dovetail nicely into case studies. CBA's client base spans anyone that's a Bitcoiner. And so, in some cases, I'm helping seed round businesses, make introductions to potential investors.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ In other cases, I'm working with scaled entrepreneurs selling the whole business because they have looked at the return on invested capital in that business and said, I'd rather own Bitcoin, and everything in between. And so, In the Bitcoiner seed round stage, you're thinking about what portion of this raise do we allocate to Bitcoin? How do we manage against our burn? And you have these 2 trends of like, well, I want to raise as much cash as I can to buy Bitcoin today, but I don't want to sell any equity because the only reason I'm building this thing is because I think it's going to outperform Bitcoin.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ That's a very different mindset than fiat VC, where you're saying just raise as much cash as possible because that's all that matters. On the other end of the spectrum, before you come to the conclusion, I'm going to sell the whole thing, look at with an advisor what does a partial sale look like? What does taking some chips off the table look like? Work with tax folks to look at what actually net proceeds is going to be and then have a real sense of humour about it's not going to happen overnight. Because it's a lot of work.

Marty Bent [51:32] Yeah. Well, I think to give tangible examples of companies that you've worked with, I mean, not to name them by name, but you have a few in here that I think would be helpful for people listening. Maybe their business is similar. And so the franchisee, I think, is a really good one.

Scott Marmoll [51:50] The franchisee is my favorite. And I called him before this to see if he would mind what level of— of commentary I gave. And so I'll keep it high level, but a multi-site franchisee. So I've done a lot of multi-site franchisee M&A in my fiat days. This is a business in food, in restaurant, in a really nice scaled franchise brand, and the owner is a Bitcoiner. And so you're thinking, okay, well, that business has nothing to do with Bitcoin. The reason CBA is involved is because the owner's a Bitcoiner and he wants advice from another Bitcoiner. They are exploring the outright sale of that business because the return on invested capital of opening another store, another of the multi-site brand, is like 15%-ish with leverage.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ That's not worth it when you think about the opportunity cost of just holding Bitcoin. And so for that situation, we got involved early and started talking about, hey, maybe you should raise some debt to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. So they started accumulating Bitcoin on their balance sheet a year ago. And the start of our conversation was, I think you should raise some debt.

Marty Bent [53:06] I think you—

Scott Marmoll [53:07] I, at the time, assumed he was pretty bullish on his business. I was like, I'm not telling you to sell equity. I think you should use debt to accumulate faster at lower Bitcoin prices last summer.

Marty Bent [53:17] Yeah.

Scott Marmoll [53:18] And through that exercise and learning what the options were in the debt markets, he was like, man, I don't have that much conviction in the next 5 years of this trade to be long the equity with leverage just to get a little bit more Bitcoin exposure. And so through that exploration, we came to this conclusion of, I think there's a number where I'd like to sell this business. And so that's what we're working through right now. But that is a great example of one where he literally lived through the journey of just started stacking sats. We worked through that with him. Then we explored, well, could you use leverage to speed that up?

Scott Marmoll ⋮ There feels like a runaway freight train in Bitcoin right now. Last summer, we all thought we weren't going to be where we are right now, but it still would've been a great trade if he ended up doing it. But through that exercise and looking at, okay, I have to do what? I'm going to have to personally guarantee potentially. I'm going to take on how much leverage? That's how much interest expense? Whoa, that's a lot of heartburn. I'm not that bullish on the brand here or the underlying investment opportunity. And so then I think the conclusion is going to be, let's sell this business. Now, part of the heartbreak in my business is the business owner retains up until the day of closing the right to change his mind and say, never mind.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ So I like to joke, M&A advisory is like 364 days a year of heartbreak, and then one day a year you're crying tears of joy because you get a deal closed. So I think I might be a little bit masochist for enjoying it so much, but those closing days are very fun. Yeah.

Marty Bent [54:48] All right, next one, multi-unit operator.

Scott Marmoll [54:50] That was the multi-unit operator.

Marty Bent [54:52] Okay.

Scott Marmoll [54:52] So I jumped out of order. The first one is really transaction preparation is more of an abstract of if you are in a sort of nice fiat business and you're thinking through what does that look like in 18 months? Don't wait 18 months to call. There's a lot you can do ahead of time. The main thing we talked about earlier, which is make yourself replaceable. Make yourself irrelevant to the business as the owner, as the control owner and entrepreneur. If everyone is paralyzed when you're on vacation, the investor, the buyer, whether it's a strategic or a private equity fund or a family office, is going to have a lot of trouble letting you go to the beach. And so then you get back to that analogy of they're going to want you to drive a really nice car to the office every day.

Marty Bent [55:34] Yeah.

Scott Marmoll [55:34] So the work begins well in advance of a transaction to make yourself not needed.

Marty Bent [55:40] And so you explored this option with the multi-unit franchise owner, but he decided not to, wants to sell the business, but diving into who the leverage equity play or leverage treasury play may make sense for.

Scott Marmoll [55:53] Yeah. So that's what we explored in the mid-stages with the multi-site operator, which was, I said, look, I think you're bullish your business. But you want to get more Bitcoin, you started stacking a year ago and you're feeling behind as the price runs, you have access to the private capital markets. Private credit, for all of its being in the news lately, is still $2 trillion of dry powder begging for anything good to lend to. And the anything good to lend to is cash-flowing businesses. And so the idea there is, okay, let's go raise 3 or 4 times EBITDA, depending on the business and the situation, of debt capital, put that debt on the balance sheet, put the cash on the balance sheet on the other side, use that to acquire Bitcoin.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ Now, that's never really been done. Typically, these private credit funds, what they're underwriting is they give the owner an amount of cash, the owner distributes that cash to himself, he buys a boat or an airplane or another vacation home. And in that case, the private credit fund's recourse, what they're lending against is the business. It's not the boat, the airplane, the house that actually sits outside of the business. And so my argument to private credit, even though this sort of deal has never happened before, it's a better underwriting for them because now there's the equity and cash flow that you're used to underwriting, but there's also this Bitcoin on the balance sheet.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ So your private credit fund guys aren't going to suddenly become Bitcoiners, but even if they valued the cash Bitcoin on balance sheet at 50%, it should give more recourse to the loan than a typical— what it's called when you distribute the cash for the airplane situation is a dividend recap. So this should be net better than a dividend recap from the private credit side. And safe to say those folks are dying for a new form of deal with better collateral because we've seen what's happened to the public ones with redemptions.

Marty Bent [57:44] We've seen the software credit deals aren't panning out as many thought they would 5 years ago.

Scott Marmoll [57:50] I mean, I think you and I could both rattle through half a dozen software B2B SaaS, SMB SaaS products that we've replaced in our own businesses that otherwise I'd pay $50 to $100 a month that now I just clank them together.

Marty Bent [58:03] Yeah. What would you say to people who say, this is insane, we're not going to have businesses? What's the incentive for anybody to go start a business?

Scott Marmoll [58:12] I think that the Bitcoin hurdle rate does make it really hard to justify starting a business, but I mean, you and I are living proof that there's still businesses worth starting. But yeah, maybe that person is right when they say, if this continues, no one will ever open another Taco Bell. And I'd ask that person, well, does that sound like such a bad thing? So I do think that as the hurdle rate for investment capital rises, some businesses that currently look like good businesses will actually be exposed to be malinvestment. Because if I can make 30%, 40%, 50% CAGR holding Bitcoin, I'm not going to open another Taco Bell as an example. So yeah, I think there is this period of austerity where folks would rather save, and saving is investing in the future. So that's not a bad thing. No.

Marty Bent [59:05] All right. Any final thoughts? Anything we didn't cover that we should get in here? I think this is very concise. I think we ran through the whole playbook.

Scott Marmoll [59:12] I think it was good. I would just say, I think so. I want to give a shout out to the Bay Area Bitcoiners. They— so my Bitcoin origin story is mostly private. I didn't really sort of visit or talk with folks about Bitcoin in meatspace for a few years. And when I finally did, it was during COVID in San Francisco. And so I was just like dying to talk to another human being. Those guys were the start of like kind of giving me the encouragement to, hey, like you should talk to people in person about Bitcoin because You do a good job of explaining it.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ And then I'm now in Charlotte, North Carolina. That's where we'll hope to stay for the long term. And I'm very involved in that group. So I also want to give a shout out to them. I think I would encourage everyone. And the reason I thought of Bitcoin meetup groups is because I'm hearing exhaustion from like 5-year Bitcoiners who are like, man, like If we get to September of this year and we're not higher, then I'm really in it for the tech at that point. And, you know, I'm in it for the tech too, but the tech is number go up. And I think one of two things is gonna happen in September or by September.

Scott Marmoll ⋮ 'Cause September of this year, the 5-year rolling comp is a $65K high of September 2021. So either Bitcoin's return is gonna look really mediocre, or we're gonna laugh about how worried about the price of Bitcoin we were with the Strato Hormuz stuff going on.

Marty Bent [1:00:36] Yeah.

Scott Marmoll [1:00:37] when you fast forward to September of this year. Put me in that second camp, but otherwise, I'll come back on and I'll help craft a new narrative that you just have to zoom out further. But I would just say, well, I would say what you say, we're going to win. And I'm excited for the future for Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [1:00:51] We're going to win. Go check out the playbook. Let us know what you think. And yeah, if you're a business owner out there, I mean, I think what made me feel confident about writing this with you and now publishing it is that We're living it. Like, TFTC runs on a Bitcoin Standard, 1031 runs on a Bitcoin Standard, CVA as well. And as somebody who's been doing it, I've had Bitcoin on the balance sheet since before Saylor, 2019. It has, I mean, it has helped us reinvest in the business. It has helped us, me as a business owner, grow the stack. And it is a very pivotal tool to our capital stack that, that has benefited us massively over the last 7 years.

Scott Marmoll [1:01:36] Absolutely. And a huge thank you to you, Marty. Uh, your openness to exploring this has been very well received, and, uh, I'm grateful for the partnership.

Marty Bent [1:01:47] So, well, like I said, real recognize real, Scott. So that's all. Go read the playbook. Peace and love. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes A day early and ad-free. Make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time.