Transcription

@0:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

hello everyone and welcome to the shades of entrepreneurship this is your host mr.

Gabriel Flores today I am here with Adam Trexler Adam how are we doing awesome thanks for having me oh folks I am so stoked about

this conversation. So this is actually one of the first times I think I've had an individual that's coming on this show that basically is taking currency and creating a new form.

I'm not going to explain it yet. I'm not going to go into all the details. Adam, first introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your company.

@1:18 - Adam Trexler

Sure. My name is Adam Trexler. I'm the founder and president of Valaurum. We make an innovative form of gold called the The Aurum®.

It looks like a dollar bill made out of gold. And it basically is that the technology underlying it though, it's a nanotechnology we put down individual items of gold into a thin film.

And what it means is that you can have two dollars to five hundred dollars worth of gold in a single bill.

And it basically makes gold affordable, easy to authenticate like paper money, and much more usable to public in a way that it was for two thousand years before gold got so crazy expensive that is the most unique thing i've ever heard anybody start doing but first look i gotta take a step back a little bit let's talk about your beginning venture entrepreneurship what was your first entrepreneurial endeavor i don't talk about this very much great question uh when i was probably 11 years old i had a uh i found out about this thing called a water balloon slingshot and it was this huge mass of surgical tubing and one per you know you'd have two friends hold either side of it like the the part of the y and then the third person would pull back on the surgical tubing when there was a pouch with the water balloon and you could launch a 150 yards and i found out about this and um it's it's kind of funny but negotiated uh to buy them uh wholesale and then after

ties them in the backs of magazines in the classified section, which most of your viewers will not remember. But it used to be popular mechanics, popular size, major magazines, you would have these little ads.

And I used to buy stuff out of them when I was like eight years old. But I sold these water balloon slingshots.

I had a phenomenal margin. And I don't know, I sold them for two or three years that way. And it was a pretty fun little project.

@3:28 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That was the first time I ever had an entrepreneurial project. I love it. So it sounds like you had kind of had the entrepreneurial itch at a very early age.

@3:36 - Adam Trexler

I did. And I came from my dad who had as a CFO of a company that went public. He later worked in venture capital.

so I was around it and really had some real help and kind of a leg up in that way, as I found it, Valaurum.

@3:58 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

know, that's, that's a one. Beauty I feel like one thing I again I have a four year old and one year old folks and one of the things I constantly do Is I take them out to all I they priced sat in more board meetings than they probably care to a care to have throughout their life already?

But again, it's like the exposure the experience you start to learn things and especially at a very young age And now after you started doing slingshots with I gotta tell you folks I remember those things you had the two people on the side arms straight up and those things with lunch I'd love it.

What what what did you transition into after that?

@4:32 - Adam Trexler

Yeah, I went to You know high school College I Actually worked You know through my dad with a number of startups in my early 20s None of them really struck my fancy, but you know I was in that world I was in the venture capital world I was working kind of angel investors and then on a number of startups that didn't really particularly go anywhere

And I said, I'm not, this isn't really for me, I just didn't have a passion for any of the products or any of the startups and the money itself was fun but not for me.

And so I did something totally non-remunerative and became a teacher. And I started an academic career and got my masters and my PhD in the history of money, literature, culture around money.

And I was just fascinated by all sorts of questions about what is money, why is money, what it is, how has that changed in history.

And thought I'd be doing that, I had a pretty successful academic career with appointments and postdocs and that sort of thing publications.

And I learned about this basic technology to atomically deposit gold onto. who, you know, a rectangle with an appreciable amount.

I, I just was transfixed and I, I spent about nine months kind of researching it and getting involved in that and talking to, you know, the engineers who had really started it.

And I said, I gotta find a company around this. And I, I left my academic career and started Valaurum and August 2012 and went from there.

@6:32 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I love it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to pick your academic brain a little bit here. Cause I, we, I mean entrepreneurs, right?

Our goal is kind of essentially to establish generational wealth, right? And then build and support generational wealth for ourselves in our communities.

Now with that said, give us, give us a quick synopsis about money. What is money? How has it changed throughout history?

@6:54 - Adam Trexler

Oh, great question. classical definition of money is that it has, three features. It's a means of exchange or a medium of exchange.

So, you you have something I want to give you that. I give you the money, I get the thing, and we don't have to run around bartering goats for carpentry work.

You know, I don't have to find a carpenter that wants my goat to get something made in my house.

So, you know, it's a medium of exchange. It's a unit of account. So, this is how we count lots of stuff.

In a modern economy, whether it be the value of labor, the, you know, how much I have in my bank account, everything else, it's unit of account.

And then the third thing is, it's a store of value. And the idea of a store of value is, you can imagine if all we had for money was apples, as soon as your apples were added, you'd be in trouble, right?

But what we need to do over is be able to plan, accumulate, and spend in different time levels. So saving for your retirement is one of the key ideas of that kind of store value function of money.

And all different money has different qualities of these three units, but that's the kind of basic thing. Now, what's really interesting is we are living in a time of tremendous monetary innovation.

And so you have all sorts of technology that is sitting on top of classical money or is taking some features of classical money and doing really interesting things about them.

And in that sense, know, the last, I would say 20 years have been transformative to how money functions. I don't think we're done with that.

But I think it's a really exciting time and Valaurum is leading the forefront of some of that innovation.

@9:08 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, let's actually get into Valaurum a little bit. So you're studying for or kind of researching it for almost a decade, right, and started under.

@9:17 - Adam Trexler

All right. I research it for like nine months.

@9:20 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And I'm in. Yeah, yeah.

@9:22 - Adam Trexler

love it. Yeah. Decade nine months, you know, same difference.

@9:27 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

There's a nine in there somewhere folks. And now let's take us to that process. you you're, you're, you get in researching, you're like, okay, I'm in.

What does that first step look like? put nano technology. So maybe you first talk a little bit about nano technology and then talk about how you are able to kind of get into that vertical.

@9:44 - Adam Trexler

Yeah. you know, I was really, I'm really indebted to two serial inventors, Paul Difondoeff or Johansson. They started working on this technology and, excuse me, it's, it's a.

It's a coding technology, so what we're doing is there's a process called sputtering, the bulk rises were one around it, but what you're doing is you're creating a plasma and the highly charged ions in that plasma will hit a gold plate and break off individual atoms of gold and then those gold atoms land on a thin film.

Just think of gold falling onto a piece of plastic like it's snow, excuse me. What makes this nanotechnology though is first of all we are working with individual atoms and plasma and things like that.

Second of all we're able to control that coating thickness to an you. we have better than 1% control over gold that is 1% the thickness of a human hair.

We're talking billions of meters in terms of what we're measuring and depositing, billions. So, you know, you'll remember centimeter, that's 100, we're talking about billions here.

And that's a very difficult expensive technology. It's used, know, related, sputtering is used in things like a microchip manufacturer, where they're talking about, you know, six nanometer features.

They use gold as well. They don't care what the gold costs, because they're making a chip set, you know, a way for that's $10 million.

What we're doing and what we've had to do is really push that sputtering technology in some very distinctive ways.

But we sell products for $2. that have an appreciable amount of gold in them. So we've really had to do a tremendous amount of innovation to make that marketable, but also to have it work and not be this disintegrating thing, but actually live in people's wallets or on a shelf for 20 years.

@12:21 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, and that was actually gonna be my, one of my next questions is how do you kind of make it so it's not gonna destroy itself, right?

So this investment, two dollar, whether it's a two dollar investment, at least you have some ROI in it.

@12:36 - Adam Trexler

How do you kind of make sure it's durable? Yeah, I mean, that's 12 years in counting of research. There are real problems with this.

It wants to fall apart. We're at the point now where you can send our bills through the washing machine and they'll basically be fine.

tough, but that wasn't a straightforward process. there's a lot to do with the polymer, the unique properties of that, how we deposit the gold, and and plenty of trade secrets that should overcome to get there.

But you know, what I'll say is, you know, from my academic research, one of the things I learned was problems that you have to continually work on over a really long period of time are hard, but they're incredibly valuable.

And your listeners will have ideas that would never occur to me. And isn't that, you know, that's one of the most wonderful things about entrepreneurship and innovation.

If you can get it to sort of kind of work, but keep working on the problem, that's one of the most valuable things.

And, you know, I've never been satisfied with our technology. It, I promise you, it's been, we had absolutely brilliant people working on

But for a dozen years, we're not done at all. And continuing to run down specific problems and fix them is what makes you really have a world-class product.

@14:12 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And I'm very proud of the work that we've done there. Yeah, I think it would be hard for us to find an entrepreneur that's actually satisfied.

It's a constant growth. in fact, it's like, quote, people will never have to be successful because they're too busy chasing success.

It's like that old saying, now, one of the things you mentioned too is you essentially wanted to get to the product who is at marketable.

It's not an able start market. Tell me about your marketing. How do you market the product?

@14:43 - Adam Trexler

And then who is your kind of ideal consumer? Those are two separate questions, which you might find interesting. So we primarily sell through marketers and precious metal companies.

It turns out you're So gold is this commodity, I would describe it as a monetary commodity, which is going to make both sides bad, but it's both a physical thing, it's an element, but it also performs all of these monetary functions for people for central banks, etc.

It's an enormous market. Investment grade gold is worth trillions of dollars, has hundreds of billions of dollars a year in turnover, and there's really robust international systems around it.

So we work with huge precious metal retailers, and what we really do is we design products with them. Why people buy gold turns out to be very cultural, and so my PhD was more relevant than I thought, just to have that insight.

Gold is universal, it has a universal value, you can go to any content, except maybe Antarctica, although you could probably-

buy some Antarctica and food, buy it, it's universally valued, but the reasons people buy it are incredibly culturally specific.

And so we're not an expert on how to sell gold to India or Poland or Namibia. So we want to work with a company that has that experience to develop, co-develop products that can wholesale.

We hold the technology, we don't have to own every piece of that vertical chain. So that's an important piece there.

As far as the consumer goes, that's the second part of your question. That's really interesting. What we say is anybody who owns money or uses money.

And it's rare to have something that's so broad. Our customers tend to recognize that Fiat monetary systems are unstable, not a chicken little sky is falling kind of person, and throughout the world there's always a couple of fiat currencies that are failing.

That's just the nature of it. And what we most want is to reach consumers or investors who understand those risks and are looking for a solution.

And what we think is having the units correct is really important. So, you know, we want our products to be for everyone.

A US $100 bill. I've never met a billionaire that threw away US $100 bills. And I've never met anybody with with less money than that either does it.

So we think the correct units are super important and that's what the law. been able to offer the global public.

@18:03 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I really like this strategy, the way you kind of built it up. Because essentially, like you mentioned, it sounds like you're one consumers, right?

You're almost like a manufacturer working with other people, and they customize what their culture will more than likely purchase.

And then that second tier is now, OK, you go sell it to your consumers. And the reason I like it is because you're really leveraging the boots on the ground individuals that are part of the culture.

Tell me what your community loves and needs, and then we'll try to make something that is a value of them, to them.

@18:37 - Adam Trexler

That's a really cool concept.

@18:40 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Now with that, how did you start marketing to those gold metal folks? How did you kind of get in front of them?

assuming, is there a conference? How do you kind of essentially target that kind of specific, again, niched area?

@18:55 - Adam Trexler

How do you target them? Yeah, we went to a lot of conferences. Um, we did a lot of things wrong.

mean, I tried to make products in the beginning and they sucked. And one of the worst ideas I had was, you know, first of all, we didn't have any money.

So I didn't have money for good designers. So the designs were fine. I also didn't understand how important the aesthetic appeal of it would be.

now we have gorgeous artists, you know,-winning pneumismatic artists work on our products. But it didn't start out that way.

I did go to a lot of conferences as we, you know, had the capital to afford them. And it was hard sometimes.

We'd go to a conference like, God, I hope this works. You know, hope I get something out of this, you know, having a booth and just standing there and praying somebody comes up and talks to you.

Um, and you know, we found, uh, really powerful people in that goal space who understood what we were trying to do and said this is transformative.

And, One of the best things I did is very early on I started building a board of advisors because the people I was talking to were far too powerful and demanded far too much money, but they took options and you know we have phenomenal people help us on our way.

@20:29 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I to sell a product or service the conference, the Saturday markets right those things. That's truly like you're trying to find proof of concept right you have your product is somebody willing to reach in their back pocket and pay you for what you have.

Right and that's that's the that's the tricky part and then you mentioned bringing on in the advisory board, you know, tell a little bit about that and the importance of that and how it helped you and your company continue to move forward.

@20:57 - Adam Trexler

The advisory board specifically. You know, I think that one of the most important skills I have is as a listener.

And there are people with tremendously varied expertise from chemists to engineers to, you know, have a former director of the U.S.

government, security printers, people who have lots of experience contracting with foreign governments. Not one lifetime could contain those areas of expertise.

And, you know, I view a lot of my role as the president of Valaurum is to listen to a lot of people who know much more than me and try to put those things together and try to find the best experts I can and whether either directly or indirectly put those things into conversation with each other and then figure out where the opportunities actually are, the opportunities.

innovation, the opportunity for markets, the opportunity to communicate to the public. And honestly, you know, being at a market stall, like you described, I mean, I, I've had thousands and thousands of conversations with everyday people about this thing.

And for many years, the first, you know, a lot of them were like, why would you do that? Why would you want that?

You were bad. But I was really interested in, you know, why did 70% of the people not what did they not understand?

And some of the things that you had to explain to people really shaped how I grew the company. And, you know, some we go to some of those conferences now and it's like, you know, you know, we're sort of, not just me, but you know, we're greeted as like celebrities, because we started one place and now

like, oh my gosh, you know, you've grown to sell millions of these things. yeah, that's a little satisfying. But you really learn from talking to people and the, you know, whatever this means, the average consumer has so much to teach you.

@23:20 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, you know, one thing you mentioned, was like, you know, 70% of the aboriginally of people didn't really know it, didn't really believe what, throughout the research, kind of trying to understand their psyche.

What did you determine was that 70%. What was the thing that you, you know, mentioned through your conversations, how did you begin to tailor your conversations to make it, you know, essentially your elevator pitch, right?

@23:41 - Adam Trexler

So make it really easy to understand. Yeah, there's some really interesting things there. mean, it's a hundred things. I could never go back and figure out how all of my words have changed, you know, go back to 2012 or 2014.

One of the things that I think is profound is You know, I have lived abroad. I've traveled all over the world.

I'm very focused, not just on the highest-end investors, but consumer behavior all over the world. You know, and I was thinking a lot when I founded the company of things like, you know, in the early 2000s, throughout Mexico, throughout Asia, telephone credit cards, you know, the cards that you would use to charge up your cell phone.

These became currency all over the world, and the cell phone companies actually became currency creators, and that's kind of gone away, but it was a really interesting moment, and there's there's a dozen things like that.

So it's very focused on this, like, the scale, you know, and at that time, the rich man in Mexico, you know, created the cell creators, the cell phone network, right?

So, and I may get that slightly wrong, forgive me, this is my academic set coming up, but you get the idea, so a lot of people I spoke to at entrepreneurial conferences, they were like, why do I need $2 worth of gold?

Why do I need $5 worth of gold? I'll go buy $10,000 worth of gold, and I'm like, that's very nice for you, sir.

However, there are a couple billion people who desperately want to own gold, who live in unstable currency regimes, who can't afford a $2,500 coin, the collective value of that is trillions of dollars.

Just as importantly, I challenge you, sir, and I would never say it more computationally, you know, you know, even those of us who have quite a bit of financial privilege.

I certainly want to whip out your $2,000 piece of gold to spend. That's not something I really want to bring out at the 7-Elevenor gas station.

@26:09 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That doesn't sound very safe to me.

@26:11 - Adam Trexler

So again, coming back to, there's an appropriate size to these things, an appropriate value, and conventional gold just can't do that.

So I really had to change that, how I talked about that, and to say, this is the correct value for everybody of any means, and you'll notice I started off that way, not this is gold for the people with least amount of money.

It's not that. It's gold for everybody, made into a standard that's usable by everybody.

@26:47 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, one of the things you also mentioned as, you know, during these conferences, you're learning, you're talking, and you mentioned your first couple of conversations weren't the best.

What were some of the things that you learned through that time that learned? you should actually stop saying from a marketing perspective and start using, like, were there different terms or words that made it a little bit easier for those individuals to understand?

@27:09 - Adam Trexler

Yeah, and it took a long, you know, some of them took a long time. You know, like I was just saying, don't call it cheap gold, right?

Don't call your product cheap. Our product is part of a monetary standard that's worth trillions. It's correct, or it's valuable.

It's actually more valuable, arguably, because it's more usable. And the market has borne that out. gold has the highest premium of any gold product in the world, which is one of our great accomplishments.

Another thing a lot of people would say is, like, what do I do with this? And I didn't have great answers.

And so what I worked on over time was building up a dealer network that would buy it. But there was not one, there was not silver bullet to that.

I couldn't solve that in a day or in a year. And so I worked for 10 in years and we continue to work so that there's a great redemption network of places, know, credible deep market makers who will buy it back because if you can't do that, what are you doing?

You know, it's just a trinket. The other funny thing is I would want to put it into people's hands because without them touching it and seeing it they kind of didn't get it.

And I had so many people think it was a free sample and try to walk off with the gold.

And so learning to, um, ideally politely say to people, oh, that's, that's sale or, you know, oh, yeah, please kind of have it back was very awkward, but it's something I have to go through.

@28:49 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That is too funny. You know, one of the things you just mentioned also is usability. it sounds like you were able to kind of identify a network of individuals that would in fact allow you to

utilize the currency, correct that you create?

@29:02 - Adam Trexler

that correct? Yeah, well, two things there. So one is dealers. So, you know, dealer by definition, they'll sell our product, but they'll also buy it back.

more importantly, what I did is I decided we weren't going to be involved in creating the network that way.

And we would let a marketing company do that in the way that they saw fit. So, you know, one of our customers that's the most successful about that is Goldback.

And they've created a whole barter network across, I think, six states at this point. It's expanding all the time.

But they have thousands of businesses where you can spend gold voluntarily. And that's an extraordinary grassroots movement. But they're, you know, you're able to do to buy insurance, buy groceries, buy gas, and have your house remodel.

When I went to Utah, breakfast, lunch, dinner, all with gold, and they've done a great job of that, and my hats are off to them, what became very clear to me was that Valaurum couldn't do everything, and we would be most successful if there were a lot of stakeholders making a lot of money alongside us.

So I wanted them to do that, and I know that Valaurum is not going to be able to create a network like that in Turkey.

Or in India. We're just not going to be able to do that. We're never going to have the capital to do that.

We don't have the cultural expertise to do that. We don't have the business connections. So, let lots of people make money.

That's been my philosophy. And if you have the incentives right so that lots of people can earn lots of people can participate in what you're doing.

I think that's where you're really successful is if you're making lots of people successful.

@30:57 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And I wish you more. Our entrepreneurs would have that mindset. know, one of the things you mentioned in several times now was value, value, value, value, right?

Not only value to your organization, Valerin, but then value to the gold people, rather purchase your item, then value back to the frontline consumer, right?

The $2, $5 bill of purchasers. piece is so important. I think entrepreneurs have failed to miss that sometimes. It's not about how good or like you mentioned cheap.

I don't want a cheap product. What I want is value. I want something that fills, whether whatever the price I paid for it, I'm still getting a value back for it, right?

@31:39 - Adam Trexler

Absolutely. And in that sense, you know, we're competing with consumer products, which often have no value. You know, if you buy an orum from us, or from a distributor, the extraordinary thing is you're holding something that has had value continuously for 2,000 years.

And I don't expect it. not have value. You know, I have a TV, you know, I TVs in my house that I need to get rid of and they're valueless and they're only 10 years old, right?

That's an extraordinary difference to have something of that kind of millennia durability and that gets back to store of value.

You know, so I'm really proud to contribute that. But then also, I constantly think about what's in it for other people.

And we're still learning about that and we'll be learning about that as long as I run this business because if you're not aligning yourself with other people, you're taking advantage of them.

And I don't believe that ever really works. We want to contribute value to everybody we interact with. And that means you really have to understand them and really have to listen.

@32:56 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, I love your concept in regarding like making Sure. It's beneficial for everyone. You know, some of the folks know that listening, I started nonprofit Latino founders here in the local area.

We are our goal is to help scale a hundred Latino businesses to a million dollar reincarnated revenue in five years.

Now, that does not mean push them to venture capital and somebody else take over the business. Not at all.

I want to tell you about your MVP, your talk about your product market fit. Talk about the average cost of a customer acquisition.

How do you retain those customers, right? Talking about your sales marketing funnel really gets you to a stage where you have operational efficiency because then you can create generational wealth.

My goal, as you kind of mentioned, know, our goal is not to exploit our community. Our goal is to put a spotlight on them to create generational wealth.

We're not taking any equity in their businesses. We're a full on nonprofit. I got an executive director we pay and we continue to scale these either through accelerator or pitch competitions.

A lot of different things here locally. But again, it's kind of like the old saying, all boats ride with the tide kind of thing.

And I think that's kind of where It seems like you're kind of like really truly focusing on that area as well.

@34:04 - Adam Trexler

I think so. hope so. What you're doing sounds wonderful. want to find the win-win. That's one of my core orientations is I don't believe that most negotiation is a zero-sum game.

You know, a good business relationship means that I earn money as you earn money. And how do we construct that with any product or service?

And the extraordinary thing about an economy that I think often gets missed is when you have meaningful exchange, and this is something I've thought about for many years, is a theoretician of money, when you have meaningful exchange, you can walk away with more value than we could do individually.

We create value together. That's what a society is. And when we create value together, we all become sure. And, you know, so how do we structure agreements, whether it's contracts or just, hey, we're going to do this together, so that we're all better off.

That's, that's what I think is, you know, the true heart of entrepreneurialism.

@35:18 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, I almost kind of goes back to the carpenter versus goat analogy, right? Exactly. It goes right back to that where the, the, the goat wasn't as valuable to the carpenter.

And so you had to find something of value to them. But they're also determining how valuable is it to them and how unvaluable is it to you?

And what's the true trade off? know, is, is my carpenter work, is my goat truly worth the work that you're going to give me, right?

@35:43 - Adam Trexler

Is everybody just touching up my paint on the house? I'm not sure if I move my goat. Maybe I'll give you my cat.

No one wants a cat.

@35:49 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

But I'm sorry cat people. I'm joking cats are great. I just don't have any. I'm a dog person. And don't get me.

Don't hate me. you know, it goes back to that point, right? Now, what would you say as you've been building your

company was the most difficult piece of building it.

@36:05 - Adam Trexler

Oh, there's so many difficult things. You know, one thing I'll say is that Valaurum, and I don't think this is true of every business, and it's not even something to be bragged about.

It's just a fact. Valaurum is much more complex than my PhD. In terms of stakeholders, in terms of the underlying scientific processes, in terms of the complexity of the way we mark it.

You know, so it's difficult all together, and bringing all of those elements together. That's really, really hard. You know, I would say that the other hard thing, I really believed in this at the beginning, and getting seed capital is so hard.

And you know, I came from a position of relative privilege in terms of being able to be connected into some angel networks and also be mentored in terms of how do I set up this business.

was an enormous advantage and I would never underplay that. But how do you get set up to start something and keep working on it and maybe eventually leave whatever else you're doing to earn your bread?

It's a tough process. I'm asking people for money is tough. I'm not intrinsically like a shy person in terms of making requests, but if you're not nervous for the people who you're taking money from, you probably should be.

If you don't take that responsibility really seriously, probably you shouldn't be asking for money. I have felt deep, painful obligation to my investors.

and really worked so hard to make that come right. And you're going to get a lot of notes, but there's nothing else to do.

@38:13 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

No, and that's great advice.

@38:16 - Adam Trexler

Yeah.

@38:17 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Because I think a lot of times, people, especially entrepreneurs, I believe, you know, decks get checks, right? company or some obviously paying the loan back or some type of like VC funding isn't always, it's not free, folks.

know, they're either going to want equity in your company, they're going to want to sell, know, scale and sell kind of thing or have that loan back.

You know, so I'm glad you kind of pointed that out because I think sometimes there is this misconception a little bit of when you kind of go the VC route and people kind of have little deer and headlights, but then more importantly, they come to the see their value.

@39:00 - Adam Trexler

of their company and they're sometimes little shell shocked that it's not as valuable as they as they believed in and one of these you mentioned I think that actually helped create that value is that vertical integration right like your value right now is not just the product that you make now but this entire network you have created across the international lines right with all these partners that's now a true value now is what what kind of as you're building out internationally it's like essentially like a cur is it would you consider the currency is it an actual currency what you're creating I would say that we make currency products so we've actually made legal tender currency for seven countries we also make what you would call gold volume which is gold that you invest in for the gold value we also make collectibles we have we've probably made over for two thousand individual products over that time so yeah lots of stuff some of its currency you know and all of it has

these monetary functions, all that is a store of value at some level. That's what I was saying. There's all this monetary innovation and we're coming out with some other stuff that's I'm really, really, really excited about.

That's going to change what people understand money to be.

@40:17 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

without spilling into proprietary information, can you let us know a little bit of some of the things that maybe these listeners could be expected in the future?

@40:27 - Adam Trexler

Yes, there are a couple of them. One is there are real problems with physical objects that can bear interest and we're working on something there.

So there used to be something called a bearer bond. They're in the original die hard. They kind of went out of favor, but it used to be that you could have a piece of paper and in 10 years, it would be worth more than when you started.

Typical currencies work the exact opposite of that by design. controversial, you know, the Fed wants inflation. It has inflation targets.

barrier bomb is the opposite of that. have some really interesting products along that line of their development. And then the second thing is nobody has been able to make a really good physical form of cryptocurrency.

And we have several patents and are working on some really interesting things in that area as well.

@41:30 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yes, I will definitely bring you back to the show when you get to that level because I would say the concept of cryptocurrency, you know, it's kind of interesting because when you kind of look at it, it kind of generally moves with the market, you know, the general sentiment, right?

Because they are relatively big wells. And if they have a majority of the crypto and the majority of the stock in there is sentiment is to sell and they're selling them both.

Well, you're going to see a dip in the market. And I think that's one of the things a lot of folks, you know, in the crypto world have been kind of waiting.

@42:00 - Adam Trexler

for like a crypto was supposed to have its moment when the dollar was super low right crypto was supposed to be that alternative for high but then you saw it dip as well just the most recent presidential election you saw the stock market just ripped this week and crypto was right along with it right theThe Aurum® Bitcoin and you know reaching these you know 79,000 I think it's up there now and so it's very interesting because to your point it's not tangible I can't touch it I can't feel it right yeah and that's not necessarily a problem because it you know I think for you know your kind of first wave of crypto currencies primarily their value is around medium of exchange and speculation what I mean by that is not so much people are not really still buying their Starbucks with bitcoin but what's really cool is the idea that I could move a billion dollars with a single transmission of

you know as an assignment to Bitcoin and there's no intermediary to that. I could literally send you a billion dollars or really I hope Gabriel you could send me a billion dollars and there's no bank involvement and nobody to stop it.

That's an extraordinary idea. That's a world-changing idea. Having said that, I am not convinced still that traditional cryptocurrency is a store of value.

think it's mostly bought for speculation, which is the exact opposite of a store of value. Having said that, the emergence of stable coins, so tether, circle, kinesis is one of the major glint who are putting other monetary instruments like dollars or gold or their proxies onto a blockchain so that you can have that tremendous performance in terms of medium of exchange, but a different kind of stability or a different store of value, that's really interesting as well.

I'm a student of the space. I've been following blockchains since 2012. We made our first cryptocurrency bill, think, in 2015.

You know, we've been interested in the space and a huge believer in gold, but I also don't think that there's one true standard or, you know, one true money.

I think I'm a monetary technologist and fascinated by the whole space.

@44:27 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I love it. You know, and, and, and, and folks, I can tell you right now, me and Adam are not, and we're not investors.

@44:32 - Adam Trexler

We're not advisors. not telling you how to invest.

@44:34 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

If anybody is out there, I know Adam doesn't want to send me a billion dollars, but if anybody's out there listening wants to send me a billion, I'll be, I'll take it.

I had no problem. Now, Adam, give us what advice. even doing this, you know, for some time now.

@44:51 - Adam Trexler

You're learning a lot of different things internationally and nationally, right?

@44:55 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

What advice would you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?

@45:00 - Adam Trexler

Oh, so much, and I hope any of it's helpful. You know, I think try to figure out what your product is and what makes it different.

You know, what is the real value you're offering somebody? And you don't have to have that perfectly nailed down, but darn it, work on it.

Work on it relentlessly. Make your product awesome and, you know, never stop working on that. Never stop thinking about how do I make it better for somebody, whatever better needs.

Second thing related to that is, you know, I heard this recently, if you want venture capital, you better be working at a global level.

I don't else can do or on a path to that. And most businesses don't deserve venture capital and don't matter.

It doesn't matter. I know so many people who got extraordinarily wealthy doing things that on the face of it anybody else could do and they just did it better.

And that's fine. That's a different kind of entrepreneurship. And it's honestly the way most people make money. if you want to live in the kind of startup technology realm or you know that Valaurum is in, you better do something and you better, you better be relentlessly globally the best.

@46:31 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, I completely agree. I take a good example of like Apple like back in the day when we had the just the iPod.

Everybody's like, it can't get better than this, right? And then it continued to evolve and evolve and evolve and now you're like, man, it's evolved so much.

Now you're basically competing like, Android, Apple, you got all these different ones, although I'm sorry, Android folks, Apple, I still think is king.

But nonetheless, right, you're constantly getting better and better and better. And the value of back to the consumer right now I don't have the blackberry email I have my own you know I have outlook right there I have all of these things so yeah I completely agree just like constantly innovating and there is a lot of money to be thrown around I think the BC's kind of took a hit during that the pandemic we're starting to see them come back but at the end of the day you know you might send out billions of emails and they'll probably tell you to send your decks and you're probably going to hear a lot of no's and that's okay because you'd rather get a no quicker so you understand if you need a pivot and then take those like Adam mentioned bring in an advisory board people that are not close to you but within that sector either or vertical operations marketing you know individuals that can truly tell you without you know you taking offense to it whether your business is on the right track or if you need to pivot or if you just need to actually go ahead and scrap it all to that together to start thinking of something new because those are your consumers right and like you know how to mention listening to your consumers that's why it was important

to go out build these relationships at international companies because they know the consumer they don't know market they know how that culture of what they consider valuable right and so kind of understanding like at the end of the day there's things I know I know there's things I know I don't know but there's so much I do not know that I do not know you know and that those are the areas that you know collaboration and relationship building across the across the either national international lines is going to help you evolve as a business and as a person right culture you're just getting cultures going back to Starbucks he went to Milan and figure out oh you want to bring coffee back over here and that's how we have Starbucks you know so just think of the the differentations of traveling exposure cultures and really kind of using that as innovation folks you in that moment to really innovate something new and think about how can I help support this you know or how can I bring value not support how can I bring the value right always always bring it back to the value now Adam well

But one of things, you know, people are interested. Maybe they want to learn more about you. Maybe they want to purchase one of these items.

@49:07 - Adam Trexler

How do they find you online? How do they purchase some of your products? Cool. As far as purchasing it, just Google the orum and you'll find literally hundreds of retailers, you know, some major reputable precious metal sites, sell them and I'll let them, you know, do their own research about where they can find the most inexpensively and, you know, shop around.

Our website is Valaurum, V-A-L-A-U-R-U-M.com. And there's a tremendous amount of information about the company, you know, other links and that's a great place to start to learn more.

@49:48 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I love it and get folks, if you forget all that and you're trying to go, go and pop over the shades of dot com, subscribe to the newsletter.

We're going to have all this information. We're to have a transcription of Adam's conversation on the website. Also you have is a blog post that's going be dedicated to this conversation pulling out some insights of this conversation for you.

The listeners will also have Adam's contact information as well as links back to their website.

@50:09 - Adam Trexler

So you can go ahead and check those out and then like Adam mentioned, know, take take that opportunity to go learn more, figure out what retail spaces are available out there for your team to, you know, capture it and then go from there.

Thanks, Gabriel.

@50:24 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Adam, thank you again so much for your time. really do appreciate it. Are those people listening at home?

@50:28 - Adam Trexler

Before leave Adam, there any words you have to say for the listeners? No, just, you know, embrace the adventure and your, you know, my dad actually gave me this advice and he said, you know, he said it several times over the years he said this is going to be hell, but you're never going to want to do anything else after it.

You you're going to have ups and downs, but if you're on a real adventure, there has to be risk.

And so embrace that risk, live in it, and You know, that that edge is where you find the real value we've been talking about.

@51:07 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

If you want adventure, you have to have some risk and that is a cool to live by. Adam, thank you again so much again, folks.

Go and check out the shades of each dot com subscribe to the newsletter. We're going to have all this information, transcriptions as well, the blog dedicated to this back links, really, really cool stuff.

I'm going to go and check it out because I was actually looking at it earlier and Adam mentioned their artists are freaking phenomenal folks.

And you got to check out their website. is really cool what they're able to do and have gold on it again.

I'm I was very intrigued. I was really excited about this conversation. So again, folks, please check it out on the shades of E dot com.

You can also follow us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and tiktok and just search for at the shades of E.

Thank you and have a great night.