The Marriage Of Real Estate And Blockchain with Henry Elder
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Episode Summary:
Henry Elder comes from a four generation of Los Angeles real estate professionals, yet he made his own way in the world when he got out of Pepperdine. He was going to go to law school and decided to go work for a hedge fund instead, and then pivoted again and went into the world of blockchain. The lessons he’s learned along the way starting his own company of surrounding yourself with people you trust as well as people who have complementary skill sets, and finally how he found a confidence at a very young age that made it contagious so that people would want to do deals with him is something you won’t want to miss. Henry delves into the blockchain technology and tokenized real estate, and talks about the concept of marriage between real estate and blockchain.
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Listen To The Episode Here
The Marriage Of Real Estate And Blockchain with Henry Elder
Henry Elder is the guest on the podcast. He comes from a four generation of Los Angeles real estate professionals. He made his own way in the world when it got out of Pepperdine. He was going to go to law school and decided to go work for a hedge fund instead and then pivoted again and went into the world of blockchain. The lessons he’s learned along the way, starting his own company of surrounding yourself with people you trust as well as people who have complementary skill sets. Finally, how he found a confidence at a very young age that made it contagious, so the people would want to do deals with him is something you won’t want to miss.
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Our guest is Henry Elder who is also a friend of mine. He’s the Co-Founder of Digital Asset Advisors, which facilitates the tokenization of any asset including equity ownership. Henry and his team lend their deep experience across compliance, finance, tax, blockchain technology and most importantly to me, strategy to the clients around the world with projects that they currently have active on both coasts of the Middle East and Asia. An early client was Slice.Market which you might have heard of, one of the first platforms for tokenizing real estate in the US. Henry serves as Director of Origination and Investment there. Before that, he was involved with over $1 billion of domestic investments while working in real estate private equity and investment banking. He comes from four generations of Los Angeles real estate professionals. It’s rare enough to meet a native let alone someone who’s family’s been in the town that long. Welcome, Henry.
Thank you. It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.
I want to ask you to go back to your own story of origin. If you don’t mind, take us back to what was it like with that history growing up in LA. Is it, “We’ve always been in real estate. It’s in your blood. You must go into this. You have no other choices,” or did you start going to open houses or going to commercial construction sites? Tell us a little bit about how that started and what impact that had.
It was very much one of those, “This is in your blood,” type of things. My family has been in this industry for four generations. After four generations you see both the good and the bad. There have been incredible businesses built and fortunes made and poor decisions made that have brought a lot of turmoil back to a renaissance of sorts. You get to see all of these different ways that people can invest in real estate. The right way to do it, the wrong way to do it and how to deal with the interpersonal conflicts and various family members. It’s very applicable today since we’re going out to vote and it gives you a good idea of how politics works. Some of my earliest memories were visiting my father who ran the family company for a while, visiting him in his big office and being absolutely blown away. In my mind, he was a titan in the industry.
He’s well known in the industry, but to the little five-year-old me, he was an absolute god. In my mind, there was nothing more than I would ever want to do than go into real estate and continue that legacy. That followed me all through college. I studied political science with the goal of going in as a real estate lawyer and going from there. What I found quite quickly after I graduated college is that law is an industry that appeals to a certain type of person. It can sometimes be difficult to find those types of people. I went to the law firm and I took a large number of lawyers out to lunch to get their perspective on the field. Whether or not it would be something that I should go into and what specific part of the field I should go into. What I found by and large probably about 95% of lawyers I took out to lunch either said, “Don’t go into this industry. If you are going into this industry, go into it to learn a lot to go do something else.”
I thought to myself I’m not the person who wants to spend five to eight years building a basis in one industry so that I can go into another one. I would rather go do the thing that I want to do. It was Thanksgiving and I was at a family event speaking with a cousin of mine who works in the hedge fund industry. I was telling him how I was struggling with this. I had taken the LSAT. I was applying to law schools. I was on the path towards committing myself to this. He shared with me that he had almost the exact same struggle where he had originally meant to be a lawyer and quickly found out that it was not quite what it was cracked up to be. He decided to explore something else and ended up working in a hedge fund. He recommended to me that I participate in their internship program. I did that and I applied for it. I got in. I moved to San Francisco for a few months. I worked at this hedge fund. It’s called ValueAct Capital.
At the time that I was there, ValueAct was taking on Microsoft to reform the company and push out Steve Ballmer especially. I’m sitting there. I’m 23 years old. I’m fresh out of college. These guys are talking about strategies for bending a multibillion-dollar corporation to their will. I’m blown away. When I was five years old, my father seemed the absolute pinnacle of corporate professional achievement. Then here I am listening to these guys. I’m 23 years old and I’m like, “This is what I want to be.” I end up coming back to Los Angeles afterwards. I started looking for a job in finance. I’m absolutely smitten at this point. I end up working at a company called George Smith Partners which does real estate investment banking in Century City. I truly started my finance career in a professional capacity and I loved it. I was doing all these real estate deals all over the country. $200 million deals here in LA, $50 million deals in Dallas, $100 million deals in New York. From there I move onto a company called Latitude Real Estate Investors.
[bctt tweet=”Confidence is contagious. Surround yourself with people you trust.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s a large amount of money. Our audiences will be fascinated. You’re young and you’re closing deals in the $200 to $250 million range. What was your biggest surprise? Was it how easy it was or how complicated it was? What was your takeaway from doing those deals?
It exposed something to me that I have struggled with my entire career. I walk into this place, green behind the ears, trying to figure out my place here. I’m working for one of the founders of the company, a guy named Gary Tenzer. He brought me on and he was like, “I need you to run deals for me. I need you to call these 50 people to get this deal signed up.” I was thinking to myself. “What value do I have to these people? How do I get my foot in the door? Why will they take up my call?” I was calling people and I was like, “I work on Gary Tenzer’s team. You have worked together before. Please answer my call. I have a deal you may want to look at.” Some people are picking up the line, but they’re treating me exactly the way that I introduced myself. Which is as someone who has no confidence in himself. It wasn’t until maybe four or five months in that I realized that any of these guys will pick up my call if I simply call them and tell them I have a deal. That’s all I need to do.
I don’t need to qualify myself by saying, “I’m associated with this individual,” or “You’ve done business with someone I know.” All we need to do is call them and say, “I have a great deal. You’ll want to hear more about it. Here are some of the terms. Give me a call back when you have a second.” Once I started doing that and I was more confident in myself and the value that I had to offer, everyone treated me differently. My voicemails were returned, my emails were answered. As long as you portray yourself as a lackey, people who were trying to get business done don’t want to take the time to educate you on how business needs to be done. They want to get business done. If you portray yourself as someone who knows how to get business done and knows what their value-add is, people are likely to do business with you.
There’s a great line of insight there that if you’re confident, then people want to do business with people that are confident. It’s that simple. Is there a big difference between closing a deal of $25 million versus $250 million or is it just a zero in your head?
It’s just a zero. You may be calling different people. In terms of what the process, the types of due diligence that you need to do and the things that you need to know, it doesn’t change that much. Particularly in real estate, real estate is almost like professional sports. You can drill down each property into a series of numerical metrics. Those metrics are exactly the same across virtually every property. Every baseball player has a batting average and every basketball player has a field goal percentage. With real estate, it’s what’s the price per square foot? What’s the rent per square foot? What are the rental coms? If it’s a $200 million deal, those metrics are still the same. It’s a larger magnitude. Real estate is like sports and that it can be boiled down to a series of numbers. You have your batting average with baseball players, with basketball players they have their assists. With real estate, you have price per square foot and rental rates. Whether it’s a $200-million property or a $25-million property those numbers are the same because at the end of the day the way that you’re getting to that valuation is based on those same metrics. There might be more square feet right. There might be a higher rent but it’s still the same numbers.
Real Estate And Blockchain: People don’t want to take the time to educate you on how business needs to be done right. They just want to get the business done.
It’s still a mental game. There are some people that get so afraid, whether it’s their salary or a deal that you’ve got to stretch yourself outside of your comfort zone especially when you’re starting out or if you’re asking for investors to invest in your company. The difference between $1 million versus $10 million, if you’re not confident with it and what you’re going to do with the money then neither would the investors be. That’s a great lesson there. From there you moved to Latitude Real Estate Investors who you’re dealing with bridge debt. How different was that?
It wasn’t too different. The biggest difference was that instead of being the party that brought all the other parties to the table, I was controlling one side of the table. We were bringing the actual capital to the deals, which was an interesting position to be in. If I was worried about the value that I was bringing at George Smith Partners, it’s not something you have to worry about when you’re representing a company that’s going to write a $40 million check.
An analogy would be the difference between hosting a dinner party at a restaurant versus owning the restaurant and inviting people. Would that be close?
That’s accurate.
You’re bringing in the cash and the people as opposed to putting people together.
Once we had a deal under contract, if I picked up the phone and I asked for something, that thing would be delivered. If I called someone and I was like, “We have two days to get this done. I need it done within the next 48 hours,” it would get done within 48 hours. When you’re working to bridge debt fund, it’s a fairly commoditized product. When I was going out to brokers and property owners and trying to get them to use my product, I had to figure out how to sell it to them. That’s where the difficulty came from because that was the difference between me and the 50 other bridge debt lenders that we had out there. That was where I learned sales techniques. You figure out how to differentiate yourself from the rest of the competition. I was lucky in that regard for working at Latitude because it was extremely well-known. It had been around for sixteen years and it had been through a couple of cycles at that time. When I was going out and I was pitching to people, that was what I relied on. “We are like a grandfather of this industry. You can go put your faith in one of these new upstarts and then get left at the altar scrambling for a replacement or you can go with us. We’ve been around for this long because people believed in us, people trust us and because we don’t re-trade or drop deals.” We put out an application that is our solemn if not legal promise that we will fund this deal.
[bctt tweet=”Go do the thing that you really want to do.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When you’re selling anything that is somewhat seen as a commodity, it seems to me like what you were doing was painting a picture for people of what life would be like with you and the history that you bring to the table of stability and competence so that they can sleep at night. You’re tapping into the emotions of that to differentiate why us versus why somebody else. Anytime you’re pitching anything always the question comes down to two things. Why are you the right choice? Why is now the right time? That differentiation of the team from a standpoint of our history but saying, “We’ve been around a long time,” is not enough in my humble opinion. You need to connect the dots, which it sounds like you did so that you won’t be left at the altar by somebody who hasn’t been through this before. Our experience gives you peace of mind. All of that is a great way to sell something no matter what your selling that allows you to stand out from other people. Then you had this moment of insights, a-ha moment. Those, “What am I doing with my life? Am I happy?” You’re too young to have a midlife crisis but you did have a moment where you went, “I’m not a lawyer. I love doing this and I’m good at it. There’s something else.”
I thought to myself, “Four generations of real estate. I’m doing well on my own.” I made it a point of mine not to rely on the family connections to build my own real estate career. Here I was at Latitude nothing to do with the family company. Nothing I had done previously had anything to do with family companies. I’m feeling pretty proud of myself. My then girlfriend and now fiancé was working at a company called Gem. Gem is here in Venice and they build enterprise blockchain applications. Through her, I was getting introduced to all of these people in the blockchain space. One of those people was this gentleman by the name was David Bailey. I met David Bailey the owner of Bitcoin Magazine who was dating my fiancé’s roommate at the time. David was the complete opposite of the buttoned-up, very conservative real estate people, who I had been interfacing with to that point. David was all about Bitcoin. He was very much a Bitcoin maximalist. At first, his appearance and demeanor and all of that seemed exactly what I would associate with someone who was interested in Bitcoin. At that time, it was somewhat fringe and I don’t think anybody from real estate thought that it was something to be taken seriously. Over time listening to David talk about Bitcoin and the blockchain industry as a whole, I started to become more and more interested in it.
In December 2016, we spent New Year’s with David and Emily in Nashville. I think of that as my blockchain baptism. It was four days of concentrated look at what exactly was going on behind the scenes in the blockchain world. It gave me a very early look at what was going on in the ICO’s space. When I came back to Los Angeles, I quickly realized that this created a new capital market. That new capital market would provide new sources of funding for any business venture. I also realized quite quickly that this new capital market would need to be regulated. When I came back to Los Angeles, I started exploring how to tap this capital market to raise a real estate fund specifically because that’s what my expertise was. I called two friends of mine, Paul Monsen who I worked with at the investment bank and Mark Rutter who is one of my oldest friends and is a moderating influence.
Real Estate And Blockchain: Real estate is almost like professional sports that you can drill down each property into a series of numerical metrics.
Paul is like an absolute steam engine. If you get him excited about an idea, he will make it a reality. Mark is very cerebral. He’s absolutely brilliant. He’s a lawyer. I knew that if I took an idea to him and if he got excited about it then that was a good indication that that idea had some serious legs. Mark and Paul got excited about it. We started putting together a team to explore how we could compliantly tap this capital market. At the same time, we started hosting Meetups in Los Angeles called The Blockchain Hideout to educate people on this technology. Also, to take the crowd’s temperature on securities and regulation in this market. Blockchain Capital did their raise in March of 2017. That was the first regulated compliance security token.
Nobody seemed to care. ICO mainly started taking off. Everybody was raising $10 million to $100 million in ten minutes. That was all that anybody cared about. We were having these meetups. We were telling people this company did compliantly. This is probably the model going forward for these. A lot of these ICOs are being conducted in a non-compliant manner. People did not like hearing that. We would get shouted down. We would have people stormed out of the meetups in anger. In October and November, Science Blockchain did their raise and fell somewhat short of the dollar amount that they been targeting. That indicated to us that this concept, although we think it’s interesting and it is the future is not quite ready for prime time. Neither the investor demand nor the community acceptance for security tokens exists yet in a mature form. We showed our idea, but at the same time, we were absolutely bitten by the blockchain bug.
Paul and I started Digital Asset Advisors and said, “We love real estate. We’re good at it. There is an entire world of other stuff out there that we can take part in and make a true impact in the formation of an entirely new industry.” With that, we entered the space and our first client was Slice, which was building a platform for tokenizing real estate. Specifically, commercial real estate, specifically for sale to international investors. One of the greatest and original use for the blockchain is the ability to transact large or small value amounts internationally across borders with very little friction. This lends itself incredibly well to commercial real estate because assets here in the United States are very desirable. However, they are not easy for international investors to access. When you have a situation where the majority of wealth sits offshore, but the majority of desirable investable assets sits onshore. If you can create a pipeline to facilitate the frictionless investment of that wealth into those assets, then that’s a winning business case right there.
[bctt tweet=”Figure out how to differentiate yourself from the rest of the competition.” username=”John_Livesay”]
If I’m to sum up the problem you’re solving at Digital Asset Advisors, it is simply that there’s a lot of wealth overseas that wants to invest in commercial real estate in the US. There are regulations preventing them from easily doing it. It also typically requires huge amounts of money. By using blocking technology, you create this almost like an oil pipeline that takes something from one location to the other and allows it to be fractionalized. It allows people to invest in an asset. In this case Slice is offering commercial real estate that’s never been available before and certainly not in small chunks.
That’s what Slice is doing. I should carefully bifurcate Slice and Digital Asset Advisors.
You helped craft this. It’s the problem you saw, but they’re not the only ones with this problem. What you bring to Slice is the understanding of real estate and blockchain combined.
Real Estate And Blockchain: One of the greatest and original use cases for the blockchain is the ability to transact large or small value amounts internationally across borders with very little friction.
For Slice, yes. We started working with Slice when it was just the two co-founders. They brought on a third co-founder long after we were working with Slice. We worked with Slice exclusively for five months, helping them build their platform. We were helping them figure out the thorny issues of allowing access to foreign investors because there’re tax and regulatory burdens that come with bringing in foreign investors. We need to figure out how to solve that. We were helping them find a pipeline of real estate to bring to the platform, creating due diligence processes that institutional investors would appreciate, investment memos and underwriting models. In that case, our real estate experience was immediately applicable. Real estate is not the only industry that will be impacted by blockchain. Our basic knowledge of finance, economics, blockchain technology and the network that we have built out was applicable across multiple industries and clients. We had the benefit of having worked with Slice and created this high profile and survived for long enough because there was a shakeout of service providers in the spring of 2018.
In the summer of 2018 and fall all the sudden all these people who we been in contact with and all these companies that we were talking to at conferences wanted our help as well. In the winter of 2017 and the winter of 2018, we would go to conferences and they would be absolutely full of people. Every other person you met was some sort of a service provider saying that they could do this and they could do that. By the summer of 2018, you’re going to conferences and none of those people were there anymore. All that’s left were the people who are doing things. Us sticking around long enough and working on a high-quality project like Slice gave us the legitimacy. Where when we went to people when we were like, “You have a problem, we can solve it.” They will believe us off the bat. We went around and we signed up three or four additional clients in completely unrelated industries. Each one of those we’ve been able to apply our knowledge and our skill sets to help them effectuate their business plans. Even to help them put together a legitimate business plan. There are so many good ideas out there for uses of blockchain technology, but there are a lot of people who don’t have the experience of running a company.
[bctt tweet=”Surround yourself with people that compliment your skill sets and open up your point of view so that you don’t end up with a tunnel vision.” username=”John_Livesay”]
They don’t understand financials or they don’t understand what a business financial should look like. While they have an idea of how they can apply blockchain technologies, they don’t know who the best partner is to build the technology or which protocol they should be building on that can utilize their idea of the best. Our position in the middle of all of these different service providers because we work with the issuance platform. We work with the security lawyers. We work with the broker-dealers. We work with the protocols. We work with tech firms. The different disparate parts that you either pull together in order to successfully execute an asset tokenization or a security token offering, we know them all. We can shepherd anyone of these clients through that process and introduce them to the different players and the different service providers and say, “For what you’re trying to do this is the best guy, but these guys are also very good. This is the pros and cons of each one. Let’s sit down with each one of them. We’ll walk you through the platforms and then you decide. We’ll run that process for them because we already have a relationship with all these different guys.
That’s like curating three different businesses. The technology, the protocols, the compliance, the tax implications and the business model. If you’re maybe good at two, but not all three of those things where you need somebody else who’s done it before to say, “Use GoChain versus ERC20.” All those in the weeds kinds of questions that you have to decide while managing the compliance issues and all the other things to make an asset-backed token. It can get overwhelming even if someone’s got a lot of business experience to try and figure it out by yourself. To me, the real value you bring is relationship, insights and curation which saves time, which gets you to market faster. That’s how I connect the dots of the real outcome of what working with you looks like.
If you punch in security token issuance platform in Google, you’ll see twenty different platforms. How do you know which ones are legitimate, which ones have done an issuance and which ones can perform what they say they can? We know that. That’s something that we’re facilitating some of the issuances that they’re doing. We know who’s doing what. We consider ourselves like the guide to this world. You want to understand it, you want to be a player, you want to know how to do it, we’ll help you with all of that.
I think of you as a Sherpa helping people climb Mount Everest. What last piece of advice would you have for someone who wants to get involved in the blockchain, make a career change. If they say, “I want to get into asset back tokens and still have people excited about it.” They may not have the volatility of a Bitcoin but there’s still some upside. What insights and advice do you have for the industry in general?
My big takeaway would be twofold. Surround yourself with people that you absolutely innately trust. Make sure that those people compliment your skill sets. Open up your point of view so that you don’t end of the tunnel vision. Also, this industry is so full of data. It’s changing at such a rapid pace that newbies who are coming into it, it’s quite easy to be overwhelmed by it. When you have a good idea and you’re bringing it to the market, there are a lot of people who will tell you that it’s a bad idea. They’ll shoot it down with a bunch of stuff that you may not understand. In an industry as fast moving as this one, it’s like drinking from three fire hoses. It’s quite easy for somebody to shoot down any idea. If you stick to your guns and you find someone who also supports you and believes you that it’s a good idea, don’t be overwhelmed but don’t be intimidated by the naysayers.
You went through that yourself when you and Paul were starting your own little meetup group. People are like, “What compliance? Get out of here. We don’t care about that.” You’ve lived it and you’re walking your talk. I can’t thank you enough for sharing your journey. You are certainly on an exciting trajectory. You have long since proven yourself separate from your family’s business especially by jumping into the blockchain, not just the real estate but in other areas. It’s going to be fun to watch where you go and which companies are fortunate enough to get to work with you.
Thank you, John. It was a pleasure to be on here.
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From On Air Anchor To Blockchain with Elsa Ramon
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
One of the keys to success is authenticity. You can’t fake that, and Elsa Ramon has it. She exudes authenticity and effervescent energy on camera. Until recently, Elsa was the weekend evening anchor for CBS in Los Angeles. She made the big decision to leave that industry and her successful career and go out and start getting involved in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. From on air anchor to blockchain, Elsa shares how she made that big decision, what her future goals are, and how you can embrace new technology and still use your old skills in this new world that’s being disrupted every day. She also shares some secrets of what makes a good story.
Listen To The Episode Here
From On Air Anchor To Blockchain with Elsa Ramon
Our guest is Elsa Ramon. She was recently the weekend evening anchor for CBS in Los Angeles. She is a five-time Emmy Award nominee for her excellence in reporting and anchoring. She has worked as an anchor reporter in places like San Antonio, Phoenix, and Dallas in addition to LA. She got her first job on air in Palm Springs. She graduated from UC Irvine with a BA in English Literature. One of her other important accomplishment is she’s the mother of two children, Bella at fourteen and Zev who is five. Elsa, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me. I love talking to you.
Your effervescent energy on camera, I’m fortunate enough to have had the chance to meet with you in person and it’s the same. One of the keys to your success is your authenticity. You can’t fake that. That is the key to one of your successes. The people that are reading to this are always interested in hearing people’s story of origin, their particular journey. You can jump in from when you were at UC Irvine or even go back further to when did you decide that you wanted to be on camera as an anchor?
It was when I was eleven years old. Before then, I thought I wanted to be a doctor. I thought that was a fascinating career. I was the person that naturally wanted to help people, so I thought being a doctor would be cool. We were living in Austin, Texas at the time. My dad is from Austin, my mom is from LA. We had moved back to Austin and been living there for a couple of years. The woman who lived out on the street, Martha Cerna, I did not know she was a producer for a kid’s television news show that aired on the NBC affiliate in Austin called Kids World. I always found excuses to try to ride my bike past his house, come over, or try to rally all the kids on the street to go play over at Jacob’s house because I had a crush on her son.
Apparently she saw something while we were always over there playing that made her ask my parents if I would be allowed to come down to the TV station and audition for the new season of Kids World. My parents thought about it because my dad didn’t want me to do it. He thought I would get tangled up in this world of on air, things that he hears through the tabloids and all that stuff. My dad’s a real pragmatic guy, Navy, old-school, old-fashioned. He didn’t like the idea of me being in that spotlight and that exposure. My mom was totally opposite and said, “You should let her do this.” Ultimately, my mom won out. I went down to the NBC affiliate in Austin, KXAN, and auditioned.
They had twelve spots open. They were going to get six kid anchors and six kid reporters. That audition day, there was a ton of kids in there. Long story short, I made the cut. I was at eleven years old, shooting stories with a producer and sitting in the editing process and voicing over the pieces that she wrote and going on air with it and fronting it as a reporter at eleven. That was it. I changed what I wanted to do from that point on.
[bctt tweet=”Secret to a great story is the people in it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What a wonderful experience to find something you love and are good at, at such a young age, and then go from there. You’ve gone on to have such success, what do you think makes a good story? Whether you’re pitching to get a startup funded, pitching to get new clients to hire you or get customers for your business, storytelling is the key to that. Clearly to be a good reporter, and anchor, you know what a good story is. What do you look for when you’re deciding what stories to cover and how to make them memorable?
It comes down to the people who are in the story. You have a story. A lot of people might have the same story. It’s the people behind it that make all the difference. How have they learned from their story? How can we connect to them from what they’ve been through, what they experienced, and what they learned? How willing are they to let you in to learn? That’s the key. It’s vulnerability on both ends. It’s not just the person who is willing to sit down in front of the camera, take that leap and put their story out there. That takes a lot of courage, a lot of guts, and support. Whether it’s a good story, even a bad story, a story we learn from, they have to be vulnerable. They’re showing they are vulnerable by agreeing to be on camera with you and tell their story.
I never took that for granted because that takes a lot for people to make that decision. It takes vulnerability on my end too. I have to let the people know on the other end that they are being accepted and received and the trust that they’ve put in me, is not be taken for granted on my end either. I want them to know that I have the utmost respect and care for their feelings and their experiences because I’m human too. I have a story too, and there are a lot of things I can relate to as well. I want them to know that and feel that right away. It’s people. If you don’t have the people behind a pitch, a story, whatever it is to connect to and endear to, then I don’t think you have anything.
I love what you said. It could be the exact same story, but it’s the people that make it unique and compelling. I hear that from investors all the time that they’re investing in the team. Of course people, when they’re deciding who to buy or who to hire, they want to buy from people that they trust, like, and know. That’s what you’re gifted at, letting people get all that intimacy in a short amount of time in a segment. Would you share one of your favorite stories that you covered in your career? Whether it’s CBS or before?
I don’t know that this was my favorite. This was definitely not a favorite. It was a turning point, and extremely important in my career. I was at my first television job, my first on air job, I should say. It wasn’t my first TV job because before then I had spent about two years working as a production assistant and behind the scenes at KNBC in Los Angeles. I graduated from UC Irvine, I was an intern and I was lucky enough to be offered a position as a production assistant before I graduated from college. I had my foot in the door already. Production assistant ran scripts to the anchors and ran out and grabbed sound bites for the reporters. We were unpaid utility players. I was learning the ropes that way.
I did that behind the scenes before I got my first on-air job as an anchor reporter in Palm Springs in 1996. I had been at the job for a couple of months. Before then I was trying hard to learn the ropes. If you’re learning a sport, to play tennis or golf. When you’re first learning something, you’re concerned about the mechanics of it. Golf, head down, swing back, arms a certain way, stand a certain way and you’re so involved with the mechanics. That’s how I was at the beginning of my career on my first on-air job. I was concerned about the mechanics, the story, composition, beginning, middle, end, and best video first.
On Air Anchor To Blockchain: When you first are learning something, you’re concerned about the mechanics of it.
I was focused on that. I wasn’t seeing the bigger picture. I hadn’t learned yet that it was about the people, until there was this story of this woman who was coming into Palm Springs through the mountains on a motorcycle to come to a family reunion. She was a Harley rider and she was going to ride her motorcycle into Palm Springs to see the family. A lot of people cut through the mountain if they’re coming from Orange County, San Diego through to Palm Springs. She was on that mountainous trail and that mountainous road, she went off the side and was killed. She flew down about 500 feet or more. The family started to become concerned. They eventually found her, at first they became concerned. Where is she? She hasn’t shown up. She should be here by now. They couldn’t reach her.
We’d only had cell phones for a couple of years at that point and they couldn’t reach her on the cell phone. It started to become clear to them that something probably bad happened and they started retracing the steps, the path she would have taken. After calling the fire department, police, and everybody getting involved, they found her. They found the crash scene down 500 feet below. It was horrific. It was sad. It was a really hot summer day. The whole road was blocked off. Fire engines, paramedics, police officers, they were setting up a recovery effort to rappel down the mountain and recover her body. The whole family had come in from parts all over the country, they were all there on the side of the road.
The family reunion turned into this horrible tragedy and they were all there waiting for the fire department to bring up her body. They were all crying and bawling on the side of the road. It was terribly sad and so horrific and so heart-wrenching that I realized at that point that this is not about the mechanics of putting together a story. This is an entire family that’s been shattered by this tragedy. They were all in town for this wonderful time to reconnect with family members, to catch up with each other, take the pictures and talk about the time they had that great family reunion. Now, that was forever marked by her death.
The fact that they even talked to me while they were waiting on the side of the road through their tears, I was blown away that they gave me that trust and that honor in the middle of their tragedy. From that point on, I thought I will never take people’s pain or what they’d been through for granted. I hope to God people don’t have to go through something like this, but doing this for 21 years I’ve seen horrible things. I’ve also seen amazing things of the human spirit and how people come together and rally together when there’s been tragedy to help, to donate. We’ve seen it too as a country during 9/11. We’ve all seen it. During natural disasters and fires, we’ve all seen how people come together and donate money, time, food and clothes. That never ceases to amaze me every time there is something bad that happens. People come together, communities come together.
[bctt tweet=”Blockchain gives people freedom.” username=”John_Livesay”]
My big take away from that was when something is intense and emotional, the training wheels come off the bike riding of, “Am I doing this right? What’s the structure?” You’re in the moment and it’s a heartfelt connection because you trust that the skills are there. For the audience reading, when you’re giving a pitch or trying to get someone to hire you or trying to get a new customer, if you can get back to your purpose and your original reason for doing something, your authentic passion will come through. You can let go of wondering, “What am I supposed to say when this slide is up and did I say it perfectly or not?” and get in the zone. It sounds like that was a big turning point for you in your career. That’s a great example of that in action. More recently, you made the big decision to leave this incredibly successful career and become an entrepreneur in a whole new way. Tell us that story.
I never thought I would do that. This has been my life, my passion. I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been hard. It’s been rewarding. It’s been satisfying. It’s been gratifying. It’s like any job and career, it has its ups and downs, but it was my life. If somebody would have told me that someday, “You’ll leave it and branch out on your own,” there’s no way I would have ever believed that. I also don’t live with my head in the sand. I do realize that the business, after being in it for 21 years, is changing dramatically and I don’t necessarily think it’s for the better.
I also think our world is changing too and the way we operate, not just globally but in the United States. I recently had an opportunity to take a leap of faith and start working in the cryptocurrency, blockchain technology space. I can’t reveal yet exactly what I’m doing, but know that we are already working behind the scenes. This will be brought to light and to air eventually, and I’m excited about this progress and this project. It’s a breath of fresh air. I’ve got a shot of excitement, hope, and learning again. I feel like I did years ago where I’m a little scared, but I’m ready and I’m going to go forward with this.
It sounds that you’re definitely getting out of your comfort zone and getting into the learning zone.
When I say that the television and the news business is changing, I recently gave an interview and said it was a dying business. It’s dying in the sense in the form that we know it. The model that we know is dying with social media, the internet, and people are getting their news from many different outlets. It used to be my parents turned on the TV, they had several choices for their news, they picked one and that’s where they got their news, that or the newspaper or magazines. For immediate news, that was the model. That was it. That’s how it’s been done for decades, but it’s not that way anymore. I started seeing salaries getting cut back, the legacy anchors and journalists in markets like Los Angeles, all the big markets, we’re going backwards.
They’ve been asked over the last several contracts to not get raises but to get cut. I know personally of friends that I worked with who were asked to cut their salaries by up to 30% at their last contract negotiations. They’re in a position of, “I either take that or I don’t have a job at all.” It’s becoming leaner and less content. It’s less about content and quality in my opinion, and more about the shiny object over here. They’re doing what they can to try to hold on to their viewers, I get that. It’s a business. It is a business, butt’s such a struggle because many of us got into it to help people to make a difference, to change a few lives, and we can’t save the world alone.
We’re making a difference, one journalist at a time, I’d like to think. It was getting harder and harder to do that with more and more resources taken away, more and more people taken away. Money is becoming scarce and resources are becoming scarce, I knew that this is not right. It’s going backwards. I need to find something, another passion, because I felt like I was the last of the Mohicans. Even the generation before me might’ve been the last of the Mohicans, the legacy anchors that are there now. My fears were validated and confirmed when I was asked to re-sign my contract, which was great. It’s always nice to be renewed, but then they said, “No raise,“ flat.
On Air Anchor To Blockchain: We’re making a difference, one journalist at a time.
That was devastating to me because I had put in the first three years of that contract so much effort, so much time, so much passion, and so much commitment. I sacrificed a lot of time with my family and then to be told you’re not worth getting a raise and in fact, none of you are. That’s when I knew, “This is not a good situation. I’ve got to do something now.” I was lucky enough to meet some people who are deeply and heavily involved in the cryptocurrency and blockchain technology space and started learning, being enlightened, and here I am.
You are going to be able to take your passion for journalism, which is helping people. You are now figuring out ways that the blockchain stories that you might be exploring and covering could in fact help people, educate them and get them more comfortable with this new technology.
I will tell you the theme of the project we’re working on is freedom, and that is what cryptocurrency and blockchain technology will do. It’s going to give power back to the people, and I know that sounds cliché, but it’s going to be in a way that we have not experienced before here in the United States. We’ve all been lulled into this false sense of security with the way we live in our country. It’s about to be shaken up tremendously. Globally, this is already taking over. In small pockets it is taking over, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, in the United States too. We’re a long ways away, but we’re going to come a very long way in a short amount of time. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to be helping people learn this new way of life, and this new way of operating in this new financial system, in the short amount of time.
[bctt tweet=”Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is going to give power back to the people.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The concept of freedom is certainly something that everyone is connected to. As you said, if you were used to doing something, everything from buying a house requires that you have to go through Escrow and the title, and all of those things could be changed. How do we know that a particular food is really organic? If it’s on the blockchain, that might change how we get that verification.
You hit the nail on the head. Everything as we know it is going to change with blockchain technology. The agriculture industry, the healthcare industry, the real estate industry. How we notarize documents, how we buy real estate, how we bank, how we use our money, where we use our money, it’s going to change. People might be wondering, how does journalism and this world of technology, of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, connect? I would say they’re a perfect match because as a journalist, our whole point was to right wrongs and to get some justice for people one story at a time if we can.
There’s nothing more satisfying than resolving something for people, getting them relief, or making them happy after a terrible situation that we could help fix. It’s the same with blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. This is going to right some wrongs. This is going to provide freedom to people who didn’t have it. This is going to provide identity to people who haven’t had one. It’s in line with what journalists want to do. This is exactly what blockchain technology and cryptocurrency is going to do.
You’re the perfect person to be the brand ambassador, to give everyday people the ability to understand what’s available, the inspiration to follow their dream, and shine a spotlight on this new technology in a way that’s accessible and not intimidating. It can embrace everyone and not just be for this select few who are tech experts.
On Air Anchor To Blockchain: There have been excellent articles written in the LA Times and other credible media about what the blockchain can and can’t do.
That’s another thing. We’re going to take away the fear that people might have and the mystery behind it is enough for people to say, “No, I don’t want to learn about it. I don’t care. This is what I know. I know fiat currency. I know money. I know dollars. This is how we live our lives. This is how our parents lived their lives. This is how our grandparents lived their lives.” At some point we all have to adapt and change, or it’s hard to get left behind. That’s with everything. We’ve seen that with cell phones, internet, and TVs. This is another adaptation that we’re going to have to accommodate. Eventually we’re all going to be on board with this. Right now is the time to learn. I feel the sooner everybody learns, the more freedom they’ll have.
Any last thought you want to leave us with either on your philosophy of life or your excitement about the blockchain?
I couldn’t be happier, feel more grateful, and lucky that I met the people that I have over the past year in this space to enlighten me and to encourage me to learn and grow. I feel like I’ve gone from zero to 60 in such a short amount of time. It’s just the beginning. It’s wonderful and I would encourage people to type in cryptocurrency in their search engines, type in blockchain technology, see what stories come up. There have been excellent articles written in the LA Times and other credible media about what the blockchain can and can’t do, the pros and cons of cryptocurrency, and the history of it. I would encourage people to do that, learn as much as they can and get involved now.
[bctt tweet=”Learn as much as they can and get involved now.” username=”John_Livesay”]
If people want to follow you on social media, your Twitter handle is @ElsaRamonOnAir, is that correct?
You will be able to find me on Twitter. Please stand by. I will be announcing on social media, Twitter too, when we are able to go public with what we’re doing. We are going to have an entire social media release and a space for people to go learn, engage, and reach out. I manage my accounts. I respond to everybody that I can. If I miss a few people, that is truly by accident. I really am that connected and I like to engage personally with people. Feel free to reach out to me. I’d love to hear from you.
What a gift you are to all of us. Thank you so much for being on the show, Elsa.
You are so welcome. Thank you for having me.
Links Mentioned:
- Elsa Ramon
- @ElsaRamonOnAir – Twitter Handle
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