Podcast 197. Investing in Crypto the Smart Way with Eric McDonald

Average Joe Finances:
0:00

Hey, Welcome back to the Average Joe Finances podcast. I'm your host, Mike Cavaggioni, and today's guest is Eric McDonald. So Eric, thank you so much for joining me today.

Eric McDonald:
0:10

Yeah, it's great to be here. I appreciate it.

Average Joe Finances:
0:12

Absolutely. I'm pretty excited to talk to you cause I don't have many crypto guys come on the podcast. Right? And it's something I don't know that much about and I'm not comfortable talking too much about it because of my limited knowledge. To have you on to discuss some of these things, and I'm gonna ask you some of the quote unquote dumb questions. But I'm excited to, to do this. But before we do that I think it's fair for my audience to get to know you a little bit better. So if you could share a little bit about yourself, share your story. Who is Eric McDonald?

Eric McDonald:
0:44

Yeah. I'll give you the corporate professional background side of Eric. And so I started a healthcare technology company about a year and a half outta college. And this is a company called, DocuTAP and it's the original idea which still exists today, is the idea of a medical an electronic medical record that a physician can carry around the clinic in its hands. And this was, 10 years before the iPad ever came out. So we were really early in our time. And over the course of 22 years, I wrote all the original source code, built a team. I raised money from angel investors and then from a family office and a venture capital, and then private equity. A really fun, cool startup story. Last year it sold for $ 1.25 billion. And so be able to say no, I didn't get all that money. Don't worry. The private equity guys and VC guys got a good chunk of that. But to be able to build something like that and say, Hey, over the course of 22 years, here's what I did. It's super fun. And that's probably what I'm most proud of is the success I saw there. And most of that success honestly didn't come from me. It came from the people I surrounded myself with. And over time I realized I do have this knack for taking something from nothing and building in some, into something great. And so I think I'm probably foolish enough. To try it again. And this time it's not in healthcare tech, it is in tech. I think of it as more FinTech. It's the crypto space.

Average Joe Finances:
2:13

Okay. Awesome. Thank you for that. And what a background, right? For, from the first medical tech piece that you created to now, and congratulations on that success to be able to sell to, to sell that for over a billion dollars is absolutely amazing. Now. Yes. I know you got a small chunk of that, right? Because you had a lot of other private investors in there. That's how it works with real estate too. I invest as a limited partner in multi-family deals, and I get my small chunk based off of how much I put into it. So that's pretty neat. But yeah. So you have now evolved going towards cryptocurrencies, right? You have it, what's your company called now? It's CoinLion, right?

Eric McDonald:
2:51

Yeah. CoinLion.

Average Joe Finances:
2:52

Can you explain a little bit what you guys offer and what you guys do?

Eric McDonald:
2:56

Yeah. You bet. And there's a handful of things. When I look back at my prior life, in my prior life, we built this great organization on one niche within healthcare. And so we focused on this niche that was like 0.25% of all healthcare in the United States. And so as I entered into CoinLion I wasn't the founder. I wasn't any of the original crew, but as they brought me in, I said, guys, I know you want to be an exchange. Let's carve out a niche within that exchange and not try to cater to everybody. And what is it that we're gonna do? Let's make this just stupid simple so people can get on and feel safe. About buying and trading and selling on this platform. And so number one, hey, how do we make this safe? And just stupid simple. And then two is really this idea of auto trading using bots and algorithms. And we do both of those in a really simple way. And we really cater to two different audiences. One of our audience is that sophisticated trader. Who wants to build some strategies out and knows how to use technical indicators and when to buy and sell. And we've got some really robust tools for that individual. But we know that's probably a limited set in. In fact, we think that's less than 5% of our target audience, and that's what it is today. So the other 95 are your Average Joe. Honestly, that's Hey, I have no clue what I'm doing in crypto. I just I don't, but what I do wanna do is I wanna follow Eric McDonald, or I wanna follow Mike. And so they get onto the platform, they create an account and they follow. And they subscribe to my strategies, or they subscribe to your strategies. And so they could put, Hey, I'm gonna put 30% of my assets to follow Mike and 70% to follow Betty. And when Betty's strategies trigger a buy or trigger a sell, so does the person that subscribe. And so ultimately when you boil down what do we do, that's what we do. We are an exchange. So you don't need an account somewhere else. All of the settlement happens on our platform. We keep all of the ratios that are one-to-one, right? Meaning if you buy a Bitcoin, like we have the Bitcoin there, We're not leveraging anybody's assets, we're not borrowing assets, we're not, none of that kind of funny stuff that got FTX and Sam bankman free in trouble.

Average Joe Finances:
5:25

Yeah, I was gonna say that's the big difference between you guys and FTX then. Yeah. Because you're actually, you actually have those assets on hand, not, leveraging someone else's to do that.

Eric McDonald:
5:36

We are, and I'm gonna rabbit trail a little bit, so I'm gonna come back to, ultimately those are the two things. Safe and leveraging bots to do trading. So if you want to just buy crypto and hold it for 10 years, you can do that a million different places. But if you're like, Hey, I'm looking for something super simple, that, that capitalizes on the volatility, we're that place and we're a safe place for people to do this. We're based out of the Midwest. We've got awesome work ethics, and when you look at my track record for building businesses, my goal is you just build an awesome business. It's got a really good foundation and wealth creation will happen on its own. Okay? Different than what I think oftentimes. People are trying to build on greed and there's this land grab, I have to build something overnight. So again, I go back to my last company sold for $1.25 billion. That's awesome. It was not built overnight. It didn't take two years. Nope. It took 22 years. And you know the number of people that have come up to me after they read an article on the paper or read a journal, and they're like, wow, you guys just exploded overnight. I'm like, Nope, we really didn't actually. It took a long time. And so that is one of the differences here, is we're not trying to be a flash in the pan. And, just a, again, another side story that's where a lot of these tokens come into play. I was talking to a gentleman about two months ago and he said, Hey, my net worth last year was 800 million and now it's zero. And I'm like, what? How does that kind of money disappear? He said we created this token. And I said CoinLion, we've got our own token as well. It's awesome. I wanna hear your story. How did it like, and it went just through the roof, and he was worth 800 million. Okay. I'm like, and then it went to, it literally went to zero and this all happened within two weeks. Okay. Tell me like, where was the value? There's no value. We just were trying to build stuff on hype and hope that everybody thought our token was the next token, and they, everybody just would want it. And for me there have been a lot of crypto companies that's what it's all about. There's literally no underlying value being created there. It's the, here's a bunch of tokens.

Average Joe Finances:
7:52

I'm glad you bring that up, Eric, because I feel like that is the fear a lot of people have with crypto, including myself, because that's a lot of what we see. We see a lot of these random like token coins come outta nowhere and some influencer will hype it up. And people just buy it, and it inflates like crazy. And then the people that were, that made the coin and got in early, they sell and they make a nice profit. And the people that we're buying towards the middle and the end get screwed. At the end there. And I've been seeing so much of that and I feel like that's one of the things that's been given crypto a bad rap, so I'm glad you brought that up because that's that's full transparency right there.

Eric McDonald:
8:35

Yeah I think there's a few things that have given crypto bad rap things like FTX Sam Bankman-Fried.

Average Joe Finances:
8:41

Oh, that's the number one thing that comes to mind, right?

Eric McDonald:
8:43

Yeah. And honestly, in my opinion, that boils down to one thing and it's greed. In greed, if you rewind, 50 years, you're gonna see a crash from somebody else driven by greed. Hundred years ago, like just for thousands of years, humanity has been driven by greed. And so like I wanna be able to build a legacy that I can honestly be like, Hey, this is what we built and we did. And so greed has been a huge factor. I think the other one is trying to make things happen overnight, and that's, I do a live event with any of our users once a month, and I've hammered this home every time, is that my goal is to build value in this business, build a sustainable business that has revenue and has all of the pillars needed for a business to grow and flourish. So don't expect this value, the value of our token to go from, 5 cents, 7 cents up to a dollar, up to $30, all in a very short period of time. It's just, I don't think that's realistic. And so I have been building all of these pillars for success at CoinLion, and with time I'm gonna start building more and more value into the Lion Token, but I'd rather start with that core business instead of just that Lion Token. And so you're gonna start to see that. Come to fruition more and more over the next, 9 to 12 months. And that's where a lot of tokens have gone wrong, is there's no value that's behind and driving that token value.

Average Joe Finances:
10:10

Yeah, no, that's a great point. You brought that up at the earlier as well with with the one person that you had described that their coin went, they got an $800 million net worth.

Eric McDonald:
10:19

Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
10:19

Like overnight and then, the next week it was down to zero.

Eric McDonald:
10:23

Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
10:23

Yeah. Value. That's one of the most important words in, in any space any investment space is value. What kind of value are you bringing to the table with, this specific coin or what kind of value you're bringing with the asset, that you have. Cuz the value, that's what's gonna, that's what's gonna, cause people to wanna buy it.

Eric McDonald:
10:43

Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
10:43

There's, there is some intrinsic value to it right now. There is, there's been a lot going on in the crypto space lately, right? We saw after FTX we saw, Bitcoin drop again, and all of a sudden it got a little quiet right after, after all that stuff went down. So why is it now that with this uncertainty, you're starting to see more people or more investors start picking up the pace on the crypto side?

Eric McDonald:
11:15

So there's a lot of speculation on what's driving this, right? You've seen a really nice rally since, I'll call it January 1st of this year. So what's driving that? Part of this is like you've seen over the last 18 months, 15 months a lot of collateral damage from just some failed projects. So you had the Te Luna collapse and there was just a bunch of fallout, and every time there was some. Some collateral damage there, everything would pull back another, 10 points. Sometimes it was 30 points, right? And then we start to climb back a little bit and then there's something else. And and then you've just got the economy in general that the economy has in the US here has really struggled. You're seeing. The Russian, Ukraine war, like all of these things these, macroeconomics, they totally have an impact on crypto. There's a higher correlation now to Wall Street and crypto than ever before, and that can't be surprising. We can't sit here as crypto people and say, listen, we really want this underlying blockchain to be the financial underpinnings of the world. Okay. We can't make those statements and then also be like, Hey, when things in the world happen, why does crypto go down? When you want it to be part of it, don't be surprised when it pulls back with that. And so I, I am not surprised to see pullbacks in the crypto space when the macroeconomics of the world are having some of the same hardships. Okay, A tighter correlation to Wall Street, and when I say wall Street also is tied into all of the economics around the world as well. And that was part, in my opinion of what we saw happen through, most of last year in 22 and early in 21, or, sorry, late 21. All right. So why the rally now? I think we are starting to turn a corner on a few things. From a macroeconomics perspective, I think at some point you have to see a bottom, and I think that we've seen that bottom and. And so to be able to see this nice rally is giving the confidence that, yep, this is definitely here to stay. We know it is here to stay and here's this rally. For me personally, the other thing that comes in a account right now is what's going on with the US dollar. There's a lot of talk about AC around the world, other countries just saying, Hey, listen, we're gonna shift gears and not use the US dollar for trade with. X biggest one, obviously is oil being the, the reserve currency there. That's a big topic. Okay. So when there's a gap in anything in our lives, it gets filled by something else. And, I'm curious to see how crypto starts to fill some of those gaps. And I think it's an exciting time for crypto. I think that we're still gonna have a little bit of a hard slog here. I think that 20 threes, ultimately going to end the year in a strong spot I do think that there's just gonna be another one or two dead bodies that float to the surface that's collateral from. Prior projects or somebody else that over leveraged themselves. And so when we see these things, we can't be surprised with some of these bank failures where they didn't manage their funds well or an exchange like FTX where they were greedy and like overleverage stuff, hid stuff, didn't do what they said they were gonna do. Some of those aren't surprising. Those are gonna get weeded out though, and there's a chance one or two bubble up yet this year.

Average Joe Finances:
14:37

Yeah, absolutely.

Eric McDonald:
14:38

Sorry I threw a lot of, yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
14:39

No. That's great. So I wanna go back to what, what's happening with the the dollar right now.

Eric McDonald:
14:44

Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
14:44

As well, right? Because that is a very significant conversation that there's, multiple countries right now talking about coming off the dollar standard, right?

Eric McDonald:
14:53

Yep.

Average Joe Finances:
14:53

As a reserve for trade and, Even with that happening, the US government is now talking about, going live with their dollar crypto. Have you seen anything about that or heard anything about there's gonna be a digital currency coming out that's supposed to be, match the US dollar and what are your thoughts on that?

Eric McDonald:
15:14

Yeah I, so a central bank digital currency cbd, b c is an item that people are talking about. Okay. And I know that the federal government has kicked off a couple of, at least one CBD Project, CBDC Project. Okay. I haven't found a ton of information on that specifically. Okay. And it's a highly debated one. Now, you have heard a lot of talk about FedNow. FedNow is often confused as a. Central Bank digital currency. It is not, it's just a dis, a new service that the Federal Reserve is introducing. Okay, so today the Federal Reserve has two services that we all commonly use. It's called FedACH. We just call it an ACH. Okay? But they do ACH transfers all the time. They all flow through the Federal Reserve like that happens today. We've all gotten used to it. We all use it. The other one is FedWire. And we just say, Hey, I gotta just do a wire transfer. What is it using? It's using the infrastructure, the servers, and the protocols used by the Federal Reserve. Okay. What are the downfalls of those? ACH transfers take anywhere from one to three days. They used to be two to five. What time did you initiate it at? Was that four o'clock? Sorry, it doesn't pick it up till the next day. Oh, the next day is actually Saturday and Sunday. Servers. The Federal Reserve servers aren't allowed to run on the weekends. Oh, it's a holiday too. The Federal Reserve servers don't run on the weekend or holidays, all of these things. And so with time, the federal government's crud, we have to have something better than what we have. Let's take the exact same infrastructure we have and create FedNow. What's FedNow? It's just that it's the services that we just described instantaneous. Wait, we can actually do that on the weekends then too. Yes, it does. Okay. So it's instantaneous and it's 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 365, yes. Oh, so it's a CBDC? No, it's not. It's not a central bank digital currency. It sounds like it. Okay. If you wanna call it that. You certainly can, but it doesn't run on the blockchain. Okay. Oh, okay. Good point. But they know what banks is coming from. That's true. But they know that today from ach. They know that today with wire transfer. So are we really gonna get all freaked out about FedNow? No. Okay. So I think there's a great space for spot for this FedNow. I think we need it. Okay. And so I'm excited about it. And just for a little bit of context, there are times where. As we're moving assets, we'll move 200 Ethereum, we'll move, 50 Bitcoin, we'll buy and sell constantly. I need to move US dollars at some of the same rate. This morning I moved 200 Ethereum and I moved that literally within 30 seconds, 60 seconds. It's so fast. Okay, great. I need to, cover that with $350,000 in USD. I gotta wire it, call the bank, get a wire going. It takes 20 minutes, not the end of the world if it's during business hours, right? There are times where I need to do two or three of those in a day, but sometimes it's on the weekends and you're just waiting. So there's absolutely a spot for that. Now, Central Bank Digital Currencies, CBDC's is there concern? Sure. If we're talking about the Chinese digital one, That runs on the blockchain. Yeah. We probably shouldn't be using that for all of our, daily activities. I'm not gonna go get groceries. That thing, I'm not gonna be buying it with my house. I'm not gonna be, so yeah, we should have some concern there. What about the US government and we're maybe tiptoeing out of the area you want to go? Do I really want the US government tracking every payment I do with a CBDC? Eh, probably not. But here's the scoop. There are so many different. Stable tokens I can use, like nobody's forcing you at this point that the only currency you can ever use anywhere in the world has to be the US CBDC lemme pause, let me re let you respond or directly. Is that what you were asking?

Average Joe Finances:
19:10

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious though, too, with going back to FedNow, right?

Eric McDonald:
19:15

Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
19:15

Do you think that, having this instantaneous way to transfer US dollars will take away some of the, convenience or some of the qualities that people use cryptocurrency for because of the fact that on crypto, on the blockchain, it's basically instantaneously, right? So like you said, you're able to move 200 Ethereum within 30 seconds. But when you have to wire the money, right? Oh, it's after four o'clock, sorry, you gotta do it tomorrow, right? Do you feel like that might cause a ripple in the crypto market?

Eric McDonald:
19:48

Sure. So if I'm a crypto hardcore crypto person, like all of a sudden I'm like, oh, shoot. Dang it. Now all of a sudden the US government has a competing product. In that it competes on that one level. There are different aspects of crypto that doesn't solve though, right? In the sense that crypto is this distributed model. It's not going through any one's central component. There's a level of anonymity that can happen with crypto in the blockchain, right? That people appreciate and that anonymity is decreasing though with time. If you wanted to hide your crypto, you certainly could but there are a lot of really good analytics tools that can ch chase and track down stolen Bitcoin or stolen crypto in general. So the anonymity's starting to disappear a little bit, even regardless of any regulatory stuff.

Average Joe Finances:
20:43

Okay. Yeah, so that, so I guess in that aspect, it's not really going to affect it that much. But it's still will, it's a competing product. So there, there will be, competition obviously. But with that being said, there is, it's 2023, right? It's as we're recording this, it's April, right? And, There's a lot of changes happening right now, both in the economy in the crypto markets, with blockchain itself. Where do you see cryptocurrency, for the rest of this year and even beyond that, like, where do you see this going?

Eric McDonald:
21:17

Yeah, no, really good question. What I think that you've seen happen in the last few years is the, I'll say the infrastructure. Being built out. Think of this as maybe like your interstate freeway system, right? That that's connecting. So you've got this really good foundational system now that didn't exist three years ago. Okay? And so I think that the next phase is gonna be more of a consumerization aspect, okay? Making it really easy for users to get on and off platforms. And doing it in a way that complies with reg regulation. On our platform we are verifying your identity and making sure that you're a legit person. We do a selfie. Can we match that to your government issued id? Verifying you are who you are, right? And so those things have gotten better, but those are the infrastructure things that crypto needed to have and it needed to mature. So then you move into this consumerization aspect and I think that's what you're gonna see, I'll just say in the next two to three years, is more of that consumerization. How easy is it to get my US dollars in here? And then out of there, how easy can I move that? Where can I actually buy stuff? If I wanna be able to buy stuff, how do I start using crypto to do that? I think you're gonna start seeing some more of that happening in the years in, I'm just gonna say the next two to three years. It's that consumerization aspect.

Average Joe Finances:
22:36

Okay. Yeah. Right on. Because you don't see too many places where you can actually use crypto right now to make purchases. It does happen. But there it's not happening a lot. Yeah. Like I know recently, they had the first home sale in the United States that was bought completely with Bitcoin, which was really cool. And I definitely see the benefit of blockchain, especially when it comes to even real estate, right? Having a title as an NFT or something like that is, is significant, right? Because the, nobody can mess with that. It's on the blockchain, you own it, you own the title it's yours. It it cuts out the middleman, right? So I'm a little worried for the future of title companies, right? As this becomes more and more used, or maybe they'll just change how they do business and now they'll be the ones structuring how that works, or building the NFT for that title.

Eric McDonald:
23:23

Yeah, you hit on title companies, like there's a handful of companies that. They have to evolve with time or they will get left behind. Like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video two great examples. I haven't seen one for a while.

Average Joe Finances:
23:36

Yeah, that's true.

Eric McDonald:
23:37

They didn't evolve. And that's just, that's natural. You look at some of the, the hype in social media, Instagram and Facebook used to be the hot thing, and they're getting left behind. They're getting their lunch eaten by TikTok. And so to think that, You can stay the same for decades and own the market. It's just it's false. And so there will be times where title companies that business better change. It's gonna change. Yeah. And blockchain's a really good place for that's a excel. And so I think, going back to your question I think that you're gonna see more and more of that happen in a tangible way over the next few years. And so 23, I think 23 is gonna be a year of stabilization and validation of the market, moving back in the right direction where everybody's yep, see, and now we're gonna get after a bunch of the consumerization aspects.

Average Joe Finances:
24:24

Yeah. So bring it back down to its normalcy, get comfortable, and then we're gonna start to see some big changes coming, right?

Eric McDonald:
24:31

I think so, yeah. And it. Bitcoin just went through the roof. It grew way too fast in my opinion. So is it surprising to see a big correction? No, it's not surprising. And then you have a bunch of fallouts that cause it to be worse, right? So there's a handful of things there stabilizing. I think the other thing that's gonna be helpful is some good regulation in the US. We just, we need it. And you're seeing regulation happen around the world and, and so with some more time here, I think you'll see some good regulation come out in the US.

Average Joe Finances:
25:00

I knew I liked you Eric, because you're the first crypto person I heard actually calling for regulation that, you know that cuz it does, it needs to be regulated. There can't be, and I'm not a fan of government involvement in pretty much anything. But when it comes to protecting people, I'm for regulations when it comes to protecting people's livelihoods their lives themselves their wealth. I, think stuff like that's important and to have an unhinged crypto market. With that nobody can tell you what to do.

Eric McDonald:
25:33

Yep.

Average Joe Finances:
25:33

It makes it dangerous for a new investor, right? So speaking of a new investor let's say, somebody's just now wanting to, get into crypto and they wanna start buying and trading and they don't know too much about it. What's a great resource they could use to learn more about crypto and blockchain and just get their. They're bearings before they, they deep dive into this into this monster.

Eric McDonald:
26:02

Yeah, it's a little bit tough because there's so much on the web. There's just so much.

Average Joe Finances:
26:06

I know. I'm trying to have you narrow it down for me, man.

Eric McDonald:
26:08

I'll narrow it down to this. Go to YouTube and type in blockchain. Teach me about blockchain, it is tough because there's so many different aspects of crypto and the underlying one is blockchain itself, right? Go understand what the blockchain is and if it's helpful, I can provide you a few links that are really good links on blockchain specifically give you one on Bitcoin specifically, and Ethereum, okay? So if anybody's gonna go educate themselves, focus on those three topics. What is the blockchain? Two is what is Bitcoin and how is it different than the other tokens the blockchains, right? And three is what is Ethereum? If you learn about two tokens, Bitcoin and Ethereum are the two you wanna learn. Okay? And that's the other thing we do, Mike, is we don't spend a bunch of time pulling in junk tokens onto our platform. So we have people all the time, we're like, Hey, I just found this like really cool, token called wormhole. Do you have it? I'm like, no, we don't. We have the ones that I know are gonna be. As best as possible, stable and reliable and a good option. But they're also not the ones that are gonna do a 10000% return in one week or something like that.

Average Joe Finances:
27:14

Yeah. That's the stuff that's unstable, that's gonna make one or two people rich and the rest of the people get screwed over.

Eric McDonald:
27:19

Yeah. Yeah. They get a goose egg. Yep.

Average Joe Finances:
27:21

Yeah. No that's awesome. That's awesome. Okay. So now you, Eric, you've had some great success, right? Building up the medical tech company. And now you're with CoinLion. You're helping them build up. There's also a couple other businesses that you sit on boards for, right? What are some of those?

Eric McDonald:
27:38

Yeah. There's a mixed bag there. One of those is just a good buddy of mine. He runs a company called Sidecar and they provide, services to chiropractors. And and so because of my background in healthcare tech, there's a bunch of value that I can provide to him. Phrase is an AI healthcare engine and is trying to figure out how to leverage voice capabilities with AI in the healthcare space. And so there's a few really fun projects there. Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
28:08

Awesome. Yeah, I was just trying to, so people could know a little bit more about your background, that you're not just the crypto guy there, there's so much more to it on the tech side as well.

Eric McDonald:
28:16

Yeah, I hate, I swore I'd never do a startup again. Cuz startups are just hard. They're hard and, In reality, it's what I'm good at and I kinda wish that I wasn't some days, but it's my niche and so go check out my profile on LinkedIn. You can see a few of the other companies that I'm affiliated with. I'm not looking to jump on another, a bunch of other boards. If anybody wants to reach out though and I'll, donate a little bit of my time, I can do that.

Average Joe Finances:
28:39

Yeah. No, that's fair. Definitely appreciate that. All right, Eric. This has been very informative. Probably my favorite crypto interview that I've done. I wanna say thank you for that. But now I'd like to transition this into something that I call the final round, and that's where I'm gonna ask you the same four questions that I ask everybody that comes on this show. And it's gonna give us a good idea of how you are when you get asked tougher questions. But I'm pretty sure I already know how this is gonna, you're gonna crush it. So you ready to go?

Eric McDonald:
29:07

Let's do it. Let's go.

Average Joe Finances:
29:09

All right. So this is a a personal question for you, Eric, but what's the biggest mistake you've ever made? In investing?

Eric McDonald:
29:17

In investing or in my professional background?

Average Joe Finances:
29:21

In investing yourself.

Eric McDonald:
29:23

Yeah. It's probably not doing enough due diligence. So I lost quarter million dollars on a deal and it was in a solar space and and ran through all the things, talked about the sources and used how you gonna use this money, right? Gave them the money. And a month later they asked me to sit on the board and we were running through all the financials and I'm like, Hey, where's the money that I just gave you guys? And the response was we ended up having to go pay down some debt. I'm like, wait a second. That was not part of the conversation at any level here. And in hindsight, I didn't do enough due diligence to realize that they were being pressured to pay down specific debt covenants that they had, and then they weren't in a spot to actually extend that at all as well. So I essentially gave a quarter million dollars and it disappeared instantly within the zero value.

Average Joe Finances:
30:18

Wow. Yeah.

Eric McDonald:
30:19

So there's that.

Average Joe Finances:
30:19

They were already upside down. Ouch. Hey I appreciate your transparency on that, man. That's tough. Okay. So the next question, Eric, is gonna tie these all kind of tie into each other, but obviously that was a big lesson learned for you, right? But what is something that you've learned that you wish you knew when you first got started? And this could be, in the tech space or investing yourself, anything like that for you professionally.

Eric McDonald:
30:42

Yeah. Earlier on I should have sought out and thought for wisdom surround yourself with individuals are gonna help make you wise with time. And I did that. I should have, I could have done that sooner. And I think that with wisdom comes this, Hey, check your ego at the door. And I think that when you're in your twenties, you think you can conquer the world. You're, and so I didn't get bit by it, but in hindsight, not bit bad, I should say. But in hindsight, I should have I should have sought out wisdom more, and I should have done it faster by surrounding myself with better people not that I didn't have good people specifically on wisdom.

Average Joe Finances:
31:22

No I definitely appreciate that. Cause that's one of the things I talk about a lot too Jim Ron says, you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with. Yeah. And that is so true because you know who you hang around with, who is who you project yourself to be. So if you're hanging out with five millionaires, you're gonna be the sixth one. If you're hanging out with five people that are not doing anything with themselves and they just game all day and stuff like that, you're probably just gonna game all day and not do anything with yourself.

Eric McDonald:
31:47

Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
31:47

Yeah that's super important. Seek out those connections that have the wisdom and the people that you wanna be like, right?

Eric McDonald:
31:54

Yeah. Yep.

Average Joe Finances:
31:54

Awesome. Okay. Eric, do you have any tips or tricks that you would recommend to someone that is just getting started out today? We talked about this a little bit earlier, but we can go into a little bit more detail here.

Eric McDonald:
32:07

Yeah, I don't think any, anything I'm gonna share is gonna be new. It's probably things they're like, oh yeah, that makes sense. But, it's focused. Hey don't try to boil the ocean. Go find a niche. I'm just, I'm a big niche guy, right? And so if you're trying to get into healthcare, like what part of healthcare, like if you're trying to get into crypto narrow this down to an area that you can really go conquer and be great at that, and then expand from there. So oftentimes I think that people are probably too, they think too big, too broad, and they're like, Hey, I'm gonna reinvent salt water. And you're like, all right, can we maybe like dial this in just a little bit? So find a niche and just stay focused. The other thing that, I do today is I don't work 80, 90 hours anymore. And it's not because I'm in a spot financially where I don't have to is that I think that you're gonna get the exact same, you're gonna get the same space by just being really focused with your time. In the 30 hours you're gonna week work versus the 80 hours.

Average Joe Finances:
33:05

Yeah, absolutely. Intentional, be intentional with your time.

Eric McDonald:
33:08

Yeah. I never worked an 80 hour week, and at the end of the week I was like, oh, done with all my work, like literally everything. There's always more work to get done, and so when you work 30 hours a week or 40, and you're super intentional, right? That's the word you use, super intentional with it. I think you can get to the same space and save your family, save your friends, save, whatever that is.

Average Joe Finances:
33:28

Yeah. Absolutely. Appreciate that. All right. Eric, this last question does not tie in like the rest of 'em, it's just an opinion-based question. But it's Do you have a favorite business or investing related book or podcast or both? Or we'll even say crypto as well.

Eric McDonald:
33:46

Oh I am, I'm probably horrible at this. I'm a horrible reader. Like one of my good friends, he's the average CEO reads 50 books a year. I'm like, I read one or two like at best, and they're audio books. And on the podcast side, I love listening to Joe Rogan. And it's probably more for comedy and learning than anything else. He's got such a wide variety of people that come on there. But if you're looking for books I'm, the worst of that. The flip side of that is this is anybody who is an aspiring entrepreneur or an awesome entrepreneur and you feel like you're failing cuz you're not reading books. No, you don't have to figure out how you're gonna learn though. I learned by having really good mentors wrapped around me. And when I brought in my venture capital and private equity guys, they were like top tier, top 10 VC or private equity in the world. Those were my mentors. And so those are the guys and gals that taught me.

Average Joe Finances:
34:42

Awesome. Appreciate that.

Eric McDonald:
34:43

Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
34:44

And it's okay. I don't read too many books either, but the ones I do usually, it's what gets recommended to me from from people I bring on the podcast.

Eric McDonald:
34:51

Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
34:51

I don't enjoy reading, but sometimes I get a lot of value out of it.

Eric McDonald:
34:55

Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
34:55

Like I just finished traction and that was such a good book.

Eric McDonald:
34:58

Sure.

Average Joe Finances:
34:58

Yeah. But anyway. Okay. That is it, Eric, for the final round, you survive. Pat yourself on the back. Great job now. I do have one more question for you though, and this is the most important one of all, because people are listening to this episode and saying, Hey, this is this might be something I might wanna consider or get into. If people wanna learn more about you, they wanna learn more about CoinLion. Where can people find that information? Do you have a website you could share with us? Any social media profiles we can follow? Let us in on the dets.

Eric McDonald:
35:29

Yeah, if you go to CoinLion.com, you're gonna find everything there. So you'll have links to all of our social related stuff so you can see what's going on Twitter. So go to CoinLion.com. You can sign up for an account. You can, you're gonna need government issued ID. No criminal background in financial in the financial space. Otherwise, you're not gonna get an account. But get an account created. Go poke around. You don't have to deposit any funds yet. You can deposit some funds using ACH. Which takes, two to three days, we had eight FedNow be instantaneous, but go deposits and funds. You can tiptoe into this a little bit, but CoinLion.com is where you wanna get started.

Average Joe Finances:
36:07

Awesome. Okay. Definitely appreciate that. I'll make sure we have those links in the show notes to make it easy for everybody to copy and paste or click away. Just don't do it if you're driving. Eric, this has been a absolute pleasure. I feel like I, I learned a bunch and I feel maybe a little bit more optimistic about crypto now that I know that there's people like you out there. So I wanna say again, thank you so much and I really appreciate your transparency with everything.

Eric McDonald:
36:30

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, mike.

Average Joe Finances:
36:32

Absolutely. Congratulations on your success and your continued success, and I hope to see more of that coming for you. I also wanna say thank you to my listeners and thank you all for joining me in our special guest, Eric McDonald, on the Average Joe Finances Podcast. Go leave us a five star review and tell us what you liked about today's episode with Eric. Aloha from Hawaii and have a great rest of your day.