Creating New Tech Leadership with Peter Rex: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, the only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down creating new tech leadership. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Peter Rex and the EO Fire Studios. Peter is the CEO and founder of Rex, an ecosystem of tech companies headquartered in Austin, Texas. And today, we'll talk about wealth divides is the real issue. We've got to figure out ways for people to participate in wealth creation for themselves and oh, so much more.

0:36And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Peter and our sponsors. Over 41 ,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free at netsuite.com slash fire. Do you have the right mentor in your life right now? For the first time in seven years, I'm opening up a few mentorship slots for individuals who know they need the guidance and accountability to take their business and life to the next level.

1:12Email me at john at eofire.com with the subject line mentor and we'll schedule a 15-minute chat to go over the program and see if it's the right fit for you. Peter, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? I think that most people disagree with or they haven't considered is that to be successful in business, you actually need to focus on serving people long-term. And that is going to lead to more success than being short-term self-interested. And I think a lot of people get that wrong and they get into sort of the money-making mindset and they get real short-term focused and very transactional.

1:58Fire Nation, I hope you're excited because we're talking about creating new tech leadership today with Peter Love Rex. Peter, before we get into specifics about new tech leadership, give us a little backstory. What's the backdrop that led you to becoming a tech founder? My story is, you know, not necessarily one that started off. It looked like I'd be, you know, even a successful entrepreneur at all. Right. I came out of, even when I was young, I always had problems in school on Montessori school. I was kicked out of that, but I always had in my heart to serve people, right. I've raised Irish Catholic and stuff.

2:32So you kind of always had that in your mind. And when I went to, I actually went to the Catholic seminary when I was about 18, but due to administrate due to basically obedience, again, administration reasons. I had to leave that as well. It didn't work out. Started in community college, then went to Harvard Law School later, but sort of backed my way into entrepreneurship and getting into that area as that's the only thing that would fit for me. I even tried, I thought maybe I'd go into public service or politics and that only lasted a couple of weeks before I realized I hate that. But entrepreneurship, once I realized you could serve people and you could do it in and through business, I said, okay, that's awesome.

3:07I'm doing that. And then when I chose that as the platform, the area I'm going to focus on is serving people in business. Then I sort of found my way into tech as a way that I can do it in a scalable way where I can scale my service, anybody, anywhere in the world. So we could be building something here in Austin, Texas, where we're based right now, but that service, that product can be used in Mumbai, India. It could be used in the Philippines, wherever it might be. It could be used in Puerto Rico, where you are. In today's world, let's be honest, Peter, being a disruptor is key. If you're not disrupting things, you're probably not really making any waves.

3:40If you're not making any waves, nobody's paying attention because it's a really crazy, busy, intense world. What part of tech did you decide to disrupt? Well, JLD, one thing I'd say to you is that, and I agree with you, you got to be disrupting things, right? And what we're doing actually is we're doing something very, you know, I'd say very ballsy to be, you know, Frank is where something they say in Puerto Rico, they'd say, we're doing something that takes a lot of cojones. What we're doing is we are going after big tech and we are going to what our mission is going to end up disrupting big tech.

4:13And I think everybody knows it's a big problem. And, but we're actually, we have a solution that's going to work. And I think there's a couple other solutions people talk about, but they're not real solutions. They're just like, they're mirages in the desert. They're not going to have any, they're not going to have any water in them. It's not going to work longterm. And the two things that people just to set the groundwork so people get it. And then I'm going to get into, you know, what we're doing specifically here, but I'm just setting a little groundwork for people to understand what we're doing here.

4:35Cause that's a bold statement, Sam, on a disrupt big tech. And I'm going to, we're going to, our team's going to do that, especially with people like you, J.I.D., helping us out here and fans here listening as well. Right. Fire Nation getting behind us. But when you look at it, the two solutions people are thinking to big tech is, oh, let's get the government involved. You know, that's going to save it. I mean, governance never saved really anything in these types of areas. Right. That's not going to solve the problem. They're going to go over there and they're going to break up big tech. Okay.

5:01Whatever. That's they could do that. It's not going to solve the problem. You're going to end up with just a bunch of smaller tech companies in the same area with the same biases and, and exploitation problems and censorship problems that have led us to really all I'd say on the left and right hate big tech, right? So big government, you know, getting involved to break up big tech, that's not going to solve it. It's also going to create barriers to entry for entrepreneurs like me and entrepreneurs, like the people listening on this show, that's not going to be good for anybody. And it's not going to actually solve it long term.

5:28The second thing you always hear from is like, you know, you got like Trump doing this to you, someone going after and they're going to create a new Twitter, they're going to create a new Facebook. Okay, well, you know, I don't think it's going to work anyways, that idea, because you have such strong network effects on those platforms. But even if it did work, it wouldn't solve the problem of big tech. What you need is you need a real solution. And the solution that we're working on is going to solve it. And it's a hard one. It's a much, it's a much more strategic approach. We have relocated from the West Coast about a year and a half ago to Texas.

5:57And we are building a new ecosystem of technologies out of the capital of Texas, Austin, Texas. And our focal, our entry point is at the intersection of real estate and tech, because that's an area we know cold, and it's also a greenfield. And we can get into if you like, or we can go anywhere you want as to why we're launching. So we're launching numerous companies at once. We already have them up and going in the technology space. And we're going to launch even more startups as well. And there could be even entrepreneurs on here that they want to get involved by investing or they want to get involved by joining one of the startups.

6:29So I'd put that out there as well, you know, in case anybody's interested. So for anybody that is still not quite there yet, can we really just dive into the definition of new tech leadership? What is that? So new tech leadership is going to be grounded in virtue and focused on serving and empowering people. And the problems we see with the current tech leadership, big tech, which is really as a monopoly, it's out in Silicon Valley in Seattle. The problems that we see out there is that you have a really a rudderless place. They don't really have strong principles underlying them. And they've also proven that they will exploit people.

7:07They're going to take advantage of their power that's been given them. And they've compromised the trust that we've given to them as consumers over time. Trust that the tech leadership in the past, like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, have rightfully earned from us because they never took advantage of that trust. But now they've taken advantage of that trust. And now we've got to do something else. We've got to create an alternative technology system, ecosystem, which is very robust and powerful out there in the West Coast. And we've got to do it. And I'm leading that charge out of Texas. So Fire Nation, we have a lot of things to be chatting about around the ecosystem of tech business and how you can get involved in some other great stuff when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

7:46Question for you, Fire Nation. Do you have the right mentor in your life right now? For me, mentorship was everything. From when I was just getting started in podcasting, webinars, course creation, book writing, you name it, I hired a mentor to guide me every step of the way. For the first time in seven years, I'm opening up a few mentorship slots for individuals who know they need the guidance and accountability to take their business and life to the next level. It's a three-month program, and together we will achieve massive results. If you're interested in learning more, email me at john at eofire.com with the subject line mentor and we'll schedule a 15 minute chat to go over the program to see if it's the right fit for you.

8:31That's john, J-O-H-N at eofire.com but only if you're prepared to ignite. It would be really nice if we could predict what the future holds for our business. Talk about saving a lot of time and frustration, but predictions are just that, predictions. Rates will rise or fall, inflation's up or down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until we can actually see into the future, over 41 ,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one fluid platform. NetSuite gives you one source of truth, so you can have the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions.

9:13And with real-time insights and forecasting, you can see into the future with actionable data. If our businesses needed this type of software, I'd use NetSuite in a heartbeat because whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com slash fire. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash fire. netsuite.com slash fire. So Peter, we're back and you're pretty amped, brother. You're pretty amped about launching an ecosystem of tech business.

9:50Why are you so amped up about this? Well, I mean, it's absolutely critical right now. I think we realize to even have freedom in America, right? And here's the thing, Johnny, and for the listeners as well, it's very important for them to understand this. When you think about our system, we got our freedoms from breaking free from a totalitarian type system before the British, right? You know, I'm Irish Catholic, Irish Catholics in the past were always under the British and they were under the Protestants. They were never able to own property. They were effectively, you know, slave, like slaves are indentured servitude.

10:23And people that came to this country, like my ancestors, your ancestors, everybody, they came for opportunity and they want, they want to be governed by people that they, they're able to be, you know, choose the right people. Right. So even from a government standpoint, what our first amendment, right. A lot, our first amendment allows us to have the freedom of speech freedom of voting, things like that. So we can. And why is that there, though? It's there because in order to vote correctly, in order to choose correctly as an electorate, as a citizen, you need to have communication and you need to see different ideas.

10:51Right. So that's one thing is a control of ideas. The other. And if it's in the hands of a group that's looking to block and manipulate, manipulate the information or the news, that's a big problem. We've already seen that that is already a problem. Right. The other thing is when it's your public square and that's where everybody's on and what they're all using on their, you know, the public square of today is online. So when that's controlled by people that have a radical position and they are willing to manipulate or exploit people, that's a very dangerous and precarious position for the population.

11:21And the only real solution is to create a new ecosystem of technology in a different area that can compete with it. So that's why I'm excited about what we're doing. But I think it's really the only thing that we can do to actually put a check on that and to create new leadership, because technology is absolutely critical and it's top of the funnel. And we need entrepreneurs stepping into this area in order to make this happen. And Fire Nation, that's potentially where you come in, being an entrepreneur, stepping up into this new world. And let's kind of keep going down the timeline because you have the next step and the next step planned out.

11:52So what's next? Right now, we're actually opening up for the first time to investors to raise capital. And we haven't done that thus far in the tech space, but we are ready to do that now. We've got already six technology companies that we've spun up, some further along than others. And we could talk about some of what those are doing, but they are revolutionary products and they're using machine learning, artificial intelligence and blockchain and a number of other excellent cutting edge technologies. And we have a world class tech team. So we are open to investors for the first time. And we're always hiring and looking for entrepreneurial people to join these startups that we have.

12:28We have a few we have a bunch of others in the wings that we're going to be incubating on and building out. But we're very excited about what we're doing here with these companies and the success that they're going to have. We already have success on the six that we've already brought out. And I'll give you a couple examples. We have one called OwnProp. And OwnProp is a blockchain for real estate product. It's where you can tokenize the asset of your real estate property and be able to sell it. And our goal is to get it down so you can sell interest for a dollar. That is important because it democratizes the access for people that would like to own a piece of real estate.

13:03Whenever you go in a downtown area, you look at the premium assets, the real jewels of the city, they're always owned by rich people or some institution, right? But with blockchain, we believe and actually we think it will happen. It's going to happen. We're going to push it into being through OwnProp is you can put these assets onto the blockchain on OwnProp, our platform we've created, and you can then open it up. So a guy in the street, you know, driving an Uber or whatever he's doing, he could say, oh, I believe that that's a great investment. Let me buy a couple hundred dollars of it. And they can then get in.

13:34But currently they can't do that because the transactional costs are too high. So we have, that's one of our products. We've got another one that transform in the maintenance space and we can get into that or, or any of the other ones. We have FinTech products and ensure, ensure tech products as well, all breaking in through the real estate space. And as you know, real estate touches everything. It's where we all live, where we play, you know, where we sleep, where we work. And it's from that space, you have insurance industry, the finance industry, all comes in there. So we can climb very easily into adjacent industries with these products.

14:03Yeah. Why don't you just maybe pick your favorite you think would maybe most resonate with our listeners with Fire Nation? Let's chat about that a little bit. And if any questions come up along the way that I think our listeners will have, I'll ping them in. I'll mention the own prop one a little deeper. I mean, I'm excited about all of them, by the way, but I think people right now just love blockchain and the promises of blockchain. and so do I. I love it too. That's why I'm getting into it. So we'll talk about OwnProp. And OwnProp is real estate on the blockchain. And I'll explain why that is so important for humanity.

14:36If you look at over history, JLD, you've got down to the times of Julius Caesar in 60 BC, you had real estate as a primary source of wealth. I think one of the three of the Chiron Vera, I think it was Cassius, right? He had his wealth, he was the richest person in the Roman Empire from real estate ownership. So real estate has been durable forever as a durable piece of investment for putting your money, for keeping it downside protected and securely growing it over time. But more and more, and actually throughout all of history, the middle class and really the lower class, the poor have never had a chance to invest into real estate and get a piece of the action.

15:16And with OwnProp, real estate on the blockchain, we can open it up to them. Now, we have to work through securities regulations, the SEC, but we're already working through that. And right now, as of now, we're able to open it up to 13 million plus accredited investors. And soon we're going to open up to 300 million of the retail investors in the US, nevermind the global investors that can then buy a piece of the action as well within real estate. Right. And and this is this is something that's never been able to be done before without blockchain. And I could I could, you know, get out. I'll explain a little bit of why that's the case.

15:51And in a way, it's given away my thinking on this. But I'm happy to do that because I want people to get involved in this, because I think this is a huge humanitarian issue because wealth, the wealth divides a real issue. You know, I think people on the right are not as concerned as people on the left, but we should all be concerned. We're all one big human family. And we've got to figure out ways to open up opportunity for people to also participate in wealth creation for themselves so that we don't have such a damn big wealth divide. And this product, I think, is going to be a big answer to it.

16:21But if you think about it, so blockchain right now, if you wanted to without the blockchain, without our product and you wanted to buy a piece of, say, a jewel asset downtown, for example, in Austin, Texas, the capital of Texas, we have a property called Hotel Ella. That is a property that's a jewel asset in downtown Austin. that is going on OwnProp. OwnProp will then tokenize that asset. It's an iconic hundred year old asset that will go on OwnProp. We'll take it on there. It's going to be an asset that'll be valued at over 60 million, but we'll take it on there and we'll break it into tokens that are immutably recorded in the blockchain.

16:55And we're going to open it up so investors can invest into that down to a dollar eventually. So someone could say, oh, you know what? Why don't you, know it could be even a kid right they could be you know just working doing a waitress waiter work on on the side right while they're at school in high school and they could start throwing 100 bucks here and there into an asset like that that they might even work at they might work at the restaurant there they might work down the road and they know that that's a premium area because a lot of people the man on the street they know a lot of stuff and they can get involved and they can put that money in and you couldn't do that before and the reason why you couldn't do before without blockchain is because transactional costs are extremely high i've heard estimates that there's about 60 people that have to touch a real estate asset before the transaction can pass from one hand to the other that are taking a fee off it in some regard.

17:39And some of those people are not at the closing table, but they're down the food chain of like who touches it. Right. So that's crazy. And you could get that theoretically, that closing cost down to, you know, nobody involved with the blockchain. And I would argue it's even more secure. It's more it's more secure that, you know, you got what you think you got and you know who it came from as well. But with that, the current system, the way it's done, if you want to go own a piece of that hotel, I'm talking about called Hotel Ella in downtown Austin, and you go to buy a piece of that, well, right now you can't get in.

18:10I mean, even if you want to invest with me, I mean, the minimums are going to be like, you know, a million dollars or something, right. To come in and invest with me into that or company, unless in a friends and family area where you might get in for a minimum of a hundred thousand. Now who the heck can afford that? I mean, when I was coming up, I can't, you know, I was scratching together, like, you know, 5 ,000 bucks was like the most I had in my bank account when I came out of college and I had that from construction. I mean, how are you going to get a piece of the action? How can you participate in that?

18:35You can't. And the reason why you can't is not because people are conspiring against other people from getting in. It's because the system has too many hands involved. So when you sell, if you tried to sell, let's say a$10 ,000 piece of that hotel, just say$10 ,000 of the$60 million value. You wanted to sell$10 ,000 worth of it to say you, JLD, and you wanted to buy it. Well, the problem is you buy it for 10 ,000 bucks, but your closing costs are going to be around a thousand dollars. So in order for you to buy that, you had to spend 10 % of it to get in. Well, that's not economically a smart move for you, but on the blockchain, we could drop those costs theoretically into the future.

19:15And I believe it's going to happen down to cents to pennies. Really, it could be pulled off. Even right now, we could drop it down to, you know, a hundred dollars or so. So you're already talking about a 10 X difference or a hundred X difference even right now. And, and that's, that's massive. It's also massive for people who are, you know, older people that could, you know, we all have parents, we have grandparents, right. And a lot of those people are sort of house rich, but cash poor, right. And their home could be, you know, they could be in Cleveland, Ohio, right. And their home could be worth$150 ,000 and they have no mortgage, but yet they don't have money to go visit their grandkids.

19:50Well, what they could do on own prop is they could go and sell a couple thousand dollars of their property value on own prop. And someone can buy an interest in their home without taking on debt. It's just pure equity sale. And they could go take that money and go visit their grandkids. And they still have the rest of their equity in their home and they can cash that in as they'd like in the future. So I think both sides of the transaction here, the buyers and the sellers, it opens up a massive market that up to now has not been opened up. And I think it's I think it's an extremely important thing for people to understand how this could be applied.

20:23I had this idea when I first read the Bitcoin white paper about four or five years ago. I was in San Francisco and I read this thing that, man, this is this is amazing. I loved it right away. And I then within a few weeks had the idea of putting it on onto putting real estate on blockchain, actually. And but I thought, you know what? I'm so damn busy. I can't do this at so many other companies that we're building and growing. Right. So I said, I can't do it. So instead, what I did was I went on a podcast that's the most listened to crypto podcast in the UK. And I just marketed the idea and said, hey, someone should pick this up and do this because it's good for people.

20:55But I don't have time to do it. But no one's really done it in a big way that's working because it takes a number of disciplines combined, which we happen to have very well inside of our ecosystem, inside of our company. So I decided to just go and boom, let's launch this thing. So we've already got it going and it's up and running. Wow. I mean, this is the type of action that you need to be willing to take, Fire Nation to just catch this fire rocket that is this new tech leadership that's in this world. And there's so many dimensions. There's so many niches. There's so many opportunities within.

21:28Peter, let's end with a bang. How specifically can Fire Nation get involved? What do you want to give to us as a call to action? Everybody listening here, myself included, are either already are entrepreneurs or they're people that already have an entrepreneurial mindset. So you can get involved in three ways. The first way you can get involved is you can invest in our startups. We're gonna be opening those up to, we've opened those up to investors as of yesterday, literally. And we haven't done it publicly online yet. We've only emailed this to a few thousand of my own personal connections, but we're gonna open that up publicly in the next week or so.

22:09So they can get invest. They can invest into startups. And that's entrepreneurial to make an investment early in things and have a vision. Right. So the second way is you can join companies like mine. You don't have to join my company, but join companies like mine that are grounded in virtue and that are determined to serve people and empower them. And especially please do it in the area of technology, because we need leadership there. We need entrepreneurs stepping in that space and just going after it full all in. And the third way is you can help us spread the word. tell other people about this.