Transcript for:
Season 1 Episode 2

Today on Going Public, our final two companies launched their Regulation A offerings to public investment. Trouble is on a mission to save music for the masses. It's on demand, it's offline, it's all of the best music in the world, but it's free for the consumer.

While NGT Academy is training cybersecurity warriors with zero upfront tuition. We've gave people IT training and landing them into a career within six months or less. These four diverse companies on Going Public are representing tech, education, skincare, and fashion and have each begun their journeys to raise capital from public investors, including you, the viewer. Welcome to Going Public. Okay, so before we get to these companies, let's get some very important legal issues out in the open.

Going Public is for entertainment purposes, and at no time do the company, sponsors, nor any participants provide investment advice, endorsement analysis, or any other information. or recommendations with respect to securities. On Going Public, you're going to hear from four companies that are giving you an opportunity to invest through an exemption from registration with the SEC called Regulation A. These offerings have not been offered to you. not gone through a registration process with the SEC and do not have the investor protection that it provides and it should be noted that just because the show is called going public there is no guarantee that any company will in fact go public or ever lists on an exchange like Nasdaq for example bottom line you need to know the risk going in the companies have all files and offering circular with the SEC that you should read carefully including the section called risk factors because these are speculative and illiquid offerings and you can lose some or all of your money.

Another thing you need to know is that Going Public is operated by Crush Capital and Crush Capital is being compensated by the companies featured on the show. And some of our mentors have interest in the companies as well. These relationships mean that there could be a conflict of interest between the investors, Crush Capital, the companies featured, and the mentors on the show.

We detail all these potential conflicts on the Going Public website. website at goingpublic.com. Are we gonna dive right into it? Dive straight in. Okay, let's break down these companies.

Let's start with Treble. Treble's model music for free and have brands sort of foot the bill. That's a whole new advertising model.

When it comes to Bob and Gary, they're all about how they're actually going to generate revenue. One day, they're doing a deal with Televisa. The next day, there's something about Walmart. The next day, they're raising money.

So my head explodes, and I'm like, wow, these guys are doing a lot. Gary, I just hung up with Mike and you absolutely killed it yesterday. Tell me more. Tell me way more. He said, you guys are now in the big leagues.

You got all these music industries. How much should I invest? Treble is... music app unlike any other in the world. It's on demand, meaning you choose a song.

It's offline. It's full licensed library. It's all of the best music in the world, but it's free for the consumer.

That's treble. We make it possible for your music consumption to be free because it's the brands who are paying for your music. Brands want access to our consumers, and they want to advertise to them. They want to make them special offers. They want to target them on their phones.

Brands pay for that. That's how we make money. That's how our investors get a return, and we have a patent to do it.

When you open the app, you have the home screen. We have both playlists, and we also have new releases. Kanye West, Iron Maiden, and Lady Gaga. Let's just take this Kanye West album. There's a big yellow button here.

This is a download. album, when you tap on it, this is what happens. We are gonna play a short ad while this record downloads and we are monetizing the preview and download experience as opposed to most music services will interrupt the play time.

Subscription growth is in fact slowing. The subscription model is great for people that can't pay and that want to pay, but there are a lot of people that don't, so the industry is looking for the next big solution and we see that in trouble. Check this out, we're number one now in Mexico. When we launched the product, in less than two years, we have gone to 3.2 million monthly active users.

We've been growing 50 to 100 percent year over year, quarter after quarter. When you look at the dynamics of the global music population, we've got about just shy of, I guess, 8 billion people on this planet. A little more than half of them have smartphones. The entire paid streaming industry, this is Amazon Music, Apple Music, and Spotify together, is expected to cap out at 7 or 800 million.

So that leaves... four billion people and we feel that we've created the best mouse trap to go after those four billion people who won't pay for music bob and gary made some bold statements about how users friendly this app is, but I can honestly say that it is true. But I still think that we should take a deeper look into the company.

Bob is quick to point out their market opportunity is larger than the entire subscription streaming space combined. We can acknowledge that those 4 billion plus people are not necessarily paying customers. Trouble's customers and main source of revenue are advertisers. And as we've seen with other scale-up companies on going public, they are operating at a loss and there is doubt on their ability to continue operating as a going concern. Alright, let's look at the risk associated with their business.

Trouble relies on third-party licenses, namely contracts with the music labels. There is no guarantee they'll be able to renew those contracts indefinitely or with favorable terms. Also, there is no guarantee that the recording artist will even continue to partner with the record labels to manage their rights, or that the laws or regulations relevant to Trouble's business practices will remain in place.

Further, as a technology and data-driven company, Trouble is at risk of security breaches that can negatively affect business. If you'd like to learn more about Trouble and their investment opportunity, go to invest.trouble.io. Okay, we have one more company to follow on this Reg A journey here on Going Public. NGT Academy. The founders, TK and Jacob, have a pretty interesting backstory that has shaped the service they offer.

And pay close attention to their revenue model. It's a little different, and I'll dive into it after you hear their story. If you want to get into information technology, college is not the answer. We've trained thousands of engineers.

We know it can be done in months versus years. And without that student loan debt. Terry and I were instructors in the Air Force. We take folks from high school, we would train them and then they will go to the battlefield where they're supporting real-world networks right away.

But it didn't take them four years, it just took them four months. And that's when the idea was born. Could we take that military training framework and then deploy that at scale in the civilian sector?

So we focus on getting people IT training and landing them into a career within six months or less. over 50 billion devices connected to the internet. So cybersecurity becomes extremely important. The world needs NGT Academy because there's a huge deficit in a lot of IT jobs. In cybersecurity, it's gonna grow to over 3 million open jobs in the next few years.

And that's where we come in. Our programs focus on real world skills and project-based learning. So when they actually go to that job, they've done these things, they're familiar with it.

The whole concept is that we can take people from zero to engineer in less than six months. You're going to come out the other end as a network analyst, network admin, junior network engineer. People that have graduated go work at amazing companies like Amazon, Google, Riot Games, Visa.

NGT Academy is going to disrupt the education sector. I really don't want to be in a world where 2030, we've now accumulated $3, $4 trillion in student loan debt. So we offer zero tuition up front for our students.

using an income sharing agreement model. Students can come to us with literally zero income, go through our program, not pay us a dime until they actually land their job. And that's the beauty of the ISA.

We only take 10% of the student's income for up to four years. And that's it. Now, if we get you a job and you're making $100,000, tuition is capped at a $25,000 tuition cap, and you're going to pay back that in 30 months.

So when the students win, earning more than $40,000, and we get 10% of that income, That's when we win. This is truly a game changer. It aligns with the student and it aligns with our business model.

2019, we did $3.2 million in top line revenue and this is off a 7K product line. We took a hard pivot and we said this model is not going to scale for us and we moved into live cohort teaching. This was the right move.

So this is kind of where we're at. This is the model we believe that can scale. And now we have four months to set up our 2022 for success. We are here to change many lives with this innovative approach of zero tuition and zero student debt.

Our mission is to change a million lives by 2030. What does that really mean? It means changing a life by getting into a job. If we can perfect this model and scale it from 2,000 students to 10,000 and then eventually 100,000, we can get to a scale where we can serve a million people. million students and change your lives forever and that's the frame of mind we're thinking about how we're wanting to build this company does this look familiar to you this is why i love ngt Academy but we should still take a closer look at their company.

They have a unique revenue model that is partly based on a forward-looking metric called bookings. Bookings simply means the commitment of a customer to pay over a period of time for a product or service. In the case of NGT Academy the service is an education and the payment is a percentage of a graduates earnings over four years.

Bookings are common in business and accounting, but not necessarily as easy to understand as a simple transaction revenue model, like buying a Hammett purse at a store, for example. There are risks associated with NGT Academy's bookings as the payment is varied and not guaranteed based on a few factors. One, the student's ability to graduate from the academy. Two, that student successfully securing a job after graduation. And three, the potential wide range of salary of that position.

In this case, bookings for the same service can convert to a range of revenues from $25,000 down to $0. And don't forget, IT training is a competitive and crowded marketplace. NGT Academy does not have a patent or exclusivity on the ISA model.

And we should note that NGT Academy is operating at a loss. And there is doubt as to their ability to continue as a going concern. To learn more about NGT Academy and the investment opportunity, visit invest.ngt.academy. Today I'm meeting Gary at his first trouble office, so I'm excited to see where all the magic was made. Gary!

Yeah, hello! Lauren! It's so good to see you! Welcome to the place where it all started.

I'm so excited to be here. Check this out. So we moved from my kitchen into this place. This building.

Yeah. I'm excited to see it. Yeah, so am I, actually. Let's check it out.

I am very excited to share the beginnings of travel with Lauren. I'm hoping that she's going to connect with the story of our company. She's going to connect with what we're doing and the mission that we have. And your daughters, they were also involved.

So they were actually the main instigators, you know, in the beginning. So I have two daughters, Juliet and Grace. One of them was in the orchestra in high school. The other one was a singer.

So we talked a lot about music and we consumed a lot of music. What finally gave me the push to start the company was when there was an incident at my daughter's school, you know, where one of the kids unwittingly pulled some content from a torrent site. And instead of it being music, it turned out to be something sinister.

My daughters challenged me at the time. They said, you're a smart guy, you're a smart engineer, why can't you solve this problem? And then one day I said, if you guys will do it, I'll do it with you.

They were intimately involved, you know, right from the beginning. Knowing that I was building something with my daughters, it was a lot of fun actually. I think that's what kind of gave me the extra push and the extra energy. Yeah, this is definitely bringing back some memories, for sure. So this was your seat?

That's right. Where was Bob? Bob was a huge find for us.

I actually met Bob in this building. So he agreed to a meeting. I wanted to impress him.

It's like, hey, we got leather chairs. You know, look at this huge, giant table. This is our boardroom.

What I didn't know is that he didn't come to interview for the job. He came with a mission to sell me on an idea that he had. Pitch you something.

He was definitely pitching me. And the more I'm listening to him, The more I'm thinking, this guy's a great sales guy. Like, that was the best interview ever. Calling him right now.

Bob, hello! I know that room. It's got really, really crappy.

fake leather chairs. Is that your other office? Because, oh my goodness.

This is Treble Beachside. I wanted to get to know Gary, and when he told me what they had going on in Treble, and even though it was a small team, I realized that it had the chance to be a billion or a multi-billion dollar company. And I quickly said, you know, I'd love to join what you guys got cooking.

And, well, the rest is history. Not every company is big. It's not going to start out big overnight. And I think to see Gary's story and where he starts from other entrepreneurs they'll be able to say okay this little four walls that I have can grow into something and that is not an American story I don't know what is Welcome to NGT Academy in downtown Phoenix. This is a six-story building with a basement.

58,000 square feet. That's going to be all of us. We've been having this vision of a kind of new age training academy.

Live, learn, and play, all in the same building. In the military, we would have housing taken care of, food taken care of. Gym access and technical training, all confined in a tight area. So I'm gonna kinda break down every floor and we're gonna walk through it.

So we're gonna start off with floor one. Let's go inside. This is a work in progress, so you gotta use your imagination.

But the first floor is a food court. We're looking at probably around seven restaurants. Opening this area to the public, letting free traffic come in here. And then to the right, we got the daycare.

This will be one of the first tenants that's going to open up pretty soon. So excited about that. This vision that we had, what, five years ago when we actually did a model. Remember where we took the NGT logo?

We actually tried to raise our first round of funding on that idea. We did. They were like crazy. You can't do this with a million dollars.

Remember that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need about four million. And we pivoted, which worked out perfectly.

Yeah, online first. Yeah, online first. All right, we are at the basement floor.

This would be a really cool space. that has a training data center, nice lighting, everything, really geeked out, and then a nice lounge for people to chill out at. Just create a really cool atmosphere around that. You're going to see all this come to life in the next year. And this outside area, this could be an atrium, it could be a patio.

A lot of greenery, you got to just, you know, use your imagination. Welcome to floor two. Floor two is wellness.

We've got a yoga studio we're going to walk through over here on the left. And then we've got a dozen or more offices and those offices are going to have energy healers, chiropractors, therapists, you name it, really around overall wellness. This entire building, we're doing a lease to purchase.

So if the numbers look right, this entire building becomes a profit center. We plan to lease out 20 plus offices on the second floor. We want to have seven, eight restaurants coming into the food court that's going to serve this entire community. I mean, there's...

600 condos coming across the street from us. It was a no-brainer for us. Welcome to Co-Living Student Housing.

27 units per floor. Floors 3, 4, and 5. They'll get their own rooms, but they're going to share communal areas, maybe kitchen, living room. It creates a seamless user experience where we can really transform them.

What I'm more getting pumped about as we get this facility, as we get this campus idea going, is how can we build the tech in such a way Where the online experience is integrated with the campus experience. Yep. I could see a future where even 80% of our students are learning online, but we bring them to the campus for like an immersive experience. We want to start the in-person training in order to get government funding. Our goal is to serve more veterans, and veterans have been asking us for years to get GI Bill funding approved.

GI Bill is a scholarship, if you will. that most veterans have access to where they can spend tens of thousands of dollars, college, higher education, certifications, and we need two years of in-person training for any of our tracks to get GI Bill. The GI Bill is very important to us because we're veterans ourselves and we really take pride in serving veterans as best we can. It's worth the two-year wait.

Here we are. Welcome to... Our headquarters, this is an exceptional area, right?

It's beautiful. This floor, when I first walked through it, the energy felt right, everything felt right. And sometimes in life, you have those moments, and that was one of those moments. So it's a beautiful space. We can probably have about 25 employees here.

This is our largest classroom over here, where we have all our storage. 30 to 35 students, this is our cybersecurity training room. We're going to continue to have our online-based programs. And even when we have in-person training here, we can still have people joining those classes remotely. Ultimately, this will allow us to create the most phenomenal user experience for a student that is going to spend four months to transform their life.

This is the next chapter that's going to take us to building the number one IT academy on the planet. All right, you've met the companies. You've got a handle on how Reg A works.

If you're interested, you can click to invest right now. We've got a link right here that will take you to each company's investment site. You can learn more about them, read the circulars, and ultimately make your informed decision. You know, we're getting so much outreach from investors, from VCs who are wanting to invest.

But I think we need to make a choice. We have millions of users. Making it possible for them to invest in the company that they love, that they are excited about, was something that...

was very appealing to me. I think Reg A customers are going to be the core customers. The timing's perfect. We're transitioning to the Reg A capital raise right when we're launching the new logo and the new brand. We could end up raising $20 million, $10 million, $30 million, the whole $42 million in a couple months.

That's the unknown. I really want the benefit of Proven's growth and the growth in the value of Proven to be shared with our customers instead of just you know institutional investors. I mean think about it we have 300,000 families a lot of people just want to be part of this this company. opportunity, I believe.

We need to get our financials and our data room prep. Yeah. After completing the Regulation A financing, maybe we can fuel the growth and the expansion, adding more customers, more territories, more countries. It's not just go time for us, but for everything everybody.

You ready to do this? Yeah. All they have to do is click to invest and they can be an owner improvement. Excited about that. I'm holding you accountable.

Yes, Mr. Chairman. Next time on Going Public. With the reggae's open, these companies are ready to start raising capital. Gary and Bob are wasting no time to start pitching wealthy investors.

Put your name, the other people you bring in. Big Presley, say you guys are in. I love this.

You're actually pitching me hard. While double-o Tony is creating the world's most dangerous investor video. James Bond.

And with serious growth comes serious competition. Scrutiny is heavy. The first thing people do is they say, isn't there already one of those?

So these founders are working with entrepreneur and branding expert Jeff Hoffman to take their brands to the public market. I'm not sure why this was custom for me. I want you to reposition the whole thing.

We have to answer that for a public market because they will beat us up over that. Join us next time. ongoing public.