Welcome back to another episode of the IRA Cafe podcast! This week, Kyle Moody, business development manager at American IRA, sits down with Victor Menasce, senior partner at Y Street Capital. Victor brings a fascinating journey from Silicon Valley microprocessor design and leadership in the tech industry to becoming a successful real estate developer and capital raiser.

In this conversation, Victor shares how his technical expertise transitioned into the world of real estate, his lessons learned from early investing missteps, and the strategies he now uses to help others scale and diversify their own portfolios.

The episode covers the nuts and bolts of capital raising, the importance of aligning investor goals with the right projects, and how self-directed IRA investors can participate in unique asset classes—including real estate development projects like active adult communities. Victor also dives into the philosophy behind his book "Magnetic Capital" and his daily Real Estate Espresso podcast, outlining the core fundamentals for building successful investment relationships and managing risk. Whether you're just considering your first investment or looking for ways to refresh a seasoned strategy, this episode is packed with valuable, actionable insights.

Key takeaways:

1. Professional Transition and Leverage: Victor discusses his shift from tech to real estate, highlighting the value of leveraging previous business and capital-raising experience rather than starting from scratch in a new industry.
2. Lessons in Scaling and Location: Early investing taught Victor that not all assets are created equal—location and demand are more important than simply finding low purchase prices, and scaling comes from aggregating manageable properties for operational efficiency.
3. Investment Alignment: He emphasizes matching investor goals (safety, cash flow, growth, risk) with the right type of project and ensuring alignment between capital and opportunity as a fundamental principle for success.
4. The Myth of Passive Income: Victor breaks down misconceptions around "passive income" in real estate, explaining that true residual income comes from involvement in well-managed, scalable businesses, not hands-off flipping or rental operations.
5. Environment Over Knowledge Alone: For both beginners and experienced investors, Victor’s most important advice is to immerse yourself in the right environment—surrounding yourself with people actively succeeding in your field is key to learning, growth, and opportunity.

Tune in for candid advice on growing your investment skills, insights into real estate capital raising, and how to strategically use your self-directed IRA to its full potential!

On this episode of the IRA Cafe podcast, we bring you Victor Menasce with Y Street Capital, who's going to fill you in on his background in the tech Silicon Valley world and chip making, all the way into how it morphed into being a senior partner in real estate developing and capital raising. You can do every single bit of this with your self-directed IRA. Come on into the cafe. Welcome everyone to another installation of the IRA Cafe powered by American IRA. I'm Kyle Moody, the business development manager here who's always eager to take your call, and we are ready to get you set up whenever and wherever you are ready to take your investment objectives. That's right, if you are just now getting ready to start your self-directed retirement account Remember, americanira.com is where you are able to find all of information about our company, all about the different account types out there, and how you can invest in many, many different asset classes. Don't think that you have to do it on your own. I am right there and we can spend as much time on a call as you need.

I'll look at all your scenarios. I'm not able to give any tax, legal, or financial advice, suggestions, or opinions. Rather, we will make sure you have all the information so that you can move forward with the proper decision-making, and therefore you are well on your way. Whether it's going to be a traditional or a Roth IRA, whether you're an entrepreneur with no full-time employees and you're going to use the solo 401, remember, no matter the retirement vehicle, they can all invest in these same asset classes. And also remember, it's not so much what the IRS says that you can invest in, since that's so broad, it's the handful of things that you might not be able to do with your self-directed account. If those are questions you have as well, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me, and my direct phone number is 828-412-8123. And as always, you can email me at [email protected]. So, uh, welcome those inquiries, and looking forward to working with you.

As always here on the Cafe, we want to bring you information from outside sources, where they came from, what they do now, how you can actually use your self-directed investment account to make investments maybe in their offerings or do what they do. If there's one thing that you have been doing with your self-directed retirement account and you're thinking about maybe switching gears a little bit, we like to diversify it up, right, to bring you information on real estate, information on private private lending, whether it's precious metals, oil and minerals. Well, today you're going to learn about capital raises and how that capital funding is used for further investments. Your IRA can still be a part of those investments, and then the dividends come back in to fund your account where it will grow. And we have someone that is joining us today, Victor Menasce with Y Street Capital. He is the founder and senior partner. We are so excited to have him with us today, not just because what he's doing now, but I'm really looking forward to him telling you a little bit about where he came from. So we got a lot to cover with him, very, very deep information here.

So Victor, without further ado, we are so glad to have you with us today. And if you wouldn't mind, just tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, Kyle, great to see you, my friend, and great to be here. My career path into this business was not the typical career path. I started in the tech industry, gosh, in the mid-1980s, started my career in microprocessor design. So I was a chip designer designing chips for the telecom industry and rose through the ranks of both public and private companies. Spent most of my tech career in that space, took one company public, 5 mergers and acquisitions, and some of the most fun I had in my life, frankly, working with super smart people, working on incredibly cool applications. Acquired a division out of IBM to run their microprocessor division, ran that for a number of years. And then you might remember something going on around 2009 in real estate. And at that particular moment in time, I was traveling back and forth to Japan every 2 weeks working on a new cellular network for the number 4 carrier in Japan at the time.

And it was burning me out a little bit physically. That 12-hour time zone every week was a little bit tough on the body, and it was not great for the time I was spending or wasn't spending with my family, because even when I did get home, I was exhausted. And so at that point, I decided to take a hard left turn in my career and move into real estate on a full-time basis. So that was a good time to enter the market because it was great to play offense. Tough time to play defense, but a good time to play offense. So that's how I got into real estate.

Well, let me ask you this now that you bring that up. I mean, I was gonna ask, I mean, how does someone make the shift from exactly what you were doing? And, you know, when I think about it and how you just set that up, it's 180 degrees, you know, on the spectrum. It seems like logistics, I would have to think in the day-to-day and the chips and all the travel and everything goes into a lot of the, logistic thoughts, I'm guessing, that might come along with the real estate depending on what you do with it. It certainly did during my years in property management. Tell us a little bit about what that move was like going from Silicon Tech into real estate. Was real estate something that you knew a lot about at that juncture? Is it something that you had dabbled in a little bit, or was this all brand new to you?

I had started dabbling in it in 2006. I started acquiring properties within the downtown core. I live in Ottawa, Canada, our nation's capital, and there was a need for essentially executive rentals for folks that are embassy staff, parliamentary staff, military officers, folks like that that are in town on a medium-term basis. Airbnb didn't exist, of course, at that time. And so really saw a need in the marketplace. A 12-month unfurnished lease was of no use to those folks, and they had a very specific housing allowance. So the question was, could I design a product within maybe a 4-block radius of Parliament that would be that executive suite rental priced at the housing allowance? And so that's where I started. It was a good business.

It wasn't a fabulous business, but it was a good business. The business case made sense because for a few thousand dollars, I could deliver a turnkey, fully furnished product that was better than a suite hotel and it fit the need at the price point. So it was that business case worked all day long. That's where I started. And if I was to do it again, there's many things I would do differently. I spent a lot of time, frankly, wasting time working with the wrong people, you know, doing projects that were way too small. I really honestly wasted a lot of time taking a lot of the boot camps and training classes that folks often sign up for. And I forgot that I knew how to run a business.

And I wish I'd remembered that sooner.

That's interesting.

Is it—

do you think that maybe it's because you were in a whole new pool, but the fundamentals, as you said, should remain the same.

Well, exactly. I thought that there was some deep domain knowledge on the real estate side that was a barrier. And quite frankly, those items are learned on a fairly short-term basis. They're relatively easy compared to, let's say, microprocessor design, you know, which is a little bit deeper, deeper subject. If you're, for example, trying to perform quality assurance on a chip design, There can be a lot of issues hidden within the design of a chip. But say if your kitchen counter isn't level and an egg is going to roll off onto the floor, that's fairly easy to QA. That's not that difficult. And so I ended up just thinking I needed to start at the bottom and work my way up.

And that was a, you know, a waste of time. I started flipping houses in Chicago and in Florida. That was nuts. That was silly. I should have been just focusing on what I knew best, which is how to run a business and how to raise capital and how to manage teams and all of that. I leveraged that skill set much, much later than I should have.

Okay, well then that actually leads me to ask you this. For those that are listening or watching, whatever the case may be, and they're saying, all right, well, how do I get started? You know, what, what is, you know, what comes first, the money that I need or the real estate to generate the money. You know, they, they might be in classes where they hear about, you know, the OPM, other people's money, using somebody else's money to get started. Can you talk a little bit about when you were getting started, if you at least had that capital there, if you were leveraging? Talk about what that start was really like, because obviously where you are now, somebody might listen to me like, oh gosh, I, I wouldn't even know where to start. So talk to us what that start might be like for some folks.

I started with my own money. And of course, the game of real estate is a game of big numbers. So you will run out. It doesn't matter who you are, you will eventually run out. So that you go, go, go until you stop. And then what? So I forgot that I knew how to raise capital. I learned that skill in the tech industry. And by the way, in the tech industry, it is much harder to raise money for an idea, for something that is not proven, Here in real estate or even in acquiring existing businesses, you're following a proven formula.

You're not really inventing anything new. There's no intellectual property here in the world of real estate. You're basically taking a proven formula and just doing it again and doing it better. That's it. There's not much more to it. And so the investment thesis can be much more easily supported. You're talking about Yeah, there's risks. There's business risk.

There's some market risk because things can change. You could have a pandemic. My goodness, who would've thought? And things that come along that can affect things. You can have interest rate risk, construction costs, tariffs, all these different things, but you've got less risk than you do in the tech industry for sure. And so if you are adept at managing risk, then you can put together businesses that make sense and you can put investment theses together that make sense. Great.

Let me ask you this. So now we're talking about where you came from. You've given some folks a flavor of what really to think about, but let's go ahead and get into scaling. Okay?

Sure.

Because that is one thing that, like you said, if you could go back and talk to you, if the now you could go back and talk to the then you, you would've said, look, don't Don't worry about this. Let's already think ahead of when we're going to scale. So in the scaling of the development that you were doing or the real estate, which really came first, that type of development that you were doing, or did it kind of coincide with the start of Y Street? We're going to get into Y Street in just a second, but really, which came first on that for you?

I started, well, I started working with a partner in Chicago doing major rehabs on apartment buildings in the South Side. That was not a very fruitful exercise because those exact same vintage buildings on the North Side of Chicago got much higher valuations than on the South Side. So learned a powerful lesson. It was not just the purchase price of the asset, it's looking at the demand for that asset. That's what makes it more valuable. The same building in a better location is going to demand a higher price, and it's because of that demand. I often give an example because every year the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts go out and they sell stuff. The Girl Scouts go out and they sell cookies every year for a couple weeks out of the year.

Where do they go? Do they go to the fanciest neighborhood with the biggest houses, or do they go to the hood?

Why?

They go to the fanciest neighborhood because what'll happen is the homeowner, they come up to the big wooden fancy door and they ring the bell and the homeowner say, oh, that's really cute, kid. Here's $20, keep the cookies. And they go get to sell 'em again. So if the Girl Scouts have figured it out, how come real estate investors haven't?

Right. Yeah. Reminds me of There was a neighborhood like that when I was growing up, and everybody liked to go trick-or-treat in that neighborhood because you didn't get the fun size, you actually got the full-size candy bar of whatever it was. So we always joke that, well, now we need bigger baskets of bigger pumpkins to take. So no, totally a point taken on that. All right, so now take us into the creation of Y Street Capital. And talk to us, our listeners, about its operation, both with someone who might have the real estate vision or the capital investing in capital raises. Explain maybe the differences and how clients can really invest with you and through you.

Maybe I'll take a moment and just give a little bit of the preamble that led up to Wise Street. So where I really cut my teeth in the development side is by making incremental, taking on projects that were incrementally more difficult. So we started in Philadelphia, in North Philly, very close to Temple University, essentially acquiring properties that were, let's say, small to medium size. And we, over a span of several years, ended up acquiring maybe 85 to 90 properties within a 10-block radius of Temple University and redeveloping those. Now, these smaller buildings, some of them were 9 units, some were 13 units, some were 11, some were 15, all different sizes, they're too small to manage by themselves. But if you start to aggregate them together within a radius, now you can start to manage this portfolio as if it was a monolithic building and start to get the management economies of scale that you need to have property management in-house and deliver a decent quality product. So we really developed a system for building these buildings. And from there, the step to doing zoning improvements to get higher density.

That was a small step. From there to greenfield development was a small step. So every step of the way, we took on projects that were of increasing complexity. And then I was in fact invited to join Y Street Capital. I was not the founder.

Hmm.

But the original 2 founders had a project that had decent complexity to it, and they felt that my expertise would be helpful both on the capital side as well as on the development side. And so that was really the genesis of how we started to scale up. And today we're active in multiple states across the US, a couple of provinces in Canada. We have a thriving consulting division where we're, say, developers for hire for other owners, for other investors. And we have clients everywhere from California to All over the US, California, Florida, several provinces in Canada. We're quite active there as well.

Now, do you— did you then, or do you still now contract when you start talking about taking buildings down and this and that? I mean, have you expanded to have your, you know, arms of this under Y Street, or you guys are really just coming with the capital and all of those types of things are contracted out?

No, no, we undertake the development ourselves. We're not just capital raisers. I think that's a dangerous thing. You really need to understand the risks that you're taking and understand the details of these projects because guess what? They're all hard. They all are. I don't care what anyone tells you. Even the most innocuous, simple-looking projects, there will be surprises in there that are going to test your skill and resourcefulness. That's essential.

You've got to have that skill set.

You can't have— Well, now with you, one-stop shop, you're doing it all. Now let's talk about investors. You know, our clients, they know that they are able to invest in private equities, private entities out there. They can do the real estate deal themselves. But if someone was looking to invest via Y Street, talk to us, walk us through that process from beginning to end and what it would look like for an investor?

Maybe the place to start is just to set a little bit of context with respect to investing. I believe that money should go into one of 4 different buckets. There is your safety bucket. This is maybe the gold coins under your pillow. They're untouchable. There's your cash flow bucket. There's a growth bucket and maybe a risk bucket. And so you as an investor need to be thinking for, you know, often people will typecast themselves and say, well, I'm a cash flow investor, which is partly true.

That's true for that one cash flow bucket. And it's up to you. It's not for anyone else to say what your allocation should be between those 4 buckets. But all 4 buckets exist. And so is the investment appropriate for that bucket? Sometimes people will think that they're buying a cash-flowing asset when in fact it's not, or vice versa, or they're, they're, they need to be really clear on what the goals are. And so when we talk about it, we talk about matching the goals for the money with the goals for the project. And if that alignment doesn't exist, then don't take the money. We're not going to take the money.

It doesn't make any sense because it doesn't fit. So it's first of all understanding what that alignment is. And when you look at any investment, you want to be looking at a 3-legged stool. You want to look at the asset and the submarket. Does that investment thesis make sense to you? Do you like the team that is actually being entrusted with your money? And number 3, the specifics of the deal. And you really want to look at it through the lens of all 3 of those. And then only then Maybe consider making investment. So there should be never anything about it that feels forced.

It's gotta feel like a very natural fit. It's gotta feel like there's that alignment between the goals for the money and the goals for the project. So it could be that some of the things that we're doing are not a fit. I've had investors say to me, you know, we have a project that's pretty exciting, but I don't do land. I'm sorry, that's just not who I am. Okay, fine. That's perfectly okay. We have several land development projects.

It's not for everybody. We have 77 million square feet that we bought in Colorado for 23 cents a square foot. We think we got a good deal. That was the former Norris Ranch. Mr. Norris, the Marlboro Man in the cigarette commercials, that was his cattle ranch.

Wow.

And so Acquiring just under 1,800 acres is again, not for everybody, but we've got some interesting plans for that project. And now that's fully subscribed. And at some point there will be future opportunity on that project, probably. But, you know, when we were raising that capital, it was about, is this the right thing for you? Yes, the returns, there was way more upside than downside, that's for sure. So we want to make sure that it's the right fit. So it really starts with a conversation, kind of a KYC, know your customer type conversation, and see what is your investment horizon. Are you looking to tie up the money for 6 months or 5 years or 10? What is your investment horizon? What is most important to you? If it's in an IRA, we tend not to focus quite so much on the tax consequence, although there are always tax considerations in any investment because of course it's sheltered if done correctly. You want to make sure, you know, what's the risk, what's the rate of return, what's the control structure, all of these different elements which we'll share openly and transparently.

And, you know, we like to focus on projects where there's acute demand for that product in that location. And Not just build a commodity because what's the definition of a commodity? If gas is 5 cents cheaper across the street, you don't care if it's Sunoco or Mobil, you'll go where it's 5 cents cheaper. That's a commodity. But if you have a product that is offering a unique value in the market, then that price sensitivity becomes a little less important because it has unique value and that's what we focus on.

So with that, Explain to somebody, you know, a positive or a couple of positives of maybe investing in a capital fund as opposed to going out doing the real estate themselves. One thing that I always hear folks say is, well, you know what, I've done enough real estate. I don't want to get my hands dirty anymore. I'm fine with lending that out or giving somebody else my money. What's something else that somebody would consider?

I think the industry has done a bit of a disservice by using this word called passive income. I think it's a myth. It doesn't exist because money comes only in 3 ways, right? There's active business income, earned income. There's residual income, and I use the term residual income as opposed to passive income, and capital gains. That's it. There's nothing else.

Okay.

So if you are out there, often people say, well, I'm investing in real estate. What are you doing? Well, I'm out flipping houses. Well, okay, well that's not investing in real estate, that's manufacturing. That's earned income if there ever was one. Because the second you put down the hammer, the revenue stops, right? That is earned income. There's nothing passive about it. You can scale up any business to a point where it is throwing off enough cash that it's generating residual income. And I know some volume flippers that are doing 40 flips a year, 50 flips a year.

They're not getting their hands dirty anymore. They're managing all the teams and the portfolios, and they're getting residual income even though the underlying business is extremely active. And you can invest passively in an active business, and that's where you can get passive income. Same as you can buy treasury bills. Same exact same thing, right? You're making an investment in something that is going to generate passive income, but there's something active underneath it. So I think that's an important distinction. Real estate, there's nothing passive about real estate. There just isn't.

I mean, eventually, if you have certain assets that are stabilized and they're on autopilot, there is less effort. But it's still not passive. It's still not passive at all. So you really want to focus on folks that are good operators, that have a team put together, that really understand what it takes, both from a construction management, development management, asset management, property management, all of these different elements. That word management keeps repeating itself, and it's essential to getting anything from A to B.

How large is Y Street now? How many, how many people do you have working for you under the umbrella?

We're not very big. We're, you know, we're 5 partners and we're, you know, we're across a couple of different states. We're part of our team is based in Canada, part in the US. We have a few employees, but we're not very— and a few interns, but we're not very big. We're under 10 people and we work with outside contractors as well.

Yep.

There's our team right there. And, uh, so it's a, it's a great team, great culture, uh, very close-knit, and, uh, love the people that I work with on a daily basis.

And that's so important. What are some examples, uh, investment examples that if someone wanted to use, you know, invest in any way, but especially our self-directed clients that are listening today, uh, what are some investment examples that they could expect to be able to invest in with you?

I'll share one that we're actively raising for right now. And of course it's only open to accredited investors so that I can talk about it publicly.

Right.

So we're building an active adult project up in Spokane, Washington. Like a lot of markets, there's been a lot of, let's say, market rate apartments built pretty much nationwide. There's a lot of markets today that I would say are a little bit saturated with new apartments. Now, if you think about the progression of housing from market rate, I'm now talking senior housing. The first step in senior housing traditionally has been this thing called independent living where you're in a complex, there's meals served cafeteria style on steamer trays, they have transportation, but co-located with that will be an assisted living and maybe a memory care facility. So you might progress from there to AL or assisted living. You might progress from there to skilled nursing and maybe from there to hospice. Yeah, there you go.

Spokane. That's our project up in Spokane. And the thing that's interesting about active adult is you don't have the meal service. You don't have a lot of the services that you find in independent living.

Right.

But there's a lot of focus on community. So it's amenities rich. There is a communities director that plans a lot of the activities. You're with a cohort that's the same age group. You're not going to be mixing folks in their 60s and 70s with folks in their 20s that have very different lifestyles. And it's that sense of community that is key. The average tenure in active adult is in fact about 9 years, which is quite long compared to a market rate apartment. And the mix is also interesting because it's 30% couples, 70% single, and women typically outnumber men 6 to 1.

So if you think about mom who maybe doesn't want to mow the lawn anymore, maybe husband has died or is infirm, they need a place where there's a sense of community. They They certainly don't want to go into senior housing. They're still active and will be for a number of years, God willing. You want them to be in a place where they're in a safe location. They have that sense of community. Kids don't have to worry about mom and worry that they may be dealing with things that they are not equipped to deal with. So it's really a product designed for that. And by the way, there's very little of it.

There's only like under 100,000 units of that product. in the entire nation.

Oh, wow.

Which is a drop in the bucket when you consider 340 million people. I mean, it's a drop in the bucket. So it's a product which is in high demand. Most of it is full and it is priced at a discount to independent living. So I'll just give you an example and I'm just going to make up some numbers here. Don't quote me on them to the penny, but let's say a market rate apartment is, I don't know, $2,000 or $2,200 a month. Independent living might be $4,500 a month. That's a big jump.

Whereas active adult might be under $3,000, might be $2,600, $2,800 for a one-bedroom, right? So it's, yeah, it's a bit of a premium to a market-rate apartment, but you're getting a whole lot more for your money. And it's also a discount to independent living. So when people often go into active adult, they will in fact skip independent living altogether. There might be a medical event that maybe has them go into AL, assisted living, later down the road, but they will stay in active adult as long as possible.

My mother is 83 today, so happy birthday, Mom, out there. And I tell you, if she was in one of these places, it better be as active as it can be, because when people look at her and, and my dad both, they can't believe that they're both in their 80s, and I can't either. So that is the thing. I think that's actually really a cool blend that you're talking about right there because it gives them still something to do, those sharp folks there. And kudos for you for taking that on. So you heard it right here, folks. I mean, an investment opportunity if this is something that you're thinking about. I'm sure that you will have ways to be able to get in touch with Victor as well, and he can tell you more about it, as actually your entire team.

What I like is that your team is accessible and can talk folks through things like you said, to really feel or see if it's going to be a right feel or not. And you're not just senior partner, not just the investor out there and the developer, but you've got author under your belt as well. Magnetic Capital. Tell us about your book.

It's funny, when I moved into real estate, I told you I ran out of my own money and I had to relearn the process of raising capital. And then when I did, I discovered that it was pretty much the same as what I had been doing in the tech industry. A lot of the same principles applied, and it came down to really 5 fundamentals. You've got to have a relationship with the money. People are not going to part with their life savings with folks they don't know. You've got to have trust, which is not just are you dealing with an honest person, but it's that whole psychological contract with a lot of layers to it. Is this person capable of putting together a good plan? Are they able to execute the plan? Can you trust them with small commitments? All of these different things that make up that psychological contract of trust. Number 3, what's their track record? Show me you know how to be successful.

It doesn't mean you haven't had any problems, but when you did, how'd you deal with them? Number 4, do you have a compelling opportunity? Often people lead with the deal and they think it's all about the deal and it's never about the deal. And then number 5, that alignment that we talked about before. What are the goals for the money and do they match the goals for the project? And if all 5 of those principles fit, then it's probably going to be much easier to raise the money. If one or more of those are missing, it's going to be extraordinarily difficult.

Gotcha.

And I discovered that in the tech industry. When I relearned it in real estate, I said, oh my gosh, it's the same. So I wrote a book. It's that simple.

I like it. I like it. You know, for those of you out here listening, Victor and I actually, as we were getting to know each other, and this was a couple of months ago, you were in the car heading to an appointment. I was getting ready to jump in the car and head across in town where I live here to another appointment. But just talking and the education platform and really already the information that we knew about each other's lanes that we both serve in, the amount of knowledge and the things that you can learn, the things that you can capitalize on with a company like Y Street. you know, with your self-directed IRA from American IRA, but this knowledge as well from him being an author. And then also what we really had a laugh about were our podcast platforms. We're the IRA Cafe, and here we are coming on and doing recordings a few times a month.

He's actually got one, he's out there every day, and it's called the Real Estate Espresso Podcast, your quick shot of everything. And I just thought, you know, What are the chances in that? The cafe to the shot of espresso. And if you want to tell us a little bit about the podcast before we finish up as well.

Absolutely. Yeah. So Real Estate Espresso, when I launched the show, I was thinking, gosh, why does the world need another podcast? And if folks are already subscribing to 6 shows and listening to 5 because that's all they have time for, why are they going to listen to me? What am I going to bring that they can't already find. So it was really thinking about how to design a show that would fulfill a need in the marketplace that wasn't really being served. And it was that daily shot of espresso, that morning shot of what's new in the world of investing from the perspective of not the rookie investor, but from the perspective of a more sophisticated investor and really understanding what is it that investors are looking for. So we talk about strategy, we talk about macroeconomics, we talk about things that we see happening in the news and commentary on it. It's important to look at these different elements through the lens of a sophisticated investor because you don't get that everywhere. Because the last thing you need is another hour-long podcast where it's interview style.

No disrespect to anyone who's doing that format, but how many more of those shows that follow that format? Who has the time? And so the feedback from the listeners is that they will often listen to my show first because they know they can commit to 5 or 10 minutes every day, 7 days a week. The weekday edition are solo episodes, just me, and the weekend edition are interviews with notable people from the world of investing. And that's the format. And here we are over 3,100 episodes in and still going strong. And it's attracted a number of investors to the platform, to what we're doing. Love sharing what we're doing on a daily basis through the podcast and engaging that conversation.

Gotcha. And to wrap up with today, if in your opinion, what's the most sound advice that you can give to a beginning investor?

It's shockingly simple. A lot of people think that they need more knowledge, and so they'll go take a course, they'll take a weekend boot camp or whatever it might be. And that's great. That's helpful. Then there's the mindset folks out there that will tell you that you need more emotional fortitude or you've got limiting beliefs or whatever it might be. And that you're, you know, it's the mindset crowd out there and that's essential too. And that's also helpful, but that's not the ticket either. Because if it was, then anyone with access to AI should be a billionaire and anyone who's gone to a Tony Robbins event should be a billionaire.

And so that's clearly not it. So it's really the third element, and that is environment. Get yourself in the environment that you are working with folks that are doing the thing at a high level so that you become immersed in that environment. Learning this business, like any business, is an immersive experience. It's the same way you learned English or whatever your mother tongue was. You learned that in an immersive environment. It wasn't sitting behind the desk with a textbook. You had to get in, like you have to get in the water to swim.

You can't read a textbook and learn it that way. It's immersive. And so what is it about environment? You're not going to learn how to get things through city council unless you are having conversations with folks that have done that repeatedly. It's not taught at the university level. There's elements of it that are just intangible. So it's about getting in that environment. I mean, think about it. Why do some of the top Olympic athletes train together? Why do the figure skaters from Japan and Korea train at 2 rinks in Canada? They have ice in Japan, they have ice in Korea.

They're going to get a better training experience in that environment. It's about environment.

You know, and, and let's take it up to the seasoned investor. What would you say to the seasoned investor who's either looking to scale, who's already scaled, But you know, their feet might, might be falling asleep. So what do you say to that person who's been doing this for 2 decades?

Depends what their goals are, but I would arguably give the same advice. So if they're looking to scale in a particular direction, maybe they want to branch into a new asset class. Maybe they want to go into storage or industrial or hospitality. Get immersed in that environment with folks that are doing it at a high level, and that's how you're going to become an expert in that particular arena. Oftentimes you will look what happens when you develop those relationships. You get different things from different relationships. You might get advice, you might get access to opportunity, you might get credibility, you might get introductions, you might get a friendship, you might get access to capital, you might get all of these different things. But if you are simply going into relationships for the sole purpose of just, I don't know, raising capital, then that's probably not the best thing.

Fantastic. Well, listen, Victor Menasce with Y Street Capital, thank you so much for spending your time with us today. I know that I always say I always come on these shows and just because I'm hosting it doesn't mean that I am immune from learning something. So definitely have the day. Love to be able to spend some more time with you, and I know that we are going to get the chance to do that on one of your webinar presentations to all of our folks as well. So for Victor, for Y Street Capital, and for American IRA, I want to sign off by saying thank you to everyone who has been listening whenever and wherever you have caught this podcast. We're always thankful.

Thank you.

to be here to serve you with your account. And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode from the IRA Cafe. We'll see you then.

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