Retail Capital Disruptors: Key Takeaways from the Robinhood Summit

DealMaker was a presenting sponsor at Robinhood’s first-ever annual conference in October 2024. This three-day event brought together more than 700 attendees, including hundreds of Robinhood’s power customers; A-list speakers like Daymond John, Vlad Tenev, and our CEO Rebecca Kacaba; and top-tier media outlets including CNBC, Sherwood Media, and Benzinga.

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Our booth had a massive line on all three days—an exciting validation that retail investors, even pubco-focused traders, have a strong appetite for alternative investments like the ones powered by our tech. But one of the conference’s biggest highlights was a live panel we hosted on the second day. Rebecca led a discussion with three trailblazing CEOs: Teague Egan from EnergyX, Ben Sexson from Monogram Technologies, and Rich Hull from Miso Robotics. These CEOs are not only reshaping their respective industries but also disrupting the traditional capital-raising model by harnessing the power of retail investors.

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Here’s how they’re doing it—and what other founders can learn from their experiences.

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The Panelists

Ben Sexson, Monogram Technologies

Monogram is revolutionizing orthopedic surgery with cutting-edge robotics and 3D-printed implants. Their retail investor base has fueled over $70 million in funding, enabling Monogram to innovate in a market dominated by century-old companies. “Retail capital allowed us to hit critical milestones that we needed to access deeper pools of capital,” Ben shared.

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Rich Hull, Miso Robotics

Miso Robotics brought us Flippy, the AI-powered kitchen assistant manning fry stations at quick-service restaurants across the US. With over $100 million raised from retail investors, Miso is transforming restaurant kitchens, addressing labor shortages, and becoming a cultural icon. “Our retail investors are like a word-of-mouth marketing army,” Rich explained.

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Teague Egan, EnergyX

EnergyX focuses on making lithium extraction more efficient—a critical bottleneck in the electric vehicle revolution. They recently raised $75 million in a single Regulation A+ campaign—the first cleantech company ever to max out this exemption. “Retail investing decentralizes and democratizes capital-raising,” Teague said, calling it a game-changer for companies and investors alike.

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Key Takeaways from the Panel

1. Retail Capital Drives Innovation

For these companies, retail investors did more than provide funding—they validated new ideas and unlocked critical growth opportunities.

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Ben Sexson explained how retail capital allowed Monogram to innovate despite skepticism from traditional investors: “It really enabled the company to develop technology where capital wasn’t available initially for what we were doing.” He noted that retail capital often acts as a stepping stone to institutional funding.

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Teague Egan highlighted retail capital’s ability to decentralize the fundraising process. “Traditionally, we’ve been limited to very few avenues of raising capital, mainly venture capitalists,” he said. “Retail investing decentralizes and democratizes the ability to raise money.”

2. The Power of Community Engagement

Retail investors often become brand ambassadors, creating a ripple effect that goes beyond financial support.

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“Our retail investors are like my word-of-mouth marketing army,” said Rich Hull. He shared how Miso’s retail investors amplified their story through organic social content and created buzz that helped the company grow.

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Even companies without direct consumer-facing products see the impact. “We just had an incredible Wall Street Journal front-page profile,” Teague noted, “and now we have 40,000 people sharing that because they’re excited—they’re an angel investor in this company that has succeeded thus far.”

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3. Blending Retail and Institutional Capital

Retail capital can complement institutional funding, helping companies achieve better valuations and attract strategic partners.

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Teague shared how EnergyX alternates between retail and institutional raises to maximize leverage. “We did a crowdfunding round at a $60 million valuation, which led to our first institutional financing,” he said. “That valuation then helped us secure major partners like General Motors and Posco.”

Rich explained how having 40,000 retail investors builds credibility with institutional investors. “That’s a signal to the market,” he said. “It shows there’s strong support for the company before even going public.”

Lessons for Founders: Building Success in the Digital Age

The panel offered a wealth of insights for founders navigating the challenges of building and scaling businesses in today’s dynamic landscape. Each speaker touched on recurring themes that emphasized the importance of focus, team-building, community engagement, and strategic capital management. Here are the key takeaways:

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1. Build a Loyal, Engaged Community

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All three panelists underscored the value of retail investors as more than just financial backers. Retail capital creates a community of supporters who believe in the mission of your business and act as advocates for your brand.

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Rich described Miso Robotics’ 40,000 retail investors as a “word-of-mouth marketing army.” By sharing social media posts, creating buzz, and even visiting locations where Flippy is installed, these investors continually amplify Miso’s visibility. Similarly, Teague noted that while EnergyX isn’t a consumer-facing company, its retail investor base has significantly increased the company’s profile and credibility within the battery and lithium industries.

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Founders should think of their investors as partners and look for ways to engage and energize them, whether through social media, newsletters, or opportunities to participate in the company’s growth story.

2. Prioritize Team and Execution

Great ideas require great teams to execute them. The panelists repeatedly emphasized that founders can’t do it alone. Teague shared his strategy of hiring world-class talent across every area of EnergyX, from marketing and engineering to operations. “I’ve tried to go find the absolute best people in every position so that EnergyX can execute on our milestones,” he said.

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Ben echoed this sentiment, emphasizing the importance of co-founders and collaborators. “Find at least one other person you can suffer with,” he advised, crediting his spouse and his co-founder as being critical to Monogram’s early survival.

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Startups face challenges that demand resilience and expertise. Building a team with complementary skills—and the grit to navigate tough times—can make or break a venture.

3. Stay Focused on What Matters

Rich highlighted the importance of focus, recalling how he streamlined Miso’s product strategy when he joined the company. “We decided to focus entirely on Flippy, our signature product, before expanding into other opportunities,” he said. This decision enabled the company to improve Flippy’s capabilities while reducing costs and time-to-installation, ensuring a strong foundation for future growth.

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Disruption often requires founders to tackle big, systemic problems—but trying to do too much at once can dilute resources and slow progress. Founders should identify their highest-value opportunity and commit to it fully before scaling their efforts.

4. Use Retail Capital Strategically

The flexibility of retail capital allows founders to pursue long-term goals without being tied to the demands of traditional investors. “With retail investors, there’s not a lot of pressure to act on someone else’s clock,” Ben explained. This freedom allowed Monogram to reach key milestones that proved the viability of their technology in a conservative market.

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Teague described how EnergyX alternates between retail and institutional funding to maximize leverage. Retail raises help set valuations that attract institutional partners, while institutional investments bring strategic benefits that retail investors cannot. This blended approach allows founders to retain control while accessing the resources they need to scale.

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Founders should view retail capital as both a financial and strategic tool—one that not only fuels growth but also validates their business in the eyes of other investors and stakeholders.

5. Challenge the Status Quo

Each panelist is operating in an industry ripe for disruption: healthcare, food service, and energy. These sectors are dominated by incumbents with entrenched practices, but retail capital has enabled Monogram, Miso, and EnergyX to challenge the status quo.

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“Traditionally, the venture capital world holds all the power, leaving startups with little leverage,” Teague explained. “Retail investing decentralizes and democratizes the ability to raise money.” This has allowed EnergyX to sidestep the limitations of traditional funding and gain control over their growth.

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Rich pointed out that disruption aligns investor and founder interests, creating a shared mission. “My whole job is to drive shareholder value, which benefits the investors but also benefits me personally because I was one of the first guys on the cap table,” he said.

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For founders, the takeaway is clear: identifying inefficiencies in old, tired industries and aligning with retail investors who believe in your vision can unlock opportunities that incumbents and traditional investors might overlook.

Closing Thoughts

From building communities to focusing on execution, the lessons shared by these three founders reflect the evolving role of retail capital in modern business. Founders willing to embrace disruption, engage their investors as partners, and assemble exceptional teams can turn bold ideas into thriving businesses.

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Rebecca closed the panel by highlighting the unique role retail capital plays in innovation. “Retail investors are more than financiers,” she said. “They’re partners in disruption.”

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The panelists agreed, pointing to retail capital’s transformative potential for both companies and investors. “Crowdfunding isn’t just about funding,” Rich concluded. “It’s about validation, community, and momentum.”

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For founders, harnessing this partnership is not just a funding strategy; it’s a competitive advantage.

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Watch the Full Panel

Full Transcript:

Rebecca Kacaba: All right, everybody. I am thrilled to get started with this amazing panel of CEOs we have for you. Now, these are DealMaker's fab and favorite CEOs. They're disrupting a bunch of different industries I'm going to ask them to tell you about, and they're also disrupting the way they raise capital by bringing in retail.

So we've got Teague Egan of EnergyX, Ben Sexon of Monogram Technologies, Rich Hull of Miso Robotics, and myself, Rebecca Kacaba of DealMaker. Let's get started over at the end with Ben. Can you tell us a little bit about how you're disrupting the world and how much retail capital you've raised, Ben?

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Ben Sexon: Sure. Thank you, Rebecca. So we are disrupting the world with surgical robotics. We are commercializing an orthopedic robot, but we have plans for other clinical applications. We've raised in excess of $70 million, in large part, almost entirely due to your support. So, thank you very much for that.

And I think some of the other panelists have raised potentially more than us, but I think we have the best investors in this group.

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Rich Hull: Already starting controversy. I love it, Ben.

I'm Rich Hull. I'm the CEO of Miso Robotics. Miso launched seven years ago with a burger-flipping robot named Flippy. And then very quickly, Flippy migrated over to the fry station, where he cooks French fries, chicken nuggets, and pretty much everything you can cook on a fry station. We tried to change the name to something fry-related, but nobody could come up with anything better than Flippy. And so it stuck. That's probably thanks to the efforts of Rebecca. Flippy, at the time and still today, has a bunch of Instagram fan clubs and has become kind of a cultural phenomenon. So, we kept it.

And I'm relatively new to Miso. I've been here for about a year. We've raised north of $100 million of retail capital.

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Teague Egan: I think I've eaten some fries from Flippy before.

I'm Teague Egan, the CEO of EnergyX. EnergyX is an energy technology company that focuses on the battery materials supply chain. Specifically, we're focused on lithium extraction and production, which is the critical limiting factor and bottleneck to the whole electric vehicle revolution. We invented disruptive technology that produces lithium far more efficiently—about 300% more efficiently than existing methods. Now we're building two big lithium projects to produce enough lithium for approximately a million electric vehicles a year. So those two projects are under development.

Retail capital has been a huge part of our funding mix. However, we have supplemented that with institutional capital from great strategic partners. In total, the amount of retail capital that we've raised to date is approximately $90 million, I think. And we just completed, I believe, the first-ever full $75 million Reg A, which is the max that you're allowed to raise in a year. And that's with great thanks to Rebecca and the whole DealMaker team.

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Rebecca Kacaba: Amazing. Thank you, guys. This is so great to hear about these disruptive businesses that are changing the world and are powered by you guys, the retail investor. So let's dive into how you guys think retail capital has helped to fuel your business's growth. Ben, let's start down there with you.

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Ben Sexon: Sure. So our average investor is around 65 years old. We're starting with total knee replacements. So our surgical robot, which is named Monogram, is pretty competitive with Flippy in terms of good naming.

We're starting with that application, and it really resonated with our audience. We kind of have, I'll say, future patients who I think have some passion for what we're doing.

What it enabled Monogram to do was really innovate in the space. Beyond just investing in a company with the expectation of a return, they were supporting a new technology that was going to be very disruptive. And so it really enabled the company to develop technology where capital wasn't available initially for what we were doing. I think Teague kind of talked about institutional capital. Sometimes retail capital can be the stepping stone for institutional capital. I expect that's going to be the case with Monogram. It really allowed us to hit critical milestones that we needed to access deeper pools of capital. So it's been a tremendous, tremendous opportunity for Monogram and hopefully for our investors.

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Rebecca Kacaba: Rich, let's hear from you how the retail investor has powered Miso's growth.

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Rich Hull: It surely has. But I think Ben hit upon something really interesting, which is the idea that he's doing surgeries probably for older clients, patients, and those are the people that are also investing in you. So there's a certain market efficiency there where the market may not necessarily know that there's a great company, but the customers know that there's a great company. And so when they can then come in and support that, I think that's kind of part of where the magic happens here.

For us, unlike you guys that have a very specific demo of investors, we have 40,000 investors. It's about an average ticket size of about $3,500, and they range in age from young to old. I think that's interesting. To me, the reason is everybody understands restaurants. We've all eaten at restaurants, and Flippy is just such an intuitive product.

Restaurants are having a really hard time hiring people to work in the kitchen. During the pandemic, we thought that there was a lot of publicity about it, and we thought that was kind of a temporary phenomenon, but in reality, it was just accelerating something that was already happening. It's a permanent issue.

Our friends at the State of California recently did us an extra solid by increasing the minimum wage to $20 an hour in restaurants. Now it's really hard to hire people. You can't, and the people you can hire, you have to pay a lot. So you want those people to work in a high-value position that could be washing dishes, front of the house, doing upsells, but the fry station is not one of them. Nobody wakes up and says, "Gee, I want to burn my arms all day and smell like grease." By taking that off the table and just automating it, we make restaurants far more efficient. We're kind of saving the restaurant business. If you can't hire people, you can't open. So for us, those restaurant customers are the people who come in and support us.

And in a weird way, that's kind of our secret weapon. That's like my word-of-mouth marketing army that other companies don't have. So they go out and tell their friends they're an owner of Flippy, and they go visit Flippy. There's a flywheel there that keeps it going, which I think is super interesting.

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Rebecca Kacaba: And that actually ended up with you guys getting featured on Saturday Night Live, right?

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Rich Hull: I mean, Saturday Night Live, we've gotten a lot of publicity. Flippy's kind of got his own little personality, and it's pretty interesting.

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Rebecca Kacaba: That's the power of organic social. I love it, and I love that you guys have such different retail communities that your story appeals to. Teague, what about you?

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Teague Egan: Real quick, how can I watch that? Like, Saturday Night Live, Flippy or Miso Robotics, or which episode?

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Rich Hull: Probably all of the above. It was on—we've actually been featured on a bunch of shows, including Saturday Night Live. The last one I saw was on Weekend Update on SNL. So I'm sure a Google search will produce that for you.

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Teague Egan: Cool, cool. You know, I think for me, I just want to talk a little bit about retail investing in general and what it—well, yeah, what it meant for our business, but doing Reg A and retail investing, I think it's a huge breakthrough for the whole financial market.

It really is a disruptor to the status quo of how companies like us are able to raise capital. Traditionally, we've been limited to very few avenues of raising capital, mainly venture capitalists. And while all money is green, venture capitalist money is a lot more difficult to obtain. It's red in a sense. Not only is retail investing disruptive, but it's disruptive because it decentralizes the ability to raise money and democratizes it.

If you are beholden to a very small or few venture capitalists who hold all the power, that gives you very little leverage in either the terms you're trying to raise capital on or the valuation. For EnergyX, when we started out, I put in the first million dollars of capital to start the business. Then I went to raise outside capital, and I felt like my valuation was somewhere in the $50 to $60 million range because of some of the milestones we had hit. However, when I approached the venture capital market, they were trying to offer me—you know, they're trying to beat you down and take huge percentages, get seats on your board, and control the company.

All these things that they are able to do because they have the money and hold the power. It was around that time that I learned about crowdfunding. I said I'm going to go test this in the market and see, not what five people are telling me, but what the general population is telling me.

Today, this conference as proof just shows the power of the retail investor—someone looking to either (a) trade stocks and make money on their own accord or (b) be able to invest in private companies that have exponential growth capability.

That's the other aspect that has been kind of limited to the good old boys' club—the venture capitalists or the private equity guys that have been able to make huge returns on explosive growth companies like Uber or Facebook, where the regular person could only invest in them once they went public. That is not the case anymore with Regulation A. And I think that is such a powerful tool not only for our companies but for retail investors as well.

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Rich Hull: Teague, I think you're right, because I think that means equity crowdfunding is fulfilling the promise that it set out to do, which is—you know, the premise of it originally was that the rich get richer because they get access to the Facebooks and the Googles before they're public, and the average person doesn't get the benefit of that explosive growth.

Explosive growth, I think, is a great phrase, right? Because that's what drives this. But also on the flip side, and you mentioned this earlier, when you've got retail investors meeting institutional and strategic investors on the same cap table, that's kind of a validation of the company. For example, for us, we recently took an investment from Ecolab. Ecolab is a $70 billion public company. They sell cleaning solutions to every restaurant you've ever been in.

They're a great strategic partner. But now putting them on the cap table with a bunch of retail investors is super interesting, and it also validates everything that the retail investors have come in and invested in. I think that collision of those two worlds is what we're seeing now. Now that you've got companies that have raised a significant amount of equity crowdfunding, like all of us, you're seeing the institutional and the strategic investor community come in, paying attention, and saying, "Oh, we like that. Let's jump on board."

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Teague Egan: I love that. I totally agree. That's the way I funded EnergyX as well, right? And I had a mix of benefits coming from the retail side—they're sending deals, they're putting deals on the system—and then the institutions are giving me a different value. I think that's the model that we all see and feel the benefits of, and we want to share that with the market.

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Rebecca Kacaba: And I love that you took it so broad, Teague. That's why you've become such a great friend to me with your great vision, and the Wall Street Journal said it last week, and I agree with them.

So let's jump to: are there any perhaps unexpected ways the retail investor audience added value to your business? Ben, specifically for you on your NASDAQ IPO, maybe you can focus on that. Was there anything about the retail audience that surprised you?

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Ben Sexon: Sure. So for those of you that don't know, we just closed an oversubscribed round that we did with DealMaker. We're a publicly listed company on NASDAQ, our ticker is MGRM. It was a very interesting deal that we put together and very innovative, Rebecca, with the help of your team. We offered preferred shares. Our common shares are listed, with a dividend and with a warrant.

So it was structured very similarly to what an institutional investor would get. But our retail community had access to the deal. At one point, the common shares were trading at a significant premium—and still are—to the offering price. So it ended up being a deal that had liquidity for investors coming in. It was very attractive in terms of where the common was trading.

I think this is going to open up a whole new funnel of opportunities for the retail investor where they're underserved. Today, the average retail investor isn’t getting access to, let’s say, private deals from publicly traded companies. With crowdfunding, that’s going to become possible. Just like you were talking about getting access to pre-IPO companies, I think the retail investor is going to start getting access to equity being offered by publicly traded companies with favorable terms.

This is something that’s really transformative for the industry. What’s exciting to me is that I wanted to see our investors—our retail community that has been supporting us for six-plus years—have access to the opportunity versus a VC that we met yesterday and doesn’t really have the same kind of skin in the game in terms of caring about our product. So it’s also a way for companies to give back to their loyal audiences over time, to give them access to deals that maybe would only have been available to institutional investors.

That’s one of the things that’s very, very exciting. I think it’s going to be transformative for the capital markets over the next 5 to 10 years. Middle-market investment banking is going to be completely disrupted by this business model. That’s my thesis. And we’re excited to be a part of it.

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Rebecca Kacaba: I know a lot of people are echoing that thesis as well. I love that.

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Rich Hull: I think what Ben is doing, and what you guys are doing with Ben, Rebecca, is really kind of the next evolution of equity crowdfunding, right? It’s the bridge to one step further into the public market. We think about that a lot.

You just finished a round; we are finishing a round tomorrow. Tomorrow at midnight Pacific Time is the absolute last chance to invest in our equity crowdfunding round. But we think about, well, what is the next step after that? Do you go and sell to a financial investor, a strategic investor? Do you go public? And if you do go public—and now we’re starting to see green shoots in the public markets—what does that look like?

There weren’t a lot of IPOs over the last couple of years, but now it’s starting to come back. In our space, one of the most successful IPOs in the last year is Cava, which is a restaurant business. That’s actually really interesting for us, given that we’re kind of in restaurant-adjacent businesses. And we think, like, okay, well, what do our 40,000 retail investors mean if we decide that we want to go public as a next step?

That’s a really interesting roadshow to walk around and say to the institutional community, "I’ve got 40,000 people who have already raised their hands and sent a signal saying they want to support this company. They already have as a private company, and they surely will as a public company." I don’t think we’ve seen that before. I think Ben is doing kind of the closest thing to that. Today, you’re leveraging your prior equity crowdfunding investors who want to double down and continue to support you as a public company.

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Rebecca Kacaba: Yeah, and they are doubling down a lot, right, Ben?

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Ben Sexon: Exactly. We had a lot of investors who have been with us for a long time. And I think companies like those on this panel that actually care about their investors can structure deals that they hope will be accretive. Obviously, there’s no guarantee of returns for anyone here, but what’s fun about the capital markets is you have liquidity.

The hard thing for companies that aren’t public is that an investor can maybe realize a return when you hit critical milestones that increase the value of the company. But if an investor wants to tap out and buy something with that hard-earned capital, they can’t—they don’t have access to liquidity. What’s exciting about the public markets is our deal was instantly accretive at some points.

For example, we were offering preferred shares at $2.25, and they were trading at a 75% premium at some points during the raise. Someone could have literally converted their shares, made a profit, and sat on a warrant. This is a very interesting model, and I think if companies are smart about how they structure deals, they can be very accretive to their investor community while offering instant liquidity.

So I’m tremendously excited about what this means. Frankly, we’ve been talking to a lot of investment banks and securities attorneys who were initially skeptical of this business model. When they saw the success of this model, they said, "Don’t talk to anyone else ever again—this is what you should do for the rest of the life of the company." Strategic capital has its own benefits, but this is very attractive. It’s the best situation when you have a win-win: a win for your investors and a win for the company. I think that’s what DealMaker helps companies achieve.

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Rebecca Kacaba: Amazing. Teague, let’s bring it back to you. Any unexpected ways retail capital has helped the business?

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Teague Egan: Like I said, all money is green, right? That money has been more than 50% of our capital raise mix, which has allowed us to execute on our operational milestones that have pushed the company forward. Now, having an investor base of 40,000, which is where we’re comparable to, that is a pretty cool marketing tactic.

We just had an incredible Wall Street Journal front-page profile last week, and now we have 40,000 people sharing that because they’re excited—they’re angel investors in this company that has succeeded thus far. So, I think that having that loyal fan base is powerful. Now, EnergyX isn’t a consumer-facing product, so there’s that, right? But it’s still exciting.

I don’t even think that we’ve fully unlocked the power of what it could mean on the public markets. Now you, Ben, you have, which is cool, and you’ve actually seen the benefits of that. We’re still private, and I’ll always shoot it straight—there are pros and cons to that. Like, they [retail investors] have access to these highly explosive growth companies, but for us, there’s still no liquidity, right? And that’s the risk that the institutional investor maybe can bear.

That’s why they’re rewarded. Now, that’s the option of the retail investor. Obviously, our goal is to provide liquidity to some of these investors that have been with us for a few years. Some of our earliest investors that participated in our first crowdfunding offering in 2021 have seen a 10x return, but that’s still on paper. We still have to have that liquidity.

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Teague Egan: Yeah, okay. So, it’s been a few years—not that many, three years—since we did our first crowdfunding offering, but those investors have seen a 10x return. But we’re yet to have a liquidation event, either an acquisition or go public. At some point, a secondary market might evolve, which would be great. But yeah, we’ve seen a lot of benefit from the retail investor, and I think there’s still more to be uncovered.

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Rebecca Kacaba: I think it’s so interesting how you guys have leveraged the organic social component. Whenever I talk about what DealMaker does, people automatically assume that it’s going to work best with a consumer-facing brand. And you three sitting here are proof that it actually doesn’t necessarily need to be. You can leverage the power of the retail investor and the power of that crowd you’ve built to help propel the business forward regardless of what it is you do, which is really exciting.

I spend a lot of time in Washington talking to the legislators about crowdfunding and how to change the legislation. And this is exactly what they intended, right? They wanted to give retail investors like you guys access to alternatives and to things that only institutions were getting access to previously. And you guys are here proving the model. So, it’s amazing to see.

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Rich Hull: Let’s talk about—sorry, we’ve got to pass the microphone around; it’s going to make it super awkward—but I think everything you said is so true, right? But everything Teague said is so true as well. We just saw something very similar, like a perfect example of what you’re talking about. And you know, we too were talked about in the Wall Street Journal. We saw tons of pickup from our investors who passed it around and really enjoyed that.

But over the summer, we had the Miso Innovation Lab, which is where we experiment and think about future products and growth. The guy across the street from us at our office in Los Angeles said, “Hey, I’ll give you free rent in this restaurant space I’ve got for the summer. It’s fully equipped with a whole bunch of equipment—you guys want it?”

And we thought, yeah, we do. We don’t necessarily want to be in the restaurant business, but our industry has been talking about the semi-autonomous kitchen of the future where humans and robots work together. Nobody’s ever proven that out, though. And we’re like, screw it, let’s just do it. And we did it.

What happened is that got amplified because all of our investors wanted to come and check it out. And a lot of those investors have big social media followings, and then they shot videos and posted them. It kind of became this self-fulfilling thing where it drove a lot of success.

So that’s a consumer-facing application, but I think what you’re talking about with non-consumer-facing applications is also interesting because it’s all about emerging growth. Most retail investors don’t get the opportunity to invest in private emerging growth companies.

In our space, which is AI-powered robotics, there aren’t that many places in the public market to get exposure to AI investing. You can invest in NVIDIA, and that’s it. That was probably a pretty good investment. But if you miss that one, where else are you going to deploy capital to basically get the upside of AI? We know AI is going to change everything.

So, as an AI-driven company, we provide that opportunity even though we’re not consumer-facing. We provide the opportunity to give retail investors that exposure to those emerging growth deals, just like both of these guys have, right? We’re all doing super innovative stuff.

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Rebecca Kacaba: Yeah, I love that. That’s so true. That’s exactly the power of the community. So let’s dial in on that point. Do you see it as a strategic advantage in your industry, vis-a-vis your competitors? Or maybe on an exit? Ben, do you want to start?

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Ben Sexon: Sure. We’re playing in the orthopedic market, and for those of you who don’t know anything about the orthopedic market, our average competitor is over 60 years old. This business has been around a long time. There are four companies that account for more than 75% of the market.

It’s an oligopoly—it’s not really what you would call an opportunity-rich environment for a small startup with not a lot of capital. So, how do you take advantage of the arbitrage that’s obviously there, because these companies are not innovating in a way that we think they can?

What crowdfunding allows companies to do is break through where the story is challenging or difficult, or where there’s a barrier to hitting the first critical milestone. That was the case for us. It was the opportunity to actually prove that, yes, tech pros can come into the orthopedic market—which is what our competitors have called us.

There was a healthy skepticism about what we were trying to do, and VCs that we talked to shared that skepticism. In our case, the skepticism was, “Yes, there’s an obvious problem, there’s an obvious opportunity, but you don’t have a team, and you don’t have a product. You just have an idea.” What do you do? You can’t offer people options in a company with no liquidity to pay the bills, right? There are only so many people who can’t get paid as founders for three years.

Crowdfunding was the seed capital that Monogram needed to do something disruptive in a market that hadn’t seen innovation in 50 years. That’s what’s tremendously exciting for us. Our mission as a company is to advance the standard of care in orthopedic medicine—and medicine generally. I’m really proud to say the turnover rate at our company is almost zero. The employees who have been with us from the start are still with us.

There’s also an element with crowdfunding where you can make decisions that are best for the long term because you don’t have a VC breathing down your neck who doesn’t really understand the market or the technology. That’s what has made our business so sticky, and it’s why we’re going to be commercializing the most innovative product the orthopedic market has seen pretty much ever. I am tremendously excited, and it’s all thanks to Rebecca, your team, and our investors who have stuck with us and believe in the story and the opportunity.

We had a community that’s not really—well, we’re kind of weird because our customer isn’t directly our investor. Our customer is actually a hospital and a surgeon, but the ultimate patient is advocating to their customer on our behalf. So there’s a really nice synergy happening as a result of the crowdfunding. We are very annoying to surgeons, but now, when they come in and see our product, we’re not annoying anymore. They can’t wait for it to get to market. So it’s really exciting.

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Rebecca Kacaba: Well, you really hit on an interesting word, which is disruption, right? I think that’s a consistent theme with all of us. We’re coming into old, tired markets and disrupting them.

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Rich Hull: Yeah, we’re very similar. Restaurant kitchens haven’t innovated in 50 years—they’ve been operating the same way. The front of the house was innovated 15 or 20 years ago. There were online reservations, OpenTable—the former president of OpenTable sits on our board—and he talks a lot about the disruption happening back then. Point-of-sale systems were another big disruption for the front of the house. But the back of the house has been operating literally the same way for decades.

Our mission is to come in and disrupt that, just like your mission and your mission—to come in and disrupt old, tired businesses. The public companies in our space that have been selling products to restaurant kitchens—they too haven’t innovated. They’re like the Blockbuster Videos of our space, right? We know which direction they’re going. They’re old, tired dinosaurs. They’re going to buy us, or we’re going to buy them, but something’s going to get disrupted.

That’s where equity crowdfunding comes in and gives you that extra push. It’s a win-win for the investors. It’s a win-win for the company because everybody benefits in the end. It really aligns everybody’s strategic agendas.

For me, I was an early investor in Miso before I came to run it. So my outcome is tied to my investors’ outcomes. My whole job is to drive shareholder value, which benefits the investors but also benefits me personally because I was one of the first guys on the cap table. That’s part of the brilliance here—you get to come in and power that disruption, and you just don’t see that in the public markets.

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Rebecca Kacaba: That’s an amazing point about alignment with the community because you’re aligned with the retail investors’ interests. You’re building the same thing. And Ben, I think you crystallized an interesting point: sometimes when you’re taking a product to market, surgeons aren’t going to be super receptive to new technology. But if you have the community pulling it and asking for it, that helps you bring it to market and cause that disruption.

That’s where retail knows something that big institutions don’t. They’re locked into the way they do things, even if that way has more risk. But retail says, “Hey, look, we want this. We want things to be done in a new and exciting way.” They know someone who had a bad surgery and want a different solution, even if the medical establishment is saying, “No, the way we do it is fine.”

Teague, we were talking about retail capital as a strategic advantage. Did you have any, like, vis-a-vis competitors or in your industry specifically?

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Teague Egan: Yeah. For us, there’s not a strategic advantage in the same sense as some of our other investors who provide strategic help. For example, General Motors is one of our biggest investors, and they’re going to buy hundreds of thousands of tons of lithium from us. We also have other major strategic investors like POSCO, which is a big lithium producer themselves, as well as a cathode producer. They will use our technology in some of their mines and purchase lithium from us.

But I think the examples you gave are important. Every company is different, right? For us, the strategic advantage of retail capital is in getting the word out about EnergyX, building our profile within the battery industry, and within the lithium industry. That visibility then attracts additional capital and increases our leverage for further institutional raises.

Teague Egan: We’ve kind of flip-flopped back and forth on raises. After I put in the first bit of capital—about a million bucks—we did a crowdfunding round at a $60 million valuation. That led to our first institutional financing, which was about $10 or $15 million. Then we went back and did more crowdfunding and raised another $10 million. That valuation helped us command a major institutional round with General Motors, POSCO, and ENI, the big Italian oil and gas conglomerate.

Now, we’ve just completed our last crowdfunding round, which will probably set the valuation for an upcoming institutional round. So, I guess you could view it as a strategic advantage in that it helps justify to our institutional investors the valuation that the market believes the company is worth.

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Rebecca Kacaba: Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t think you can put a price on just the general awareness you’ve brought to the category. When someone’s talking to someone, and they know your new technology is out there, they’ll say, “Why aren’t we using this? We should be using this.”

I know we have a mic set up for questions. If anyone has questions, feel free to come forward, and I’ll give you the mic. In the absence of that, I think I would be remiss to have such an amazing panel of CEOs up here if I didn’t ask you to give a little bit of advice to the listeners on how you’re building your company and what you think the key strategic things are for people to focus on when building a company in this new digital age. Ben, do you want to start?

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Ben Sexon: Nice. That’s a heavy question.

I think, when I think about it, we’ve been talking a lot about the advantages of the retail investor. For me, it really boils down to time preference. With our investor community, there’s not a lot of pressure for us to do things on a specific timeline established by some cohort of institutional investors. We can do what we think is right for the company. Institutional capital doesn’t always work that way—they have their own strategic objectives.

My advice to startup founders would be a couple of things. One is, find at least one other person that you can suffer with. For me, that was two people—one was my wife, who suffered just as much as I did. Our business was actually funded because of her for about three years. The other person was our surgeon co-founder, Dr. Eunice, who’s still a practicing orthopedic surgeon. The number of things we went through and the number of times we would have given up if we didn’t have each other—you couldn’t even count them.

Sometimes founders are really sensitive about, “This is my idea. I don’t want to share it with anybody.” I’d invite you to have a bigger mindset—50% of something big is a lot better than 100% of something small. So, find key people you can trust, who have skills you don’t, and be okay with people being better than you at certain things. Be comfortable handing the mic to them if they’re better suited to address a particular audience. And be humble about it.

So, those would be my three things: have somebody who helps push it behind the scenes, find key partners, and be comfortable with others being better than you at certain things.

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Rich Hull: I feel like we could have a very long conversation about long-suffering spouses of startup founders. That can be our next panel.

Everything Ben said is correct—this is a team sport. You can’t do it alone, and if you don’t have that, it’s almost not worth doing. For my part, I wasn’t the founder of Miso, although I was an early investor. I was the founder of another company called Vix, which is now the largest Spanish-language streaming service in the world. I founded that with some other people, and over time, we added more founders. We sold to Univision, rolled up some other streaming services, and grew the business. The team at Univision became founders in a sense, too.

Success has many fathers. If Vix had been a failure, everyone would’ve pointed at me. But now that it’s a success, a lot of people are part of the founding crew, and that’s awesome. When I came to Miso, my focus was product focus. Miso had announced several products before I got there—there was a beverage robot called Sippy, a tortilla chip-making robot called Chippy, and a coffee robot called Drippy. You get the gist of how we name things here.

I took a page from Steve Jobs’ playbook. When he came back to Apple, they had 40 products. He famously cut that down to two. I did the same—we stopped trying to do five or six products and focused on one. We chose Flippy because it’s our signature product and by far the largest revenue opportunity—a $4 billion opportunity for us. While we want to disrupt and automate the entire kitchen, which represents a $15 to $20 billion revenue opportunity, we wanted to nail Flippy first. Then we can earn the right to expand into other products.

That focus allowed us to go back, improve Flippy, and create a next-generation version. The one we have today is half the size, twice as fast, half as expensive to manufacture, far more reliable, and takes 70% less time to install. That means a lot less lost revenue for restaurant customers. So, it’s about focus. If you take Ben’s team sport aspect, my focus aspect, and probably whatever Teague’s going to say, those are three key things to being a successful startup founder.

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Teague Egan: I have a little bit of a different approach. I’m a sole founder, and I’m not married, so I don’t have a suffering spouse with me. I take pride in being the one who really suffers—I make it my job to ensure others don’t have to. I’m more than willing to take all the suffering so that those around me don’t feel it.

My one piece of advice is to surround yourself with an incredible team. At EnergyX, we have some of the best people in their respective fields. Our marketing team—Kelly and Courtney—were instrumental in executing one of the first, if not the first, $75 million Reg A rounds. From a technology standpoint, I recruited some of the smartest PhDs and engineers to help us build world-class technology. Operationally, as we develop billion-dollar lithium production plants, I brought in experts who’ve built other major lithium companies.

So, my job is to suffer so that my team can execute. I focus on finding the absolute best people for every position to ensure EnergyX can hit our milestones.

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Rebecca Kacaba: Amazing. I think those three sum it up well: have an amazing team, be super focused, and hire the best of the best so you can execute to perfection. I agree with all of those—that’s what we do at DealMaker as well. Thank you guys so, so much. I really appreciate this. I know the audience appreciates hearing your insights. You’re breaking ground and disrupting in your respective industries, but you’re also disrupting the way capital is raised. We have so much respect for that. As if being a CEO and founder wasn’t hard enough, you’re doing double disruption.

Thanks, everyone. Really appreciate you listening. Have a great day!