Q I think people have loved throughout the season hearing the Fundrise story itself and how you guys raised a hundred and fifty-five million dollars from the retail investing public without actually going public yourself. Can you remind everyone how you did that, A, and then B, how you're now opening this up to every private company?
A When we started Fundrise in 2000 12, like the mission was to give individual investors direct access to real estate, because we saw when money's intermediated, problems happen. Intermediaries don't have the same interest as the owners. And so we scaled that business of democratizing real estate investing, having sort of a direct to consumer model. And then when we went to raise, we said, well, why Don't we walk around and talk? Why, why don't we raise money directly from the individual investors in the same way we do for real estate? And that was 2017. It was extremely uncertain. Like no one's ever done it before. We didn't know if it was going to work. And so we launched it. We think we raised seventeen million dollars in the first like 24 hours. It was like very successful. We said, okay, aha, this is the future. This is the way to do it. And we scaled up. Raise a hundred fifty-five million dollars for 35,000 investors for Fundrise itself, for the tech company, not just for the real estate. So we said, what's the next thing that we should do for other tech companies, and we should wrap it in a structure so that all the company has to do is what they normally do with an institutional investor, right? One company on your cap table, but behind it is like a mutual fund with millions of investors. And if you're a private company, you should want to have retail investment, From the…
AI assessment note: “we should wrap it in a structure so that all the company has to do”