The WealthTech Podcast

Host: Mark Wickersham

Guest: Rafay Farooqui, Founder & CEO SUBSCRIBE

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Mark Wickersham: alright, Rafay, it's great to have you on the podcast I'm excited for this conversation. I wonder if you could just kind of give a quick introduction and tell me a little bit about SUBSCRIBE.

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Rafay Farooqui: Mark. Well, thanks for having me. We're excited to be on your podcast and talk about SUBSCRIBE, which is an operating system for alternative investments serving alternative asset managers. 

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Rafay Farooqui: institutional investors, wealth managers, family offices, law firms and fund administrators. So really the entire community of stakeholders around the investment operations into private funds.

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Mark Wickersham: Excellent. So what is describes ideal client profile? Obviously, you you're

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Mark Wickersham: you're touching all the different stakeholders within that. But how would you describe your ideal client? Profile?

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Rafay Farooqui: Yeah. Well, when we founded the company we really founded around the problem that we thought institutional LPs, wealth manager LPs and family office LPs face.

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Rafay Farooqui: which is a lack of centralization of their investor data, a lack of standardization of the process to get invested in into private funds. And we saw a lot of opportunity to build technology to streamline that workflow. So the ideal client for us is someone who's struggling with all the paperwork when it comes to investing in private market funds

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Rafay Farooqui: which tends to be these type of investors. Now, that being said, the other side of the equation is the fund manager and their providers, which are service providers like law firms and fund admins. There's a lot of

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Rafay Farooqui: pressure on that system as well, so we would view them as a client as well. And so you really have these 3 food groups of LPgp and Sp Service providers that can use our platform on an open architecture basis. But when we formed the company it was really around the thought of how do we heLP

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Rafay Farooqui: the investor, the family office, the multifamily office types and others to centralize their data and create a repeatable process around investing operationally into private funds.

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Mark Wickersham: I I mean, there's so much friction involved in in the process on both sides. Actually, right? So both the GPS and LPs are struggling as they're trying to

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Mark Wickersham: expand their as LPs are expanding their allocation to alternatives, as GPS are looking to further distribution. Models, obviously firms like SUBSCRIBE are coming in to heLP kind of solve some of these these key friction points. What makes what makes SUBSCRIBE unique.

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Rafay Farooqui: You know, we didn't find a lot of

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Rafay Farooqui: platform players that had taken a true technology approach to solve the problem. We did find that there were marketplaces, and there were, you know, kind of placement agent distribution tech that would heLP the fund managers identify potential new investors and have investors identify new possible investments. But we took a very different approach. We actually saw a lack of

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Rafay Farooqui: software for the enterprise that would heLP the tech stack of the investor. And so what made us different was, we decided early on that. We actually weren't even going to build a sales team. We're going to build a great product.

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Rafay Farooqui: and in order to build a great product, you wanted to make sure the majority of your staff were engineers, in fact, full stack engineers. You designed a great product for usability, user experience, intuitive workflows. And so I think that that's what defined us early. And I think today continues to make us very different than anybody else that's trying to

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Rafay Farooqui: create a digital venue

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Rafay Farooqui: because it can get very confusing. As to you know, it's all blends into one. But actually the product speaks to itself. I think that makes us very different in the way that we tackled. You know the solution.

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Mark Wickersham: So the product sells itself because that you've put the focus on the customer experience and kind of solving the problem. And then versus try to marketing and sales.

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Rafay Farooqui: Yeah, it was really important, in fact, you know, to put our heads down and build a product that solves a problem because we felt. 1st of all, nobody was doing it. Nobody was really automating investor onboarding, building.

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Rafay Farooqui: reusable passports, filling out subscription documents automagically, as we like to say. And so it was Greenfield. So we had the luxury of time, really, because no one really cared for a while. And we built it. And what we found was, the user was really excited about the product. So we just kept enhancing it. They would tell their friends they tell other friends. And

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Rafay Farooqui: pretty soon we found that 90% of our incoming or 90% of our growth, I should say in customers was all referrals or

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Rafay Farooqui: yeah

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Rafay Farooqui: calls. And so we've actually never developed a proper sales process, and never had to at the moment, because

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Rafay Farooqui: the product is speaking to itself, and the product has continued to expand from doing just investor onboarding and subscriptions to doing all the subsequent transactions, you know, redemptions, additional subscriptions, transfers all the messy stuff we just keep building new functionality, and we find is organically our customer base is growing because we can solve all these operational friction problems. And you know. So we continually keep kicking the can on a salesforce.

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Mark Wickersham: It's yeah. I mean, it's

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Mark Wickersham: for a long time. This was a speaking from the family office, the LP side. There's a pervasive problem with really no solution out there. So as terms of a

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Mark Wickersham: product market fit. It's great to see that there are firms out there looking to solve this problem. I talked to one particular family office, was doing some research on this, and they said, It's like cleaning bathrooms at the airport like nobody wants to do it, but somebody has to do it. In terms of just some of the low level 1st mile valuations and the friction in in the subscription process.

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Mark Wickersham: Can you talk to me a little bit about your digital passport product and how that works.

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Rafay Farooqui: Yeah, I think that this is also very unique about us. We haven't really seen anyone approach the market this way since we did have the LP in mind. The problem that we saw that the LP already faced is what I call the investor portal problem.

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Rafay Farooqui: The investor portal problem essentially is defined as let's you take your average multifamily or family office, let's say, and they're invested in 50 to 100 funds. Likely they're coming across that many investor portal logins. And so what

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Rafay Farooqui: this told us was that all these decisions are made before they engage the investor before fund managers, engage investors to raise capital. So they tell you where your data room is. They tell you where their investor portal is. They tell you how you're going to get stuff.

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Rafay Farooqui: And the problem is that if you're a single family office or a multifamily office, and you just have a small team

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Rafay Farooqui: for the most part. Now you have people out there trying to deal with all these entry points to get your stuff. And so we didn't want to repeat that problem when it came to investor onboarding and electronic subscriptions. So we thought, Well, how can we centralize this rather than have it fragmented? And so the answer was really the beginning of the answer was in this concept of the passport.

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Rafay Farooqui: What we realized was that the investor's information doesn't change often, and it can really be passported much like you can travel to another country, use your passport, and you enter sometimes need a visa.

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Rafay Farooqui: sometimes other requirements. But really, that's a reusable identification document that you can

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Rafay Farooqui: go one to many. And so the investor passport is very similar. Concept. It's a lot more complex than an average passport. Think of it as 2 to 300 data points about that legal entity. But once you do capture that, you're empowered, then to fulfill any piece of paper required to onboard to a fund.

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Rafay Farooqui: and this became a very powerful concept. If you could capture that data, once, maintain it and then use it repeatedly on custom documentation, which is kind of the hat trick that I'll talk to you about. But that really was the beginning of the passport. Today. We have about 11 million of these, and growing in the system that are reused on any fund in the industry.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, it seems like it makes so much sense. And it seems like simple concept that I'm sure it's been hard to

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Mark Wickersham: execute. I always like to talk to founders

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Mark Wickersham: about their entrepreneurial journey with you. You start a case as well as describe what have been some of the keys to success. You've been a serial, successful entrepreneur when you look back at that, what have been some of your keys to success? And what have you learned from some of your failures.

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Rafay Farooqui: Well, you've got to have a real belief in yourself and a belief in your idea that you're right, I would say in both my previous venture case and my current venture SUBSCRIBE. The early days were very lonely. We weren't sure we were right.

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Rafay Farooqui: and you know it took a lot of work, and then some product market fit to say, Oh, wow! We are right. But even then there were only a few people that cared. It did take a while for the herd to come in, and what I'd say is, everything is

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Rafay Farooqui: slowly than all at once. And so that was one experience that I had in both ventures. The other thing is that really embracing

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Rafay Farooqui: your customer and their ideas and their problems is core to success. I would say, SUBSCRIBE one thing that we did really well early on was to not worry about sales, as we mentioned, not worry about too many things, revenues, things like that, and really focus in on the client's problem and the product and have them use it and let them be our evangelists.

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Rafay Farooqui: And I think that that's worked out really well for us, because when the client's happy, they're telling others. And it's pretty evident in the market that we've come a long way because of our

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Rafay Farooqui: clients, success and their happiness, so that at the core of it is really one of the most important things is the success has come from

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Rafay Farooqui: making sure our clients are successful, and it kind of is exponential from there.

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Rafay Farooqui: you know, in terms of failures. I like to say that I've made all my mistakes once I won't make them twice, and so we've had a lot of failures. Every day is kind of a staircase. You go up and down and flat, and sometimes break the wood plank. And that happens when you're running large businesses and touching a lot of different clients. But I wouldn't say that there's necessarily any particular failures. One thing is, we're never moving fast enough.

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Rafay Farooqui: We're never delivering enough code on time. And so that's a personal challenge for myself and for our team that we want to fail less at meeting missing deadlines.

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Mark Wickersham: Well, software is a messy business until you're in the industry like it's hard to understand. Like

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Mark Wickersham: to be able to create and deliver. You know usable, beautiful product. It's hard. What

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Mark Wickersham: what would you say is, if you were talking to other Fintech founders? What would you give in in terms of some of advice.

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Rafay Farooqui: You know the concept that you can put something down on a piece of paper approach

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Rafay Farooqui: investors and get risk. Capital in America is a beautiful thing. I don't think risk capital like that exists anywhere else in the world. So the 1st thing is, know where you're going to get your capital, even before you put your deck together. Once you put the deck together, I wouldn't rely too much on it. It's a good idea you have to make sure you can communicate to investors and others, and that you can market it and get your 1st few clients or your 1st few test clients.

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Rafay Farooqui: One thing that I think has been consistent in both my businesses has been. We've always gone out and got the client before we had the product ready.

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Rafay Farooqui: and I think this is an important element of success. If you build it and wait for them to show up, it's likely you're already headed down the wrong path. It's always great to have them show up when it's not completely built

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Rafay Farooqui: that way. You have constant feedback you have someone to build with, not for. And then you can grow it from there. But I think this is a critical part of entrepreneurship in the Fintech space, which is, I've seen a lot of failures where people spend a lot of time designing building product, thinking through everything, launching and

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Rafay Farooqui: then not really delivering on the go to market strategy to get a client.

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Mark Wickersham: I think that you know those early adopters are worth. Their weight in gold is beyond that. The revenue that you receive from those early adopters right to help you get that that product market fit right to be able to ground that solution in in reality versus what you think you know, the solution should be, I think, is really important.

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Mark Wickersham: When you're looking at scaling. So you you've got your initial clients. You've had that successful test case. You've gotten the funding.

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Mark Wickersham: What are some of those kind of key barriers to scaling? And how do you overcome those barriers?

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Rafay Farooqui: You know, in this market.

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Rafay Farooqui: because it's so sophisticated in finance and alternatives, private markets. And you have institutional players, you know. Even a family office is an institution, not a retail investor, even a financial advisor works at an institution, not a retail investor. This is a b 2 b enterprise software we've built. It's really

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Rafay Farooqui: important not to get distracted and focus in on how you can solve the problem for most of the people. I believe that if you speak to one customer and ask them where their frictions are and what their problems are. 80% of what they will tell you is that they have unique problems.

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Rafay Farooqui: and they're not entirely wrong because the way they think about their problems is unique.

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Rafay Farooqui: But when you talk to enough people, enough family offices enough multifamily. Office enough fund managers, etc. You will find that there's actually a pattern in what's not working. And that's a really important approach.

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Rafay Farooqui: Because if you start to fragment similar experiences and build to each one of them, there's no way that you can build a standardized process that scales. And I think that this is an important thing, that once you've actually engaged clients is to talk to a lot of them and find the commonality in the standardization solution

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Rafay Farooqui: and deliver that. We've been unbelievably successful on this point. If we hear from a client that something's not working, and here's the problem. We will then go speak to 20 others.

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Rafay Farooqui: and we will figure out where the 80% commonality and standardization is build to that. And then along the edges, you can customize to make it work for everyone.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I think building that 80% is key and not

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Mark Wickersham: every family office is a is a unique snowflake. Right? That I know the saying is out there. You see one family office see one family office. But you can start to see patterns fairly quickly. I mean, maybe around the edges. They have some unique

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Mark Wickersham: challenges or workflows, but there's certainly a commonality

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Mark Wickersham: out there with family offices. And then, I think.

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Mark Wickersham: to when building product, I think some of the hard part is not necessarily figuring out what to do. The hard part is figuring out what not to do when right.

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Rafay Farooqui: Well, you know, I'll pull the thread on that if you've read one subscription document. Maybe you've read one subscription document, but the reality is, if you've read 3,500 like we did. They're pretty much

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Rafay Farooqui: standard. Of course.

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Rafay Farooqui: terms are different, but information that they're seeking is pretty common, and this was a very important approach for us, which was we could actually standardize investor passports, and we could build a standard

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Rafay Farooqui: process to fulfill documentation. Even if it was a custom template which we do, we don't standardize templates. We can actually automagically fill out a custom form. It's bring your own document to our platform. And so this also saves now the family office, or multifamily office, from being faced with all these other portals that are popping up for subscription documents. They can just say, No, thank you. Send us the Pdf.

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Rafay Farooqui: We use SUBSCRIBE. They upload it. And for them it's a repeat process. So we've really thought about that problem that they might have had the investor portal problem and solved it from their perspective. Thinking about them.

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Mark Wickersham: When you talk about, you know, scaling alternatives. Obviously, you know, they're saying out there that private markets are broken. It's a lot of friction throughout the investment cycle.

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Mark Wickersham: Why is there so much friction? And what can family offices, you know, do to eliminate some of that friction?

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Rafay Farooqui: Well, I wouldn't agree that private markets are broken. I think if you go to the Macro, the obvious is that the number of publicly listed companies in America has declined significantly, maybe 80% over the last 1015 years. And so and the number of private companies has increased significantly. In fact, the number of private companies that have 100 million dollars of revenue or more

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Rafay Farooqui: has grown substantially so. If you want to participate in the economy with your investments, and you're not in private markets.

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Rafay Farooqui: You're missing out on a large part of the economic viability of the country or the globe, for that matter. So why have they been messy? Well, these have always been

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Rafay Farooqui: paper-based private investments with a lot of disclaimers and a lot of legality. They're not registered. They're not qsipped. And in a way, the stakeholders involved have never really needed to innovate.

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Rafay Farooqui: You know, the providers of subscription documents and fund formation, the administration services, the people who have access, the placement and the folks investing do have a lot of capital and people. So you can keep throwing people at the problem. And so it's kind of stayed status quo for a long period of time. And so the frictions are kind of hidden

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Rafay Farooqui: like you said, it's like cleaning bathrooms. It's like, yeah, no one wants to do it, but someone does it every day, every month. And so that's what's been going on until they're offered an Uber or Netflix, or an Amazon. They're like, Oh, wow!

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Rafay Farooqui: It fixed the problem. Now, I have other problems to do it. But I think that the frictions are really there because we're victims of our own capital. We have enough of it to throw people at the problem.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I think I think that makes sense. I think you don't really realize there's a better alternative to

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Mark Wickersham: flagging a cab down in the rain until somebody comes along with A with an app that shows you a better way to do it.

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Mark Wickersham: There's a lot of talk about, you know, democratization of alternatives. I think you might even coined that term back in the day. Where would you say? What stage are we at? I've heard you often say that we're beyond the democratization stage. Can you just talk to me a little bit about where we're at in terms of the evolutionary stage of Alts and what the future holds.

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Rafay Farooqui: Sure I've always had an idea that the digital transformation of private markets is going to occur in 3 distinct phases.

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Rafay Farooqui: which is why I started my 1st company around democratization which provided access to things that weren't available to wealth advisors in the Us. My second company is actually Stage 2, which is about infrastructure. Once you have democratization meaning everything's accessible to everyone. For the most part, if they really want it, it's packaged in the right way, which we're seeing with these semi liquid products. It's kind of happened. And that's what I mean by

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Rafay Farooqui: democratization. It's not a thing that's happening. It's kind of happened, and now we have to deal with it. So dealing with, it means well, there's a lot more pressure on the system. There's a lot more buyers, a lot more sellers, a lot more service providers, and everything is paper based. And so you really need new digital infrastructure to support

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Rafay Farooqui: this market. It never had an exchange. It never had the right pipes for scale. And so that's what we're doing with SUBSCRIBE is we're rebuilding this industry infrastructure for the investor for the fund manager and for the service provider, so it can be seamlessly grown to scale.

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Rafay Farooqui: So that's really phase 2, which is the infrastructure build. And once that happens, what you find is that there's kind of this life cycle phase which will be the next phase. Once everything trades at scale, everything central data. Standardized processes are standardized. You can start doing more magical things

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Rafay Farooqui: in this asset class. So you know, phase one phase 2 and phase 3 are occurring. I think we're kind of in the maybe 5th to 7th inning of phase 2. And it'll be really exciting to get into that life cycle stage to see this really scale. But it's happening. You're seeing the Regulators change some rules. So more people can play.

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Rafay Farooqui: Packaging is definitely part of that UMAs and portfolio bulk, trade allocations are starting to happen.

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Mark Wickersham: So I I've also heard you talk about alternatives, and very equity, like terms, too, in terms of

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Mark Wickersham: pre-trade trade post trade. So this is kind of describes where we're at in the current life cycle and of Alts, and that's could you talk to me a little bit more about that stage, and how you see Alts becoming more equity like.

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Rafay Farooqui: Yeah, so digital transformation. And this second stage of

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Rafay Farooqui: infrastructure build is really focused around these 3 moments in time. In the operational workflow. The pre-trade is the dating stage, you know, the data rooms, the information both the buyer and seller are trying to figure out if this is a right fit for them.

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Rafay Farooqui: the trade moment is about transactions, data on documents, signatures, AML, KYC. All the things that you do to get invested, all the things that you do to remain invested, the things that come up, that you have to change over the life of that investment. Sometimes it's open-ended hedge funds which are short. Sometimes it's long dated 10 year private equity funds and drawdown funds.

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Rafay Farooqui: And then there's the post trade, which is really the management of reporting data. How is my investment doing? Where's my tax documents? Where are my pcaps to show my values? And how does this all integrate into the larger ecosystem of systems. And we talk about the family office and multifamily office and their full stack. Well, they have crms, they have reporting systems. They have other things

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Rafay Farooqui: that a tool like this needs to seamlessly integrate into upstream and downstream, which we do through open Apis and other mechanisms. It's really important. You don't show up with a solution that has to sit on its own and becomes another swivel chair interface that someone has to deal with.

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Rafay Farooqui: So the move towards more equity like is making sure that the pipes plug in upstream and downstream data flows seamlessly. There's a source of truth.

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Rafay Farooqui: and once you get that, I think what will come of these markets is more of a standardization in the underlying investment items. In all these portfolios very similar to Q- sipping

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Rafay Farooqui: a security with a ticker that trades. I think you're going to start to see a real normalization of the instruments that are held by these funds, whether it's companies like Spacex, or it's a private credit or private debt instrument on a company. I think those are going to start to be kind of categorized so that you can really start understanding what's in these.

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Rafay Farooqui: and whether, if you hold 2 funds that you might be holding a lot of the same assets, and then understand from there

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Rafay Farooqui: what you might be able to do in terms of a risk overlay or reducing your risk to any one sector, so that would be a much a future where these assets are much more equity like. But it starts with the operational transaction data being harnessed and then bleeding into that investment layer and and providing a standardization there.

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Mark Wickersham: That makes sense, I think. I think, you know to your point that you need to be. You can't live on an island right. You have to be able to integrate with

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Mark Wickersham: the family offices tech stack, and if they have an added par to be able to to plug into that or your other systems or Crm systems?

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Mark Wickersham: Where do you see the the future of alternatives going? Obviously, I think they're they're looking for

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Mark Wickersham: broader distribution. You've mentioned some changes in terms of the

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Mark Wickersham: qualified investor and be able to push that lower.

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Mark Wickersham: Talk about it actually even having alternatives into a 4 0. 1 K. But where do you see the where's the future of Alts going.

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Rafay Farooqui: Well, I think we're really seeing a lot of change. And if it all happens, it's a meaningful step, because some of these things we've been talking about for a long time, you know, packaging Alts to be in cits which would then go into 401 K. Plans increasing the amount of private equity or private investments a closed end fund can have is that kind of

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Rafay Farooqui: comment recently, from that we heard from the sec. Rethinking the accreditation rules. How wealthy

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Rafay Farooqui: do you really need to be to invest in these products? you know versus, how much education should you have to invest in these products. Sure, there's a balance there.

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Rafay Farooqui: like I said before, excluding people from the private markets in today's market excludes them from a large part of the economic activity. And so you really need to reconcile that for today's market is you can't prevent people who are well to do and are earning and want to participate from participating in that. All they can buy is stocks and bonds. So that has to change. So

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Rafay Farooqui: all of this, plus the wrapping of a lot of these drawdown structures like private equity and secondaries and real estate in Bdcs or reits or semi liquid products, both in the Us. And what we're seeing now in Europe and other places is the change that we're seeing so definitely, everyone's trying to make it more available and easier to use

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Rafay Farooqui: the the one thing I think about is that

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Rafay Farooqui: good returns don't come from size.

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Rafay Farooqui: There is still truth to the illiquidity premium.

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Rafay Farooqui: So if things are a liquid, you should expect a higher return. There's a reason for that return. If you make it more liquid, I think you should expect that your returns will be lower. It's only rational, I think. At the same time, if you expand the capital that's being raised for any one opportunity, you should expect that the return will be lower, so there'll still be a room, especially for family offices and multifamily offices that tend to not invest with

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Rafay Farooqui: the major players all the time they look for that top decile, smaller manager that'll remain hard to access, hopefully easy to do the subscriptions through us. But there'll be, I think, a real place for that, especially if something bad were to happen with some of these products, and we get blowback.

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Rafay Farooqui: So I think we're in uncharted territory from a size and return perspective, and that that's going to have an impact. So I keep my eye on that. But I think generally moving the market to where more people can participate is a positive thing.

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Mark Wickersham: Since it wouldn't be a wealth tech podcast if we didn't talk about AI, obviously, with so much information being unstructured with alternatives being legal documents and and document based. AI has been a real game changer for the asset class in terms of creating efficiencies, automations unlocking that data, converting it into structured information.

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Mark Wickersham: How has AI changed the tech landscape for for alternatives, both from the Gp's perspective, from the LP perspective. And I would love to hear about how AI has changed your business as as a tech provider.

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Rafay Farooqui: Well, I think we have to agree that 1st off, before we get to private markets or our business generally, for every industry, AI is an enabling layer

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Rafay Farooqui: for more efficiency internally, in every organization. If you were doing XY, and Z, whether you have a front office top level job or a back office logistical job at any organization. There is no doubt that AI can make you more efficient, focus you in on the things that matter and increase your productivity, so that productivity layer, if you think about that and multiply it

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Rafay Farooqui: across every organization in the world, just that efficiency delivered to all of us is going to make our lives better. Okay? So now, if you brought, if I don't think private equity or Fintech, or platform businesses like ours or data are any different.

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Rafay Farooqui: So if you're running a tech business today and you're not employing AI tools to make your internal efforts more productive, you are behind the curve. You have to get on that you have to make your organization 10 times more efficient and productive using these tools. And we're doing those things. Now.

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Rafay Farooqui: thinking about finance and think about regulation and data privacy and things like this, we really are careful about using these tools, especially open source tools for anything that has sensitive data. So we don't do that today. However, we see a lot of applications where things we build ourselves and data, we house ourselves and Llms that we can use can actually deliver efficiency tools for our user as well.

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Rafay Farooqui: And so we're working on some of those things to deliver a better experience, a faster experience, a more on demand experience for our users, and we'll be rolling that out. But I think AI generally must be embraced and used. The second thing is, if you run a sas business like we do. AI is a major threat. I think every Saas business in the world

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Rafay Farooqui: will be made irrelevant over time by AI. And so you really need to embrace this and understand what it means for your organization, and how you can use it to take the next step.

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Mark Wickersham: Okay, there's a hot take for you. I haven't. I haven't heard that one yet. But

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Mark Wickersham: This has been great. What I'd normally love to do, Rafa is is wrap these up on a personal note with 3 questions that have nothing to do with wealth. Tech.

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Mark Wickersham: I understand that you're a collector of historical finance and Stock Exchange items

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Mark Wickersham: 1st off, how did you get into that type of collecting? And what is the kind of some of the more interesting pieces in your collection.

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Rafay Farooqui: Sure. Yes, I mentioned that once before, and many people have mentioned it back. I think it's just a neurotic behavior to focus on something else other than work which I do all the time in the business. And so I started to think about, well, what am I interested in? I'm interested in finance. Old Wall Street. I used to live down in that part of Manhattan, and it just kind of intrigued me as to how American finance started, and the Stock Exchange was really the core

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Rafay Farooqui: core element to that. And so I took a liking to it. And then I started seeing Digital transformation and seeing stock exchanges disappear all over the world. And so I thought, Wow, this is like a real historical moment. Why not start to understand? What's the memorabilia around this. So it was kind of a fluke, started collecting a couple old photographs, and they turned into what my wife says is too large a collection.

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Rafay Farooqui: That being said, I think one of my more recent purchases, which has been a lot of fun, has been a movie poster from the 19 twenties, I believe, of the Wolf of Wall Street, the original

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Rafay Farooqui: a movie. So it's a very large poster that was probably put up in some movie theater at that time.

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Mark Wickersham: Fun.

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Mark Wickersham: obviously, you spend some time in New York City. You can see by the background there. What I think is one of the great cities in the world. What is one of your favorite locations in New York City? And what do you love about the city?

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Rafay Farooqui: Oh, wow! I think the city is so dynamic that at every corner you turn there's just something new and something really old that's been around forever. So New York City really has something for everyone, and old or new, I think downtown in Soho, sitting at a cafe, having brunch

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Rafay Farooqui: has got to be one of the best experiences. If you haven't had that in life, you should have that often.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah. Nice Sunday afternoon down in Chelsea, or so. That sounds pretty good to me. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you being on the show, and thanks for sharing.

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Rafay Farooqui: Mark. Thanks for having me have a good one.