The Venture Capital Alternative: How Matt Moyers Is Fighting for America's Inventors

In this episode of Author Hour, Eric Jorgenson sits down with Matt Moyers, author of The Venture Capital Alternative, to talk about the patent portfolio that sold for fourteen times its opening bid, the book idea he sat on for the better part of a decade, the 60-day first draft and the 18 months of editing that followed, and why he shopped every publisher he could find before choosing Scribe.

Transcript

Matt Moyers: And I basically had the first draft of the book done before I got ahold of Scribe. And I reached out to a whole bunch of different publishers, thought about self-publishing, talked to a couple of different authors. And ultimately, I wanted something that would look like it was done by one of the big publishing firms because I didn’t want to do it by myself. And so ultimately, Scribe offered the best hybrid solution for what I wanted to put together. And I really wanted to make sure that I had a decent editor. And Scribe’s editor came through and I thought he was really good. So that was really important to me.

Eric Jorgenson: Matt, I first want to just thank you for being here.

Matt Moyers: Appreciate it. Appreciate being here. Thanks for having me.

Eric Jorgenson: Of course. Before we get into the book and your business specifically, do you mind just giving us a little bit of your broad background?

Matt Moyers: Yeah. So I am a 27-year expert at the intersection of intellectual property and finance, which is a fairly unique and nuanced business. I started out and got in the finance world as an investment banker. And after the Enron crisis in 2003, when Arthur Anderson collapsed, there was a very large legislative change that made intangible assets and intellectual property more important to businesses’ financial statements. And so I got into the world of valuing and transacting intellectual property assets. So I’ve been doing that now for a pretty long time.

Eric Jorgenson: That’s super interesting. And is it that most people in the IP world just don’t come in with any sort of financial... They come in with a legal understanding, but not the financial aspect?

Matt Moyers: Yeah. So intellectual property is a three-legged stool, right? There is the legal aspect, which is the biggest aspect that people think about. But then there’s the engineering aspect and the innovation aspect, which is a piece that I... I don’t have an engineering degree. But then there’s the third leg, which is the finance. And so I work with the legal and the engineering, the innovators to kind of come up with, hey, what’s the value? How do you transact? How do you make money from... How do you save on your taxes from owning intellectual property?

Eric Jorgenson: Amazing. And so what was the... What kind of form did this take throughout your career? Did you work at a firm for a while? Did you set up your own independent business immediately? What have you been doing for these 27 years?

Matt Moyers: So my first nearly 10 years was in the space of accounting. So I was at a big four accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers. And I did intangible asset analysis and valuation of an accounting for the better part of that time across all kinds of different reasons, whether it was for tax or accounting and compliance or even M&A. So that’s where I started was in the world of the accounting. And then around 2011, I got specifically into the space of intellectual property. We’re focusing on legally protected assets, such as patents, copyrights, trademarks, the really strong forms of intellectual property that companies seek assistance from the government in protecting. So there’s a lot of different forms of IP and intellectual property, but the government backed ones are kind of where I moved into around 2011, specifically around patents.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, super interesting. And so when did the glimmer in your eye start to write a book?

Matt Moyers: So there was a very large legislative change in 2011 called the American Events Act, which really changed how the patent system works in the United States of America. And that was about the time that I was transitioning from the accounting world into the true IP world. And we did some really large cases involved with bankruptcy and intellectual property. One of them was a company, Nortel Networks, which was a $100 billion company out of Canada, basically the AT&T of Canada. And that company went bankrupt in 2000. I think it was 8, 9, 10. And then they had to sell all their assets off. It was a full-blown liquidation of one of the largest companies in the world. And the patents were sold. And those patents went through a stocking force bid. And initially, Google offered to buy those patents for $314 million, right? And that was the steady bid. And then a few months later, when they actually opened it up to the entire universe of potential buyers, a consortium ended up buying it with Apple and another group of companies for $4.5 billion. So it was 14 times higher than the original price. And a team of mine was called in to allocate the value of that transaction to all of the investors. And so my idea for a book came shortly after that project because the complexities and difficulties around valuing the IP was so challenging in a bankruptcy setting that it seemed like a book needed to be written about how to value and how to make the IP system better, particularly on the finance end. So I sat on that idea for the better part of a decade before I actually started doing something with it.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that’s not uncommon. I think the delta between first idea and, oh, this idea is irresistible now, and this is the time in my life to do it, is often really long for people. But you did it. And that’s what counts.

Matt Moyers: Right. And I would look at it. I’d think about it. I’d write an outline. And then I’d put it down on the sheet, just put it in the back and then not think about it again. But yeah, finally, in 2023, 2024, I was like, OK, now is the time. It’s really important that a book like this gets out there, that people kind of look at intellectual property through the lens of finance in a way that will make the system better. Right. And that was the goal with which I wrote the book.

Eric Jorgenson: So what made that the time? Was it personal circumstance for you? Was there something in the environment or the industry that changed?

Matt Moyers: There were. There were. Yeah, it was it was a combination of the two. I had gone through some really difficult times with various different clients who have had their intellectual property used without authorization by very large tech companies. So that was one. The other was the change in presidential administration in 2024, which changed from a presidential administration that is in favor of intellectual property protections to from the previous one, which was in favor of weaker intellectual property protection. All right. So, you know, depending on if you’re blue or you’re red will will kind of dictate whether or not you want weak or strong intellectual property protection.

Eric Jorgenson: That’s interesting. I didn’t realize that was sort of an issue that was split along party lines.

Matt Moyers: I mean, it usually isn’t. And it isn’t always. It kind of goes with the waves and the flows. And because of that American Events Act that Kate that was passed in 2011 and it had overwhelming bipartisan support. But now that we’ve been seeing what that that legislation has done, which has decimated small companies and individual inventors for the benefit of the largest companies in the world right now, we’re seeing a split between the reds and the blues on how to protect IP. So got it.

Eric Jorgenson: Okay. I imagine you could have written, you know, many different books, right? I mean, you’ve lived a lot of lives in this. You’ve you’ve seen a lot of different things, experience these hardships that your clients had and sort of come into this industry through an interesting path. How did you decide on this particular scope of your book? How did you decide, you know, which of the thousand books you could write that this was the one you wanted to do?

Matt Moyers: I have a deep affinity for inventors. I actually was born on December 17th, which was the day that the Wright brothers flew their first airplane. And so from a very young age, I’ve had this, you know, connection to invention and the idea of inventors. And then my career through serendipity has has introduced me to literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of inventors from the guy who invented something in his basement to the, you know, the corporate engineer who has hundreds of patents in his name for like IBM or General Electric or Google or whoever. Right. And so I’ve met these people and I know what they’ve gone through and I started working quite often with small individual inventors and they just and this reoccurring thing kept happening. I made my invention. I tried to commercialize it. Big tech came in. They entered the market. They came with a competing product that is using my inventions. And now I don’t know what to do. Right. And so I would help these companies figure out what to do, which often resulted in, you know, patent litigation against those big companies. And then those big companies would crush them. So after seeing it so many times and having a couple of very specific customers that I worked with who were really got the short end of the stick, I was like, I got to just write these stories. Right. I got to tell what has happened, what I am seeing and and at the same time offer a solution for how to make it better. So that’s what the book does is it goes through those stories of those individual inventors and then and then offers a solution to make it better.

Eric Jorgenson: So your target audience for this is that that inventor who wants to commercialize and protect their IP and get the value out of it, you know, get paid what they’re worth by the market.

Matt Moyers: Yeah, that is. So there’s kind of three different. There’s the inventor. There’s small inventors. There’s the finance people, right? The investment bankers, the venture capital people, the people who are actually putting money into early stage companies and expecting them to grow and have meaningful exits. Right. And what I have found in my research is that most of these early stage companies that are funded by VCs are funded by private equity. Most of them end up having a bad outcome, right? You hear about the ones that that are unicorns and do great returns, but a lot of them end up failing. And in my business, right, as an appraiser, as someone who works with IP people and early stage companies, I was the one that would get the call like, what do I do next? Right. And so it’s for those investors as well. And it’s also for, you know, politicians and regulators that oversee intellectual property administration and operations. Right. It is a mess right now. The IP system in America is a mess. Patents are just the canary in the coal mine of what needs to be fixed. And, you know, you even see it in the copyright space from AI. And so, you know, there could be a lot of big, important improvement changes that need to happen to the system. So my audience kind of covers all of those people, or at least I hope it does.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Interesting. I mean, I’m definitely in the target market for this as an early stage investor who wants to, you know, understand where the protections are for what inventions and how to be sure that you’re laying a strong, strong foundation, you know, for the company that you want to build. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So what was your, I always tell people you need a, you need a selfish reason and you need a selfless reason to want to write the book because it’s, you know, you’ve got to be motivated to give something to the reader and you also, you know, it’s hard and it’s a big investment and it takes time and it takes effort. And so I coach people to have a selfish reason for writing the book. Did you have a, like a selfish reason? Was this built into the building of your business or something associated with, you’re serving your clients. So I imagine, you know, your future clients are the ones who sort of in the target audience for this book.

Matt Moyers: I mean, my selfish reason is, you know, obviously I’d like to make some money from the book, whether it be from selling the book or from getting new clients. I also would like it for the selfish reason just is that, you know, I’d like to see, have opportunities to make money alongside some of the customers that I’m working with, particularly the ones that have really amazing inventive technology that ends up being poached by some of the largest companies. And so, you know, my own selfish reason, I’d like to not see those people get screwed. And my selfish reason is I’d like to make money alongside them and they should be treated appropriately when they come up with these ideas. Because I, you know, I think that inventors are one of the most important professions in society.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And I think it’s for how important it is. It’s very interesting that, you know, there’s nobody showing up at the job fair for them. There’s no career counselor slot for it. There’s no, you know, you could be an engineer. You can be an entrepreneur. Or you can, but the things like invention and innovation are sort of, they feel like traits rather than roles. But I think, you know, the more, the more the sort of rote tasks are automated by, you know, robotics or software AI, the more of us as humans should shift towards generating new things, whether it’s art or, you know, a service as an entrepreneur or a scientist as a knowledge or an innovator, an inventor. So I think this is actually a very important sort of field to advance and expand and explain to people that, you know, you can be an inventor when you grow up, they’re all over the place. It’s just rare that you see it as a job title on LinkedIn.

Matt Moyers: Right, right. That’s exactly right. Right. And an inventor is kind of a stepping stone to an entrepreneur anyway, right? Like people who are super creative in terms of like technical innovation, engineers, scientists, those types of things. You know, a lot of times they come up with these ideas and then they want to turn them into businesses and they want to turn, you know, and they want to build a new market. And the invention is just the single stepping stone. Right. And, and you can see that even with, you know, the people that you’ve written about, like Elon Musk, right? He’s, he was an inventor first and then he was a software coder and then he was an entrepreneur and a businessman, right? Like it all, it all connects together. And invention is just one of those really important tasks that unfortunately has a very low batting average for success, right? Like your inventions, if you can’t commercialize it, the likelihood that your patented invention is worth a lot of money is pretty low. You know, probably 85, 90% of most patented inventions don’t carry much market value at all. But when they do carry market value, they carry a lot of market value. So it’s a unique space and it makes it very contentious. So, and you know, part of the reason that I wrote the book is to try to bring some of the contentiousness down and that, you know, just recognize what people are doing and, and get through this, you know, financially in a smart and wise way and everyone can make money, right? Everyone can do well. But it doesn’t always have to be a fight, right? So.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, and I don’t know the details of your, your sort of offering or services alignment, but I imagine, you know, as an inventor, you spent a lot of time and money and effort inventing this thing. And then as soon as you have it, you’re, you’re sort of in this dangerous spot where until you do the legal work to protect it, you’re vulnerable until you take it to market, you’re not getting any profit on it. But once you take it to market, you’re more, you know, your risk of being knocked off is higher. And so you have to sort of shell out these huge costs, not just the engineering and invention costs of all the experimentation you have to do, but also, you know, the legal protections and the go-to-market efforts of, of marketing and production and all these things. So is, is your, you know, the book is titled the Venture Capital Alternative is the, is the solution here, you know, some sort of shared equity for, you know, people that, that have an invention, but don’t necessarily have the, the cash to pay for, you know, all of these services upfront to take something to market.

Matt Moyers: Yeah, it is. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s intellectual property finance and intellectual property capital and IP debt and IP equity, right? So funding early stage companies using IP assets, particularly patents, but potentially trademarks and copyrights or contracts and those types of things where the investment directly into the IP sustains it and makes it more tangible, if you will. And because right now, the way that intellectual property is, I mean, it can, it can just disappear. It can just disappear into the ether, if not protected. And then all of a sudden, anyone and everyone who can think of it can use it. And that, you know, and so that’s why stronger intellectual property protection is important for these early stage companies, because companies can come in and take it. A great example is Sonos, the speaker maker, right? They started in the early two thousands. They were one of the first companies to really build out wireless speakers so that you can put them all over your house and not have to have cords everywhere. And they built a really nice business. And then around 2015, 2016, both Google and Amazon decided we’re going to enter the home speaker market as well. And we’re going to add in all these things. And they came in at a like nearly $80 per for an equivalent speaker cheaper. Right. And they can subsidize that with all of the earnings that they have from all their other businesses. And they can undercut a company like Sonos. And it really caused Sonos quite a bit of problems. Sonos ended up having to sue Google. The litigation back and forth over many years caused all kinds of problems. Sonos ultimately took their eye off the ball and their entire product went sideways and their CEO had to leave the company. Right. And all of that started because of patent infringement. Right. So, you know, these are kind of the stories that I hear on a regular basis.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Is there one moment or one event, accomplishment, achievement or something that you’re dramatically looking forward to as your moment of celebration of like this book’s success? As we record this, we’re only a few months out from launch. So we’re looking forward a little bit. What was your champagne moment?

Matt Moyers: So it’s coming in the book. I tell the story of two different inventors. And the second one, Satoshi Nado from Japan, has been going through very significant patent litigation with a couple of trillion dollar companies. And so, you know, the champagne moment will be when the litigation outcomes are in their favor and they’re being awarded, you know, $100 million plus for the inventions that they made. Right. Like that’s the champagne moment. And even for smaller inventors, right? You know, even if it’s a $10 or $20 million outcome on their invention to get those kind of licensing fees or to raise that type of capital or to be able to launch their company, like those are all champagne moments for me. And I’ve unfortunately had the opposite of that, where I get calls from the inventors and it’s, you know, we’re shutting down, we’re, this is a really difficult situation. So I’m looking for that flip. The part of the reason I wrote the book is so that I can see that flip move the other way. And instead of having people calling, crying, having people calling with joy.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, well, that’s a terrible setup for my next question, which is what are some of the unexpected good things that have happened as a result of your book? I’m glad the phone is ringing, but I’m sorry that people on the other end are crying. Yeah. Most of many of your engagements start with a, you know, a tearful phone call.

Matt Moyers: I mean, it’s, it’s probably about one in five that are like that, that I’m in a really bad spot. The other side is I do get a lot of calls from the guys who are like, I just got this patent. I, I’m in the process of my proof of concept on this, on launching this product. I need, I need funding to, you know, build this business. And those are, those are fun. They’re challenging. It’s hard to find investors unless they have really good traction. And so, and a lot of times I get calls from these types of groups, these types of companies, these types of inventors, and they’re outside of the venture capital world, right? Like they’re, they’re a guy in Iowa or a guy in, in Florida, and they’re not anywhere close to Silicon, any tech hubs. And they’re like, I’ve got this thing, what can I do? Right. And so I’m hoping that the book will bring more investors, the table that are willing to look into these types of situations with these early stage companies and, and help them build lasting and meaningful businesses.

Eric Jorgenson: Cool. Is, is, as an asset class is, is investing in IP kind of like a, is it a power law thing like venture where you invest in 10 and one 10 X’s and the rest go to zero? Or is this more, you can actually specifically underwrite cash flows and, you know, it’s more like lending on future cashflow.

Matt Moyers: I mean, so lending on future cashflow is something that is happening in Europe and in Southeast Asia. So IP financing is happening in London at a, at a group called Ingot and Matt West, but in the U S it’s almost non-existent for IP financing. They say there’s some here and there, but it’s very few and far between. And there’s not any real organizations in the U S that are just focused on IP financing. Right. Maybe it’s a, something we’ll do if it’s one, if it’s a one-offy type situation, whereas in Europe, they’re, they’re legitimately trying to create programs around it.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, it’s an interesting alternative to, you know, pure, pure startup investing because there’s, there’s collateral, right? If, if the, if the underlying IP has value, you know, lending against that IP with that as collateral, you should be able to get, you know, loan like terms rather than sell equity in the upside. Of course you’re risking your IP, but yeah.

Matt Moyers: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the flip side of that is the, what the companies that are long in the tooth that tried to commercialize and didn’t, and all they have left is their patents on IP. There’s a whole world called litigation funding and the patent space is a big, a big opportunity. So there are, and it does fall the power law distributions, right? That, that only a handful of patents make up the majority of the value. And when you go and insert those against really large infringers, you can have outsized returns on just a handful of patents. So that, that exists in, inside the patent and IP space as well.

Eric Jorgenson: Okay. Okay. Sorry. I feel I, I am probably digging too much into the, like, this is a fascinating thing for me. So I just keep kind of poking at it, but how did you decide once you decided you wanted to write a book? What was the path from there to, to actually choosing Scribe? Did you start writing first? Did you look for a path to find a publisher, somebody to help you write it? What was that?

Matt Moyers: Hey, it was, it was an interesting path. And I, you know, I started out kind of on my own writing and I basically had the first draft of the book done before I got ahold of Scribe. And I did, I mean, I reached out to a whole bunch of different publishers, thought about self-publishing, talked to a couple of different authors. And ultimately I, you know, I wanted something that would look like it was done by one of the big publishing firms because I didn’t want to do it by myself. And so ultimately, you know, Scribe offered the best hybrid solution for what I wanted to put together. And I, and I spoke with your editors and I, and I, you know, I really wanted to make sure that I had a decent editor and Scribe’s editor came through and I thought he was really good. So that was really important to me.

Eric Jorgenson: Awesome. Tell me more about the writing process. Did you, how did you get that first draft created? What was your, what was your routine? What was your habit? What can we learn?

Matt Moyers: So I found this guy through Instagram who was like, I’ll help you write your book in 30 days. I think his name was Josh Bragg or something like that. And so I signed up for his course to write my book in 30 days and I, you know, it was fine. And, and I, I, I actually pumped out the first draft of the book in about 60 days using his method. And then I spent another 18 months editing it. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: You can always shift that ratio around. It’s really easy to get a first draft, but you’re going to pay that bill on.

Matt Moyers: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I was like throwing 30, you know, and I ended up, I got done with the first draft and I reread it and I was like, holy crap, this is like three books. So I, you know, I, I tore it apart. I put a whole bunch into kind of, you know, on the shelf. I, it made me realize I’ve probably got three or four more books inside of me. And so now that this one’s out, I’m going to, yeah, I’m going to, I’m going to pull those up at all their stuff out and kind of just kind of keep work, work in it. Right. Like, I think this is going to be a thing now. So.

Eric Jorgenson: Awesome. Yeah. It’s, it’s a really helpful thought exercise and man, does it help? It makes it so much easier to edit when you, you know, you flip that switch of like, I’m not killing this. I’m not, it’s not dead. It’s just going on the shelf for, for the next book is raw material. And I’m just going to, you know, save it just doesn’t belong inside this particular, you know, picture or book or puzzle. What was the, what was the method briefly that got you, you know, a draft in 60 days? Are you dictating? Are you just, are you setting a word quote, uh, quoted for the day?

Matt Moyers: Like I did a little bit of both. I did a combination of dictating and then a combination. I forget the method. It’s some Japanese method where I was just like, you know, brain dump for 30 minutes. Right. And I would do, I try to do that every single day or I would be like, okay, I’m going to set two hours aside and I’m just going to go back and edit. Right. And so it kind of shifted from, you know, the Kaizen I think is called 30 minute writing sessions. I do that two or three times a day into like two hour editing sessions. And I did a lot of walking, right? Like, cause I did, I found that I needed to think a lot, right? So I, my dog was walked like crazy just because I would be thinking so much. Right. So it was a very, it was unlike any work process that I ever had in the past. Right. Because of how much just thinking I was doing. Cause it was, I was basically taking the summation of my 24 year career and like trying to distill it down into a book. It was, it was a lot. It was mentally taxing.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. The, I mean, incredible realization and epiphany for you. I think to, to understand that, that, that downtime to allow the ideas to bubble up or to just let your subconscious feed you or, you know, to, to move and clear your mind walking in particular, I think is so massively underrated. And you see a lot of the great, like creative minds of history have patterns like this, right? David Ogilvie would like take a break and he would go, you literally go live with the Amish and just like do farm work for like two weeks a year. And he would come up with all these new ideas. And I think, I think it was Aaron Sorkin who talks about like when he’s writing a screenplay, he takes like five showers a day. Like as soon as he slows down or feels, feels gassed, he goes and takes a shower and that kind of like gets his blood flowing again and clears his brain. And so, yeah, you know, get, get a dog and, you know, get ready to walk. I think is a truly excellent writing advice.

Matt Moyers: Yeah. Yeah. I found I, in the morning I would write the best in the morning. My best 30 minutes writing was kind of right when I woke up and then a couple of walking sessions in the day filled in between with, you know, normal working events and whatnot. And then, and then another writing session late at night. So the mornings and the nights was where I did most of my work. Yeah. It’s interesting.

Eric Jorgenson: I like, I like the double session. Like if you, you know, you get, get your fresh energy out in the morning and then kind of allow the day to, to bring up new ideas and let it marinate and, and, you know, crank again, a half hour is not an onerous, like that’s not an long enough to feel like, oh my God, get me out of this chair. You know? So it, or, or if you have a word, you know, goal that you’re going for, you can, you know, you can hit a thousand words in 30 minutes easy, especially if you’re dictating.

Matt Moyers: Yep. Yep. That’s, that’s exactly right. The, the bigger, the harder part is what I found was then, okay, I’ve word vomited all over the page. Now I need to clean it up to make it nice. Right. Yeah. The editing, the editing definitely comes due.

Eric Jorgenson: And as a man who’s, I spent thousands of hours editing transcripts, editing transcripts is, is work AI makes it a little easier. You know, there’s better tools for it. And the transcriptions are better than they used to be, but damn, it is funny to see how many words you skip over with your ears that you don’t with your eyes. It’s just a different thing. Amazing. Okay. What advice do you have, Matt, for authors who are maybe where you were, maybe three years ago now, and you’re kind of 2023, you maybe just having that epiphany that, oh, this is the right time. There’s the either, you know, personal circumstances changed. I have the time or, you know, something happened in the environment that makes this, this now is the moment to, to write this book and kind of plant my flag for, you know, the rest of my career or for this era in my industry or whatever it is.

Matt Moyers: My biggest challenge was like fully committing and, you know, finally being like, okay, I’m going to, you know, buy into this idea that I can write the book in 30 days and use this kind of very gimmicky style of doing it to just get me to go was like, okay, just this, this works, right? Like this pushed me off the edge. And, and so, you know, I think the, the, the biggest thing that I did, you know, if I had to do it over again, I went, once I committed, I went head down, very focused and didn’t really look around the corner too much. So, you know, I, I need to think about my marketing, right? Like I have not really done a significant amount of marketing yet. And so I’ve got to work through that still, and I wish I had started it a little bit earlier, but my book, thankfully is very time. And what I believe is very timeless. Like it’s some of the principles in it will, will matter today or in 10 years from now. And so I kind of like, I can start marketing whenever I want to start marketing and that’s fine. So, yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: And I would, I find people often have an easier time thinking about it in terms of how you use your book rather than how to market your book, right? You frame it as marketing. You’re kind of like, Oh, what are the book marketing tactics? All right. Buy Amazon ads, PR, PR firm, whatever. And when I talk to authors, almost always the most beneficial thing for their life is not a book marketing tactic. That is kind of like one of the first three things you think of. It’s some way that they integrate the book into their, into their routine, into their business, whether it’s, you know, I keep a trunk full of them and I hand them out, you know, anytime I have, you know, for people that are meeting people physically or running around, whether it’s people who are like, literally every time they have a meeting with somebody, you know, the last minute is like, Hey, give me your address. I’d love to send you a copy. We talked about this. That’s actually chapter two of my book. I’ll flag it for you and send you a copy. You can flip through it. And I’m happy to answer any questions you have after you read it. And they’re just, you know, they’re shipping 200 books a month because they’re having 200 meetings. And those little things, a lot of times for books like this, it’s not, it’s not about marketing it so much as it is just involving it in your routine. Yes.

Matt Moyers: That’s, and that’s probably the better. Yeah. That’s a great way of phrasing it. Cause I’m not, you know, I don’t expect to become a, a best seller all the time on this, but I do expect, you know, the, the clients that I meet and the investors that I meet will be interested. And so you’re, yeah, you’re exactly right.

Eric Jorgenson: A hundred percent. Yeah. Find the, you know, the five events in your industry and be sure that the event organizers have a copy of it. Find the five podcasters who are relevant and, and, you know, you know, reach out to them. So that kind of stuff that’s really, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s simple, but it’s a, it does take that reframe of like, don’t worry about marketing a book. Just, just worry about using it. Yeah. Especially when, you know, it’d be nice to make money from it, but you know, you really want to just start that word of mouth ball rolling and get, don’t get those first couple hundred copies or a couple thousand copies in people’s hands. Cause they’re the ones that are going to be recommending it. So yeah, that’s great. Cool. I’m glad you brought that up actually. Cause I think that’s a really generalizable thing that I hear a lot of people get stuck on. Okay. Amazing. So yeah, your advice is just go, go all in, go heads down, structure it, make it a, make it a good, make it a real work project and treat it like that. Get a routine around it. And I think that, you know, your point around whatever gimmicky or not, there’s a wrong way to do it. Right. Just like get enough skin in the game that you, you’re like, wow, I have to keep going now, you know, just to start that momentum.

Matt Moyers: The outline was a really big, uh, right. I mean, I think one of the hardest parts was just coming and out outline for the book of framing a context of, you know, these are the sections, these are the chapters, these are the topics. Right. All of that. I think, you know, once I got past that, then I knew I was onto something. So. Yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: Awesome. Okay. Matt, where would you send people to learn more about you? More about the book to follow along and.

Matt Moyers: So the book has a, the book has a website, the VC alternative.com it’s available in all the places. It’s an audible book now as well. And so, yeah, the, my website is probably the best place to start, but you can also get it on, on Amazon or wherever. So.

Eric Jorgenson: Okay. And you post anywhere regularly, like LinkedIn.

Matt Moyers: LinkedIn and subs sub stack and X all undermining. Yep.

Eric Jorgenson: Okay. Matt Moyers, M O Y E R S. And the book is the venture capital alternative. That’s right. Thank you so much, Matt, for, for taking the time, for writing the book and for sharing some of your advice with us today. I appreciate it.

Matt Moyers: Thanks a lot, Eric. I appreciate the time.