The (Unofficial) Roast of Kevin Kim

Kevin Kim: You are listening to Lender Lounge with Kevin Kim, a podcast dedicated to helping our listeners in the private lending industry grow, improve, and streamline their business. I’m Kevin Kim, partner at Fortra Law, the nation’s largest private lending law firm. Join me as we chat with the best and brightest and private lending. They’re eager to share their years of wisdom and best practices for lenders, brokers, borrowers, investors, and more. Subscribe to Lender Lounge on your favorite podcast platform and visit our website fortralaw.com to learn more about how we can help you scale. Check out the episode summary below for other valuable resources. Hi everyone. Kevin Kim here, your favorite private lending attorney and podcast host. Welcome to Lender Lounge, Kevin Kim. As you know, we’ve rebranded to Fortra Law. Very exciting. This video or podcast you’re about to enjoy was recorded prior to our rebrand. Any reference to Geraci LLP is really meant to reference our new brand, Fortra Law.

Kevin Kim: Please enjoy this episode and please like and subscribe. Thank you very much. Hey guys. Welcome to another episode of Lender Lounge with yours truly, Kevin Kim. As you can see, we are not in the computer. We are actually on location. We are getting ready for the Captivate Conference in 2025. We’re in our hotel room shooting this wonderful podcast today. We have some familiar faces next to me. We are now in season five. We do these episodes before Captivate and we chose to do this this time with partners at Geraci and we’re going to have some fun today. Not going to be super serious. We’re not getting deep in the weeds, but we’re going to have some fun today. So before we start, my business partners, please introduce yourselves to our audience and we will get started.

Kevin Kim: Hi everyone. I’m Jen Jennifer Young. I’m a partner at Fortra Law. I’m on Kevin’s team, the corporate and securities team. Good to see you guys.

Nema Daghbandan: Well, hello, my name is Nema and that was quite, it was fun to watch you in your element. Oh yeah, man, because you did all the things already. We’re looking at the camera. I don’t know who’s going to be looking at a camera when they’re actually watching this. They’re probably on a podcast, but I feel like if I’m on YouTube, I got to get in their faces. If you’re listening to this, you really are missing. What are you

Kevin Kim: Talking about? You’re in people’s faces regardless.

Nema Daghbandan: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But it was a lot. Set that straight and there was a lot of clap noises and all sorts of sounds there. It was beautiful. It was lovely. Yeah, no, you are a podcast or a video.

Kevin Kim: We’re in!

Nema Daghbandan: Season five, bro. Is it a vlog? Extraordinary. What would you call

Kevin Kim: This Today? We’re kind of vlogging, we’re podcasting. We’re we having fun with it? Right?

Nema Daghbandan: When you do a video of yourself though,

Kevin Kim: We should, I have the meta glasses. I think we’re going to do that next time.

Nema Daghbandan: Yeah. Anywho, my name is nema. I am also, for better or worse, Jen and Kevin’s partners. I do the documents as they have told me. I really enjoy, ive been with Gisi for a very long time. I’ve given my youth to the company and here I am today unfortunately with these two people and it feels like a low point in my career, but here we are. I’m excited for this.

Kevin Kim: Today nonetheless, given my youth.

Kevin Kim: So as you guys can tell today, we’re not going super like I’m going deep into the company’s background or you guys’ background. I think everyone has met and gotten to know these two wonderful people today. We’re going to have a little fun, but first we do want to get your guys’ take on what’s going on in private lending because we are on the front lines. We see lenders of all shapes and sizes. Jen, you and I work with brand new market entries all the way up to the guys that are all over the country and Nemo you as well. And so before we get into the silly part of the podcast, I do want to ask you guys, it’s 2025, we’re five months in and last year we were a little bit nervous and this year I feel like we’re still a little bit nervous. So what are you guys seeing on the ground as it pertains to the private lending industry at large? What are you seeing with your clients and what we learn in getting ready for the next six to eight months and then going into the next year, what can we learn from our past years of experience?

Nema Daghbandan: Jen Young, I’d love to hear your perspective.

Kevin Kim: I think in the past few years, the difference with what I’m seeing recently in the past six months, a year, two years versus three, four years ago, probably the expansion of businesses into different states and different geographies. I think that expansion is real and people scaling their businesses and really making the effort to be compliant in all 50 states or whatever states that they’re going into. And they are taking that seriously because they do want to grow and they are growing. I love that. I love seeing our clients do that and we help them and we tell them what to do, which states they need to watch out for, what to keep an eye out for and they’re ready to go and they’re very motivated and that growth is real. So I like that.

Kevin Kim: So you’re seeing growth and you’re seeing growth being taken very seriously,

Kevin Kim: Expansion into geographies that they’re not. So

Kevin Kim: People are expanding into new

Kevin Kim: Markets

Kevin Kim: And for those of you who don’t know who are listeners, Jen is your go-to person at j Rossi when it comes to multi-state licensing. We run these licenses for guys all over the country, but it’s been fascinating to watch lenders you not expect, oh, I’m going into these new markets now. So it’s been great to

Kevin Kim: See versus no, I’m just going to stay in X state. We’re very small.

Kevin Kim: I mean back when we started, I started, it was like I land in this city almost.

Nema Daghbandan: Well, and it’s interesting too. I mean, I’ll piggyback on what Jen just said there as well, which is I was actually just on a call yesterday with a lender who was in Texas and I pulled up and I pulled their data up previously and about 96% of their transactions. And sure enough, that was the exact same conversation we were having. I was giving them all sorts of hard time. I think Texas is one of the worst states to lend and we can go about that for some time, but they were rapidly expanding outside of it. And if you just think about those stats for a second, 96% of their transactions were in the state and even they, and this is four years worth of data for their purposes. So it really shows you that this concept of no longer I would say is being comfortable with being comfortable.

Nema Daghbandan: That’s probably the better way to think about it is I think it’s funny. This is a weird tangent on this issue, but that is what I’m known for that in saying statements that don’t make sense. So I will say

Kevin Kim: This is true.

Nema Daghbandan: It’s one of my key strengths. So artificial intelligence, hang there with me, just hang there with me for a second. Artificial intelligence is the ultimate buzzword. We’re about to do our conference tomorrow and everyone’s going to be like, oh yeah, I do ai. And you’re like, what? Every

Kevin Kim: Software company right here says they do ai,

Nema Daghbandan: But nobody really could tell you how they use ai. But we’re all panicking inside because we’re like, oh my gosh, Elon Musk is literally trying to take our job and he’s going to,

Kevin Kim: Skynet is coming, he’s doing to doge us all the fear

Nema Daghbandan: That we all have right now. So there’s this kind of panic I would say about complacency, right? No matter who you are. And so this is all kind of a bigger manifestation,

Kevin Kim: But also the guys are feeling that downward pressure, seeing their deals being taken away by these big national shops. I got to compete. I got to compete that need that drives to compete and not lose business.

Kevin Kim: Yes, the growth is.

Nema Daghbandan: Real, right? And it’s interesting, I did not have an appreciation for this and I should have because I think that being in the law firm business, the law firm business is very relationally driven. And it’s funny because even you guys as a practice group, the nature of your business is particularly on the fun formation side of it is you have all these relationships in the world and for most companies, they will need you one time and they’re going to need you for the most critical part of their life cycle is you’re there formation, you’re there to advise ’em or whatever it is. But the really interesting aspect of this is that you still have to be very relationally minded with these customers, even though technically you could totally screw them because at the end of the day is you’re going to work with them once. So good, bad, indifferent, doesn’t really matter. You don’t obviously. But it’s interesting is that the private lending community, and what I’ve learned really from their business models is that they are actually, it’s mostly a repetitive business model. And so they’re actually most fearful of, and you just said this a second ago, but it’s really an interesting point, is they’re extremely fearful of losing the relationship with a good customer.

Nema Daghbandan: And it’s interesting because it’s forcing them to do things they don’t really want to do. That could be a geography play. Well, you know what, if you’re going to start buying properties in Alabama, because that’s where the opportunities are right now. Well, I’m going to start doing loans in Alabama because I don’t want to lose the relationship because I know that my competitors probably offer multi-state type practice. And then in addition to that, it’s also forcing them to do that little dirty word we call DSCR right now. Right?

Kevin Kim: Well, DSCR is now what today DSCR five years ago was construction, right? Well, I don’t do ground up. I don’t touch touch stuff. I don’t touch construction. That’s right. But now everyone in their mom is doing construction loans. That’s right. Why? Well, I think it is. The borrowers are asking for

Nema Daghbandan: It. That’s right. That’s right. You don’t want to lose the customer relationship and it’s forcing you to really go outside of that comfort, which is good. And the beautiful part of this whole thing is that it’s easier now than ever to do these things. You have an inflow of capital. From my perspective, there is more money than there are deals. And so it’s very good to be someone who is able to have, whoever has borrow relationships is going to be kind of the king maker for this time period. And it’s not to say right now as I would not that ebbs and flows rapidly. I think if you were to ask me about the economy in general now, I don’t understand and I haven’t for some time the imbalance of what’s occurring.

Kevin Kim: So let’s talk about that. So macro, so we don’t do a lot of this macro stuff on the show, but I think everyone wants to hear your thoughts on this because you guys we’re all on the front lines with clients in different respects and economically speaking, financial market speaking, it’s a weird, weird time.

Nema Daghbandan: It makes no sense.

Kevin Kim: Yeah, it’s confusing. It’s confusing. It makes

Nema Daghbandan: No sense. I mean when you look at the market right now and you’d say is the average person that you’re going to walk into right now, no one would be bullish about where we’re headed in the next month or the next two months, the next

Kevin Kim: Three months. But at the same time it’s always cautious optimism. Cautious optimism. And that could be always because we’re mortgage people and we’re

Nema Daghbandan: Entrepreneurs, it could be that. Sure, sure. It’s good to, again, and I’m a cautious optimist by nature there, but it is a very, what I don’t understand and I don’t have a deep appreciation for is that why is the business doing so well? So I’m obviously for those that don’t know, run a fun little company called Lightning Docks. It does all at this juncture, 5,000 business purpose loans a month. We’re talking almost 3 billion worth of transactions. There’s enormous amount of flow that’s occurring on there right now. And the thing is, you watch those transactions and I get to get a little window into all these businesses that are on there and I get to say it’s like if I’m going to just track this same company and I get track them from January of 2023 and I just got to watch their business and their life cycle and they’re growing dramatically and I can’t understand it because I can’t, I go, but there’s no good reason for that business expansion, meaning that we didn’t have this crazy, we went from an awful interest rate environment. So if you have this interest rate shock, it didn’t get a whole lot better. You have basically 50 or so basis points in terms of the drop from the fed level. You had a better capital market situation. So maybe they’re able to borrow money a little bit more cheaply or sell loans on a bit of a better basis, but you didn’t have a seismic shift.

Kevin Kim: But I think that that’s actually, we have a seismic shift in one aspect. We’ve been talking about rated securitization. Yeah, that’s right on panels for a long time. But there’s one after effect of that if there are more securitization, so if there’s more bond money chasing and being in flowed, but that creates a secondary effect. The old guard of capital markets relationships that are buying loans, banks, life insurance companies, pension funds, the ones that are buying loans now they have to compete.

Nema Daghbandan: Yes.

Kevin Kim: And so that changes the dynamic because I feel like, okay, now you are telling me you sell me loans and it was xprize, but you just did a securitization, now your pricing is better. You don’t need to sell to me anymore.

Nema Daghbandan: That’s right.

Kevin Kim: Well then again, maybe I should compete. And so I feel like the capital inflow Sure. Plus the growth. That’s the thing. I think new market entry, not new market. Market expansion. Market expansion, that’s

Kevin Kim: Right.

Kevin Kim: People are growing because they’re adding new markets to their books and taking over new markets. They have a very good system in place and they’re attracting, or their borrowers are going to new markets and they’re taking the same formula

Nema Daghbandan: And

Kevin Kim: Dominating in Alabama as they were in Texas. That could be it. And we don’t know because we’re not talking to the borrowers.

Nema Daghbandan: Yes. I can’t tell you the why of this story. I can only tell you what is occurring in real time. Seriously. Most nights will wake up in the middle of the night fearful that the other she will drop. I’m telling you, it’s a tortured world.

Kevin Kim: We are children of the recession, right? Don’t we’re children. Hey,

Kevin Kim: Let’s not age all of us.

Kevin Kim: Well, we are. We’re all around the same age. We’re children of the G ffc. That’s right. We’re in the mortgage market. Technically speaking, it’s rational to think that like, oh boy, here we go again. That’s

Nema Daghbandan: Right. Because any indication in the indication that kind of looks like the general sentiment is negative and you go, oh crud, here it comes. But it just doesn’t. Every day I wake up and I’m a sociopath because every day I wake up and I pull up a data report that says how many loans closed yesterday on lightning docks?

Kevin Kim: That explains so much.

Nema Daghbandan: I know little weird human, but I do every day I wake up and I look at him and go, okay, we’re okay. Right?

Kevin Kim: But at the same time, if you look at for CASA data, so fora shows, if you look at the national leaders, I’m seeing red, right? So volumes are down nationally. Well, right. Maybe their volumes. So the reported volumes in for casa, were seeing downward arrows in the red. So this is interesting.

Nema Daghbandan: I did this because I am a nerd. I will a self-admitted nerd on this one. So I tracked, tracked the top 100 loan originators in for casa. They’re year over year. Q1, 20, 25, 20 24. You guys want to do some fun quizzing?

Kevin Kim: Sure.

Nema Daghbandan: Okay. If you were to guess, did that cohort grow or decline year? It grew by what percent? I want to say 15%

Kevin Kim: At most.

Nema Daghbandan: 6%. Okay, so that’s our first stat. But of the top 100, what percentage of those either declined in volume during that time period or were flat? What percentage of those make up that declined or were flat? Of the top 100. Of the top 100

Kevin Kim: Large percent.

Nema Daghbandan: I would say 70% of them. You think

Kevin Kim: So? 85.

Nema Daghbandan: You’re both wrong. Anyways, it’s 50%. It was 50%. It’s the exact number. I know my numbers, but that’s fascinating. Right? That makes sense. Why?

Kevin Kim: Because the bottom half, what about it, the bottom half of the top 100 are not tied into capital markets. You have this phenomenon,

Nema Daghbandan: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. Maybe you’re right. But I don’t know if that answered because I actually I didn’t. They’re either

Kevin Kim: Selling their loans, which means that the aggregator is setting their cost of capital or their balance sheet lenders and their investors are setting their cost of capital. So they can’t be competitive compared to the guys have top 10 who have very low cost capital. Maybe.

Nema Daghbandan: Again, you’re probably right, but I don’t know. When I was looking at this briefly and now I, I wish I had all the answers and I felt so good and you caught me and

Kevin Kim: I hate, here’s to you audience. This is the thing. We live in the world of funds. We live in the world of balance sheet lenders. They have their

Nema Daghbandan: Own

Kevin Kim: Capital stack, their capital stack. They’re very different from our guys who are purely reliant on either they’re institutional or they have lines of credit plus leverage, plus securitization, plus loan buyer. It’s a different world. But that’s the fascinating part about our world right now. There is so many ways to be successful and I love that regardless of whether things are kind of down or up because of the fragmentation, our clients are finding ways to get their deals done and finding ways to evolve and change. And they’re all kind of looking at what’s the formula? What’s the formula? And there is

Kevin Kim: No,

Kevin Kim: They’re all different. They’re all different.

Kevin Kim: They’re different.

Nema Daghbandan: I agree with you. They are different. Very different. But I think that there’s a formula. This is what I’ve come to the determination of you ready for it. You and I agree on this. Do we Go for it. The formula. I know this is going to blow your mind execution. That’s it

Kevin Kim: Yes.

Nema Daghbandan: Yeah, it is. The people who do better, they’re just better business operators.

Kevin Kim: They’re playing in the same mostly field, their borrowers field to work with them, their borrowers enjoy working with them. We have a client on the real estate side and they are one of the national leaders in the Southern California market and they have our clients chasing them for deal flow. And they tell me, Hey, because we have the deals, we get to pick and choose and all that matters to us is can they get it done? I don’t care about pricing as much. Can they get it done when we need to get it done? That’s what we care about. And that’s the big, big, big ultimate difference maker. If you can’t get it done at the 11th hour, you’re not going to win that fight.

Nema Daghbandan: That’s right. I think people believe rates and terms

Kevin Kim: Matter

Nema Daghbandan: Far more than they actually do.

Kevin Kim: I don’t agree with

Nema Daghbandan: That. I think it’s borrower relationship and ability to execute. And I think just really what I would say also is that the people, there’s this famous Jeff Bezos video from whatever late nineties, and he’s basically talking about this concept of, I can’t remember at the time whether there was some recession or something that was occurring. And they’re asking him like, Hey Jeff, what are your thoughts about the recession? How are you planning for this? How are you planning for all these macroeconomic debts? And he’s like, I don’t, that’s silly. Well then what am I going to do? It’s not my control. He’s like, lemme just tell you what I know with certainty. My customers want things faster and they want me to try to deliver more cheaply. And he built the model to get it done faster, cheaper, all of it. Right? And I love that. And I loved watching that video because it really takes, there’s so much, I think almost victim mentality that I see oftentimes in these contexts of like, oh, they’re working with these capital guys. Oh, they’ve got this institution. I

Kevin Kim: Hear it all the time. How am I losing business to X, Y, Z,

Nema Daghbandan: Right? If I had what they had and I’m like, no, go. What is within your control?

Kevin Kim: We had a guest on the show season one episode. You know him, him Noah, right? Child to Noah. Noah gets shit done. He will be able to get the deal done faster and he still loses deals. It happens. But his borrowers stick by him because he can execute. He gets done and he gets done on time fast. He will remove hurdles to entry that maybe the big guys do and make it easier on his borrowers. And that’s the thing that I always tell people, you are not owned by an institution, so you have flexibility.

Nema Daghbandan: Well, and going back to Amazon for a second too, what Amazon really taught us was a concept of the buy now button.

Kevin Kim: Yeah,

Nema Daghbandan: Right. What is your business version of the buy now button?

Kevin Kim: And you got to give a shout to Avi. Avi has basically created the buy now button of our industry. Shout out to Avi. I mean we had ’em on the show. Their concentration is like, how do we make it easier? How do we make it easier? Remove all the friction from

Nema Daghbandan: The purchase,

Kevin Kim: Right? And to the point that they have, they’ve solved the evaluation issue, they’ve solved the credit issue, they could do it. They’ve removed as many hurdles as possible and they can move quickly. And it’s a

Nema Daghbandan: Relentless focus on that rather than oh well what’s the capital markets going to do?

Kevin Kim: And the plus alpha is they have a low cost of capital. And so they can compete on rate, on risk, on float entry. It’s a lot. And shout out to Arvin, he was on the show. That was what he was concentrating on it seemed like. And that’s still the same truth as when they were lending home. So it was good for them. Yeah. So we’ve had a lot of serious talk, a lot of fun talk, but I think it’s very serious industry related talk. I’ve gotten some questions from our producers. They’ve asked me to prepare some things for you guys, questions that you may want to ask. And then we’re going to get into a point you notice they’re wearing. Listen to Kevin shirts today.

Kevin Kim: Listen to

(): Kevin,

Nema Daghbandan: Fun fact, neither

(): Of us listen, neither of them, neither of actually listen to this podcast. I’m a big fan. But in terms of in real life, I get yelled at by Kevin at probably once a week

Kevin Kim: I think I yell back at Kevin Few times week.

Kevin Kim: So here’s the thing. So I go back to this thing about oldest child. Youngest child as a different, the dynamic,

Kevin Kim: Are you the youngest

(): Child?

Nema Daghbandan: We’re about to get lectured as a group lecture. Everyone go on.

Kevin Kim: Are you the youngest child?

Nema Daghbandan: I am the youngest child.

Kevin Kim: Oh, that makes so much sense.

Kevin Kim: Jen and I are both the oldest children. We’re both the oldest. And there’s a different dynamic here,

Nema Daghbandan: by the way. You’re right. But go on.

Kevin Kim: And for years, I’m just trying to understand how this guy operates and I figured it out.

Nema Daghbandan: But, let me rephrase.

Kevin Kim: As the youngest child usually does,

Nema Daghbandan: As a youngest child, does Kevin, in all sincerity many years ago, grabbed me. And he is like, I need to talk to you. I’m like, let’s talk. And he’s like, I’m really, really annoyed by you. You’re just totally acting like a little brother all the time.

I literally don’t understand what you’re saying. Technically I am a little brother. I am a younger brother in life. I think the dynamic there is probably an accurate statement. But what do you want me to do with this piece of information? He’s like, you don’t understand. I was like, you’re correct. I don’t understand at all what that statement means and more importantly what you would like me to do differently. And he’s like, you need to think and act like a big brother. And I was like, again, just for context here, that is not my actual birth order. And so-

Kevin Kim: You should have asked your older brother!

You have an older brother.

Nema Daghbandan: I do have an older brother, but a younger brother will never ask an older brother.

Kevin Kim: This is true. This is very true. But that’s important.

Nema Daghbandan: It’s important. You’re leading people. That was my point. You’re leading people a hundred percent. You were upset with me. So here’s what he, let me just actually say. What I think he meant in this situation was, hey, an older brother is kind of constantly worried about their younger siblings and making sure that they’re taken care of. So think of this law firm and think of the people here as your younger siblings, if you’re out in an event with them, make sure that they get to their car safely, make sure that they get to their hotel room safely, make sure that they’re taken care of. That’s what he should have articulated. But he can’t articulate that because he’s Kevin.

Kevin Kim: Yes.

Nema Daghbandan: Right. So that’s the problem. So instead he’s being be a bigger brother, be like a

Kevin Kim: Understand the words that are coming out of my mouth. I don’t have to say it outrightly.

Kevin Kim: You have to explain it though.

Kevin Kim: How long have we been working together?

Nema Daghbandan: No, and you know how it was not, it’s nothing that you ever said that got me there. I am now a father. Crazy. I know.

Kevin Kim: Once you become a dad-

Nema Daghbandan: I’m a father. I have my son who is older and my daughter who is younger, my son, you can easily tell be like, Hey, go watch your sister for a little bit. He’ll totally get it. He’s only two years older, but he’ll be like’s going to watch. He’s going to follow her around the playground. He’s going to make sure that no one messes with her. He gets it. The other day I had an opportunity, I was with my daughter, sweetest girl in the world, and she really is sweet. She just has a heart, the biggest heart you’ll ever find. But we were out and about at a playground, and I think she was six at the time. And there was a little 4-year-old girl that was walking with us and I said, Hey Cora, make sure you go watch this other girl, make sure she doesn’t fall at the playground, take care of her. And literally two seconds later, she just walks in the opposite direction. And I was like, oh my God. This is what Kevin was saying. I’m the younger brother, she is the younger sister. And that’s how I finally figured out what the hell you were saying all those years

Later is what you wanted me to do.

Kevin Kim: This is how I was never told explicitly what to do. My father would always tell me this esoteric concept and I have to noodle on it and philosophies about it and figure it out. Read between the lines. Reading between the lines is a very important theme in Korean culture and needs to figure out what is it he’s trying to say on top of all that. I’m literally the fourth generation oldest child in my family. They have any idea how Asian culture works? That’s a big brother. They

Nema Daghbandan: Have a lot of bloodline issues,

Kevin Kim: Big burden. And I’m a boy. And so that’s a very big burden on me. And so that burden still stands on my shoulders and I very much care about how everyone is doing. But also the point was also you have to make sure that they don’t see you in a negative light. Right? Fishbowl. Fishbowl, the idea was fishbowl. Right? And so that was the theme I was trying to get across. And I told ’em Fishbowl later, but

Kevin Kim: Okay, but hold on. So is your child. I always have this question. I mean for those of you guys who know Kevin have met him conferences on the phone on Zoom, he’s easily the loudest person in the room anywhere he goes.

Nema Daghbandan: How did you isolate it down to Zoom?

Kevin Kim: I don’t know. I’m giving you all the opportunities. Conferences

In person

Nema Daghbandan: Have you ever met Kevin?

Kevin Kim: All the time? 150% of the time

Nema Daghbandan: what was the experience like and loud was the result of the medium experience with Kevin?

Kevin Kim: I was trying to give you an idea and you think, oh yeah, I do remember Kevin was screaming on Zoom and he was so loud and he was just the only person in the computer. But

Kevin Kim: You heard what I said,

Kevin Kim: But my question,

Nema Daghbandan: but you didn’t know what he meant.

Kevin Kim: I had to read between the lines. No, but why are you so loud?

Nema Daghbandan: Well, that’s a great question.

Kevin Kim: Is it just me? I want know is a question. Why? What happened? Is it childhood trauma?

Kevin Kim: No. I feel like, is it trying

Kevin Kim: To be the oldest brother?

Kevin Kim: I have asked many of my friends who are also loud… Why are we all so loud?

Kevin Kim: It’s not we!

Kevin Kim: Here’s the thing…

Nema Daghbandan: Do not

Say WE.

Kevin Kim: I have this theory. I have this theory. I think I’m actually, I’ve never gotten my ears tested. I think I have hearing problems. I really think I do. That’s issue number one. Issue number. Because also in high school-

Nema Daghbandan: How many issues?

That’s a lot.

Kevin Kim: In high school I would always play music at loudest volume possible.

Kevin Kim: So years are damaged. Maybe

Kevin Kim: My ears are damaged. But secondarily, my wife is actually the third. My wife a third pointer. If you met my wife, you both have met. She’s quiet. She’s reserved.

Nema Daghbandan: Yes. She’s a lovely woman. Yeah. Yes.

Kevin Kim: When she married into my family, she told me, every time we go to your mom’s house, I’m constantly coming out. I just went to a concert and I was like,

Kevin Kim: Her ears are ringing.

Kevin Kim: Yeah. Yeah. You’re a loud family.

Kevin Kim: So yeah,

Kevin Kim: Your mom and dad were allowed super loud. My mom in her childhood would get in trouble for being loud. My dad is got a loud, he had a big booming, loud voice. My brother is louder than I am, if you can believe it. No. Oh

Kevin Kim: Yeah. No, I cannot.

Kevin Kim: And that comes from him being the youngest son and him and him trying to figure out how to get his point across. And it’s funny because my girls now have it, I have two girls and they’re both loud a F like guys, they’re pretty terribly loud. There’s a gene one possesses apparently. And it comes with, on top of all of that, the Korean language can be a very aggressive language. And so when people think that we’re fighting all the time, but we’re not, we’re we’re

Nema Daghbandan: Just talking. If you’ve ever eaten at a restaurant with Kevin, it is a scary, scary experience because normally if you’re like, Hey, oh, I like my drink refilled, you’d be like, oh

Kevin Kim: Man. Right When you have time, please. Right, you have time. Oh my God, what’s happening?

Kevin Kim: For those of you who have visited Korea, you may know this, but we are very direct and we’re also, Hey, right here, refill my drink please. That’s all we’re saying. Should be fair.

Nema Daghbandan: The drink gets refilled.

Kevin Kim: It gets refilled. Maybe Shit, we maybe learned something from today. Exactly. And also in my defense, in my older years after I had Audrey especially, I’ve gotten a lot more quiet, comparatively speaking. You remember how loud I was back in the day? You are. He is less, I don’t know if

Nema Daghbandan: Quiet is the word. I would,

Kevin Kim: No, I’m not quiet. By no

Nema Daghbandan: Means am I quiet. But you are less. I’m trying to use podcast words here. No, don’t. It’s less angry. Yes. Well that was okay. That was the a word I was thinking of

Kevin Kim: To describe what you are less sub currently. Yes. And I’ve actually that angry, one of my questions was the loudness, but also you’re a very grumpy person. For those people who don’t know on,

Nema Daghbandan: Oh my gosh.

Kevin Kim: Every single. He’s so grumpy. He’s so grumpy. So why You’re such a grouch.

Kevin Kim: What? I am a grouch. Have you always been? I’m agro. Why? I’m a grouch. Why? So I asked this question to myself recently because he’s so much fun to hang out with. I am.

Nema Daghbandan: But have fun. But then whenever it comes to anything, you’re just,

Kevin Kim: But in his offense though, he has gotten less grumpy in the past. He called me out on it.

Kevin Kim: You’re welcome. He legitimately went to my wife and she’s like, why is he so grumpy? Tell stop being so, and my wife also knows this about me. I have a, there’s no two versions of me. When things are going well, I’m very happy. When things are not going well, I’m not very happy. And when things are not going well,

You’ll know exactly how I feel about something. Right? So I have never wanted to have or have, what is he trying to say? What is he thinking?

Kevin Kim: And I appreciate that. I like the straightforwardness.

You don’t need to hide your feelings.

Kevin Kim: Transparency. I’ve been very known to be very hold all that out there. And the reason why last year, it was the year you told me, Hey Kevin, why are you so grumpy?

Kevin Kim: You need to stop.

Kevin Kim: Macro wise, back to macro, last year was a rough year. Private lending was tough last year. And when the market is not doing so well, our business suffers. Our business suffers. Which is fine. I feel the pain. I get the

Nema Daghbandan: Professional macro, but grumpy. Kevin was not the year 2024. Lemme just give you an example. So you walk into an office, right? I dunno. With other human beings in it. And it’s the morning. And so you’re natural responsible like, Hey Jen, how are you doing? Kevin? Good to see you even saying, and all you get was Kevin, 100%. You don’t get a high guttural sound. It’s a general hi, the bumpy, guttural sound.

Kevin Kim: So we moved offices recently, right? End of last year. And now my office is right next to Kevin’s. And I was dreading that because number one, he’s loud and number two, he’s grumpy. And so I said, you know what? I really hope my daughters don’t watch this episode. I said, no, you know what? I can do this. Every morning I go in, I pop my head over, I say, good morning Kevin. And he goes,

Kevin Kim: Not every day,

Kevin Kim: Every single time. I said, good morning.

Kevin Kim: I say it.

Kevin Kim: I stopped saying good morning to him when I got into the office.

Kevin Kim: As a result, I am not a morning person. And I do not intentionally do not have my coffee until I get to the office because I watch a

Kevin Kim: Lot of same bro.

Kevin Kim: I need my coffee. Don’t see to people see be a much better

Nema Daghbandan: By the way. Fun fact, Kevin is right on this one. So listen to Kevin that it is better to wait in the morning and drink your coffee about an hour afterwards. Dr. Huberman. Thank you. Oh actually, yeah,

Kevin Kim: I do that. I

Nema Daghbandan: Don’t do coffee. Don’t forget your first in the morning. Yeah. Wait that hour. I do it

Kevin Kim: When I get to this 90 minutes or more. It’s tough. It’s very hard.

Nema Daghbandan: That first hour I’m like, it’s very hard what’s happening? My body is trying to do something, but I don’t want to move anywhere. It’s

Kevin Kim: Tough. Yes.

Kevin Kim: How is that again?

Kevin Kim: And morning when you have two girls getting ready for school. It’s fun. It’s so much fun in the morning,

Nema Daghbandan: Right? Little humans are brutal in the

Kevin Kim: Morning. Thank God that they now have to wear uniforms. But before that it was, I don’t want to wear this. I want to wear my hat like this. And my wife and I are like, who does

Nema Daghbandan: This? Who does your girls’ hair in the morning?

Kevin Kim: I used

Nema Daghbandan: To. I am known in my family as Can you

Kevin Kim: Braid?

Nema Daghbandan: No, I can’t braid, but I could do some curls. Girl, I am like a curl queen at home. Do not mess with my curling ability.

Kevin Kim: So my girls have very we’ll teach out to braid desires of how they want their hair tied. And I did not expect to have two daughters. The universe honestly did not expect you to have two daughters. To be fair. No, but to be fair, Ruby, no Ruby Keys. It’s not Ruby Keys anymore. Ruby ki you Ruby Kisky, you’re going to have girls. It’s true. And I had girls, you got what you deserved. That’s actually true. When we were pregnant with Abigail, I watched a ton of YouTube videos of how to tie hair, but it only explained how to tie a ponytail. So I can only tie a

Nema Daghbandan: Ponytail, but you could do a mean ponytail.

Kevin Kim: I can do one ponytail, one ponytail, only one. If they asked me to do two, I can’t. If I asked me to do three, I can’t. They ask me to do something high, I can’t. So now my wife does it. My girls have very long hair. Now they’re down to their middle of their back and they all want to have very pretty hair. Abigail is right now big in the braids, can’t braid worth a damn. Audrey wants to have pigtails. Can’t do that. Then she’ll get mad at me because I do it too hard. So I have ogre strength. Is that what you call a lack of coordination? Go on. Getting your hair pulled by an ogre is not something that Audrey finds enjoyable. And so I do not touch their hair in the morning. I do not anymore.

Nema Daghbandan: Wait, I have a more serious question.

Kevin Kim: Okay.

Nema Daghbandan: Okay. So men of a former generation were known, and I am assuming for probably both of you that I wouldn’t call it necessarily a distant father, but a not emotionally available father. I think it kind of marked most of our childhoods.

Kevin Kim: If you’re Asian at times two,

Nema Daghbandan: Julie and you are grumpy and you’re Kevin. So that’s a whole other component to sit on top of that, right? Would you consider yourself an emotionally distant father?

Kevin Kim: Good question. I go back to the Asian thing, right? So if you saw me with my children, you may say that I’m emotionally distant,

Nema Daghbandan: Right?

Kevin Kim: But

Nema Daghbandan: You feel compared

Kevin Kim: To your father, comparatively speaking, how I was raised, I feel like I’m a lot more and a lot has changed. My wife and I have been talking about this a lot. You

Nema Daghbandan: Do you ever tell your kids I’m happy, sad, mad,

Kevin Kim: Glad. Do you ever talk about, oh

Nema Daghbandan: You apologize to them?

Kevin Kim: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So I do all the things that my dad never did with us. See, my dad was raised, he was born during the Korean War and he had two boys. And I feel like if I had two boys, it’d be different because boys, there’s a different mentality with boys, but with girls you can’t do that kind of stuff with them. So there’s that.

Nema Daghbandan: Look at the softie. Look at the softy.

Kevin Kim: There’s that. The second thing is also, we have a word for it. We have a phrase for it. Koreans use it and Japanese people use it. And the cusp of it is that you’re a grumpy person, but you’re also very nice at the end of everything, everything down

Kevin Kim: Nice. Grump.

Nema Daghbandan: That’s a great way to describe Kevin. He’s a nice grump.

Kevin Kim: We call this

Nema Daghbandan: Because he’s very thoughtful in his own weird ways.

Kevin Kim: In my own weird way, I try to be

Nema Daghbandan: In your own weird way. You’re very thoughtful.

Kevin Kim: That’s how I try to be with them. But at the same time, maybe

Nema Daghbandan: We should get new Lender Lounge shirts. Like nice grump.

Kevin Kim: Nice grump.

Kevin Kim: The word for it in Korean is Tsundere means it is a combination of it’s Cinderella and also has to do with being a forest, being that’s very soft and nice. But the idea is my wife always makes, and my dad was the same way, but with my daughters, I say I do all the things that I wish my dad did with me. But at the same time, if you looked at me, if an American looked at me, they would say, you’re really mean. I’m like, oh, I just hold ’em to a very, I’m just grumpy, just grum.

Kevin Kim: But I’m nice.

Kevin Kim: I hold ’em to a very high standard and I tell them, listen, I expect you to do these things, your actions and that kind of stuff. But also at the same time, my 4-year-old, we still baby her. So there’s a lot going on there. But my wife says it’s not enough. So I’m like, yeah, that’s true. But once again, I was raised in a different way. I have another important question.

Kevin Kim: I just want to give Kevin kudos because I have noticed you are more open and maybe it’s, I force it upon you to communicate because sometimes that’s needed with such a grout, you’re

Nema Daghbandan: Very good at it. I give you a lot credit for it. And this was my segue, so I’m glad you brought it up because I’m wondering, so you’ve got this interesting dynamic. So generally speaking at the firm, we’re all, most partners have had their own groups and there’s times in which we’ve been together. So Melissa and I were both in the banking and finance practice, but now she runs that. And so for most of the practices, the partners have also been the department head of their practice.

And you guys fit in this unique situation, which is you’ve had to work with this man and continue to work directly with this man in his grumpy era.

Kevin Kim: I had my hair dyed very recently. So you don’t see the whites

Nema Daghbandan: In his, that’s not about in his, that’s just because you’re getting older. Hey, I just didn’t want and is post era writing’s going to be hr, so I want you’re writing your tell. All right. And so you start in this organization.

Kevin Kim: Oh yeah,

Nema Daghbandan: With Kevin. So first let’s just take it back to the interview. I

Kevin Kim: Didn’t interview

Nema Daghbandan: Her. Ah, that’s why you took the job. Got it. Okay. That makes sense because that was the first question I had

Kevin Kim: Know who I interviewed with. It was take him,

Nema Daghbandan: Which also

Kevin Kim: Grump. Yes.

Nema Daghbandan: Also

Kevin Kim: A grum. Yes. Identical.

Nema Daghbandan: We were very similar people. Yeah, he’s more downtrod than

Kevin Kim: He was. He’s a lot more asking. He was asking a question about what would you do if blah, blah, blah. And my team, they don’t like it when I yell at them. I’m like, why would you yell at your team members in an interview? He goes, I don’t yell at them. I’m like, you’re yelling at me right now in an interview. I warn about this,

Nema Daghbandan: But

Kevin Kim: I took the job

Nema Daghbandan: In America. We don’t yell at our employees. Oh wait, but I took the job. This was your interview. And you’re like, you know what? This place feels like home. But at the same time, but I’m

Kevin Kim: Behind take. I messed up. VC messed up. I found out at the same time you and I were at CNBA in Las Vegas and take calls me while we’re at the conference. We have to hire this lady.

Nema Daghbandan: Interesting. Okay, so something’s not going correct up there. So you chose to sign up for the thing and then you meet the man, the myth engine.

Kevin Kim: Yeah.

Nema Daghbandan: What are your first thoughts?

Kevin Kim: I mean, initially we didn’t work a lot together, so it was all fine and dandy. Good times, best life. Easy. Yeah. Quiet allowed me to work. And then after Tay left, I worked a lot closer with Kevin, a lot of just one-on-ones and trying to figure out and asking the questions and getting his thoughts, but then not communicating like a normal few. That’s what I’m trying to understand is it was like blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, it’s just us two in this room right now. And are those office spaces this small? I feel like you don’t have to use that outside level voice, but

Nema Daghbandan: Take out, that was my inside voice. But take the volume problems. Right. Just take out the fact that immediately after the show we’re going to go buy him some hearing aids. That’s my one. We need get his hearing aids. My first takeaway. Yes. But beyond that, was he also giving you the little brothers? I mean they’re not little brother. Was it still these weird messages you were like, what the hell does he say?

Kevin Kim: No?

Nema Daghbandan: Okay, I

Kevin Kim: Didn’t get that.

Nema Daghbandan: Okay. So you were able to understand there were no cryptic messages to her.

Kevin Kim: Yeah. That

Nema Daghbandan: Was just what you relegated.

Kevin Kim: Yeah. I mean I feel like I do, I don’t know if you know this, but there is a speak Kevin kind of thing.

Kevin Kim: Jen is very good

Kevin Kim: Speaking. Kevin. I think I do.

Kevin Kim: There are three people in the office that speak Kevin very, very well. I’m not, who are they? She is probably up very, very high up

Kevin Kim: There probably. Yeah.

Kevin Kim: Ruby was very high up there until she left and moved to LA

Nema Daghbandan: And now Ruby just went

Kevin Kim: Forward. Now Ruby’s like, what the f are you saying Kevin? Right.

Nema Daghbandan: She’s become basically a farmer at this point.

Kevin Kim: Well, she

Nema Daghbandan: Just got to let her real, she raises chickens then, right?

Kevin Kim: With her chicken and her delicious age dish of the chicken. She’s amazing. The oldest young woman that’s

Kevin Kim: Ever existed, like a hundred percent. I’m surprised she’s not crochet. Hey, I’m not now. I’m not complaining. I get

Nema Daghbandan: Free eggs from her and then delicious. The eggs are delicious. Hey look, real talk. You should ask Ruby at some point in your life for eggs are the best eggs you ever had.

Kevin Kim: She got chickens, she can

Nema Daghbandan: Pick you up. And when do

Kevin Kim: You ever hear about LA people raising chickens you never hear about? That’s awesome. Love. Love it. I love it. And by a byproduct or maybe a product of it, she also listens to country music, so I don’t know. But the third person is Melissa. Melissa actually. Really? Oh, that’s right. Melissa really does. You two

Nema Daghbandan: Are the ultimate

Kevin Kim: Because there’s the older, she’s the oldest of her

Nema Daghbandan: Tribe.

Kevin Kim: You’re

Kevin Kim: The oldest of your tribe. Ruby is the oldest of her tribe. That’s right.

Kevin Kim: Yeah. Crickets. It’s fine. Okay, so going back to that, yeah, so I’m not going to say it was easy, but I understood him because he is nice. He’s inherently nice. He’s inherently thoughtful. He inherently means, well that doesn’t come across in his grumpiness and his short, whatever it is, however he speaks. But I get it. So using that, I went with it and then when I started feeling more comfortable, I would call him on it. What the fuck are you so

Nema Daghbandan: Grumpy? So let’s talk about that.

Kevin Kim: And we’re in a zoom meeting with a bunch of people and he just like, people are asking him questions just patiently asking a normal question. And then in his head, something’s going on in his head and he just says short. And he’s like, I don’t care about this in my, I’ll speak up and be like, why are you being so grumpy to everyone? We’re just asking you a normal question.

Nema Daghbandan: Let’s is an internal meeting or an external meeting?

Kevin Kim: Internal meeting.

Nema Daghbandan: But let’s parse through this for a second because what was going on in your head? Was it just the straw that broke the camel? Was it just a series of concept that finally you’re like, I’m going to murder this kid. I’ve got to say something.

Kevin Kim: That comfort level, it was a comfort level that had to be built for me to actually be straightforward and forthcoming with Kevin. And I would tell him like, Hey, this

Nema Daghbandan: Doesn’t, but what got you there? What happened internally that you said, you know what? I’m going to confront the bully. How am I a bully? I’m not a bully. He’s not a bully. I’m definitely not a bully.

Kevin Kim: He’s not a bully.

Nema Daghbandan: The grump, whatever you

Kevin Kim: Want to call, he’s grumpy.

Nema Daghbandan: I am the Grinch. The Grinch. But what made you get that level of comfort and go, as you know what today’s the days.

Kevin Kim: I think it’s just kind of working very closely and understanding his mindset, understanding how he views our clients, how he views our team, his thoughts about what to do and how to think about it. And just getting to know him. Kevin, as a GII

Nema Daghbandan: Partner,

Kevin Kim: My partner. Now you’re

Nema Daghbandan: Saying effectively as you gain enough trust that

Kevin Kim: Knowledge and understanding

Nema Daghbandan: That you say is, Hey, I got to this place where I felt like I, it’s not coming from a bad place.

Kevin Kim: That was what I understood

Nema Daghbandan: Early on. But the interesting thing is fine one, be like, Hey, I don’t need to, which is fine. There’s lots of people I work with or whatever where I’m like, Hey, just let it roll off because they don’t mean any of it, right? You’ve got a good enough rapport with this person, but there’s a difference between letting it roll off your shoulders and confronting the person. And it’s the confronting aspect of it that are literally,

Kevin Kim: But I confront people. I am the kind of person, if somebody’s going to be, I feel disrespectful to me or anything, right? Or if I’m not sure, I will say something and be like, Hey, that was a little bit rude. Did you

Nema Daghbandan: Wish you’ve got a natural kind of instinct to be confrontational in that sense?

Kevin Kim: Is that the right word? Confrontational.

Kevin Kim: The reason why. Okay, the reason why I feel like whatcha trying to get on, bro. The reason why I feel like this really does work well is she’s very direct and I’m

Kevin Kim: Very direct. I’m very direct.

Kevin Kim: And there are times that’s true where I am very much very frustrated at the fact and the reasoning is whether she understands it or not. I tried to set the foundation of this very early on. I am never coming at you in a negative way. I may seem like it, but I’m not,

Nema Daghbandan: Which I

Kevin Kim: Agree with you. If you have a question as to what my motivations are, I’m an open book. Ask me.

Kevin Kim: I don’t think that there’s a doubt about your motivation. I think we all understand you’re always coming from a good place, a thoughtful kind of considerate ish place consider. But I learned something that was really important. I think that really is really helpful for me. It’s not how, it’s not your intention, it’s how it’s received. So sometimes if you’re going to be loud and you’re short with somebody, that’s what I try to come back to you and say, Hey Kevin, maybe let’s not explode like that on a random Tuesday at a 9:00 AM meeting to the team. They might not take it that way. And you’re saying, I know, but I didn’t mean it like that because you care and you’re passionate. And I love that, right? Because who doesn’t want to work with somebody who is so caring and passionate?

Nema Daghbandan: Can I ask you guys a question?

Kevin Kim: Yeah.

Nema Daghbandan: Because this is interesting because that’s an interesting dynamic. You’re talking about the internal aspect of it and kind how to manage your own internal team dialogues and how to lead in a way that’s not, that’s going to create foster an environment so that you can actually have people confront you and get that. But you’re both counselors and chief, so your clients are coming to you all the time, all the time. And you’re in the most interesting part of their business, which is you’re in their dream entrepreneurial stage of their business. I’ve always been on their operational side. So I’m dealing with people that, and I’m very operationally minded, so we’re always very tactical, very, here’s what we do. Next step, here’s what you do. And it’s almost like writing instruction manuals back and forth with each other. So it’s not a particularly emotional environment that I’m primarily new existing. It’s for us and for you guys, you’re there. They’re dreaming and not starting their

Business

And they’ve got all these, what they probably deem as great ideas, but you’re probably interacting with them. Oftentimes. I’m like, that’s stupid, or Yeah, because I don’t know, I’m speculating. So walk me through how do you manage a client trying to, I also want to give you, please give me money when this conversation,

Kevin Kim: I never view it as please give me money. Right? I always, there have been many a time I’ve been on a call with a client. Yeah, could I sell him on something that he probably would want to buy because he’s dreaming, storming those beaches

And like, oh, that sounds really cool. That’s that he’s buying that Porsche when he really shouldn’t be. Right? And so it’s like, could I sell that? Yeah, I could have. You’re not ready for this. The thing is, the beautiful part about being in this position is that yes, they are in the mindset of storming the beach. They are in that I’m an entrepreneur dreaming stage. But at the same time, the reason they reached out to us is because they know, Hey, you’ve been on the front lines with these people. You walk them through it, and for better or worse, you’ve seen it all. And so they come with the understanding, first of all, like, okay, I need you to advise me. I don’t know how many times like, Hey, we’re going to rely on your expertise here. It happens all the time. Second issue

Nema Daghbandan: Is, that’s actually next question because there’s so much of your business in which there isn’t a rule book. So how much of it you guys are just being like, yeah, here’s what you should do. How comfortable. I never tell a

Kevin Kim: Client what they should do.

Kevin Kim: Never tell a client.

Kevin Kim: Sometimes you have to because sometimes they’re just very lost and they’re looking to us for,

Kevin Kim: My philosophy has always been, here are the options in front of you based off of what you’re telling me. Because there’s rules, there’s still rules. So here are the options in front of you. Here’s what I can tell you has worked based off of these experiences, these clients that I’ve known that have taken that strategy, and here’s what they’ve done with it. A good example is with funds, right? Clients ask about the fund structure all the time. What kind of fees should I charge? What kind of rates should I pay to the investors? There’s no formula, but here are the reasons why these ideas are good. And this fund over here, without naming them, has raised X dollars over this amount of time and has this volume. There’s some wisdom to that. But we’re never in the business of telling the client, we don’t ever shove down an idea their throat in when it comes to corporate or fund work on licensing. We have to,

Nema Daghbandan: Right? Because there’s the right answer in licensing,

Kevin Kim: You have no choice,

Nema Daghbandan: Right? Yeah, that’s right.

Kevin Kim: No choice.

Nema Daghbandan: That’s right.

Kevin Kim: But the problem is always this, the clients, their perspective is they’re dreaming. They want, and their lesson, private lending, because it’s a little bit more tight, more in real estate. In real estate, we get all kinds of crazy ideas.

Nema Daghbandan: But walk me through what’s a crazy idea and then what you,

Kevin Kim: I mean, the craziest and most extreme idea was years ago I was the associate, the sponsor wanted to pay his investors with capital. And I was like, client, you can’t do that legally. You cannot do that.

Nema Daghbandan: What does it mean to pay?

Kevin Kim: He wanted to take in capital and pay distributions with that capital.

Nema Daghbandan: Oh, okay.

Kevin Kim: I told him client

Nema Daghbandan: Contributions.

Kevin Kim: That is a Ponzi scheme,

Nema Daghbandan: Right? I was about to say is

Kevin Kim: That is what a Ponzi scheme is? And the client was like, but no, that client, that guy over there does it. And that guy over there. And the only thing I could tell him, listen, you hire me to be your advisor. You hire me to advise you through the law and what’s a good idea in business. And I can tell you in my experience, both as an attorney and as former employee, SEC. And what I understand is a good idea with investors don’t do that. And that’s an extreme example. And that client didn’t take it so well. He really, really, really wanted to do that. And there are times where it’s just not going to work out because listen, you don’t want to take my advice and we have to accept that reality. There are going to be times where it’s not, you’re not going to, you disagree with me fundamentally at your soul philosophically. And I’m like, okay, that’s fine. And in

Nema Daghbandan: Those situations, can you continue to work together

Kevin Kim: Now in certain circumstances, right? So in that circumstance, the answer is no, because that is

Kevin Kim: Security. Choose stubborn, you can’t do

Kevin Kim: Anything legal, whatever that is. Securities fraud. Sure. You can’t do that a hundred percent.

Kevin Kim: So I feel like Kevin and I we’re very good at kind of building that relationship of a trust of a true partnership with our clients where they have ideas and they’ll run it by us, but they want to get our thoughts and we tell them, this is, I see it, here are some other options. Here are some potential consequences. Here’s some other ways to do it perhaps. Right? Would this work for

Kevin Kim: You? That’s the key item, is that the beauty of the brand that we built over the years. I mean you remember how bad it was when we first started a long time ago, but now the brand is, people respect us, our expertise, and that comes with a lot of weight. On top of that, we go out of our way to provide value to them beyond legal.

Kevin Kim: I sure do.

Kevin Kim: So we’re sending them, giving them introductions, we’re giving them referrals. We’ll give me ideas. Well, hopefully they appreciate it. And that plays into like,

Nema Daghbandan: So you’re saying is there’s enough rapport being built in the process that typically they’re listening to you? I

Kevin Kim: Mean, I know that I actively, intentionally try to build that rapport with every client that

Kevin Kim: I think the buildup to them actually becoming a client.

Kevin Kim: Yeah.

Nema Daghbandan: It’s a pretty long buildup.

Kevin Kim: Yeah.

Nema Daghbandan: Let me ask you a question because I don’t do what you guys do, so I’ve always been interested in some aspects of it. Lemme just give you the best example in my head so I know enough to know that if you’re a fund and you want to a line of credit, there’s some initial parameters. You’re wasting everybody’s time. You got to have two years of a track record, 20 million under management, whatever. Here’s some basic parameters to be able to obtain a line of credit. And I don’t know if those numbers are still accurate or whatever, but there’s kind of an entry point, right? What would you say in your business are, Hey, you are not ready for this. This is not

Kevin Kim: Oh, table stakes. Yeah.

Nema Daghbandan: Yeah. What do you think is you’re somebody that just these, your podcast for the first time,

Kevin Kim: We get a lot of these. So the number one thing I tell people they’re not ready for is their loan volumes is not there.

Nema Daghbandan: And what does that mean?

Kevin Kim: They’re doing one loan, two loans a month. They’re in the smaller market.

Nema Daghbandan: So then how many loans do you think they need to do?

Kevin Kim: There’s no hard and fast number with that. What I always tell investors, sponsors is first of all, are you actually a going concern lending shop? Are you actually a lending shop? Are you a hobbyist? This is your profession. And because the market is so popular, there are a lot of hobbyists and they don’t like to be called hobbyists. I’m not, I don’t mean to offend, but they are hobbyists, right? They’re not in the

Nema Daghbandan: Business. Do you intend on having a team of human beings that work with you and a real business?

Kevin Kim: That’s one big issue. That’s right. Beyond that, the other issue is, okay, your deal flow and your capital are still, your capital still outweighs your deal flow. You can still get shit done. Current status quo, your volumes is not there yet. You haven’t built a going concern.

Nema Daghbandan: Effectively build a more robust business

Kevin Kim: Because the best time a client is ready for, especially the fun stuff, any kind of real build out, it’s always this fact pattern, capital deal flow will always outpace capital. And if they’re finding that it means that their business has horsepower. That means they’re actually now in a place where, okay, now this is a thing. Now we’ve, we’re cooking with gas and that’s when they’re talking to us and they’re ready. A lot of times they come too early. That was

Nema Daghbandan: Too little brother for me. What does it mean? I want,

Kevin Kim: Give me some, you want data. If you want data, if you want data, yeah, I want to start a phone. Should I? If you want data, what I always tell clients, it’s not about the hard numbers. It’s about listen, if you are, the number of loans that you’re doing and the amount of capital you have available to you, how you’re funding your current loans, if there’s a mismatch there, if there’s inefficiency in capital because you’re doing trustees or co lender or you’re selling and you’re losing deals, but also deal flow has to be at a substantial amount, whether it’s a million dollars a month, whether it’s 10 million a month, that depends on which,

Nema Daghbandan: Can I keese what I think? You’re sure.

Kevin Kim: Did you just add an ease to that Chinese, I feel like it’s the right way to describe it.

Nema Daghbandan: You are at a place where you’re trying to scale your business and what you have is your business is inefficient, right?

Kevin Kim: Correct.

Nema Daghbandan: And ultimately you’re trying to create a scalable business. Correct. That’s really the X factor. There’s a lot of

Kevin Kim: Factors that go, there are too many obstacles to scale on funding your loans. Yes. You’re

Nema Daghbandan: Operationally inefficient.

Kevin Kim: And that is the moment where, okay, now I’m serious about doing a fund. We have a lot of potential clients that call us. I’m thinking about doing a fund and whether they choose, they realize, okay, that’s too expensive for me to bear right now. Or I realize in the what, it’s still too early

Nema Daghbandan: For me because in my mind I can think of specific circumstances and Melissa says, yeah, I mean I’m funding most of the loans myself or I’ve got my kind of close friends and family that I’m tapping for. If your funding loans

Kevin Kim: Yourself, you’re nowhere near ready for a fund

Nema Daghbandan: But these are all the circumstances. This is how I’ve currently been running my business, but it’s very hard. I can’t really grow it the way these certain, the way it’s currently running as it exists today is I can’t grow 10 times larger than this unless I do something different.

Okay.

Kevin Kim: Agreed. That’s typically where we find the most likely client who’s ready to take on our services. On the security side.

Nema Daghbandan: Yeah.

Kevin Kim: Licensing is different. Licensing-

Nema Daghbandan: Licensing, fine. Do you need a

License? Do not need a license. But one more question too, because this is an interesting one. I’d love to get both of your perspectives on, which is what makes for the outlier. You guys set up hundreds and hundreds of these businesses. And so now reflecting on the years of counseling and understanding who these people are and what kind of businesses they have, are there any traits of the outliers who have just absolutely outperformed and what were they

Kevin Kim: Outperforming is actually a very interesting phenomenon. There are clients that have very, very lean teams and very small market presence, but their fund is growing and their business, you can tell they’re doing well. On the flip side, there are very, very large organizations that are not, they’re struggling and for various reasons. And so what I find a couple of different key things, and it’s not to do with their business, really. The first phenomenon is, well, it’s always about loan volume, right? Loan volume is always a phenomenon that they have to have to support the business. But beyond that, I look at character and how the operations go. And what I find is the guys that are really, they don’t over obsess about compliance. They don’t spend too much time in the weeds on what we’re doing on legal, but it is a vital factor to their business.

Nema Daghbandan: So no analysis paralysis, but they take it seriously.

Kevin Kim: I feel like the people in our industry that have done the best is that they’re still entrepreneurs. They’re still very much aggressive in their approach, but they know they have to temper it and make sure they check with council, check in their approach, find the solution, and then one of the best ways, okay, let’s find the most expeditious path to success and move forward on that. And they don’t throw roadblocks because one of the biggest concerns that we always run into is like, oh, that sounds really expensive. Oh, that sounds really

Nema Daghbandan: Burdensome. When I think of what you guys do when on the REIT side of it, anytime I’ve ever heard a recon for you, my mind just goes, oh my gosh, that’s so difficult. And it’s crazy because when you’re talking to these people, they’re like, oh yeah, but because the moment they start doing the economic math in the background and go like, who cares?

Kevin Kim: I do tough

Nema Daghbandan: Things. I do tough things all day long.

Kevin Kim: Those clients I feel like have been able to succeed. And the clients that obsess about the money and obsess about the impact,

Nema Daghbandan: It’s not even so much the money that I think oftentimes money is obviously a component of it. I think actually the, oh man, I got to work. I have to do lot. I have to get way uncomfortable and do lots of activity.

Kevin Kim: They don’t like being uncomfortable.

Nema Daghbandan: I think that’s actually the harder money. I mean obviously money is an issue, but

Kevin Kim: Discomfort. Discomfort. Oh, it’s this big, right? I do everything this way. I’ve always been doing this way. Oh, I have to do that. Oh my gosh.

Kevin Kim: But then that’s where it goes to our client relationships and they have the trust in us that we will be there right next to them, walking them through it, telling them this is what, now we have to focus on this and then now in six months we need to make sure that we are here. So let’s plan for this and let’s start. Yeah,

Nema Daghbandan: We talked about this before the podcast, the concept of embrace the suck or this sucks and this is tough. And it like that’s life. All good things suck and they’re tough and they’re difficult.

Kevin Kim: They’re both successful clients, the ones that are always open to the idea of taking on discomfort, taking on opportunities to grow. Yeah, interesting. And that what I find, it’s novel, it’s scary, but they’re okay. Yeah, let’s do it right. They’re not scared.

Kevin Kim: Being flexible, pivoting, being able to pivot.

Kevin Kim: All right, so I’m getting a signal from our producers that we got to have to take enough turn right now and we have to ask some questions. They prepared some questions for us. And so it’s opportunity lighting round, lightning round a little bit, a little bit. Not so fast though. And we also want our audience to get an opportunity to get, you guys get to know you guys a little better. So we’ve had these questions prepared.

Kevin Kim: Oh shoot.

Kevin Kim: So should

Kevin Kim: I be worried?

Kevin Kim: Maybe, right. So the first question for you guys, secret I’ll as keep it darkest secret, I’ll answer as well. What is one thing you would like to change about the industry? When I speak the industry private lending industry and why this is deep. This is very deep and we are all very different in our perspective. So

Kevin Kim: I mean, off the top of my head, I think still kind of dealing with that stigma about hard money lending. I feel like I hear that still, I don’t know. And people just wild, wild west kind of cowboy things that people are doing without really fully understanding and then furthering that stigma maybe. But it’s very different now. I think where we are in the private lending industry and our lenders and how they operate, they’re very compliant. They reach out to us, we walk them through, we advise them, we tell ’em what’s compliant. I think that it’s taken a turn, but I think that we still have some ways to grow and we’re here for it.

Nema Daghbandan: It’s interesting that the nice thing about lightning docks is I get the benefit of working with some of the larger companies in the industry and they actually kind of mostly share similar traits, which I’ve been impressed with.

Kevin Kim: They all have standardization.

Nema Daghbandan: Well, the thing that interests me the most about them, and I think what the industry would learn best from is, especially the highest performing ones, care deeply about their teams. They are so people focused. It is not platitudes, it is not slogans on the wall. You can talk to any one of their CEOs and you can ask them and they will tell you with very high specificity the way they think about and how intentional they are about particularly the development of their people and making sure that everyone on the team understands where they are headed and why it matters to show up every day. I really hope that becomes more pervasive in what we do.

Kevin Kim: And that’s a challenging issue in a fragmented market full of entrepreneurs. You have so many different perspectives on a company culture,

But I think that the entrepreneur, the nice part about the entrepreneurs that they can learn a lot from the guys that have made it. We did an episode exclusively for Renovo talking about their top gun program, and we did another episode with them with talking about their culture building and we interviewed Bill Tester about the same topic about culture building and company and people. And yeah, I agree. One of the things that you

Nema Daghbandan: See, both of those people come top of mind to me when I think about people that are

Kevin Kim: A hundred percent right, vigilant, but even at the top echelon of the industry, there are other companies that don’t have that same kind of philosophy about culture and

Nema Daghbandan: People

Kevin Kim: And whether or not they’re succeeding or not. I do agree. There’s a scary concern that our industry can become very much like non qm, where people become just cogs in a system, just playing pieces. And you see it a lot non qm when the rates fluctuate. Company shutters,

Nema Daghbandan: We’ll fire a hundred people, we’ll do it and

Kevin Kim: They’re

Nema Daghbandan: Disposable. Disregard. Yeah, that’s right.

Kevin Kim: What I’ve loved to see though in our space that there’s a lot of people, they stay in the market, they stay in the industry, they move shops, but they stay in the industry. And so the industry is growing in that respect. I think a lot of our listeners can learn from those episodes and learn from those sponsors. From my perspective, one of the things that I would change about the industry is I would strongly encourage, I still strongly encourage entrepreneurialism, but it drives me nuts when I see a lot of these, and it always happens when you see kind of a challenge come to the market. So you always see these new programs come out and they’re always a product of some hair brainin scheme that takes advantage of some legal framework that they have no business understanding. You mean like home equity contracts? I would not on that, but there’s other stuff. And I mean for a solid six months hair-brained ideas and those ideas can be done if there’s legitimacy to it and you think about the risk and the structure. But if you’re being sold a product by some guru, and I would say we need a guru proof privately. Oh my gosh,

Nema Daghbandan: I feel like we’ve gotten, I would love that there was a lot of guru for a long time, for a long time. It was painful, got better for a long time. I get all my loans this way.

Kevin Kim: And I’m like, that is so blatantly illegal. It got a lot better for a long time. And then when the rate hikes happened, we started to see more gurus come to market with these really complicated, very complex structures that granted, there is credence to it if you look at the corollaries in commercial real estate, but there’s a reason why it works on a 25 million ground construction deal and it doesn’t work on a $200,000 fix and flip. And so there needs to be some thought behind that because people are falling for these tricks and they’re calling us and then we’re just like, wow, wow, you’re taking that much risk. That’s what scares me, because it always hurts because those folks who suffer from those situations, it hurts and I hate to see it. They’re still entrepreneurs, they’re still individuals. They can’t absorb the risk. That’s what scares me the most at the more middle market, upper market level. I am so excited about where we’re headed and everyone’s very, things are very dynamic in a good way. But at the lower entry level market, think twice before you take business advice from a guru. I’m sorry, there’s wisdom to the market and there’s wisdom to why they do it the way they do it. Don’t discount that.

Nema Daghbandan: That’s

Kevin Kim: Right. And they do it for a very good reason.

Nema Daghbandan: It is interesting. I have noticed that, that particularly new market entrants or smaller market entrants, really, I don’t know, poo-poos not the right word, but did they really frown on, oh well what those big shops do? It makes no sense. And I was like, no, those big shops got there for a reason.

Kevin Kim: Correct.

Nema Daghbandan: They got those practices for a reason because they’ve got some scars that got them there along the way.

Kevin Kim: Correct.

Nema Daghbandan: And they’re actually really good business operators and we would benefit from really coalescing around some of the institutional practices that they’re now building.

Kevin Kim: Correct. And I feel like the beauty of our industry though is it’s so dynamic that you could really take those practices, embed them in your business and do really, really well, even as a startup.

Nema Daghbandan: Yeah, agreed.

Kevin Kim: And that’s the thing that’s kind of lost on the new market entries. So don’t let the gurus fool you is my point. Alright, so this is another question we have. I think it’s geared more for you and I because we’re fathers and you’re clearly not a father. So

Nema Daghbandan: As far as we know,

Kevin Kim: So how have you changed since becoming a father? What is one quality you see in your children? You go first and then I’ll go next.

Nema Daghbandan: It made me a much better human being. It totally did. Kids are great. I have two awesome kids. They are amazing little humans and it really made me care a lot more about this concept of multi-generational structures. Just sort of think about my parents, their parents, their parents and my kids, their kids, their kids. It really made me think a lot more about what is the activity in my life today and how will it shape that intergenerational connection? It, it’s a burden and it’s a weight, but it’s a reorientation and redirection. I had no concept of how important being a parent was going to be. I had no appreciation for it. And it’s the best thing that’s ever wrapped in my life

Kevin Kim: That was so cute

Kevin Kim: For me. It’s been very, very interesting because I thought the weight and the burden of it, a lot of people worry about that. It never really got to me. I don’t notice any difference in burden. And that could be because just, you’re used to it as oldest child, so you’re used to that aspect of it, but you don’t know nothing about that. You don’t know nothing about that. Holy, it’s true. Like, oh my God, I got human beings, got to take care of what is this all about? But at the same time, I have two girls and being

Kevin Kim: Girls are awesome, going to, they take over the world.

Kevin Kim: Girls are great. And for those of you who don’t know, I am surrounded by ladies at work. I –

Kevin Kim: Am one of them.

Kevin Kim: One of them. And also I work very closely with our marketing team and you all know them. And Ruby was right. I feel like God has

Nema Daghbandan: Surrounded you.

Kevin Kim: God has given me the gift. And God tests you in the ways that in these ways, and this is one of those things, it has taught me how to be a parent. Completely foreign to how I thought parenting was.

I thought parenting was this the way I grew up, the way my mom, my dad raised me. It is not that. And there are a lot of, still some parallels to it, but ultimately it is completely different. And my mom laughs all the time about it. And I am finding myself constantly making sure that, okay, there are some, I always think back, okay, what are the good things that mom and dad did? What are the things I could do without, let’s make sure that we concentrate on the good things that mom and dad did. Character building, discipline, hard work.

Nema Daghbandan: Do you think your parents thought about that?

Kevin Kim: My parents probably did. Do you think

Nema Daghbandan: They had the similar concept?

Kevin Kim: Most, this is what I want, take what I want to take away. The most important thing that my dad taught me from the youngest of age was, try your best. Try your best, do your best. Now

Nema Daghbandan: My parents are just scream at me, become a doctor, become a doctor. My

Kevin Kim: Mom did that. My mom did

Nema Daghbandan: That for the record. I’m like an extreme disappointment to my parents,

Kevin Kim: Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, right? So I became a lawyer. So that was good enough. But at the same time, the hard work part. And so the hard work and be very like, if you’re going to do something, try your best, do your best. Don’t be lazy. If you’re going to be lazy, just don’t do it at all.

Nema Daghbandan: Sure.

Kevin Kim: That’s something that I take. But at the same time, the kind of old school, Korean parent, kind of emotionally distant, that kind of stuff we put away. And so I’m learning a lot. And then on top of all that, the most important thing I feel like has nothing to do with these emotional aspects, but more just thinking about, alright, I had children at a little bit older age, my parents did. I need to make sure that I’m alive when they’re older. And so do things that will hopefully extend my life. That’s right. And so I can be there when they’re older. I don’t want to pass away. When my dad passed away last year, Abby was seven or 6, 7, 7. So I want them to be older, my grandchildren to be older. So thinking about what can I do to be living a longer life, a good observation, hopefully see them go to high school or going to college. So that’s kind of important to me because my grandfather saw me go to college. He passed away right before I got married. So that’s important. And so having that kind of aspect to life with my children

Nema Daghbandan: That’s an interesting one. Yeah.

Kevin Kim: Because there’s a different bond that you gain when they get older. And so to me, I can’t really connect with a child as much, but as they get older, there’s going to be difference. And I want them to be older and I feel like that’s going to be important to me

Kevin Kim: Well, I feel like you’re probably going to have to work on your anger and grumpy issues.

Kevin Kim: I do. I do. Hey, I’ve better,

Kevin Kim: You have gotten better.

Kevin Kim: I’ve gotten better.

Kevin Kim: I was trying to give you credit for that.

Kevin Kim: And I realized part of it has to do with stress management. I’ve been doing a lot more going to the gym a lot more that’s been helping and faith and all that kind of stuff. Right. So, alright, next question is,

Kevin Kim: Well, I wanted to ask a question. If we’re asking questions, me and Nema, were talking about this just right before the recording started, we kind of were just wondering about cucumbers and clowns.

Kevin Kim: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We go back to silly stage. Silly stage. Okay,

Kevin Kim: I’m sorry.

Kevin Kim: Okay.

Kevin Kim: But we have to know what is it with cucumbers and clowns? Why do you hate them? What do they do to you?

Nema Daghbandan: Well also too is, and

Kevin Kim: If one walked in right now, either a cucumber,

Nema Daghbandan: He says he is not fearful of them, said he. But it’s a fine line between hate and fear, right?

Kevin Kim: This is true. This is true. Cucumbers are a food that I could never, I never was able to eat as a child. I was able to eat almost anything but cucumbers. Koreans use so much.

Nema Daghbandan: I’ve eaten weird things with Kevin,

Kevin Kim: So I’ll vouch for ability to eat odd things. Yeah, I eat urchin, I eat cod sperm, I eat all kinds of stuff. But at the same time, you heard a here folks, but I can’t eat cucumbers on their own. It’s a thing. I just never, and it’s actually,

Kevin Kim: You’re not even allergic to it.

Kevin Kim: I’m not allergic to them.

Kevin Kim: They taste like water.

Kevin Kim: There’s a Facebook group for Koreans that hate cucumbers. I’m a very active member of that Facebook group. This is the second thing that you’ve probably taken away from this

Nema Daghbandan: Entire episode.

Kevin Kim: Cucumbers, I

Nema Daghbandan: Hate them. I suspect for most of who know is on Facebook currently. And just trying to find this tribe of Koreans who are anti cucumbers. And for those of you who

Kevin Kim: Have Korean food, there’s a lot of cucumbers in Korean food. There’s so many. There’s so many. And I can’t,

Kevin Kim: There’s so many dishes.

Kevin Kim: I’m so good at getting cucumbers out of my food. Right? That’s cucumbers right now. The funny part is I actually thoroughly enjoy pickles. Right. So that’s the funny part. You’re a madman. Exactly. Exactly

Kevin Kim: Right. Okay. So the clowns, clowns,

Kevin Kim: Clowns, clowns.

Kevin Kim: You’re not scared of them. I have irrational You hate

Kevin Kim: Them. I have irrational emotional response to clowns. I don’t know. Emotional response. It’s not, it’s an irrational, don’t worry. It’s not discount statements. It’s an irrational, he’s gone to a therapist has actually completely gone through a good friend of mine. Emotional response. A good friend of mine is a psychiatrist. And he explained to me, Kevin, you have a good friend. No. Hey, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with going to therapy. Therapy is good for you. I agree. Especially to talk about what the clown did. Clown, I actually have never had a negative experience with clowns. I’ve never been attacked by a clown. I’ve never been molested by a clown. None of this. The movie it.

Kevin Kim: But you are not

Kevin Kim: Scared of that. This one got very dark and not weird. The movie, it scarred me. The first movie, that’s movie it scarred me for, I watched it as a very young child

Nema Daghbandan: Scar. Maybe I’m just thinking of the trailer for this episode. And I feel like you just start with, I’ve never been molested by a clown lead line for this episode.

Kevin Kim: And I bet you it’s going to go viral and beyond that, after it, there was a lot of, for our audience, there’s a comic book called Spawn, and the bad guy in that is a clown.

Kevin Kim: But you’re not saying you’re scared of

Kevin Kim: That. So let’s think a clown irrational.

Kevin Kim: That’s

Kevin Kim: What I question wise, the if walked in that room right now, I will not operate out of a sense of fear. I will operate out of a sense of violence. No, no. So earlier I will be violent, I will get angry.

Kevin Kim: If a clown walked in right now, what would you do? Boom.

Kevin Kim: Well, now I’m a 42-year-old father of two leading an organization. Probably cons, there’s consequences to my life now. And so I probably bury it deep inside and ask that clown to leave the room. And I talked to many years,

Nema Daghbandan: How

Kevin Kim: Loud were you going to be? Like, that’s the beauty of it.

Nema Daghbandan: I feel like you would’ve thrown your

Kevin Kim: I’ve, I might. It depended on clown. It’s a sad clown kind of mopey, not too aggressive, not so bad. Comes in all happy.

Nema Daghbandan: It’s a aggressive clown.

Kevin Kim: It’s aggressive. So this, yeah, it depends on the clown. You weren’t around for this, but back in the day at our old office,

Nema Daghbandan: You brought in a clown. I forgot

Kevin Kim: Amy Martinez, shout out to Amy Martinez. She used to torment me with my hatred clowns. And she would hide clown dolls and popups and especially in Halloween. And there was a time where I was always looking under things to make sure the clowns wouldn’t pop up because I was just,

Kevin Kim: Even if they were this little and a toy,

Kevin Kim: She hid one in the men’s room just right, you know the urinal. And there’s a little metal pipe right here. She hid one behind the pipe because she knew I’d see it. I said, Amy, you bitch.

Kevin Kim: Oh my gosh.

Kevin Kim: But it’s not a fear because I don’t run away from them. In fact, I would probably run towards them and ask that gentleman, sir, I understand you’re here to work, but female clowns or female Miss sir, I understand you’re here to work, but being around this room will be bad for your physical wellbeing. It’s probably best that you leave the premises. I may or may not be armed right now. You should probably leave. And that’s how I would approach it today. Now my 20-year-old self would just probably start yelling and screaming and what the fuck? Yeah. Yeah. So that’s currently my issue with, I still hold this to this day. My kid had a circus day at school and I told my wife, I’m not going to that. And at the firm, we used to go to the circus every year at the Honda Center and they all invited, you should come. I’m like, I’m not going to that because why? Because there are clowns there. Alright, back to the questions that I had prepared, not for myself, but for my producers. Alright, so what is one trait you wish you could have from the other people here? Ruby’s

Nema Daghbandan: Bubbs. She is Ruby’s in the corner right now. She’s in the corner. So I’m picking her because I definitely don’t want anything. Whatever you two have. So I had to dig a little bit on that one. Well, no, Jen, you’re fine. You have very expensive tastes in clothing.

Kevin Kim: We diverge enough with the Let’s get real, real quick. Let’s get real real quick. Let’s serious talk, real talk. Let’s get real talk here on this one. This is a very deep question. I like this one. Thank you producer. I would love

Nema Daghbandan: To be a bigger brother. That’s it. That’s it. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it sounds nice. It sounds like people that understand what that mean, they find value in

Kevin Kim: It. There is value in it.

Nema Daghbandan: That’s right. They build a big sister. There is. It’s not a brand like a group.

Kevin Kim: Yes it is. You

Nema Daghbandan: Can join them. You could be a big brother. You

Kevin Kim: Can join them. Yeah, you can be, yeah. Big brothers. Even if

Nema Daghbandan: You are not a big brother or big sister, you can volunteer and pretend as though you are a big brother or a big sister to someone else.

Kevin Kim: Yeah, mentorship. It’s beautiful. It’s a mentorship, I think. Beautiful. You go first.

Kevin Kim: I’m thinking me. I have some either you, both of you, either of you, both of you. So on your end, you’re very, he’s going to say something nice about me. You’re more organized than I would like to be, than I am. You’re a lot more organized than I am. You’re more disciplined than I am. I’m, I’m finding very challenging to be disciplined in my personal life. Professional life. Discipline is actually not that hard. But in my personal life, being disciplined and you’ve always been very disciplined about it. I remember back when you were a lot heavier. It’s been a journey, folks. You lost a lot of weight and you got a lot healthier. And you’ve been very disciplined about that. And I respect that. And I’m finding myself doing that for that longevity aspect of

Nema Daghbandan: My life. It’s so frustrating because this man just chooses to kind of eat healthy and go to the gym once a week. And he’s just completely just transforms the genetic, the way the God designed us. Capitalism is

Kevin Kim: Unfair. All I will say at that one. And then on your end, there’s an interesting aspect of you have a way of holding people to a very high standard, but also not doing it in the way that I would do it and be very angry about it. So I really do appreciate it. I’m learning a lot from it. I feel like you get results the way that I couldn’t get results and you’ve done it to me. And so I really like that about you. And I think that’s very admirable and something that I strive towards. I see like, oh, that’s interesting because at first blush it was like, you’re coming in hot, but it’s not. And that’s really cool. And then also, since you brought up Ruby. Ruby, because Ruby reminds me not to be such an asshole all the time.

Nema Daghbandan: She’s so nice. She’s so nice. She’s so nice, so nice. She’s a nice person. It’s the best. If you’ve ever actually seen Ruby get mad because I have, it’s like cartoonish, right? No, she’s imagine a, because she’s still smiling. You can’t do that.

Kevin Kim: I’ve seen it. It’s the sweetest, angry person you’ve ever met to, but that’s kind of scary. At the same time, it instills a sense of fear. Yeah. You’ve never seen, right? You never get to see, you’re like, oh my gosh. Exactly. But there’s a sense of happiness and positivity.

Nema Daghbandan: Yes.

Kevin Kim: Which is great. As an attorney, it’s very hard to be positive.

Nema Daghbandan: I will say a nice thing, not about you yet, because I’m still struggling on that one, but Jen, Jen is really good at making you, because I can be very business oriented and I really love talking about shop. I love talking about business, that kind of stuff. I enjoy it. But Jen is very good at be like, Hey, shut up. You can’t do this right now. Just put on your normal human being hat for a second and start talking about TV shows and things that everyone else cares about in life. I

Kevin Kim: Hear there’s a lot from her, right? She’s

Nema Daghbandan: Like, Hey, stop it. We’re here together. We’re going to die at work. It’s okay. Let’s talk about the things that we actually should care about for a hot second. And she’s very good at bringing that out of people and being very fun and drawing that fun out of you. And actually, I’ve thought about something nice to say about you. It took a while, but I thought about it. You’re very good at genuinely connecting people and

Kevin Kim: Connecting people.

Nema Daghbandan: Yes. It is an art in which you kind of, what I’ve talked about earlier where the CEOs I admire where I’m like, oh, they really care about their teams and their people. They just seem, almost have a natural instinct about it. Something that I try to grow and foster, but it’s tough. I feel like those great leaders have that. But for you, you have a natural connector ability. There’s just something, the way you are wired, the way you’re thinking, you’re constantly going, because more often than not, it has no business. It means nothing to you. You’re not trying to do it. You don’t care. There’s no karma. You’re trying to get out of this whole thing, but there’s just a component that you’re saying is like, oh no. Hey man, I thought about it the other day. You really need to talk to this guy. And you go out of your way to make sure those two people find each other in the universe. I love doing it. It’s all, it’s okay. I can’t say anything else nice about Kevin that just feels dirty to say in the first place. Jen, do you feel like, especially after the clown bit, do you feel like you have anything that you’d want to say nice about this guy?

Kevin Kim: Yeah, I mean, traits that I admire and really appreciate. I think for both of you guys, it’s kind of the same. I mean, I wish that there was some osmosis system where I can take your brains, your experience, your and just transfer it to me. But more than anything, I really, really love your heart in the industry, what you guys do for your clients. You’re continually learning and digging into stats and reviewing data and leading our clients in the right path, on the right path. I mean, I love that. It’s motivational for me and it’s inspiring for me. And I take that and I try to do my best and educate and care for our clients and really just provide really excellent service and advice to them because I feel like I see our clients the way that you guys do. As you’re partnering with them, you’re helping them. You’re helping them grow their business, and that heart is hard to come by.

So I love that about you guys. I appreciate that. And I think that it’s very genuine and I love it.

Kevin Kim: See, I had to end these shows on a positive note as opposed to a negative one. And that’s a very positive note. I really appreciate that. I think that’s about all the time we have for this episode. Special episode of season five here at Captivate. Hopefully you guys will tune in for the next episode. This is going to be a really fun one to walk tune into. So look out for this one and we’ll see you on the next one. This is Kevin Kim signing off. You’ve been listening to Lender Lounge with Kevin Kim, brought to you by Fortra Law, the nation’s largest private lending law firm. Fortra Law is the leading legal resource, specialty lenders, asset-based lenders, private lenders, and non-bank institutions.. Check out our episode summary to subscribe to our Lender lounge newsletter and our law firm newsletter where you can get notified about new episodes and recent content directly from our expert attorneys. In addition, we’d love if you follow Lender Lounge with Kevin Kim on YouTube, your favorite podcast platform, and on LinkedIn where you can also check out updates from Fortra Law. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time on Lender Lounge with Kevin Kim. This is Kevin Kim signing off.