Isn't it about time people people of color had equal access to capital markets?  That's the mission of the Dream Exchange. It is the first equity market founded and owned by a group of people who are from minority communities. Today's Necessary Conversation is with the Founder and CEO of this exciting venture - Mr. Joe Cecala.

About Joe Cecala & Dream exchange

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Joe Cecala is the Founder and CEO of Dream Exchange, a stock exchange in formation. Mr. Cecala is a world renowned expert in capital markets and corporate finance. His research on the U.S. capital markets is published in Oxford University's Handbook on IPO's. Mr. Cecala is also a trained CPA, and securities lawyer with an expertise in small business capital raising. In the late 1990's, Mr. Cecala was legal counsel for the company that created the first electronic stock exchange to trade stock over the internet. That company went on to become the electronic infrastructure used by the New York Stock Exchange.

Mr. Cecala is also a large contributor to a piece of legislation called the Main Street Growth Act or H.R. 2899 to create venture stock exchanges in the U.S. Dream Exchange will be the first venture exchange in the U.S.

As a former civil rights lawyer, Mr. Cecala is a passionate about social issues and effecting meaningful change on our society.

Here is a Transcript of Today's Show

Dave Lorenzo (00:02):

How do we translate what you're doing into other industries that desperately need it to other industries where you you've worked in particular are known as just all, almost all white in leadership and that's the practice of law and that's, you know, CPA firms or even big ticket consulting firms. Why can't law firms? Why can't CPA firms, why can't big ticket consulting firms, figure this out, Joe,

Joe Cecala (00:32):

I appreciate your question. Actually. No one has asked me the question, that question that you just asked right now in, in the, I've probably done a hundred podcasts since July. So thank you for actually being brave enough to open up the conversation because that's the one that I don't get the opportunity to say I'm filmed, like I'm doing right now and I'm happy to say it, you know? So yeah. Thank you for doing that. That's awesome.

Dave Lorenzo (01:01):

Hey there, folks. Welcome to another edition of the inside BS show today, we're taking you inside the creation of a new financial exchange. That's right. Imagine if you could be in the room when the New York stock exchange started, or imagine if you could be with the founder of the NASDAQ and ask him or her any question that you wanted. Well, we've got that opportunity today. My guest today is Joe Cecala and he's the founder and CEO of dream exchange. Now this is a stock exchange information. How many times do you get to be in the room where it happens when it comes to the formation of a new stock exchange? Mr. Cecala is a world renowned expert in capital markets and corporate finance. His research on the us capital markets is published in Oxford university's handbook on IPO's. He's also a trained CPA and a securities lawyer with expertise in small business capital raising in the late 1990s, Mr.

Dave Lorenzo (02:10):

Mr. Cecala was legal counsel for the company that created the first electronic stock exchange to trade stock over the internet. That company went on to become the electronic infrastructure used by the New York stock exchange. Mr. Cecala is also a large contributor to a piece of legislation called main street growth act, the main street growth act or HR 28 and 99 to create venture stock exchanges. And the U S Dream Exchange will be the first venture exchange in the U S . Joe is a former civil rights lawyer, and he's passionate about social issues and affecting meaningful change on our society. This week's necessary conversation is with Mr. Joseph Cecala.

Dave Lorenzo (03:01):

So Joe, tell us about the inspiration for the dream exchange. What led you to you know, how, how does this idea come about?

Joe Cecala (03:12):

So just a little bit of my eclectic background to kind of forest Gump my way through my career to think I could start a stock exchange. I, I really it's a it's born of archipelago. So I was in the room once before, as you described it. When archipelago was being constructed and born in the late 1990s just understanding how capital markets go about what they call hunting for liquidity and and really being a small business, transactional lawyer, and seeing that, that wasn't available to most of the most ingenious people in our society. They are raising capital. Today's a relationship-driven environment. So if you've got good relationships, you can raise money. If you don't, doesn't matter. If you've got the best idea, you don't get the same exposure. So I brought the combination of those things together over the last 10 years, really, and started to formulate how we could build a brand new type of exchange.

Joe Cecala (04:15):

And I've assembled a great team and we're in, we're building the pipes as we speak. And really, I also, you know, I started my career really wanting to just be a business lawyer, but in, in Chicago, in the 1990s there was just such civil unrest a bit like we, what we just went through. And so some of my law partners and I got together and we took on a lot of pro bono, civil rights cases, and it just became very passionate. I became really a member of the, the fabric of the black community in Chicago. And in fact, consulted the Chicago urban league entrepreneurial center and did a lot of things in the black community here. And I just saw all this combination of unique things as a way to forward change in our society where capital markets and economic prosperity and the rights of our citizens to have a free and open market, really all the convergence of all my experience, my career really came there together in doing this a little bit, my military background too.

Joe Cecala (05:21):

I was an armor officer and I just learned that you, you really have to have a compassion for other people. The army really taught me that you know, in spite of the fact that it's designed to go out and kill other people you know, surprisingly I love the army. I'm, I'm part of the army family as well. And that's been, my leadership style has been running the organization as if we're on. We're kind of like we left the boats on the beach at Normandy and we are headed to Berlin and therein lies the birth of the dream exchange. So we're not co we're not going back into the ocean. We're, we're, we're on a mission to change our society and do it through the dream exchange. And it's kind of how we operate so

Dave Lorenzo (06:06):

Well, first of all, thank you for your service. And second of all, let's talk about the aspirational nature of being the first minority owned stock exchange. Is it your opinion that this is going to unlock a whole generation of people of color who own their businesses now going public? Because the playing field is going to be level, is that part of the drive behind this?

Joe Cecala (06:34):

It, it, I mean, it has been the drive behind it ironically for more than 13 years or so. I said 10, but it's closer to 13. So I've been screaming this from the ramparts for 13 years. Ever since we started working with the Chicago urban league entrepreneurial center, and there are genius minority owned businesses with products that actually could change our society and raising capital seemed to be a bit more difficult. There just wasn't a relationship-driven, they didn't the, the urban league entrepreneurs didn't know the partner at Goldman Sachs. Not that I demonized Goldman Sachs, listen, this is not about making the rest of the world wrong, but we're in a lane where these two statistics are overwhelming. One is that 92% of all job opportunities happen after a company goes public. So if you have a a hundred person employ a hundred persons, a team, it, a public offering will grow your company to a thousand people.

Joe Cecala (07:36):

That's not me saying that that's the the treasury and sec IPO task force says that. And then you factor in the, this, this really compelling statistic, which is one black owned company in the 230 year history of the New York stock exchange has ever been listed. So when you marry those two statistics together, you can see that there's a community of people who don't have a large corporate living wage, meaningful career path jobs. You have to almost leave that community to expand prosperity and opportunity. And we have decided to bring the prosperity and opportunity to the community. So we, we really put our 10 years of shouting this and R and R our equity, where our mouth is because we are you know, we're working out certain details. The, the the funding from the it's a black owned capital group.

Joe Cecala (08:37):

So you know, their, their money's coming in and we're working out how to actually fund getting open. But, you know, we put our equity or our mouth is when we're done, we will be 60% black owned. And that is, I'm very proud of that. You know, if, if the world worked where Hey, become a partner, literally take your business and become a partner. And that's what the dream exchange will do. People will be able to invest in that community directly. You will become partners with black owned companies through your equity investments. That's what we're all about doing. And I think, yeah, to answer the first part of your question is there is a brand new generation of people that are in this world. We had over a million reaches through the black enterprise press release. So black enterprise released this last June or July whenever went out and a million people were came through our website. We had thousands of people on our webinars, and I would say the 75 to 90% were young black entrepreneurs, or believe it or not a tremendous number of black accredited investors going, Hey, how do I invest? So this is a phenomenon. I didn't, you know, a million people speaks of volumes. So yeah, this is a paradigm shift in American finance that's happening right now,

Dave Lorenzo (09:59):

Basically you're, you're unlocking the door to a whole world of capital that many people didn't realize was out there. So do you think what you're doing will then help transcend just this project? And do you think that all of a sudden there's going to be a shift and there will be funds created and an entire segment of capital markets where this element of helping people understand the importance of diversity plays into the capital raising process. So in other words, is there going to be like a, you know, like there are, there are funds that focus just on, you know, tech companies, could there be funds in the future that just focus on companies that are interested in diversity? Is this going to open the door to a whole world that really could, I mean, money speaks volumes to people. So could this open the door to a whole world where we could truly see the democratization of finance,

Joe Cecala (11:05):

This is it's already happening. So there are actually a number of, of funds that are being dedicated to you know, direct investment in, in minority owned companies. And the capital's coming. What we're doing though, is bridging a gap of access to the word. When we surveyed to create our brand five years ago, the top word that we surveyed was access. And it was access not only to the capital from the business owner, for the business owner, it was access to the it was access to the I guess investor and business owner sharing, access to one another. In other words, the investors don't see the deals you know, where do, where do you find it? Here is a great example. We have a, a friend of mine has been a friend of mine for 14 years. He is a, a black disabled veteran.

Joe Cecala (12:07):

Okay. He was an army ranger. He literally jumped out of airplanes for a living, and he owns a company that can handle electronic waste recycling. So it's a huge environmental problem. We can't just dump environmental waste in the landfills. There's precious metals, there's glass, there's toxins, and he strips it all out and separates all the metals, recycles them recycles the glass. And he's got a method where there's this junior college curriculum that's been accepted at several junior colleges. And he can actually transition people from a correctional facility into a career path in his company. He's the dream of an investor? He's he, like I said, a black disabled veteran, like how many different? And he's a great guy. Well, he wants to put thousands of people to work in the Washington DC area. So as we move forward with more and more and more business organizations like that, capital's gonna flow to him for a multitude of reasons.

Joe Cecala (13:15):

And people are using ESG environmental sustainable green. That's, that's been the mantra they're actually evaluating major us corporations on a score as to whether they're environmental sustainable and green. Well, we're adding D to the ESG. So we look at it like DSG, it's, diverse environment, environmental, sustainable, and green. We do all those things and we take brilliant entrepreneurs and we get them the capital. They need to expand products, the foundational principle of the dream exchanges. When we do that, we actually survive better as a society and as a human race. And I didn't invent that. That is just true. What we, when we give money to things that help us survive better, we get more surviving. And if we, if we isolate a segment of our population and they're not given the same opportunity, well, they're not going to survive very well. And we're, we're the, I think we are the paradigm shift in this entire environment to make that, to make that change come about. Hopefully it happens soon and it happens within my lifetime, but the dream exchange I created for decades to come, this should be an institution like the New York stock exchange, 30 and 40 and 50 years from now where we've actually changed the very fabric of America and, and our, and our globe by getting money in the hands of people who help help our society be better off.

Dave Lorenzo (14:38):

Okay. So what is needed, what is the, what is needed to, for you to make sure that when the dream exchange launches, it is the, you know, the most successful launch you're, you're, you're doing a lot of media, so you, you have the outreach to generate awareness. What about from a, from an infrastructure standpoint, what is needed to make sure that this is the successful launch that you planned it to be?

Joe Cecala (15:11):

Right? So there's, there's two things. The first thing is the actual state-of-the-art technology that is, you know, financial technology is now look, we, we transfer money on it, on an app on, in an unprecedented way. So we're playing in a very state-of-the-art technology environment. We're going to be having some announcements. I'll wet, everybody's whistle. We have some, some team leaders who we're onboarding now that are globally recognized people. Who've decided to join our team because they aligned with our purposes. So we have a small team building the proverbial pipes. That's first we have to build a state-of-the-art system, which we're in, it's in progress. The second thing is doing the media we're doing, because we're getting the message and the education out there to find the, the small companies and emerging companies that have never considered a public market as an option to raise their money.

Joe Cecala (16:16):

So we're, we're vetting and beginning of the conversation process, so that when we do create our listing rules, we will have an inventory. I would like to have an inventory when we launch of sequential, initial public offerings in our rules that allow for that to be an instant success. And then the last component is the liquidity. And ironically, that has become perhaps the easiest conversation. I've seen, I've been doing this a long time. I've actually done a lot of kind of what they call diversity contracts for, for businesses. And they tend to be very transactional. So you know, a large fortune 100 has a diversity program and they want to spend money on diverse businesses. They wanna, they want the guy who delivers information technology, or who's even delivering office supplies. They want to set aside a portion of their spend for a minority owned company.

Joe Cecala (17:20):

But what we've done is we've, we've made one company very profitable and it's, it is, it's a good thing. I'm not saying it's bad. It's just not a global solution to how to get the bar raised and to get the, the kind of the, the tide up. So all of those small minority companies, as well as just entrepreneurial companies, it's not like we are only doing minority companies, but when we flow money into those small companies, they'll expand and do better. So we're much more of a global solution where I'm done with transactional half solutions. We want to, we want a complete solution. So those are the three component parts to liquidity, the listings and the state-of-the-art environment where we're connected to, to what's called the national market system or the national best bid best offer a system that was actually created by archipelago 25 years ago. So those are the key ingredients, and we are, we're a hot knife through butter on all three right now. It's going extremely well. We have big announcements coming of our partnerships in the not too distant future. So

Dave Lorenzo (18:27):

Great. That's fantastic. All right. So let's talk a little bit about the, kind of the, the mission and purpose of dream exchange and how to ensure that that carries on. And it becomes as it becomes an institution like the NYC, like the NASDAQ. So as long as Joe's involved, I know that the dream exchange is going to be true to its mission and offer opportunities to businesses that have owners of color minority owned businesses. But what happens when we got big box that starts to flow through the dream exchange, and you decide to, you know, you're gonna move on to the next big venture. Is it part of your, you know, your founding by-laws that there is some percentage of businesses that are listed that have to be minority owned? How can we be sure that this is going to be a long-term solution?

Joe Cecala (19:17):

Yes. The, the short answer to that is yes. Long-term actually from the very beginning this was about creating a an organization that was not attached to any particular identity. You know, Apple computer and Steve jobs are, you know, peanut butter and jelly. The way I've designed, everything I'm doing is to make the mission of this and the, and, and, and the corporate organizational governance easily detachable from me personally. I like being the founder. I'm having a great time. I love my life right now. It's, you know, I close my eyes. I dream about the dream exchange. I wake up, I'm the dream exchange all day. It's, it's a wonderful, fulfilling thing to do, but even our brand. So when we started we had this complex name and I went and I asked I don't know if you've ever heard of Cheryl Berman.

Joe Cecala (20:17):

Cheryl was the last person to hold the title, chief creative officer for Leo Burnett. And she is the the force behind the brand of the dream exchange. So even before I knew what policy I wanted. I knew the mechanics, I knew the heavy duty financial mechanical world, which is trading, and those are all my clients. And look, I built a, I helped build the stock exchange. So we had to take it out of that as a brand, so that we would never lose the integrity of the purpose behind why do we need another stock exchange? You know, so we need this because the purpose is, look at stock exchange is a very simple exercise, matching buyers and sellers electronically is not. It is even in today's environment is regulated. It is, it's not super complicated. Okay. It's not a probe on Mars.

Joe Cecala (21:13):

So how do we make sure? And from the very first conversation to build our brand we have in a, in kind of indoctrinated into all policy, all rules, everything we're doing comes the, the purposes behind the brand. Actually our brand personality, Cheryl was wonderful. She actually was. I think she's the person who led the team that coined the expression. You deserve a break today. So she's a genius marketing person. And when she was working with us she said, what we have to do is capture the personality of the exchange that lives forever. And she also did this survey where the, our brand's personality, if it were a combination of people, it would be John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and John Lennon, not a single financial person was identified with what we were doing because what would, what would they do with a stock exchange?

Joe Cecala (22:20):

What would the integrity of that message carried forward? And look I have a dream and ask not what you can do you know you know, w w w John F. Kennedy I'm gonna butcher his, is the quote, you know, ask what you can do for your country. That's what would be the integrity of what we are moving forward doing? Imagine John Lennon, you know, we're all about what those three people would take a viewpoint of the financial markets, and then we're bringing in the mechanics, we're bringing in the expertise of, yeah, we have limit orders. We have we have, you know, mechanics. So, and we're actually, you know, some of the things that have been happening recently, we have ideas on how to actually change trade mechanics in the kind of the emerging company environment to sort of put a stop to some of like recently the, the game stop, Robin hood stuff. We have ideas on how to change market rules that will help you know, alleviate some of those problems for the small firm, small business. So that's the integrity.

Dave Lorenzo (23:33):

Yeah. So, so, so let's, let's talk a little bit about that. So first let's start with volume, right? Doesn't there need to be a significant amount of volume, so that we can ensure that there's, that there's no manipulation happening. And how do you, how do you plan on building that volume to start?

Joe Cecala (23:55):

Right. So right now, okay. What we have, we, and that's where the main street growth act kind of weighs in. It's a brand new law. I believe it or not, that law was introduced in 2018 actually was introduced in 2016 to Congress and it got and went nowhere. And then when our team started to collaborate and deliver our research to Congress we realized that there are specialized trading tiers that are needed and a new type of exchange called the venture exchange. So we're not only building a national market exchange, we're building a brand new type of stock exchange called the venture exchange. And what that will allow for is customized rules that are protect investors, but simultaneously protect the emerging company from perhaps, you know, like we have short-selling, you know, if you, if you look at a short sale and I don't know what the sophistication of the whole audiences, but I, I actually have a webinar where I go into detail on this topic, where I explained the mechanics of short selling now, a short sale in the big market.

Joe Cecala (25:03):

It's not so horrible if you're want to short IBM, you're, you know, you're not going to put IBM out of business or chase or Apple. They have a trillion dollar balance sheet at Apple. You're not going to hurt them by thinking that price is going to decline in the short term. So you shored them fine. But when you do that to an extremely small public company some with small, some small public companies, if it weren't for bad news, there'd be no news. So if you're going to trade off a bad news, you're just hurting the effort of a good company, perhaps to, to maintain its equity share value. So we need a customized marketplace. Now that law I actually went and met with every member of the house financial services committee, and I've probably had 300 congressional and Senate meetings over the last three years.

Joe Cecala (25:55):

And we were able to get 56 members of the house, financial services committee to vote 56 to zero to move that, that bill to the floor. And then 435 members of the house voted for 35 to zero to move it to the Senate. And it was attached to the 2018 appropriations law that never passed Congress. And the Senate voted 99 to zero was never taken out. So we have this consensus, which is, yeah. So we're, we're gonna, we're, we're taking another run at it this year. We already know we're kind of baked. Congresswoman Maxine waters has been, and her team she's the chairman of house financial services committee. She's been nothing but helpful. She sees this as a way to help the small business constituents as a tax-free look, we're not going to put this on the taxpayers. Let's invest in the businesses, let's get capital to them.

Joe Cecala (26:49):

So those customized trading tiers, especially in a venture exchange will allow for all the stock exchanges is a set of rules. So it'll be customized rules to assure that we have a trading volumes and we monitor certain volumes and limitations on it. So there's no pump and dump schemes. Like there has been in the, over the counter markets so that the companies are properly vetted before they list so that the the, the book runners and the direct market makers can actually make money. We want intermediaries to make money, and that will interest them like it was in the seventies and the eighties, Hey, there's a new IPO. You don't hear that anymore. I can get you in early on a new IPO. What we have is unicorns that are worth billions. And by the time they generally reached the public market, the wealth creation of getting in early has been harvested, and you can get in an IPO and hopefully it will go up, but it w it's not like you know, Microsoft was a $60 million IPO in the mid eighties. What, whatever genius decided to buy and hold from 1986 to today is quite wealthy. And we want to restore that wealth creation to the investor and the, and how many Microsofts can we create in this incubator, stock exchange environment? That's our goal. Okay.

Dave Lorenzo (28:12):

Okay. So let's talk a little bit about how the, how the big boys view you right now. What's, what's some of the feedback that you've gotten from the MYFC the NASDAQ, are they I mean, based on what you told me about the legislation, you know, you don't, you don't get unanimous legislation passing if there's somebody lobbying on the other side. So do you think it's because they don't take you seriously? Or do you think it's because they're, you know, the, I mean, I'd love to believe that they think this is an idea whose time has come, but my, my history business just tells me that. They're probably just saying, Oh, go ahead and have your little exchange. We'll see how that goes.

Joe Cecala (28:56):

So it's, it's a little bit of both. I think that we have when we started like working with Congress about five years ago it was kind of, we were kind of the mosquito at the barbecue. It was like, Oh, there's a mosquito. And we, we've kind of become the annoying you know, Segal at this point. So there's a little bit of that, but I would, I I'd actually give kudos. So the NASDAQ is overwhelmingly cooperative and very, they've got all their weight alongside ours. And it's been a wonderful experience where we're quite collaborative, the NASDAQ people. Everyone agrees that the market that we're entering is so enormous that we can actually create our brand in our market and almost never overlap the the NASDAQ or the New York stock exchange, the New York stock exchange in the ice the Intercontinental exchange group that owns the New York stock exchange.

Joe Cecala (30:06):

They have a little bit more of the viewpoint of, Oh yeah, go have your little exchange. You know, the, the New York stock exchange is a national treasure. It's actually where a company wants to be listed on, on that, you know you know, I guess historic environment, and they're gonna be the conventional route. We're not taking that away from anyone. So they don't view us as, as an issue at all. To the extent that in the electronic volume environment, there is only one, but, you know, there's, there's a pie and there are now seven exchanges in the country. There've been three exchanges, new exchanges born last year. The members exchange is a extremely exciting exchange. I like them a lot. They've been, you know, I had a couple of getting to know you is maybe more than a year ago.

Joe Cecala (31:03):

They they're like more power to you there. And here's, what's interesting. It's a matter of whether you intend to compete on volume and data sales or on new listings. So the NASDAQ that controls probably 75% of IPO's that's, if you're going public today, generally you're going to the NASDAQ. They don't care because those billion dollar IPOs are not the dream exchanges, sweet spot. We're a 100 to $500 million market cap companies that will probably, you know, they'll either stay on the dream exchange or they'll graduate to the NASDAQ or NYC. So we've become a complimentary exchange for them. The other exchanges like the CVOE the investors exchange members exchange, they're not even attempting to compete for listings with NASDAQ or New York stock exchange. So that environment is very benign. No one's given us any trouble. And I think the, the fact that we're minority owned and we're dedicated to a certain of philosophical segment, that it may be complex for us.

Joe Cecala (32:18):

There may be while we're, we're, we're searching for fewer companies that are viable, that that makes our business plan a bit more difficult, but it also makes it less interesting to what you just said there. I share your cynicism. I've been raising money for, for 30 years. And there are we're we're paradigm shifting certain of the old rules. Greed is good. Dog-Eat-Dog world you know, every man for himself, zero sum game, we believe that in the small investing market, and I've this, I've personally experienced this, that a good group of investors who love the company and a good group of management who are like literally dedicated, like they're on a religious mission to establishing and growing a company and a good product. When you get those three combinations, a zero sum game, dog-eat-dog it doesn't apply. Everybody just wants to get the job done.

Joe Cecala (33:12):

And those are the, they give birth to the best ideas in our society. So profitability, one of our webinars discusses how to put a value on your business when you don't have profits, how do you, how does a venture capital company do that? I have two webinars that discuss why Tesla motors didn't make money until last July, but as somehow the largest auto manufacturer in the world. Well, if you have the idea to mass produce electronic cars, you're worth a lot of money, and we're not really looking at your, your, your, your EBITDA. We don't care get that guy successful. And eventually my, my returns from the appreciation of my stock price and the profitability someday will all make me a wise investor. We need to take that into a micro environment and wet. That's what the dream exchange is all about doing, finding the next Tesla before it's Tesla.

Dave Lorenzo (34:10):

That's great. That's fantastic. So those webinars, can we find them at dream x.com? That's D R E a M E x.com. Are the webinars there? Yes.

Joe Cecala (34:19):

Yeah. So there are links to the webinars, but a lot of them are just on YouTube. So there's a kind of a dream act, dream exchange channel on YouTube. So all of our full videos are, they're not the promotional ones, so those are each like an hour in duration. And very informative if you're a small business owner to check out how to, how to put, how to price your, your investment and your equity in a brand new way that I've been doing for a very long time. So yeah, w YouTube is probably easier to get to, but if you go through our website, all the links are there to be able to access the information.

Dave Lorenzo (35:00):

All right, we're going to put all that. We'll put all that in the show notes for folks. All right, Joe, let's, let's spend just a couple of minutes talking about a subject that is important to me. It's important to my listeners, and that is diversity and diversity in particularly in professional services. So we we're in a time now. That is that's really tough and it's look, I think it's tough because all of a sudden, I, the last five years, there's all this racism that was always there, has now hit us in the face. And we have

Dave Lorenzo (35:38):

To, I think we have to have conversations about the way we communicate, how we reevaluate the way we look at the world, because it, you know, a lot of people who are unlike me thought, well, we elected Barack Obama president. Well, that's over now. Right? Everything's gotta be fine. And it wasn't. And I was ignorant. I was foolish. I was stupid for thinking that. So talk to me about the challenges now in doing what you're doing in the current environment. Is it just a matter of, Hey, this was there all the time and now it's in our face, so let's have conversations about it or has it actually gotten worse?

Joe Cecala (36:21):

W no, this is this has been there. This is not new. It's ironic because my first webinars and first podcasts, and you know, I was on, I've been on Fox news and in forums and the wall street journal talking about this for the last, you know, 10 months. And I would, the first thing I would say is that like, Y you know black stock expect on stock exchange. And, and I, and I used to think you're only paying attention to me now about something I've been saying for 15 years, because of the unrest in our society that boiled over. And th th this is absolutely something that by my own personal experience, in my personal views is true for me. And that is that you know, I grew up in North Austin, in Chicago. I, I, you know, when I was six and seven years old and went across the street into the park to play with my friends, well, half of my friends were black.

Joe Cecala (37:29):

So for me, it took a, it actually took an educational process recognizing because I wasn't, I just wasn't trained that way by my parents. I didn't have a distinguishing factor of that person is better or worse, or that's where prejudice comes in, seeing them seeing a different person look, I'm white white skin, but seeing differences, and then using differences to make decisions has historically been something. And you, you hit the nail on the head. I think there were a S there was a certain segment of the population who in fact had kind of an innate racism and they thought, okay, we elected a Breck black president, Ali Ali assumption free you know, as if that was the panacea for all of societal ills. And all it did was demonstrated. We have successful black entertainers, we have successful black athletes. We actually have a tremendous number of successful black political figures.

Joe Cecala (38:44):

And what, what are we missing? We're not actually celebrating the brilliance of the business and professional community of black people. It's there hidden there, isn't a, wow, there's a captain of industry and the black community has a seat at the table if you want to call it, which is what the dream exchange I think represents to our society. And this goes back to my, like I said, this is a deeply personal thing because I began to recognize it. My, my, I have very good friends, one of our key advisors and actually a member of our capital group now of the, of the black owned capital group is Dwayne Kyle's. His father was Reverend Samuel Kyles. He was standing next to Martin Luther King when he was assassinated. And he's been my friend for 20 years. He's my daughter. And he have his godfather.

Joe Cecala (39:43):

He's among my best friends in my life long before. This was even a, a theory of idea. And one of the things that he and I have discussed, you know, often is the origin of where we come from and a solution to correcting, you know, 150 year old problem, maybe perhaps a 400 year old problem. And that 150 year old problem is, you know, we went great. The 13th amendment has been enacted you're on your own. Well, that doesn't really take full responsibility as a society for what was created. Okay. And the, the place that has been we've fought through all of the educational and all, you know, we have w we fought through many, many, many Wars fighting through it. And the one area that has not indoctrinated itself into the fabric of our society is economic prosperity in communities where you're just less inclined to not view society as something that's hurting you.

Joe Cecala (40:53):

And I, you know, and I've said it I'm a, I'm, I'm a veteran. My brother's a veteran. My father had four bronze battle stars during world war II. I happened to understand people who who see the flag as a symbol of something, suppressing them. It doesn't bother me that someone would have that viewpoint. It doesn't bother me at all. And for me rather patriotic, I have a disabled veteran hand-carved flag over my shoulder. Cause one of my friends owns a company that makes hand-carved flags when they handed my mother, the flag off of my father's casket. And, and, and the soldier announced on behalf of a grateful nation, I'm giving you this flag. Well, that flag to me became symbolic of my dad. So, but simultaneously I'm not offended when someone is saying, look, the system itself is doing something to suppress a segment of our society.

Joe Cecala (41:52):

And if we don't fix it, look, you'll, you'll want more. You want more civil unrest, let's just keep not fixing the same old problem. So I'm here with a genuine solution. I'm here with a genuine piece of the American pie in the fabric of what it means to be free in a free and open market. And what's interesting about that is when we resolve that in the black community, it's, it's black, Hispanic, and Asian, we across the board in general, but more pronounced in the black community when we resolve that, we actually are all free. And, and the changing of that viewpoint is going to be done in conversations like this, where we're actually talking about a real solution, real opportunity, not symbolic opportunity. And we're changing from symbolism to real opportunity in the capital markets when branch Rickey got Jackie Robinson to play baseball.

Joe Cecala (42:55):

That was a real solution. We could have had all the symbolic solutions before that, but now you wouldn't say, Oh, you know, if you're a good baseball player and you're black, you can't become a major leaguer, right? Well, I want it to be, if you're a black entrepreneur at a black business owner, you have the, exactly the same opportunity as every other person in this country, by virtue of the fact that we became actually bill, bill Ellison, who was one of the early investors. He said the dream exchanges, the branch Rickey of finance, we're going to come in and actually forever change this industry and contribute to creating true equality in our society. And what's funny, sorry, you put a nickel in me. I love my, what I do. I was on a call the other day with one of our staff.

Joe Cecala (43:47):

Gus Tucker is a wonderful guy. He works for us. He, he was actually one of the leaders of the urban leagues entrepreneurial program. And he called me later and he called our chief operating officer. She said, you know, I was on a call and there were three black guys and two white guys. And in my career that doesn't happen very often. There were three black professionals creating a stock exchange and more black people were on the call than white people. He goes that hasn't been happening to me for the last 30 years. And that made me feel like that's my pay. That's that this is the, the actual, it's actually an economic reward to me. I could have done a lot of other things. I've a lawyer CPA. I could've made a of money. I think my wife would have preps.

Joe Cecala (44:34):

She certainly would have bought nicer things over the years. But you know, I'm 15 years in this and I'm not giving up until we make this change. We're going to do it. And I think society after this last year is now ready to receive the communication that I'm delivering and not look at me and, and, and our group and the people we're adding to the group as if somehow it's sort of like a Pat on the head. This is not a pet on that. This is real change. This is be ready because there are going to be a paradigm shift in finance in a way that has never happened in the 230 year history of our country. It's happening now. And I hope we're at the tip of that spear. I'm willing to, I'm willing to be the tip of that arrow that makes this change for everyone.

Dave Lorenzo (45:26):

So how do we translate what you're doing into other industries that desperately need it to other industries where you you've worked in particular are known as just all, almost all white in leadership. And that's the practice of law and that's, you know, CPA firms or even big ticket consulting firms, you know, years ago when I was, when I was at a big ticket consulting company, myself, one of my clients was a women's wear retailer. And it was a women's wear retailer that, you know, candidly, you could tell just by walking by their stores was predominantly, the, the company itself was predominantly white. All the employees in the stores were white. You know, the leadership all throughout the ranks was white. And so they're, they're a big client of mine. I get called in and they said, Dave, we have a diversity initiative going on.

Dave Lorenzo (46:18):

How do we, how do we get more black managers in our stores? And now Joe, here's what was happening. Okay. The diversity initiative came from the fact that they were opening a store on 120 fifth street in Harlem. Okay. That, that was their diversity initiative. They were like, Oh my God, we are, you know, the store is going to open in two weeks and we don't have a black manager. What do we do? So I said, well, let's look at your verse. Let's look at your board of directors, all white let's look at your management committee, all white let's look at the president of each of your brands, all white let's look at your division managers. Okay. There's there are a couple of, a couple of Latin division managers. That's great, but they're in Puerto Rico, right? So, you know, you want people to come work for your company when they have no clear career path, Joe, you know, that was like 20 years ago. Okay. So now, you know, retail, they got it, right. People of color have spending power. So there, a lot of retail has figured it figured this out. Why can't law firms? Why can't CPA firms? Why can't big ticket consulting firms figure this out, Joe.

Joe Cecala (47:30):

Yeah. You're, you're you're hitting on there's there's you're hitting on the major obstacle. Okay. Which you, we were talking about exchange obstacles. Those are kind of easy. I think we're going to easily overcome them the major obstacle. And I think that, excuse me, I think that Dwayne would generally agree with what I'm saying, which is we're changing the conversation. I, at the other end of, of the spectrum, which is we're going in, in the, in the black community and changing the conversation where a new generation of people who are interested in wealth creation are getting an educational process, coupled with a place to actually apply what they've learned. So we're not just saying, okay, because I will tell you I'm, I'm amazed at the extremely talented black professionals in finance that I've now like have come out everywhere. Okay. Like, wow, I didn't even know he existed in this woman exists.

Joe Cecala (48:43):

And so those people are now, Oh, wait, we now have a hub where as we apply this in the professional services community, that's surrounding what we do now. Think about what you just said. You cannot go public without a CPA firm. You cannot go public without a law firm. You cannot go public without a, a, some form of intermediary. Although we're lessening the investment banking, money con consideration to more professional services, consultive, intermediaries. Okay. So what, what is going to happen is as we see these black owned companies getting, getting capital, well, naturally the service providing of that and the choice of hiring those you know, those, I guess, high powered, you know, the thoroughbred consultant who comes in and he's just like, gosh, we need that guy. Well, we opened up communication lines that say that McKenzie associates consultant the black community.

Joe Cecala (49:51):

Now we'll have another side of educational process because if there's no black owned company well, are you really, if you're not a black owned company and the CEO and the board, and you just named it, the CEO, the board that there there's not, Oh, wait a minute. Do we have a a black owned law firm? Do we have a black lawyer? Do we have a black accountant? Well, if you it's a sequence of problems, which is if the company isn't there, they're not hiring the professional. So now when we, we go earlier on the sequence and we actually get corporate, that is going to be able to build teams through the companies we're working with. Well, naturally that may actually be where diversity hiring becomes, like what I'm creating. I it's actually already happening where, well, there are more black professionals on this call than white professionals.

Joe Cecala (50:47):

Oh, well, I don't actually think about it. It's funny because I actually talked to my, my, my group is, you know, we have consultive process with, with what I think are deep rooted, like the integrity of civil rights, you know, Reverend Kyles, in my opinion, if you Google him, he's a wonderful man. There's a documentary about his life. He was a Baptist preacher in, in Memphis. And the story, you know, was w marching with, with Martin Luther King. The integrity of that is within our group. And the interesting observation was there was looking askance at it. If you made money. Like one of the guys said, you know, when I was growing up and we went to church on Sunday and there was a you know, a successful black business person, some of the, some of the, the congregation would go, Hmm, they look askance.

Joe Cecala (51:43):

Or that guy, how did you make your money? How'd you make that money? And it was like, it was money was sort of suspect. That's not true for this new generation of, of, of successful people. They're going, Hey, I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to participate in the IPO of, of the next big thing. And I'm actually creating the next big thing. And we're educating them on the public capital markets, because the vast power of the American public capital markets being brought to bear upon this problem that has been there for hundreds of years is the, this is just my personal opinion. It's the final stage that kind of will make this become gossamer. It's just going to go away because the prosperity will be there. And I said, my ancestors came here from Italy on a boat in the, you know, 1905. And my grandfather opened a store. And you know, we were of modest means my whole life. He, you know, that's where we come from a grow, Oh, Italian grocer in Chicago. And he bought a house. And when I talked to him, some of my black friends are going well, my great grandfather was a slave.

Joe Cecala (52:59):

So we have these varying degrees of indoctrination into the fabric of America. And what we have in the black community is a group that is not necessarily come through with economic prosperity. In fact, if anything, their labor was used to build prosperity for others. And we've never, I'm just calling the problem what it is I'm pointing at. It, it looks like a duck. It walks like a duck. It's a duck. If less we solve that, we will never be a free society. We will never have the safety and security and true freedom that exists in a free and open market system. It just won't exist. So that's really the purpose. The dream exchanges purposes are aligned with that. And I think you'll be pleasantly surprised in the future as to the, the individuals, celebrity black people who are on our communication lines right now, going, you got it.

Joe Cecala (54:01):

When we agree with what the dream exchange is saying. So that is where those black professionals are going to come from. They're going to be chosen in an environment because it actually will be more colorblind because why not have a, why not like instead of it. And so my, the punchline to this is, I said, don't, we need a diversity manager. Don't we don't, we need the job title of diversity manager in our company. And one of the guys was laughing. He said, we are the diversity manager for the country. No, one's worried about whether you're going to hire someone who's back. So nobody's concerned about whether the dream exchange is true to its purposes and being diverse. So don't worry about diversity manager. We're just hiring everybody that can put this exchange there. And we have this, we just, I feel like I have a, kind of a stable of thoroughbred horses waiting to race, and we are in good shape.

Joe Cecala (54:59):

I just want to, I hope I have enough energy in my little horse to finish the race. But that's, that's where it's going to come from these black professionals in finance consulting, law accounting. They're going to have opportunity that currently does not exist in the capital markets and reign prosperity and wealth upon upon a segment of society that just has an Abbot. So I appreciate your question actually. No one has asked me the question, that question that you just asked right now in, in the, I've probably done a hundred podcasts since July. So thank you for actually being brave enough to open up the conversation, because that's the one that I don't get the opportunity to say, I'm filmed, like I'm doing right now and I'm happy to say it, you know? So yeah. Thanks. Thank you for doing that for, for the dream exchange. That's awesome.

Dave Lorenzo (55:51):

Well, let me just say Godspeed to you into the dream exchange because it's time has come. And I know you've got a long road ahead of you, but I'm, I'm proud. I'm honored that we could be a part of having this conversation with you. And I'm hoping that five years from now, seven years from now, you come back on and we're talking about how this success has sucks, has exceeded even your expectations. You're awesome, Dave, thank you.

Dave Lorenzo (56:26):

So folks, if you want to find out more about dream exchange, go to dream x.com, D R E a M E x.com. We're also going to put the YouTube link in the show notes. So you can see those webinars that Joe was talking about. I'm also going to put some information about Joe up there. Joe's he's had an incredible career. And from talking to him today, you get the feeling that he's kind of just getting started. So my guest today was Joe Kayla, and he is the founder and the CEO of dream exchange, a stock market. That is information. It's a stock exchange that's information. This is the inside BS show. My name is Dave Lorenzo, and we're here every single day. And we have conversations that take you inside. You get inside the business strategy. We share insider business secrets, and we also cut through all the inside BS that may be holding you back more great conversations like this are to come join me back here again tomorrow until then. Here's hoping you make a great living and live a great life.