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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Appetel, Editor and Chief of the Verge, and Decoder

is my new podcast about big ideas and other problems. For today's episode, I'm talking

to Arlen Hamilton, the founder and managing partner of Backstage Capital. It's an adventure

capital firm that focuses on funding startups by people of color, women, and the LGBTQ

community. They've done about 160 deals so far with investments in everything from online

beauty retailers to satellite internet companies. Backstage is opening a new fund that literally

anyone can invest in to allow more regular people access to VC style investing as part

of their portfolios. This is one of the first funds of this kind under a new securities

in exchange commission rule called RegCF or regulation crowdfunding. I talked to Arlen

about that and about the explosion of regular people investing using tools like Robinhood.

It's a big trend and there's a lot to unpack there. And of course, we talked about the day-to-day

...