#118 Beyond the Will: Dan Beech on Secure Document Storage and the End of Estate Disputes

**Roy Coughlan** (0:03)
Welcome to The Crypto Podcast. You can find all my podcasts on roycoughlan.com.
My next guest built a real estate empire generating over 1.4 billion. That's with a B in sales. Advised four billionaires on their wealth strategies. And now he's using blockchain technology to solve a problem that's quietly destroying more families than almost anything else. Dan Beech, please welcome to The Crypto Podcast.

**Dan Beech** (0:30)
Wow. Thank you for that introduction. Happy to be here.

**Roy Coughlan** (0:32)
Yeah. Looking forward to the conversation. I mean, you have an incredible career, an incredible career. Like, I mean, it's unbelievable. So before we kind of delve into what you're doing now and helping people, you might kind of tell me a bit about your career.

**Dan Beech** (0:49)
You know, I've been quite blessed and lucky. You know, I think success is equal parts hard work, luck, and just kind of surrounding yourself with the right people. And it all kind of comes together at the right time. But yeah, I've been, I've been quite blessed to do a lot of really exciting stuff.
You know, help, help a lot of people, and I've been met with some success along the way.

**Roy Coughlan** (1:28)
You're also an author. It's Simple Wealth, I believe, is the book. Yeah.

**Dan Beech** (1:34)
Well, yeah. So the real estate group, we had a big financial crash here in 2008 for maybe international listeners, really destroyed the real estate market.

**Roy Coughlan** (1:48)
I got caught in that a few years later. It kind of wiped me out.

**Dan Beech** (1:52)
Created global recession. So my son was born right at that same time, and I took a couple of years off just to kind of decompress. I'd spent 25 years building a business from scratch, and it was gone in about seven months.
So that was quite a blow to sort of recover from. When I transitioned back, a buddy of mine had built a really vibrant boutique wealth management firm in Beverly Hills, and he needed some help. So that's where I got into the wealth management space. Did that for a really long time. He ended up retiring. I took over. So I learned a lot about the needs of very ultra high net worth investors and ended up writing the book that you mentioned. So we were sort of talking about a lot of the techniques that we used in the firm and continue to use some today still.
And really, our goal with the book was to take those very sort of advanced planning techniques and make them accessible for everyone else. So that's why the book is Insider Secrets for a high net worth wealth management firm. Very good.

**Roy Coughlan** (3:29)
So your new company that you've launched, what's it called? I'm Wanderers of Tony.

**Dan Beech** (3:35)
It's called Archively. And what we're doing is we're storing critical life documents online so that they are accessible when needed in an emergency, you know, in moments of crisis. And we're building that on blockchain.
The online document storage space is really just screaming for innovation. You know, the favorite example that I get people is if you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to start a business, you know, and you need some kind of a device that you're going to interact with customers, maybe send out order deliveries, take payments, whatever, you want the latest tech device, the latest iPhone, whatever it is, phone, to be able to do that. The last thought on your mind is to go to a first-generation iPhone from 2007 But when people are building their estate plans and these critical documents for the end of their life or for an emergency situation, they're still using technology from 2007, the same year that the first-generation iPhone was created. We've really just torn up that old playbook and reinvented using two blockchains actually.
We're pretty excited about what we've built. Just launched in beta.

**Roy Coughlan** (5:19)
When I was doing the research on this, one of the things is what I love about when stuff is in blockchain technology, it can be deleted or edited. Because what I've seen over life, I've seen it happen a lot.
When somebody passes, people edit the will, and they do back-enders to the solicitors and everything. And people don't realize this happens till it happens then.

**Dan Beech** (5:42)
100 percent. Yeah. You never know when, like think about it. I was actually just having the same discussion earlier today. Imagine your trust is 100 pages. You have the certification from the attorney that this was their true and original copy. Maybe you even have it notarized. But what's stopping cousin Sally who has evil cousin Sally from swapping out page 35 where now she gets the vacation house instead of brother Joe?