Rashad Bilal Breaks His Silence on Recent Controversy

**Rashad Bilal** (0:00)
All right, let's get into it. It's been an eventful month. Yes. It's been an eventful month from the Atlanta mayor situation to Investfest, to Post-Investfest, and here we are. So, we're not going to drag this out too long, but it's important to actually have, we're going to break this damn surgical for the audience, because it's really important for people to understand. And we're going to have a whole dialogue about this. So, let's talk about Investfest, right? Investfest, there would be no, Investfest wouldn't be possible without Troy. He's added so much value without Mike, AB, Ian Dunlap, Matt Garland, 19 Keys.
There's people that, if it wasn't for those people, there would be no Investfest, wouldn't happen, right? It wouldn't happen at all. There would never be an Investfest if it wasn't for the people that I just named and other people as well.
But for me, Investfest is a little different, because everybody has their own relationship with Investfest.
Investfest is something that is my idea, right? So it's a little different when you come up with an idea in your head, and six years later, it's 30,000 people.
That's a feeling that very few people could probably understand, right? So you carry it a little differently. And I've heard people say like, yo, Rashad's crazy, potentially.
But you got to be crazy to think that what you think in your head, six years later, can be a stadium.
With no outside funding, with no sponsorships, with no relationships, with no connections, with no political relationship, just the empowerment of the people and the support of everybody that's working day in and day out. So when Invest Fest, Invest Fest is really a labor of love. That's what people don't really fully understand. Like we promote Invest Fest for one year. We already planning for next year now. We promote it for a year, we work on it for a year. This is all us. We don't take outside capital. Everything you see is us. So from a financial standpoint, this is important for people to understand. It makes no sense for us to do Invest Fest. It's a loss leader. The amount of money that we make from Invest Fest, right? To be candid, because Market Mondays, I owe you guys a conversation because you are actually family. Yeah.
Me personally, I made more money on one micron call than what I made for Invest Fest. 10,000 hours, by the way. All of them.
No, but it's important for people to understand.
We're not making no money on Invest Fest, because it's a narrative that, well, you guys are just doing it. It's a grift. It's a money grab. There's a lot more easier ways for us to make money. We know how to make money. There's a lot more easier ways for us to make money online or just through stock investing, stock trading, than literally doing something for a year with little to no return. This is just a fact, right? But you know who does benefit from Invest Fest? The 100 speakers that's put on stage, that speak in front of people that they've never had the opportunity to, the largest crowds that they ever had in their whole entire life. 400 vendors that come to Invest Fest that sell their products with no commission. 30 food trucks that sell their food for the whole entire weekend, and 30,000 people with no commission.
The hospitality, club owners, restaurants, tours, the Uber drivers, the event plan, the security, the hotel staff, you name it. It's obvious that as an economic impact, it's 30,000 people. Obviously, 30,000 people didn't come from Atlanta. If you was at Invest Fest, you met people from all over the world. And how they measure events is per day. So 30,000 people is really 90,000 people. That's a 90,000 person event. Right? So why am I saying this? I'm saying this to say, this shit hit a little differently when you're doing all of this. You're not really making no money. It's a labor of love. You discount tickets. You give tickets away. You discount vendor booths. You give vendor booths away. And you have to hear shit for eight weeks about how it's a scam, about how we promote scammers. The day before Invest Fest, there's a post that goes viral about the top 10 scammers that spoke at Invest Fest.
Nobody even took the time to even research that half of that list never even stepped foot in Invest Fest ever. Five people never even came to Invest Fest ever. That's on the top 10 Invest Fest speaker list.
Two of those people have no idea why is Pinky Cole a scammer. Because she didn't succeed in business, she did succeed. She had a $100 million valuation as ups and downs.