Chase and Brian of Commonwealth

This week Horacio and Stefan sat down with Chase Chamberlin and Brian Doxtator, CMO and CEO at Commonwealth, which allows anyone to buy shares in world-class racehorses.

In the chat, we discuss:

How Rally inspired Brian to think about fractionalized horses
What each founder brings to the table (Chase = horses, Brian = business & finance)
How horse racing can be intimidating, and how they’ve worked hard to make everything so easy to understand
How they spend their day-to-day (visiting their horses, talking to lawyers, keeping up with SEC regulations)
Their bloodstock team, and the difficulty of selecting quality colts
How they drive community and make everything feel personal (they have customers from 49 states and 16 countries)
How they have aligned incentives by tying their business model to customer success
How they think about racehorse valuations (there is tons of public auction data available)
What goes into racehorse acquisition costs (horse itself, and 2 years worth of training costs, expenses & legal fees)
Unicorn returns aside, what a good return actually looks like in this industry
The excitement of watching their horse, Country Grammer, win a close race
Where Commonwealth sits in the “investing vs gambling” spectrum
What’s next for Commonwealth (trading, secondary markets, gamification, and education)