Alternative Ways to Fund a Business with George Dubec

When George Dubec sold the singles network he and his wife had built in South Florida, the buyer was another matchmaking group that wanted to expand into events. But what they were actually paying for was the list. "They couldn't replicate me and my wife as the face of the business," George told me. What transferred cleanly was the database, and that was where the value sat. Nearly forty years later, he still runs a database of forty thousand clean email addresses, and he still tells business owners the same thing about building one.

George is considered one of the top business and social networking experts in the country. He started as an engineer and rose to executive staff at Packard Electric, a division of General Motors, before moving to Florida in 1985 and going out on his own. He has been a VP of sales and marketing in the internet space, produced radio and TV shows including the Internet Business Hour, and served as a judge of the Web Awards since 2006. Today he sits on the advisory board of America's Real Deal, a business investment show, and spends most of his time helping owners find money in places they were not looking. After decades of structuring deals myself, I found his map of the current funding landscape genuinely useful, and a good reminder of how much wider that landscape has gotten.

From a No-Tech Town to the AI Era

George grew up in Boardman, Ohio, in a town he compares to Happy Days. He saw the first television set in his neighborhood. The phones were party lines. "I came from a no-tech world, and now I'm evolving into this super high-tech world with AI," he said. He is writing a book about that transition called How to Thrive and Survive in the New High-Tech AI World, aimed at the emotional and psychological side of the adjustment rather than the technical one.

He was also the first person in his family to graduate from college. His grandparents came from Europe, and the message from every relative was the same. Get that piece of paper. Nobody asked what the career would be. I grew up lower middle class in Brooklyn and heard a version of the same thing. Half the kids became tradesmen or police officers, and the other half went to the local college. Going away to school was not on the menu.

Buying His Job Out of General Motors

George spent about eighteen years at General Motors as an engineer, rising through the ranks. Then he did something most people in that position never do. He bought his job out and moved to South Florida.

In 1985, he and his wife started what became the largest singles network in South Florida, running it until roughly 1992. This was before online dating and before the commercial internet. They ran cruises and dance parties, and when computers first became accessible they started taking people's profiles, entering them, and doing manual matching on characteristics. When his wife got pregnant, they sold.

Why Data Is the Asset Owners Undervalue

The exit is worth sitting with, because the value driver was not the events or the brand. It was the list. That pattern shows up constantly and business owners consistently miss it.

I had a client in the nineties, pre-commercial internet, that gathered information on schools and school districts and produced reports for real estate agents. A buyer would walk in and ask how the schools were in a given town, and there was no way to look that up. So the company faxed or mailed a report with student-teacher ratios, college attendance percentages, and program details. The company got financially shaky, and I remember telling my partners that even if it went under, the database would be worth a fortune. Everyone who ordered a report was someone about to buy a house in a specific town. Movers, mortgage companies, and home service businesses had no other way to reach people at that stage, because everyone else had to wait for the deed records to post.

George's version of the lesson is blunt. Build your database of customers, clients, and leads, because if you need to exit, that may be what someone is actually buying. It can also be a revenue source long before any exit.

The Money Most Business Owners Never Look For

After technically retiring from his web company in 2010, George moved into what he calls alternative funding. "I help people find ways to get money into their business that might not be the normal channels," he said. A lot of that work is unglamorous and specific. Tax reimbursements, tax credits, tax refunds, legal settlements. Money that already belongs to the owner and is sitting unclaimed.

The rest of it is newer. He described a Miami group building a parallel business to Bitcoin, with SEC licensing to create nodes and mine what they call trusted smart coins. The pitch is that companies seeking funding invest in the coin, and investors in those companies receive coins as a sweetener on top of their equity. He also pointed to fractionalizing deals, which started in real estate with small chunks of a property and has since spread, and to platforms like alts.co that let people buy into horse racing, exotic cars, and even a brewery.

His underlying point is practical. "Just going out there with a pitch deck trying to get money is really tough." Most owners default to the one channel they know and stop there. This is the same territory Tom Dillon covered in Episode 350 on when not to take venture capital money, where he walked through private credit, SBA loans, term loans, and sale-leasebacks as ways to unlock capital without giving up equity.

Democratization and the Vetting Problem

Alternative investments used to be closed. You needed wealth and access. The argument for opening them up is democratization, and I think there is a lot of real good in it. The counterargument is that the people newly getting access are also the people with the least ability to tell a real deal from a bad one.

George does not soften it. There is fraud, there is noise, and most of these platforms have existed for two or three years with no track record to evaluate. "It's kind of like the wild frontier. It's like digging for gold." He goes further and says that in today's market, a lot of what people call investing is closer to gambling. He contrasts it with the era he grew up in, when you bought blue chip stocks, looked at price to earnings ratios, and watched them appreciate slowly on real earnings rather than on the latest news cycle.

My own approach is boring on purpose. The core of my money sits in a diversified portfolio, and I accept the long-run return that comes with patience and not trying to time the market. Then I carve out a percentage that is genuinely play money, where I can back a tech startup or an alternative deal knowing I can afford to lose it. Even the most sophisticated investors run the same math. A venture fund makes ten investments expecting seven to go to zero, two to do fine, and one to carry the entire fund. One grand slam, two doubles, and seven strikeouts. If you are getting into the game, understand that is the game.

Gerry Hays made a complementary argument in Episode 370, where he laid out a model for participating in early-stage deals in very small increments precisely so that diversification does not require writing large checks.

Inside America's Real Deal

George calls America's Real Deal Shark Tank on Steroids, and the structure is genuinely different. Companies have to have at least a million dollars in gross sales in the last year to qualify, so it is not a startup showcase.

Once a company qualifies, there are four paths to capital. The sharks are high net worth individuals with a minimum of fifty million in net worth, four or five per panel. The studio audience doubles as an accredited investor panel that vets the companies, which is a layer Shark Tank does not have. Every company is then offered a crowdfunding platform, similar to Start Engine or WeFunder, where the viewing audience can invest at a hundred dollars a pop. Finally, companies move onto a private stock exchange where shares can be bought and sold after the fact even though the company is not public. The show and the companies are also being packaged into a private equity fund that investors can buy into.

There is a commerce layer too. A QR code appears on screen, so viewers can buy the product directly while watching, closer to home shopping than to a pitch competition. That matters for a reason Kevin O'Leary has talked about for years, which is that the real prize on these shows is cutting your customer acquisition cost. Capital is available in a lot of places. Exposure that lowers CAC is not. George noted an article reporting that Mark Cuban has lost over twenty million dollars across his Shark Tank investments while making considerably more on long-term growth in the winners.

The show currently streams on Amazon, Pluto TV, Roku, and Tubi, and season one episodes are linked from the site. They are also recruiting influencers, authors, speakers, and brand ambassadors.

I have a love-hate relationship with this format generally, and I did a solocast on exactly that. These shows have done more to educate people about raising capital and pitching than almost anything else. But a forty-five minute pitch edited to seven minutes is always going to be an artificial view of the process, and roughly half the handshake deals never close once due diligence starts.

Why Your Pitch Video Now Matters More Than Your Deck

The most immediately actionable thing George said had nothing to do with any particular platform. Whatever channel you are raising through, you need a strong pitch video of two to five minutes featuring you and your principals.

His reasoning is that investors are buried in decks and one-pagers and do not have time to read them. "It's like bait on a hook." The video creates enough interest that they will open the deck. And what investors are actually evaluating in those two to five minutes is not the business model. It is whether this person has the attitude, the moxie, the knowledge, and the experience to make the thing work.

Which leads to an uncomfortable conclusion for a lot of founders. "If you're camera shy, that's not a good thing." His advice is to practice into your phone until it stops feeling awkward, and to hire someone competent if you cannot shoot it well yourself.

Building Authority Before It Had a Name

George started his radio show, the Internet Business Hour, in 1998 and ran it for about twelve years, long before anyone was calling this authority marketing. He had two goals. Build an audience over time by giving real advice, and win business because being the guy on the air made you the expert.

He tells a story about a prospect sitting in his office to talk about web development who kept interrupting himself. "You're the guy on the radio." Every few minutes, same line. George's read on it is only half joking. There is something about broadcast that confers guru status whether or not it is earned.

I see the same effect with this podcast. It keeps me top of mind and it builds perceived expertise. The caveat matters though. Perceived expertise with nothing behind it does not produce a sustainable business. You still have to do the work over time. George's take on where this is heading is that everyone now needs some version of a brand, whether that is posting, a podcast, or a book, and that with AI you can outline and draft a book faster than ever. What the marketing people tell him is that followers, exposure, and viewers are the currency now. That is worth hearing, and also worth balancing against the fact that attention without substance runs out. If you want more on building assets that are not just capital raises, my solocast Episode 351 covers deal structures like joint ventures, strategic alliances, and licensing that most owners never consider.

Freedom Inside a System

George is about to turn eighty, which is part of why he has been paying close attention to medical and anti-aging devices. He prefers the phrase living younger longer to the usual longevity language.

His answer to my closing question about freedom went somewhere I did not expect. He said he has lived in a golden era and has never really experienced anything but freedom. Then he argued that the United States may now have too much of it. He pointed back to the seventies phrase do your own thing and asked how anything would get done if everyone actually did. His analogy was a football team with eleven superstars who each freelance. They will never win a game. They need a system.

"So I'm a systems guy," he said. "You gotta find a system that suits you, that you can be free in the system." For anyone building a company, that distinction is worth holding onto. Structure and freedom are not opposites. The right structure is what makes the freedom usable.

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FOR MORE ON GEORGE DUBEC Website, https://theultimatenetworker.com Podcast, https://techunfilteredagi.com TV show, https://www.americasrealdeal.com

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Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

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