Bridger Pennington and Mason Vranes first met in an entrepreneurship lecture series at BYU. When the speaker didn’t show, Pennington, the class TA, improvised an hour-long presentation. After putting out a request for someone to help him build websites, Vranes approached him wearing a Funnel Hacker t-shirt, and the rest is history.
After successfully launching and growing a wide range of ventures — from clothing brands to digital marketing agencies — Pennington and Vranes, alongside partner Lincoln Archibald, have turned their attention to the fund management sector with Fund Launch.
Pennington developed an interest in fund management after watching his father co-found and grow the Utah-based Bridge Investment Group. Pennington approached his father to invest in a starter fund, but in lieu of a traditional investment, his father offered to teach him everything he had learned. Armed with a whiteboard, he walked his son through the ins and outs of growing a fund outside of a traditional finance hub. Pennington spun that knowledge into his first small fund, which was launched at age 22 with $49,000 he raised himself.
But he noticed a gap in the industry. The path into fund management is traditionally opaque, reserved for Ivy League graduates in major finance centers like New York. “My dad did this untraditionally,” Pennington says. “[He] and his partners had a lot of people coming to them asking, ‘How did you build this business model?’ He would spend two hours with a whiteboard explaining it to people. There was nothing on YouTube, nothing on podcasts.”
An accessible fund management education
Drawing from the whiteboard lessons and his own experience, Pennington realized that fund management could be a more accessible path for entrepreneurs, but the information simply wasn’t available. Teaming up with Vranes, they decided to road-test an online fund management course while they were still studying at BYU.
The response was immediate. After filming and launching an initial course, they brought in $65,000 in course subscriptions in the first three months and grew their customer base to 4,000 online students.
After running the model by their entrepreneurship professor, Pennington and Vranes officially launched Fund Launch with a webinar in February 2020, mere weeks before the COVID-19 shutdown began.
With school on pause, they decided to go all in. They interviewed experienced fund managers on weekly calls, combining their expertise with Pennington’s and his father’s, and generated awareness via weekly webinars. From Pennington’s basement, he says, he and Vranes would advertise from Monday to Wednesday, host a live webinar on Thursday morning, sell the course over the weekend and start again the following Monday.
From March to August, week after week, Pennington and Vranes interviewed, filmed, livestreamed and repeated. Hungry aspiring fund builders started to take notice, and by August 2020, they had generated $1 million in revenue. “Everyone flocked to it because it was the only thing there was,” Vranes says.
Building an incubator
Since 2020, Pennington, Vranes and Archibald have built the original course into Fund Launch’s flagship offering, Black Card — a full fund management incubator designed to “democratize Wall Street” by helping aspiring fund managers from nontraditional backgrounds launch a fund. The self-guided, hands-on curriculum includes extensive advisory support, in-person events and a wide network of partner resources.
Vranes says, “The core things you figure out are a thesis strategy, the structure of the fund, how they’re going to raise money, and then how they’re going to launch, which we call the Fund Launch Formula. Our goal is to tailor that so it’s realistic … so [students] go and actually see the results in the market.”
“I started asking, ‘How good can we get if we just kept going in this business? What if we tried to do this for 20 or 30 years? Could we actually democratize Wall Street and make high finance accessible to all?’ That’s an interesting mission to go after.”
— Bridger Pennington
Fund Launch students have gone on to collectively manage an estimated $4.8 billion in assets, and the Black Card program alone has launched about 316 funds. The trio has made the process to launch a fund measurably more accessible: Instead of a six-figure investment and about a year of preparation, Black Card students can typically launch a fund in under six months with an investment of around $30,000.
A small percentage of Fund Launch “graduates” also have the opportunity to partner with Fund Launch Partners, a $32 million internal investment fund primarily led by Archibald. A college friend of Pennington’s, Archibald brought his finance background to the table when he joined the team in mid-2020. The partnership arm is designed to provide additional investment and support to growing funds.
The Fund Launch model isn’t for those with a casual interest in fund management. Archibald says, “To be a good investor, it requires patience and long-term investment. The managers who are successfully going through the program are people who really have a fundamental right to win in their space.”
A tech-enabled future
With the emergence of AI and “vibe coding” products, the Fund Launch team sees an opportunity to make the experience more tech-enabled and even more accessible. They’re in the process of building a new platform that can streamline the Black Card incubator. Vranes says, “With an AI product where you can describe what you want to build and work with the platform, … you can launch in a day or a week and for a few thousand dollars, [making it] accessible to everyone that wants to take this path.”
However, the platform would still preserve the human element of Fund Launch. Vranes continues, “[Fund managers] still want lawyers involved. … They still want a coach or an advisor to talk with them and make sure it’s a good idea.”
After six years in business, the three founders show no signs of slowing down. Despite receiving multi-million-dollar buy-out offers, Pennington, Vranes and Archibald are committed to continuing to build.
Pennington says that as he and the company have grown, his priorities have shifted from money to mastery. He says, “I started asking, ‘How good can we get if we just kept going in this business? What if we tried to do this for 20 or 30 years? Could we actually democratize Wall Street and make high finance accessible to all?’ That’s an interesting mission to go after.”
Vranes adds, “We started out in [Pennington’s] basement and in random rooms at BYU. What excites me is the potential and the possibilities in the future, and I don’t see a limit on what that could be.”