Podcast: Dan Rupp

I spoke with Dan Rupp, founder and CIO of Parkway Capital, about what it means to leave a respected institution, launch a fund in the teeth of an Asian bear market, and build an investment business from scratch. Dan launched Parkway in 2024, when sentiment in Hong Kong and across much of Asia was still deeply depressed, but he was unusually confident that the opportunity set was improving. That made this a good moment to explore not just his investment views, but how starting Parkway has sharpened his thinking about the craft and business of investing.

We discuss what Dan wanted to build at Parkway that he could not build at Overlook, why a smaller size opens up parts of the market that larger firms cannot easily access, and how his process has evolved now that it is live and supported by a growing team. He explains how Parkway narrows a huge Asian universe into an actionable set of ideas, how tools, scorecards and AI fit into the workflow, and why human judgment still matters most when assessing management, correlation, risk and portfolio fit.

We also talk about the business side of running a fund: marketing, time allocation, culture, delegation, and the challenge of being fully responsible for both investment results and the firm itself. Dan reflects on lessons carried over from Richard Lawrence and Overlook, especially the importance of serving LPs well through alignment, fee discipline, fund-size limits and a focus on capital-weighted returns rather than asset gathering for its own sake.

The conversation closes on a more personal note, with Dan reflecting on energy, longevity and the example set by his mother, who is still selling real estate at nearly ninety.

As always, this conversation is for general discussion only, not investment advice.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity:

This is Graham Rhodes, and you are listening to the Longriver Podcast, where I share conversations with my peers on global business and investing as we see it from Asia. My guest today is Dan Rupp, founder and CIO of Parkway Capital. Dan is someone I've known for many years, and I've wanted to have him on the podcast for a while.

He launched Parkway in 2024, a year after I launched Longriver, at a time when much of Asia still felt weighed down by a bruising bear market. Dan, by contrast, was strikingly confident in the opportunity and did not hesitate to say so. What's been fun to watch since then is how starting Parkway seems to have unleashed something in him.

It's revealed not just the investor many people already knew, but the entrepreneur in him as well. So today I wanna focus less on Dan's biography or any individual companies in the Parkway portfolio and more on the business of Parkway itself, what Dan's building and how he thinks about the craft of investing now that he's doing it on his own terms.

Dan, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Graham. It's great to be here.

Dan, before we go any further, I have to give the usual disclaimer. Nothing we say in this conversation is investment advice, nor is it marketing for any kind of security or fund. Everyone listening should do their own research.

Is that cool with you?

Sounds good.

Alright. So the first question is: you worked at your last job for quite a long time. What did you want to build at Parkway that you couldn't do there?

Yeah, thanks, Graham. So I worked for 17 years at Overlook Investments. It's a fantastic firm, founded by Richard Lawrence, and the longtime CIO is James Squire. They are both among my mentors, and there's a lot of great analysts on the team there. So I learned different things from different people, but I always had this entrepreneurial itch and I always wanted to build something. And as you know, Hong Kong's a great place to start.

You see lots of interesting people doing different things. And for me, I always knew that at some point I wanted to build a business. I just had such a great job at Overlook that I stayed for quite a long time before I left to join. But really, I also wanna build a great firm and take a lot of the lessons from Overlook.

Because we're a smaller organisation, we can access a part of the market that just wasn't accessible at a large firm. We're not only doing small caps, but we're doing small, mid, and large caps, and there was really a gap in the market. A lot of companies, I think, are underappreciated. I tend to be a little bit off piste. I ski off piste, but when I look at companies, I look for things like B shares in China or preferred shares in Korea, or less liquid shares that kind of come with discounts.

So I don't like crowded trades, and I felt like there were a lot of companies which were just too cheap. And so that's why I was quite excited to get started back in 2024.

And was the timing at all coincidental with the bear market? I mean, as I said in the intro, you were really banging the drum, and you had more confidence than anyone I can remember from amongst our friends.

So was that also, like, a motivation to get going?

Yeah, I was quite concerned that when I left, in Easter time of 2023, and I was just deathly afraid that there would be a big bull market in the second half of 2023 before I could get started. Fortunately, I think we maybe missed the bottom by a month or two, but we were close enough to start in January 2024.

But yeah, I looked at the Hang Seng Index. I think it had declined by approximately 50% from 2018 or so to late 2023. So it had halved, and I looked around Hong Kong and, yeah, we had lived through a difficult period. And it was a difficult five-year period, but I could sense that things would come back.

Hong Kong is a resilient city with great people. So yeah, I was confident that the city would come back, and as would Asian markets. So, the timing, you can create your own timing at some level, but there's also an element of luck. But whatever it was, I'll take it.

Better lucky than good, as they say. And you just had your second annual general meeting for your investors, and you were kind enough to invite me to come along. So, two and a bit years into this, what did you carry over from Overlook intact? And what did you do differently from day one at Parkway?

Yeah, so the investable universe is quite different. Our universe of securities is something like 11,000 companies across Asia. So, we invest in Asia ex India, so this 11,000 companies, that's using US$200 million market cap and above, and excluding companies that trade less than US$300,000 per day.

So it's a huge universe. It's probably over 10x the universe of my old shop. So with that, we have a larger pool of securities and we have a smaller team. So I think because of that, we have to work a little bit faster, be a little quicker. So we have weekly meetings. I think that we're looking for really larger margins of safety because we have such a large universe to draw from.

Let's say I'm looking for a defensive idea, and that's one of the three categories of companies that we look for. But a defensive idea generally has a high dividend yield and low beta. So yeah, we can look at a set of pretty high-yielding securities across Asia just as a first screen.

And then obviously you want to think about the durability of that dividend and whatnot. But yeah, so we can have, in some ways, an even cheaper stock, and that cheaper stock gives us a little bit of a wider moat, and that's how I take confidence in the portfolio that we have.

Were you as quantitative before? Or is the system that you've developed for identifying ideas, and like the farm process that you've described, is that something that you've built yourself?

Yeah. You know, we had something similar at Overlook, and frankly, I think a lot of firms have something like this, where you have a universe, and you wanna exclude things.

In Asia, if you look at the Asian benchmarks, right, whether it's MSCI Asia or an FTSE benchmark, and you look at the fundamentals of those benchmarks, they're actually not great, right? So the two main problems with the fundamentals, well, there's a few of them.

I look at my benchmark, which is an FTSE index. It's called ACAPXIP. That's All Country Asia Pac, excluding India and Pakistan. And the ROA for that benchmark is currently two-and-a-half percent, right? And the ROE is about 11%. This index has net debt, right? Because that's how you leverage ROAs to ROEs.

And so, you could simplistically say to get an ROA above two-and-a-half percent is pretty easy, right? So I think the first step, when you're going from a big universe to a smaller, more actionable subset of universes, is: what do you exclude? And I choose to exclude, largely, financials. We exclude lower-return businesses.

We exclude companies with a lot of debt and companies with a history of poor growth. So if it's heavily cyclical, we're generally gonna exclude that from our farm. And once you make those exclusions, you're left with fewer companies that have better metrics. The other part that's very important for us is earnings growth.

The index earnings growth, if you go back to inception in 2006, I believe, for this FTSE index, the earnings have compounded at only 3% for the benchmark. So we also want to see and find companies that we think can grow. We're looking for double-digit earnings growth. So if we can find companies that we think can grow 10%, 12% for the next three years, that's basically the hurdle that we need for the portfolio.

So those are some of the things. But I think it's very important to know what you want to exclude, and especially if you're a small team, you don't wanna waste time looking at parts of the market that really aren't in your sweet spot.

You've been in this now for two and a bit years. How has the process evolved over that time? And you have all the data to show what's working and where you're getting the best wins. How have you honed the process, and how has the team that you've assembled been built to help you to do that better?

Yeah, so certainly, when you're a first-time fund manager, you think you know kind of how it's gonna go, and of course you're gonna be learning things and you'll have some surprises along the way. For us, I hired some interns out of CUHK back pre-launch, and they're both still with me and they're full-time analysts, and one's more of a quant analyst and one's more fundamental.

But with the quant analyst, the first job was to build some of these tools, right? It's like if you're flying an airplane, you need various gauges to kind of keep the craft in the air. And so the tools, I think building those was the first step, right? And you have to build certain tools before you launch.

You need to have a portfolio, and we keep it in Excel. We also have a portfolio management system. But yeah, having a system for getting companies kind of out of the universe and into the farm, building up databases, building templates so you can look at companies quickly.

A lot of this stuff, it just takes time. And so that was the first step. I think the next step is to iterate, right, and to improve the tools and make the tools more useful. And so that's an ongoing process. And then, in the last 12 months, but really the last six months, we've started using AI a bit more.

And frankly, I'm not an AI expert, but I do trust that my younger analysts, they're using it more than I am and they're actually helping to teach me how they're using it. One way we use AI is we noticed that with a Japanese company, if you see the quarterlies, it's a 45-page document and it's released two weeks before the English document, which is only eight pages, on one of these companies.

So we said, obviously, if you don't read Japanese, you're probably not getting as much detail if you just look at the English translation. So, you know, we're using AI to translate documents and to get across a language barrier. We're invested across 11 countries with lots of different languages, so it's been useful.

And we're also doing kind of an AI summary of, say, all the news from our farm companies. And that includes if insiders are buying or selling, if they're doing buybacks. It scrapes through websites. And we're kind of aware and ready for upcoming earnings announcements and that sort of stuff.

So yeah, it's definitely evolving. AI is changing the landscape quite quickly, but we're not afraid of the AI. We think it's a tool that we can all use to make us more efficient and to free up time for more management meetings and more interactions with these companies.

Yeah, I get that, and that all sounds very familiar. I'm doing much of the same thing at Longriver, but I'm curious, you know, within that system, which parts are still stubbornly human?

Which ones require the most judgment still?

Yeah, I think judgment is hugely important. We have a scorecard. One of the tools that I mentioned, and the scorecard can rank all the securities, all 11,000 securities in our universe. We have a score. The maximum possible score would be 130 points.

It's about two-thirds quality metrics, one-third value metrics. So yeah, we could just make a portfolio quite easily of the top 10-basis-point companies, the top 20-basis-point companies, you know, the top 30, and just buy those blindly. But I think that will get you into trouble, that you need judgment to understand the company.

Understand if it's in your circle of competence. Another part of it is where judgment's important is to look at kind of things like cross-correlation. Of course you can do a cross-correlation analysis quite easily, but to look at your portfolio and say, oh, right, like we're quite underweight Japan, which actually we are right now, we only have two stocks in Japan.

So I'm thinking the next stock, I'd like to really focus on Japan. I'd like to set up a trip to go to Japan in late May. And we're asking a broker to get some meetings together for us. Or I might say, you know what, we're overweight Southeast Asia, which is largely consumer stocks. So we should look at industrials or tech companies in North Asia to kind of offset that.

I think those are, certainly, you could build that into your AI program, but I think just knowing where you should add to the portfolio and where maybe you have too much of a correlated risk, I think that judgment comes with experience, and I think that's still valuable. I think the judgment is why I read in the FT a week ago that the AI models were trying to predict English Premier League football outcomes, and they were horrendous, right?

They have all the data, they know who's hurt, they know who's hot and all that, but they can't pick a football match. And so why would we think they can pick stocks? I don't think that we're there yet, and maybe one day that'll change, but I think for now there's still a big role for human decisions to make in this business.

So you kind of touched on this a bit, but I want to ask you next: what's the difference in your mind now that you've had some experience between being an analyst and being a portfolio manager?

Yeah. You know, my role at Overlook was actually quite useful because I was an analyst, but I was also helping James out with some of the portfolio management.

And so it was just a great training ground. I mean, I think that investment in general, really the best way to learn it is via apprenticeship, like a lot of things, frankly. And so if you're fortunate enough to have great mentors around you, it's really the best way to learn it.

And I think I was learning different facets of the business through my mentors there. But yeah, the biggest differences are it's not just about... for me, in our process, we're trying to get both 10% earnings growth and 3% dividend yield. And so as analysts pitch stocks in weekly meetings, I'm trying to think kinda how that fits.

So for example, if someone says we have two analysts who wanna pitch defensive stocks one day, and let's say someone pitches a stock in Indonesia with a 9% dividend yield and someone else pitches a stock in Hong Kong with an 8% dividend yield, all else equal, I'd rather buy the Hong Kong one because A, I don't have to pay withholding taxes on dividends from Hong Kong.

And B, I don't have to worry about the Indonesian currency and potentially losing money on FX. And historically you have lost money. So it's just, it's thinking about things a little bit differently. That's a pretty easy one. But yeah, we're trying to find companies where we have a lot of comfort.

Where we can own companies for a long time, I mean, I generally will lean towards companies that I've followed or heard about for multiple years, or companies that I've been looking at over the last decade plus, relative to a brand-new idea, because it takes a while for ideas to kind of get into the farm.

We look at 'em for usually six months plus, so we would not buy a name I've never heard of just because it has great metrics. I think you have to slow down the process, and I think if you work a little slower, you tend to make fewer mistakes.

Yeah, that's a really interesting point. And coming away from the AGM, one of the things that I wanted to ask you is where you think your edge lies. Is it in using these processes and these systems to create a portfolio which, in aggregate, has certain characteristics, or is it still at its heart trying to find exceptional companies and then not getting in their way?

Yeah, I think the edge is, for me, it's having seen what a great fund looks like from the inside and understanding, both on the business side and on the investment side, you need both to really function to be successful. I think that's quite helpful. So in terms of portfolio management, I'm well aware of the problems you've suffered if you've invested passively in Asia.

I mean, the classic example is MSCI China, which I think launched in 1993 in the US at 100, and I think it's currently at 90 or something. Let's see. Sorry, 80, 82 currently. Now, you've actually maybe made one or 2% because that's a price index. I think you've gotten some dividends, but effectively it's pretty atrocious to have thought:

You've put money in Asia, in China, in 1993, and you haven't really made anything over these last 30-plus years. So there's a problem with passives. There's a problem that they don't deliver earnings growth. And so I think active managers of all stripes have a role to play in Asia.

Asia's obviously a hugely important part of the world, and everyone, I think, should have some allocation out here. Of course, not investment advice. But I think there's different ways to skin the cat. The way that I've landed on this is this 10 plus 3 framework, where it's just very clear that everyone knows that if they're pitching a stock, it's either a compounder, and that's where 70% or so of our positions are compounders, or it's defensive or it's deep value, but we know what we're looking for and there's a pattern-recognition system that's underway. If we like a convenience store in Thailand, we might like the same convenience store in the Philippines, right?

Or we might like a very similar convenience store in Indonesia. So the analysts already know the kinds of stocks that I like and that we've had success through in my last 20 years investing in Asia. And we're trying to find more companies that look like that, but that happen to trade at a fraction of the multiples because they're smaller-cap securities or they've got a little bit less free float.

But I think that's the edge, is trying to apply patterns that I've seen over the last 20 years to this larger kind of universe of companies, which I think are not that well covered.

I want to switch gears now and talk about the business of building Parkway. So, to put it bluntly, how does it feel now that you're in charge?

It feels great. There's a cliche about being your own boss, and it does feel great to have built something that I'm proud of and, you know, come to work. I'm very lucky, right?

Like, I define success as: you get up, you know, you have a nice breakfast, and you come to work, and you're happy to be at work, and then you finish work, and you're happy to go home because you've got a great family too. So to have both of those, I think, I'm quite fortunate and I'm blessed.

So that's how I define success. Now, I will say, though, when you are running your own business, as you all know, you can't really shut it off, right? Like, there's not a day that goes by that you don't think about your business. It could be Saturday or Sunday, or you're on vacation and you're checking your email, or you're responding to something that needs to be done, whether it's with the regulators or with an investor or with an employee.

So you never really shut off. And so that's maybe one of the drawbacks. It's very exciting. What we do now is, on the business side, we set targets and we're.,.. we travel and we do ,some marketing. Honestly, I did the most amount of marketing probably in the six months before launch.

In the six months after launch, I think at that point I had several hundred meetings with various people, and now it's fewer meetings, but generally it's third or fourth or fifth-round meetings with various endowments or foundations. And so yeah, I think the marketing, it's just a part of the business.

You have to be able to market. I think it helps. I'm pretty extroverted. I'm happy to get on stage or happy to, you know, call somebody up. It's easy for me to go to the US. My family is still in the US. My mom is in North Carolina, and we can go to Europe once a year and do a few things there too.

So I think if you're extroverted, if you like to meet people, and obviously you have to love investing, but I know a lot of us do out here, I think that's a nice combination. And if you have that, I think you're off to a good start.

I think you and I have both learned a lot from Richard Lawrence, me indirectly through his writings. And one of the things that he's done that I haven't really seen any other fund manager do is to talk about the two sides of an investment management business. One is obviously the investment process, but the other is the business side. And Richard always talks about delivering returns for your LPs, which is kind of so obvious, but like so, so rare.

What did you only appreciate about that after getting into the seat yourself and launching Parkway?

Overlook is quite well known for having returned capital voluntarily after periods of strong performance.

So they gave back a billion dollars after strong performance in 2017, and then another billion dollars after strong performance in '21 and '22. And I think that's a great idea, and what you're doing is you're effectively selling into strong markets and returning capital.

So you're locking in high IRRs or capital-weighted returns, as Richard would say, for your investors. It was never his goal to be the biggest fund in Asia, and he's demonstrated that time and time again, and he has really put the interests of the investors first. And so, yes, that's obviously a big part of what we're trying to do at Parkway.

For me, I was very clear that we're raising a hundred million dollars of an A share class and 200 million of a B share class. But we're not raising huge amounts of money. And after we finish, we get commitments for the B share class. We have to close for at least a year, and effectively, we can still compound from there, and we can still replace redemptions.

There's always redemptions. And we can maybe grow 5% or 10% net new money per year. So we can still grow. But the idea is once you have a fund and you have a business that's profitable, you don't need to double again. You can double from performance, but you don't need to go after... 'Cause the issue is the time that someone wants to give you a hundred-million-dollar check, it's probably after the fund's done very well and Asia's quite hot and maybe you're getting towards the tail end of a bull market, and that's not the time to take the big money.

Right. And so I think that lesson was driven home into me by Richard. And I think that he's also done things like reduced performance fees for investors, and we had our first fee reduction January 1 of this year. So I'm certainly trying to take some of the practices which I really think are best practices and apply those at Parkway.

One of the things that I've had to learn managing Longriver is just how well I need to allocate my time. So I'm not just an investor, I'm a businessperson, and I'm wondering how you think about that challenge as well. Like, how do you find the best way to divide your time?

Yeah, every week's a little bit different, and in fact, that's why this business is so great and that's why investing itself is so great. Every day you learn something different and you talk to a different company and whatnot. There are periods, like the last few weeks when we were preparing for the AGM, that's really all that we were doing, right?

I mean, obviously there's a few trades in the portfolio and a few emails to get back to, but it was really all hands on deck. That was Tuesday, and here we're talking, it's Friday. And I told everybody, get outta here, take a long weekend. And so I'm at the office alone today. But yeah, you have to make time for what needs to get done.

But yeah, I don't have a hard rule on this. Before I got into investing, I was a teacher and I taught math in Africa with the Peace Corps, that was in Cameroon, and then I taught English. So two years in Africa, and three years in Japan, where I taught English.

So I'm very comfortable teaching, and that's why I've been able to hire younger analysts and bring them up slowly, and they've gotten better and better. And so now I fully trust my team, and I'm able to delegate some things to them. So I really think it's important to have somebody to help you if you're a one-person fund.

Okay, well, maybe you can get some help from freelancer.com or somewhere, right? But I think that it's just too much to do by yourself. I know AI is getting better, and maybe there are ways to automate and outsource some of the processes, but to try to do it the old-fashioned way all by yourself, I think, is gonna be very hard to be good at everything if you're trying to do everything.

So I've been able to really delegate and parse out some of the work so that I'm not doing everything.

The answer for me has just been radical simplicity, trying to do less, but to do that well. And I'm curious, you mentioned the team quite a lot, and it's so obvious that something great is happening at Parkway.

How would you describe the culture that you're building, and how intentional have you been about building it?

Yeah, the culture, it is hugely important because that point I made before about you wanna go to work and be happy, right? You wanna be relaxed. And I like low stress. You can always feel stress, and if someone...

The first thing I'm looking for when I hire someone is: does this person stress me out or not? And if there's any sign of stress, there's no second interview, right? So, you know. But the team is, I don't like too much hierarchy. We have a very modest office. There's no running water in the office.

My neighbours include a manicure-pedicure shop, and then there's a wine shop. Elevators are slow, but the rent's pretty cheap. And we've got six desks plus two small offices, so we could fit up to eight people in here, I guess. But it's small quarters, right? And when you're in smaller quarters, we have maybe 1,200 square feet.

You just wanna be around people that you like to be around. And so that's kind of rule number one. Secondly, in these weekly meetings, we have a table that seats seven people, and I want the whole team to be sitting around the same table. And so if we're gonna grow beyond seven people, which we don't have plans to do, we would need a bigger office. But yeah, the culture is, there's not much hierarchy. My door's generally always open. And it's certainly work from the office. We don't do work from home, although occasionally I'll send people out and say, you know, go stay home and go to China or go somewhere and have fun for the weekend.

I don't look over people's shoulders, but I check in with every team member a few times a day to see what they're working on. I keep a whiteboard in the office, and basically, when I get ideas, they go on the whiteboard, and then people come in and we kind of rank-order ideas and what needs to kind of go next.

Generally, what happens is we have a list of ideas, both from the farm and the price target list, and also from the whiteboard. And the stocks that have fallen the most in the recent one month, three months, or six months kind of get priority because generally those are stocks that are trading down to price target range.

And so that's where we're gonna focus our efforts.

What have you discovered about where you add the most value personally amongst this mix?

I listened to this podcast recently, Steve Mandel from Lone Pine, and his comment was, you know, if you're the PM, you don't stop being an analyst.

Right? Like, if you wanna just be a PM and just do the trades and basically not meet companies, I think that's a mistake. And so what I do is, you know, I'm an analyst first, and so I'm doing presentations on the weekly meetings as well. As you saw, there were three analyst pitches at the AGM. I did one of them.

There's a little internal competition, you know, whoever's stock does the best for the next 12 months is gonna get maybe a bottle of champagne or something, but we wanna have fun with these things. And so, yeah, you have to remain an analyst and really lead from the front.

I'm not gonna tell the analysts to do all the analytical work and have all the company meetings. I wanna be in those meetings. Even if we're going to China and I don't speak Chinese, if I go to China with the analyst team, I wanna go there and meet the founder, or I wanna go there and meet the CEO, or certainly meet the IR people.

And even if it's through a translator or through AI tech, you know, software or headphones, I wanna hear what they're saying, look 'em in the eye and see if I think that this person is someone we can trust and we can invest with for multiple years. So that's really the main lesson, is once an analyst, always an analyst.

And even if you're a PM, yeah, you should get out and see a lot of companies.

So if we were to check in in three years' time at Parkway's fifth anniversary, what would you think would be most different?

To answer a little bit differently, I hope that not much changes in some ways. I mean, I look at our monthly report, it hasn't changed a bit since we started.

I look at our portfolio construction slide, which is the compounders and deep value. That hasn't changed a bit. Right. I wanna keep things steady. So I don't want you to see too many differences. Obviously, there'll be different companies to talk about and whatnot. So what's gonna be different?

We'll probably have a larger team. We're likely to hire somebody in the next few months. We've got some kind of third-round interviews coming up with some excellent candidates. But yeah, I don't think we really need to change too much. I think we know what to do. We have our model. And so the question is just: let's execute the model.

There's obviously gonna be good years and bad years. Unfortunately, Asia doesn't generally have steady 15% years. It tends to kind of come in fits and then sometimes you give some back. So I think probably by year five or something, by year seven, we'll probably have a down year.

And that's just part of long-only investing. But I really think the best way to compound capital through a cycle is to be long-only and is to be fully invested.

So yeah, volatility, we've had some volatility. We got through April, Liberation Day, we were down 10%. Actually, the first AGM, it was on April 8th, 2025, and we were down 10% month to date. But we ended that month up, right? And then this year we had the AGM on the heels of the conflict in Iran.

We had a tough month in March, but we've basically made it all back in April. So I just think: stay invested, keep doing what we're doing, and as long as we're enjoying the work, and as long as I'm enjoying it, which I'm having the time of my life right now, I'll keep doing this.

I think about Mark Mobius, who just passed away. Talk about a guy who died with his boots on. That guy, he was starting a fund like a year and a half ago, right? He's got so much energy, and I think that the energy is what you really need to do this, right? Because the six months before you launch is a sprint.

The first year after you launch is a sprint. You know, it's a lot of work, but you need to have the energy. And Mark certainly had that. And he did it his whole life. And he was a happy guy, right? That was obvious. So I think as long as you're enjoying what you're doing, you just keep going, and you keep moving forward and get a little bit better each day and each week, and hopefully that's the path towards fulfilment and delivering a great product for yourself, your family, and your investors.

You know, I'm really glad that you brought us to this place, 'cause I wanted to wrap the conversation up with an anecdote you shared with me once. Can you tell us the story about your mother and the energy she brings to her work?

My mom, she is 89. Actually, she turns 90 in June. She probably doesn't love that I'm talking about her age on a podcast, but she'll be okay. So she is still...

Hi, Mrs. Rupp!

Yes, Mary's her name. So Mary, she sells property. She's a realtor in the mountains of North Carolina, where I grew up. And, you know, she was a stay-at-home mom until, I think I got to... I'm the youngest of five.

So when I was probably six or seven, she started working as a realtor, and she still keeps an office at our old neighbour's real estate agency in Boone. So she's still... she doesn't go to work every day, but she has 10 or so properties. And these are kind of mostly student housing at Appalachian State.

And she's still, you know, I think she was the leading revenue generator for a month, maybe it was last summer. So she's still selling houses, going to work, she's happy to do it, it gets her out of the house and keeps her, you know, engaged. And so I look at her as a role model in many ways.

You find something you like to do, and you just keep on doing it. And really, as long as you find joy and love in what you're doing, you keep going.

Fantastic. Dan, this has been a fun conversation. I've enjoyed it a lot. If anyone would like to get in touch with you to learn more, what's the best way to contact you?

Well, I use LinkedIn. To be honest, I did not use LinkedIn very much until I started Parkway, and now I've found it's a great tool. It's really the only social media that I use, so you can find me on LinkedIn. I'll post a couple of things a month generally, but that's probably the easiest way to track me now.