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Meet Alexi Panagiotakopoulos

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Alexi Panagiotakopoulos.

Alexi, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I am here as a 1st Generation Greek / American thanks to my father, Christo Panagiotakopoulos, who immigrated from Athens, Greece. He and my mother, Connie Panagiotakopoulos, are the one who instilled in me what I like to call the “Immigrant Hustle”. In a more politically correct sense, one may call this the “Entrepreneurial Spirit”. From the time I was a kid, I witnessed my parents work and commit to family, life and business with relentless tenacity, making every sacrifice necessary to succeed and provide for their family. I grew up as the second of four kids in Central Phoenix, Arizona and spoke Greek and Spanish before I spoke English. I was raised in a small business, as my parents founded and owned two Phoenix staples, Christo’s Ristorante and Alexi’s Grill, for 33 years before selling them last year. As a Central Phoenix native, I attended Madison Simis, Madison Meadows, Brophy College Preparatory and then the WP Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. I started learning about real estate and finance at 14 thanks to my dad and his savvy investments. But it was really at my 18th birthday that I became highly intrigued by the stock market. I asked my father if he would allow me to control and invest $10,000 in a brokerage account. The money would remain his, but I got to do research, create a strategy, pick stocks, make trades and monitor the account on a discretionary basis.

He granted me this opportunity and off I went on my Charles Schwab account trading like I was Gordon Gekko. That started in September 2007. Although I loved stocks, I still wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps so I applied to and earned a scholarship to George Washington University with early admittance to study Electrical Engineering, just as my father had. But in February 2008, while playing Hamilton High School in a Brophy rivalry basketball game, I tore my ACL. As a result, I laid in bed for three weeks after surgery and watched the only thing on TV at 10 am on a Tuesday; CNBC. I quickly realized the math in finance was MUCH, MUCH easier than it would be in electrical engineering, so I withdrew from GW and accepted the scholarship to attend ASU. I continued to trade while recovering from an ACL injury and was making a small fortune in an oversees company called the National Bank of Greece. It was my best stock pick and then it happened. September 2008 the market tanked and that’s when I realized I knew nothing. After internships with Goldman Sachs and Bristol Myers Squibb, I realized I wanted to work for a local Phoenix firm with less corporate constraints. That’s when I met my partner, Chris Burbach, who hired me in a matter of days at STORE Capital (NYSE: STOR), just a startup at the time.

I spent 15 months at STORE learning the ins and outs of the Net Lease business before being presented with an opportunity to work for a private distressed debt firm, SMS Financial, where I spent the next five years entrenched in real estate and finance. Chris and I remained friends and became closer after I left STORE. One night over dinner at Durant’s we looked at each other and said, do you want to do this? Start something together? And that was that. Fast forward 18-months and we are building what we hope to be the company of our dreams. We are still very much in start-up mode, but we are living and rolling under the brand Fundamental Income, a company we hope to expand into a multi-faceted investment firm with our first strategy already trading on the NYSE as an ETF called the Net Lease Corporate Real Estate ETF (NETL).

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
For the most part, yes. I’ve been extremely fortunate in my life, but that doesn’t come without struggle and sacrifice. Every action in my life and career has come with a purpose and I’ve put it all on the line to chase a lifelong dream of starting and owning a company. I’m extremely lucky to have such a loving and supportive wife who stands next to me in everything we do and proactively supports our shared ambitions. Even though we’ve only been married for 5.5 years, we’ve bought, remodeled, sold and moved into 5 different houses with 2 temporary rental stops along the way. Along that time, we also had 2 beautiful boys that are now three and 19 months and truly alive and well thanks to my wife, Alexia, who is truly a saint. Those renovations and moves resulted in a lot of late nights, a lot of saying no to happy hours, dinners, golf and social events, all to keep up with our goals. Most of all, I left a safe and secure job where I had deeply established myself in a company at the peak of my career to partner with a man that I see as a brother.

We both did, which makes it special, scary and exhilarating all at the same time. One of my favorite quotes was by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who said starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down. In doing so, even though we’ve prepared as much a possible, one is never really fully prepared for the obstacles and challenges of launching a new firm. Over the past 15-months, I have developed an even deeper respect for business owners who risked it all to start something and firmly believe they should be rewarded for the value they create in this country and our economy. This is the best country in the world to “struggle” in, because there is always light at the end of the tunnel, and even our struggles are likely seen as a luxury in the rest of the world.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
Fundamental Income was founded right here in Phoenix, Arizona by my partner, Chris Burbach and I. Our goal is simple—focus on results. After noticing a void in the market, we created the first ever Net Lease Real Estate Index, working closely with NASDAQ, to define and track the publicly traded Net Lease Real Estate Sector. Subsequently, on March 22, 2019, we launched the first-ever Net Lease Real Estate ETF on the NYSE (Ticker: NETL) thanks to partners like US Bank, the NYSE and Exchange Traded Concepts. We created this strategy to offer investors around the world public, transparent and tradeable manner to access a business model with no minimums, lock ups or private subscription agreements. The strategy specializes in public only REITs that focus on long term contractual cash flows via leases to corporations that operate in real estate all around us—our grocery store, pharmacy, child’s daycare, gas station, distribution center, restaurant, movie theater, or gym, amongst others. We are set ourselves apart by not focusing on the IRS Tax Classification “REIT” (Real Estate Investment Trust) or a Property Type, like Industrial, Office, Malls or Multi-family, but rather on a business model that is agnostic to Property Type and focuses on single-tenant, free-standing commercial real estate that businesses need to generate revenue. Many strategies today are broad based and own various types of REITs, whereas we only focus on Net Lease REITs, and what we like to call the real estate of American businesses.

I am most proud that we were the first to innovate and launch this strategy and were able to bring it to market right from our hometown, Phoenix, AZ, where investors as simple as my grandmother and as sophisticated as an acclaimed portfolio manager can have access to the same product, for the same cost.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
The easy answer would be to say walking onto the New York Stock Exchange, a place I only dreamed of seeing in person as a kid and watching the first trade tick on our newly created publicly listed exchange traded fund—something we built out of thin air—the feeling is unexplainable. But deeper in my core, if I truly reflect on a proud moment and one of great accomplishment, it is shaking hands and solidifying our company and vision with my partner Chris Burbach. My entire life, I’ve had multiple coaches, bosses, colleagues and mentors say “you’re doing well for your age” or “you’ll get there when you’re older, but you need to pay your dues”, but Chris has never even implied that to me once.

He has always seen me for who I am, and what I’m capable of and he’s always pushed me to be better—never hamstringing me or trying to bring me down to a number. Earning the respect of a mentor, and becoming a peer, and one as accomplished, well-respected and intelligent as Chris, was a big day for me as a professional. Chris and I have always seen eye to eye and trust each other implicitly. We simply focus on merit and “athleticism” in its raw form. That is the basis of our partnership and the way we hired in the past and will hire into the future. We want competitive athletes consistently improving and at their core, know they can excel, regardless of their age, gender or pedigree.

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