The Man Who Owns 1% Of ALL Bitcoin

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Kind: captions Language: en so I can borrow $900 million at like 0.1% interest and put it into Bitcoin which averages 100% agile appreciation for the last 10 years okay what what’s yeah why not yes but but there’s another detail to [Music] it so pom dude welcome uh last time you were here I just went and looked it up four months ago the Bitcoin price was 37,000 today what is the Bitcoin price today today bitcoin price is sitting at 69,000 um in four months that’s kind of amazing and my question to you to start it off why is the Bitcoin price going up well prices go up because more people want to buy than sell so uh that’s like the simplest example uh or explanation but if you think about what’s happened in those four months um probably the biggest thing is the Bitcoin spot ETFs got approved and in those ETFs it basically just gives a ton of people access to the asset that previously didn’t have it and so historically we’ve seen these ETFs for certain asset classes get approved lots of money comes in the price goes up over a long period of time I think people are surprised how quickly assets have come in there’s over 10 billion dollars that have flown into these assets um and then also how quickly the price of Bitcoin has gone up and set a new all-time high you know within two months of the ETF Sam have you followed this have you been watching this uh like the ETF stuff I know that when I tracked my um like net worth which I look at like every six months it changed hours yeah it changed and I and I and I saw that it went up and I had no idea why be honest when the Networth goes up do you strut a little differently around the house do you look at Sarah a little differently you expect her to look at you a little differently tell me the truth baby we done it we made it baby PP was right it’s red panty night we made it we done it baby that’s what we say I’m surprised you only check uh every six months like I I check on a weekly basis and track it like pretty religiously and I feel like uh things you measure move and so if you want it to move then you got to measure it like a I track I track income I don’t track uh net worth because there’s nothing I can do about that right it’s i’ I’ve I’m not like you guys I’ve done it set it and forget it but now that Bitcoin Bitcoin and uh uh ether is close to an all-time high Bitcoin is I think uh should I just should I just sell it all and get out uh the number one rule of Bitcoin is you don’t want to sell your Bitcoin obviously um no I mean look the I think the longterm kind of like thesis around Bitcoin is uh no different than it’s always been which is you have a scarce Supply uh asset there’s lots of people who want it that number of people who want it is increasing now the people who are banging on the door aren’t like retail investors on the internet with $10 do it’s large institutions that have billions of dollars uh they’re obviously allocating to it um and probably the most exciting part over you know call it the next 12 months or so is that at the same time that all this demand is coming in uh the Bitcoin having is coming and that’s just when the daily incoming Supply the number of Bitcoin that get created each day is going to get cut in half from 900 Bitcoin to 450 so like I always joke if you went to economics 101 class supply and demand if Supply goes down and demand goes up at the same time then the price has to go up to accommodate everyone and uh we’ve seen this happen before and it probably happen again is most of your net worth in in crypto stuff now pomps I know I know it was you still you’re still holding strong yeah I I haven’t sold anything um I I bought more crypto stuff but also uh uh we’ve built another a number of other businesses and done a bunch of different things that um it’s not the same percentages but it’s still you know definitely over 50% do you remember about three years ago Sean made a tweet that I forget what the Tweet said but like some Indian newspaper picked it up what was it it said like entrepreneur Shan Pur puts all that worth into crypto what was it I love how you could tell a story and get all parts of it wrong but still the story’s kind of right not an Indian newspaper not all my net worth basically when I uh when we got bought by twitch I had a bunch of cash come in and I was like you know what I’m moving I put TW I was like I’m gonna I tweeted out I’m I’m putting 25% of my net worth into Bitcoin I just that was it that was the tweet and then a bunch of blogs like bitcoin.com and stuff like that not necessarily Indian but they all were like twitch executive says he or then someone’s like Amazon executive because Amazon owns twitch they’re like Amazon executive twitch executive says he’s moving 25% of his net worth into Bitcoin and a stunning move and it’s like uh you know my net worth is like you know it’s like we’re talking about like oh I I put quarters in the vending machine here like these are not huge sums of money that is moving like like it should not make news when I do something uh but yeah that was the that was the story and honestly one of the better moves I ever did that was in 2019 so uh so that was a a good bet I’ve always thought that the media if they wanted really to get the clickbait instead of like Amazon executive or whatever they should just label everyone future billionaire right you can’t tell aspiring billionaire yeah like you can’t disprove that right they just everyone will click on every article so we had uh Michael sailor on like a year two uh maybe two years ago now he got we we gotten a little at the end a little tizzy he got he got angry at me I remember that’s that’s about the only thing that I truly remember from that podcast why because he goes I go Michael what’s the downside of this of this bet you’re taking and he’s like there is no downside and I was like well that’s that’s dishonest because with every decision there’s upside and downside and even if the downside is minimal there is also downside and he’s like no there is no downside and I remember I think I said uh well I don’t trust you then because if you’re not admitting that there’s downside to this decision you’re just being dishonest what else are you lying about and it kind of got weird um and I still feel that way I still feel that way but on here we on what you wanted to talk about you’re talking about uh Sean I think asked if this is the craziest bet of all time it appears as though it’s working right I want you to do two things I want you to explain the like just explain like I’m five years old what did Michael sailor do and then after you’ve explained kind of like just the mechanics of like what is the bet that this guy has been placing kind of like from the start of it to till to now because he’s kind of evolved it and then I want you to tell me if you think this is sort of on the on the spectrum of idiotic to genius where does this fall for you in terms of of a bet because it is a colossal colossal bet so expl explain what he’s done yeah he he has definitely bet the company and burned the boats for sure and the way to think about um you know kind of how it started was he had a bunch of cash I think he had like $500 million to cash give or take because he owned a he owned a a a publicly traded software company micro strategy which is like a 20-year-old company at that point and they did something completely unrelated to crypto like they do uh business analytics right so they do business analytics the $500 million was sitting on the company’s balance sheet um he personally started to get interested in Bitcoin he bought some personally I think he bought like $250 million of Bitcoin he disclosed that and then the company said hey well maybe we should buy uh Bitcoin as well and I think that there’s like two different types of people who buy Bitcoin especially for a company some are like I’m going to go day trade the balance sheet which is a horrible idea and will end in you know sorrow and then there’s another idea which is like I want to have an asset on my balance sheet that I have confidence in over the long run and what he basically came to the conclusion along with the board of directors and and some of the shareholders was wait a second the dollars are being devalued inflation is really high and so we’re like losing purchasing power the number of dollars are staying the same but the inflation is eating away at our purchasing power and so he said let’s go try to buy something else and they supposedly did this entire analysis they looked at like real estate stocks Bitcoin gold you know all these different assets they came to the conclusion Bitcoin was the thing that they should buy and so he was the first public company that wasn’t like a crypto Miner or something like that to go and say I’m gonna put like 85% of my balance sheet into Bitcoin now if he had like1 million no one would care but this was a company that was like a billion dollar company $500 million in cash he made this big bet and if the story just ended there I think a lot of people would be like wow that’s kind of crazy but then he like doubled tripled quadrupled down on it and he began to raise a bunch of money via uh debt offerings so he would like sell bonds and get really good terms get that cash buy more Bitcoin then he was like selling Equity at one point whenever the value of the company like was higher than what he thought it was actually worth he would sell Equity uh use that cash to buy more Bitcoin and he went from owning zero Bitcoin in July of 2020 to today he has more than 210,000 Bitcoin which is more than 1% of the Bitcoin Network um and it’s worth you know I don’t know something more than like 10 billion dollars uh and so yeah it’s an insane bet but if it works then we’ll call it a genius bet and so like history is written by The Victors let’s see what happens all right everyone a quick break to tell you about HubSpot and this one’s easy because I’m going to show you an example of how I’m doing this at my company when I say I I mean not my team I mean I’m the one who actually made this so I’ve got this company called Hampton you can check it out join hampton.com it’s a community for Founders and one of the ways that we’ve grown is we’ve created these surveys where we’ll ask are members certain questions that a lot of people a lot of times people are afraid to ask so things like what their net worth is how their assets are allocated all these like interesting questions and then we’ll put it in a survey and I went and made a landing page so you can check it out at join hampton.com wealth you can actually see the landing page that I made and the hard part with this is with Hampton we are appealing to a sort of a a higher-end customer sort of like like a Louis Vuitton or Ferrari so I needed the landing page to look a very particular way HubSpot has templates that’s what we used we just change the colors a little bit to match our brand very easy they have this drag and drop version of their Landing Page Builder and it’s super simple I’m not Technical and I’m the one who actually made it and once it’s made I then shared it on social media and we had thousands of people see it and thousands of people who gave us their information and I can then see over the next handful of weeks this is how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did this is where the revenue came from so it came from Twitter it came from LinkedIn whatever it came from I can actually go and look at it and I can say oh well that worked that didn’t work do more of that do less of that and if you’re interested in making landing pages like this I highly suggest it look I’m actually doing it but you could check it out go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started all right now back to MFM so he he currently has 14.96 billion dollars of Bitcoin uh in micro strategy and it’s up 97% all time so he’s put in 7.3 billion and now it’s sitting on uh about 15 billion of uh of Assets Now I think there’s one other piece to be honest about which is it wasn’t just that he was like hm we have 500 million on the balance sheet what can we invest in I think the truth was and this is what we were trying in our original interview with him this is what kind of started to come out and I was like this makes more sense to me and I kind of wish he was a little bit more upfront about it which was his stock was flat or going down for a long time like I think if you look at the micr strategy chart for like since I don’t know 20 2 to you know 2020 the stock the stock was basically flat from 2007 to 2020 before he started making his bet and that’s a long time right that’s 2007 to 2020 that’s a that’s a 13-year period And so what ended up what he realized was he’s like why are they not giving us any credit like we’re basically we’re basically valued at the amount of cash we have um they’re not valuing the business really at anything and the business is going to produce more cash but they don’t believe that we can invest this way well or that we can reinvest our cash well to grow the Enterprise value of the company so we have two choices we either dividend out all the cash or we got to do something with it that’s going to get our stock price to go up and I think the reality was he was stuck between a little bit of a rock and a hard place where he had this business that was too successful to to not continue but his share price would not move because investors just simply did not believe any of the stories about what they could do with the cash and so he kind of had to do something that I think that’s the part that that’s a little bit left out is like oh I completely agree and he was very loud about it on purpose which I don’t blame him for being I I also think that uh like maybe an extension of this is whenever you have a company that has cash on their balance sheet and it’s like accumulating cash uh it’s usually because they don’t know what to do with it like there’s not a clear how do I reinvest in my business and like drive more cash in the future and so historically what those companies have done is they’ve either dividend it out or they’ve bought back their shares but if your Shares are flat and there’s not a lot of volatility to it there’s not a lot of opportunity to buy back the shares for less than what like the company’s worth and so uh this is definitely like that’s why I say it’s a bet the company burn the boats situation where he went all in on this strategy now what I think is very interesting about it is uh he essentially has pioneered this like I have a business that does software analytics and kind of business analytics and uh that’s supposed to throw off cash and then I have like a treasury strategy but if you really think about um you know maybe companies in other countries like this is not foreign to them right if you’re in a country where like the currency is very volatile or or it could lose value very quickly a lot of times you’re managing foreign currency risk and you’re trying to get into dollars or something that’s more stable it’s just that no one in the US ever thinks about this or worries about it and so now he’s doing it with Bitcoin now I actually think one of the most interesting parts of the story is that no one’s followed him like there there hasn’t been a second micro strategy um I’ve talked to a lot of people and I’m like you know one company is a data point two would begin the trend and so I actually don’t have a good answer as to like if this guy has made basically 7 billion off of this bet why has no one followed usually in public markets like somebody does something you know back like uh 2017 2018 like companies were started changing their names to blockchain Long Island I changed to like Long Island blockchain right and they just start doing anything they possibly can right now ai like everyone goes and puts AI at the end of their name to try to you know get some sort of boost in their stock price but no one’s following sailor which like the omission of everyone else may actually be a data point that we should pay attention to as well well it’s a it’s a very scary bet I mean in order to do this I don’t know if you have to be a public company but you you have to be large enough to be in that ballpark and I I don’t know how much he must own the majority of the company because there’s been like border there’s been so many times where like it could have been justifiable to fire him over all this I think he has voting control but not uh majority ownership but he’s got voting control he has about I think he has about 50% ownership of the stock and so you have the unique combination of cash cow business been around forever founder CEO publicly listed already so he’s able to do these bonds cuz when you listen to him talk he’s like so I can borrow $900 million at like 0.1% interest and put it into Bitcoin which averages 100% anual appreciation for the last 10 but but there’s another detail to it and I’m definitely not an expert on like convertible Bond offerings in the public market uh but these are convertible bonds and they convert at a premium to the current price so without getting into all the intricacies is basically like people can get paid back or they could convert to equity at maybe let’s say 50% higher so if the company’s worth you know $10 billion today it’ll convert at 15 billion so if the company goes up a lot like you’ll obviously convert rather than get paid back and so it’s not exactly the cheapest Capital if you know you’re basically selling Equity uh but you are selling it at a 50% premium so it’s still attractive to do and so do when you look at this are you like wow this is genius this is terrible this is uh this is riskier than it appears what’s the pp takeaway because you’ve talked to this guy multiple times right we did an interview with them years ago and haven’t really paid too much attention since um you live in this space you know dayto day and you you know this guy a lot better than us what what’s your honest takeaway of this I think it is riskier for a company to sit with $500 million in US Dollar Cash on their balance sheet than $500 million worth a Bitcoin um and the reason being that um or or maybe the one clarifier is if you have a long-term oriented posture and you don’t need that cash for day-to-day operations right now Bitcoin will definitely do better from protecting your purchasing power over the next 10 15 20 years then the dollars will um and so it it’s a unique aspect to be able to not only have the cash but also not need it to run your business um and so yeah I think that he’s actually taking less risk than most of the public companies and and my expectation is actually that shareholders um at some point will start turning on some of these public companies that have tons of cash and saying like hey if we’re sitting there with you know I mean Warren Buffett sitting with a hundred billion dollars of cash like how much money is he losing for the business by leaving it in cash um and it’s unclear what else he could do dude you know what’s crazy is like uh you know there’s have you guys read the book The Outsiders it’s about nine different CEOs and the whole thing is like they’ve gone from CEO to Capital allocator and that phrase has thrown around a lot but that’s actually a really hard so for a person who starts and builds a company from scratch typically their skill set is like they’re a little bit of a wild card they’re probably good at product they’re probably decent at hiring and oftentimes that means that they’re not the best at managing and I have found amongst my friend group oftentimes that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be a good investor and so it’s pretty interesting to watch someone go from being like whatever you are when you start something a tinkerer uh to a proper Capital allocator that transition is pretty rare I think uh I think typically the people who are good at being investors they kind of start as an investor and they either buy a company just so they can get the cash flow to invest but those skill sets to see someone like transfer those skill sets or or evolve as a as an operator that’s actually really fascinating to see that the way I call it is you go from product manager to people manager to money manager that’s the transition right that is the the levels of the game in business that’s rare dump those three yeah very very rare very hard Warren Buffett has a great quote he says he goes I’m a better investor because I was a businessman I’m a better businessman because I’m an investor and for those who have the disposition to do both they can become very good at one because they were very good at the other but you’re right most people aren’t able to do have both gears like Sean you and I I think are quite good and I’m sure you are too PP but I know Sean more intimately like we’re pretty good I think at going zero to one do you think that and you’ve also invested do you think that you are better at starting versus investing and how’s that evolution been so far definitely not better at investing than I am at building because I spent 15 years building and then probably four years seriously investing right so just in the learning curve a more of a white belt right but I can see what Warren Buffett says which is that when you have built and run companies you are better at analyzing companies versus somebody who’s only ever analyzed a company from a sort of spreadsheet arms length away they um you know they they take everything at sort of face value right there’s a skepticism that gets built built up a healthy skepticism when you’ve actually seen how hard it is to do some things or um you know for example a lot of times in the stock market people react to the news it’s like Google puts out a you know a overly woke AI thing and people are like Oh Google’s dead Google’s not it’s like do you know hard it is to compete with these companies do you know how durable you know how how strong these businesses are you know how hard it is to create one of these and so the you know Mr Market goes up and down in its mood right it gets euphoric and it gets depressed but a business Builder has trained themselves to not have that same swing of psychology to go from Peoria everything is is amazing going to go up and oh my God it’ll never recover again a builder kind of has been through that themselves and therefore when they’re an investor they don’t get caught up in that kind of herd psychology that uh the worst investors do what do you think pump I I think that’s dead on um you see this not only in the public markets you also are starting to see it in the private markets like uh how many of the Great Angel Investors today are really just running companies or or building things themselves and then they kind of Angel invest on the side or vice versa um and so like Founders fund maybe is like the best example where they’re really you know putting a flag in the ground and they’re like look we want to be operators and we want to invest by operating day-to-day we learn which makes us a better investor and vice versa um I just think of like to win in the dynamic World we’re headed into you have to be a ball player and I always go back to the uh like you remember when you’re 12 years old you play like little league baseball and there’s like okay hey kid today you’re the pitcher tomorrow like you’re going to play shortstop tomorrow you’re going to be like the catcher oh now you’re like the designated hitter like you just have to be able to do all the different positions and there’s not really like this specialization that you get maybe when you get into high school college or or definitely in Major League Baseball and so like that in entrepreneurship is like the most coveted position to be able to stand in is like if you’re a ball player you can build things you can invest you can hire you can manage you can fire you can do all these different things um but it takes practice and and it’s difficult to do just like anything um and so like being the ball player is really what Warren Buffett figured out what Jeff Bezos figured out what Elon Musk figured out and that involves not only building things but also Capital markets and it looks like Michael sailor figured out a way to tap to Capital markets and unique wet it’s a good transition because you went from poomp Bitcoin crypto guy as like main brand and then you know it’s like oh Pomp’s doing this real estate conference pops buying these uh you know these sweaty businesses uh you’ve showed some range I guess in the last few years um I don’t know if as a hedge or just where your curiosity went or whatever but talk to us about what what are some of the non crypto weird stuff that you’ve been looking at I know you were looking at some uh like what was the the line painting business talk about that talk about some of the weird stuff you’re doing and why you do it so um I’ve always been doing this stuff I just never talked about it publicly you know if you go all the way back to uh when I was a kid like we always had some business we were trying to do I I I um built two companies right out of college and uh in between those companies I’ve remembered that like I taught myself how to do like WordPress websites and I would go around to small businesses and be like hey pay me five grand I like build you a website right and like that wasn’t going to be like some big thing but it was just like a way to figure out like could you gain a skill could you solve a problem could you make money right do it over and over again and so over the last couple of years we we’ve been doing uh quite a bit of work and building companies or or trying to buy these businesses but crypto definitely was the thing that I think uh most people weren’t talking about online that we felt like we had a unique uh kind of narrative or perspective uh the line business is a perfect example so I was reading uh the biography on Elon Musk and uh in it every Sunday he would have the Tesla team bring him a car and they would take him for a test drive of the self-driving uh Tesla and so there was this one area on the highway where it was kind of like a a really hard turn and the car kept messing up the human had to intervene and grab the steering wheel because the car wouldn’t recognize that this turn was there and so what the engineers figured out was that the road the painting on the road was actually degraded down and so they were likew we’re tired of Elon yelling at us every Sunday so they called the Department of Transportation and were like hey get out here and like repaint this road so that the car stops messing up and so they fix the road not the car then the car can drive correctly Elon stops yelling so like they just solved kind of their like local problem but it made me think I was like wait a second these like line striping or line painting businesses are going to be exponentially more valuable in the future because as self-driving becomes prevalent on the road governments are going to mandate that the roads are painted more often so that the cars from a safety perspective can actually drive correctly and so you probably can go buy these line striping businesses right now for like three times eida and you start to scale them and then as the government mandates them paint the road more often like Revenue will go up there’ll be multiple expansion and there’s kind of this thesis of like um you have smart cars on dumb roads but like everyone wants to go compete with like the smart cars but maybe actually the best way to make money is like go figure out how to take the dumb roads and just make them smart and interact with the tech uh if we really want to dig into like the nitty-gritty details like one of the hardest parts for people coming from the tech industry in doing deals with people who are not in the tech industry is there is a drastic uh asymmetric information advantage that tech people have and what I mean by that is like let’s say that you guys start a company tomorrow and you’re like hey I’m gonna raise a million dollars on a safe note we pretty much like you can pitch me we can have a conversation back and forth we can come up with the terms the safe document is already pre-drafted and we can have that done in like two three days like Tech has basically figured out these long-term oriented people reputation’s really important there’s some baseline shared knowledge and so deals get done very quickly and there’s not a lot of friction and then because it’s a power law game investors are incentivized to invest in tons of companies and Founders understand that like there’s tons of capital available when you go into these like blue collar kind of industrial manufacturing businesses like sometimes these people have been building the company like the line tring business they’ve been building for 20 years this is like their life and when we were having the negotiations with them like we were starting out with like what’s the point of the board of directors right like like there’s an education that goes into it and so it makes getting deals done very very hard because of that friction uh that exists and so it’s almost easier to do deals with people who have done lots of deals than it is to do deals with somebody who’s done their first deal like this is the big one um and and so like we’re still trying to figure out how to solve that problem but it’s just something that we’ve noticed that you know doesn’t get talked a lot about online what were the numbers of this company I don’t want to say because uh they’re they’re super great guys um but uh these businesses um they’re bigger than you think I I I’ve looked at a bunch of these businesses so there’s like line striping another one is um like traffic cones and barricades and so if you think of that business like every construction site you have to have uh these things there from a safety standpoint it’s legally mandated and it’s like the greatest real estate business in the world they can buy like a a hip height you know like four foot wide barricade they buy those for like 400 bucks and then they rent them out for like five to8 a day and once you’re on site you’re not allowed to leave the site with like the equipment can’t leave until the job’s done so like LaGuardia that was under construction for like 10 years right so like somebody was just renting them cones paying getting paid five six seven dolls a day for 10 years and so like those businesses are really interesting what ends up happening is uh my my buddy Brent Bor got this quote he says small businesses don’t stay small on purpose so a lot of times what happens is they’ll dominate like a local area but they have very hard time kind of scaling and so you can expect kind of Revenue is like mid seven figures usually they can get to like about a million a million and a half dollars in eida uh and then the owners are taking quite a bit of compensation for themselves like you know if you’re taking $500,000 and you live in kind of like a rural area or not a major Metro uh like you’re rich right and so it’s pretty good job uh to have uh especially with the freedom it comes with and do that for a decade like you know you got paid five million bucks and and probably living pretty good there’s also like a generational thing so uh my father is a small business owner my father-in-law is a small business owner my father owns a a produce brokerage meaning buys fruit from a farmer and sells it to Walmart my father-in-law owns a moving company and I’m I’ve like asked them questions like um like do you do you have managers like how does that work and they’re like what do you what do you mean I only have 18 employees like we don’t like there aren’t really meetings like I don’t do one-on ones and or they’ll be like well how do you do you just like do everything they like yeah everything goes up through me or it’s like well how do you hire it’s like well usually just one of the people who work there might have a buddy who hopefully like could could do okay you know what I mean like there’s not a um the mindset is when when you come from I think a different generation and also you come from poverty and it’s blue collar you’re like dude I make 800 Grand a year I’m rich like why what do you mean why would I do anything else do you know what I mean I also think that there’s this element of like ambition can kill companies um if you’re in the wrong business and so like we all get excited because like elon’s like we’re going to Mars right like I’m GNA put a chip in someone’s brain we’re like that’s awesome but I I have one friend um he’s got a retail store uh he’s got three locations in the United States one of them is in New York and I was talking to him recently and he’s like yeah all of our profit comes from the New York store like actually I might be better off if I shut down the other two stores right and so it’s like when you’re in business everyone wants you to expand get bigger like do all these things and he started down that path but he realized like wait a second like maybe actually the value of this business is that like I know One Market really well uh I picked a great location like it’s a great business and if I become ambitious I will suck all the profits out of this business and try to reinvest it and end up just like blowing up and so again if you’re running a tech company like you have to be ambitious the whole point is the power law but if you’re running some of these other businesses like yeah maybe you don’t want to make more than $800,000 because in order to do that you’ve got to double the team size your profit margin goes down your stress level explodes and like the odds of success don’t actually line up with how much you could make and so I do think a lot about like there’s like an ambition product and Market fit where it only pays to be ambitious in the right market with the right product dude my father when he travels my parents now once they got older they go to Florida for six weeks every winter he travels I swear to God with a file cabinet a phone that you could plug into the wall and a fax machine and he’s like well I have to have my work equipment like I I can’t work without this stuff and like I’ll get I I’ll get texts from him and I’m like dude are you trying to post on Facebook right now like I I this is a Facebook post isn’t it he’s like is that what I just did like and so like the idea of like evolving to some of these tools it’s like dude I’m like I don’t give a [  ] about growing this I’m just gonna like bail and it’s gonna die like there is no there is no exit what are you talking about the exit is when I die I I also think that small businesses like if people don’t understand what goes into running these small businesses like you just like oh of course the business just runs it’s somewhere like a tech company but um small businesses make up 50% of jobs in America and the country is literally built off the backs of these small businesses right in terms of GDP growth and all this stuff and we all probably know stories you know similar to this where like they’re going around with their equipment um I know somebody who’s an extended family member uh he has a business where uh it’s like a chemical business and he like mixes things in order to create the product and he won’t fly anywhere he will only drive because when he can drive he can put all of the materials in his car and then he’ll like show up so like when I was living in Florida he showed up and he’s like can I just like take over the garage and I walked in there and I was like this looks like a like a science lab like he likeing yeah and then he like makes the product and he goes to the post office every day and like drops the product off so they can ship it like all the stuff and you’re just like man this is incredible what goes into building these companies compared to like the tech world we just like oh like somebody like wrote some code and it just like operates 247 365 money keeps coming into my account because Stripes awesome uh it’s just a whole different way to kind of like play the game of business dude uh there’s a great quote in venture capital of like you you can’t put rocket fuel into a car like rocket Field’s great but if you put it into a car the car explodes and that’s what your your ambition thing is is like that you ambition placed into the wrong vehicle will often just result in pain not growth and um I had heard another interesting thing I was talking to a guy who’s one of the probably one of the most successful uh VCS in the last I don’t know 20 years and he was talking about Ai and he went and he met with a guy who is like a mega billionaire private Equity type of dude and he goes to this guy this guy’s like 80 years old or something and he goes to him he says hey uh you know I’m here I want to get your advice your wisdom on what I should be investing in you know I feel like the whole world is changing AI is super exciting I want to be in the game I want to be investing in the right AI projects but I’m not sure like open AI could kill any project at any given moment if they just release a new feature uh the valuations are a little bit crazy what should I do and the 80-year-old P guy goes think you should buy railroads and he goes [  ] and he goes well when you know Buffett has this great quote which is that um change is the enemy of the investor in in in their style of of compounding right because you if you want something that’s durable that’s going to compound over 20 years you don’t want to be in an industry of Rapid change where the leader one year could be gone in year three that’s not it’s great on the way up but it’s terrible on the way down right and so he was like it sounds like everything is changing so much he’s like my Approach is go find the things that are not going to change they probably have less people interested in them right now they’re probably undervalued and what I like about your Lin striping business pomp is that it’s a mix of both so it’s like a AI proof type of business because it’s painted lines on roads but it’s also going to benefit from all the advances in AI like one of the big advances is self-driving cars and so you would be the beneficiary without the competition versus if you said I’m going to go create better lar system or you know simulation system for for self-driving cars okay cool but you’re competing against the smartest people on Earth in the most competitive field ever where technolog is going to like make everything obsolete every three years and uh that’s just a very hard way to win somebody’s gonna win for sure but but it’s a very hard way to win versus what you’re talking about the line striping business if somebody’s listening to this and they have a line striping business I know how to grow this nationally like please get in touch with me I will help you like 100% another thing suit dude come to me and Sam you’re relatable you’re relatable guys you know I got a cool baseball hat Sam’s got his like denim collection over there you don’t want pomp the suit this guy’s on TV he’s too busy for you Sean have you ever been inside a Home Depot your entire life yeah dude I go in there all the time for advice I’m like I’m looking for some men can some boys come fix some things in my house so here’s thee my car go what are the other like maybe an extens of this is not only like what’s going to change what’s not going to change but like can you bring fresh ideas to Old Industries so uh there’s this new podcast that I’ve been listening to that’s fantastic it’s called rain makers uh and it’s this guy out in LA and basically he’s like trying to find investors that no one’s ever heard of before um and so he went and found them like and I think it’s not like no one’s heard of but just like the new generation hasn’t heard of and so one of the guys that he profiled was Philip Antz who uh he owned a bunch of real estate he did a bunch of like oil and gas uh bought railroads and there’s like a tie through of this guy’s career where he basically tried to find like value no one understood so he would buy up railroad companies not for the railroads but he’d buy it because there was oil underneath the ground right or he bought up like a bunch of local sports teams because he figured out a Playbook of how he could get the stadiums for free right and he have a bunch of real estate but the one I loved was um he bought Regal Cinema the movie theater chain when all of the movie theaters were crashing and everyone was like oh this is a horrible business like you can’t make money on tickets and food and what he realized in his like aha moment was for 20 minutes before the movie starts you have a captured audience that are just sitting there looking at the screen and so he started to sell ads and he made the movie theater and AD business and then all of a sudden he completely changed the unit economics and uh was able to like save Regal Cinema became this huge thing sold it Etc and so like one okay like that’s awesome but also like part of being a ball player and like understanding this I listen to that podcast episode and we had a conference coming up and I was like oh my God I have the same thing as the movie theater all these people are going to be sitting there and so they went to advertisers like does anyone have a TV commercial that they’ve already made pay us and we will just like play the commercial in the middle of the conference and we did it and so you like start to realize that not only are you taking new ideas to these old Industries but then once you like see it you can bring this across all sorts of different applications and I really think like that is the beauty of what you guys do on my first million but also like these podcasts and Twitter Etc is it’s just like find the ideas and then like capture them and apply them into your situation and this has been going on for a long time but now all these ideas are just much more readily available dude this guy Philip anuis um have you do you know who this is Sean no I’ve never heard of him Savage Savage he’s super lowkey uh but yeah it started real real estate in oil um but then now he owns AEG do you know what that is the entertainment thing yes the entertainment thing it’s basically I think it’s the second largest ticketing service provider behind live Nation AEG owns music events like Coachella so this old guy he owns Coachella he also you know AEG you buy tickets through there uh he owns uh all types of sports magazines he owns uh a couple sports teams he owns uh entertainment parks that he’s he’s like prolific This Guy’s super prolific and you guys want to know something else about him pop you probably didn’t realize this I was reading I read a lot of history I bought this book about the American West this [  ] guy’s the author he wrote the he wrote the book on like uh America expanding into the West This Guy’s super prolific this guy feel how do you say his name Philip Antz AEG is literally Antz Entertainment Group right is the AEG uh he he’s super legit he’s amazing this guy’s amazing I I’ve been fascinated by him but he’s uh pretty lowkey like there’s not I I don’t think you could find a biography on him uh he’s very under the radar This Guy’s super fascinating that’s cool okay I like it I’m sold the that he wrote the book was a great Twist by the way that is not what I thought you were going to say at all very fascinating guy um can we talk about pooms list uh so we have this segment Sean we have to do like a redo on this segment so it started out right with uh like years ago when my wife wanted to go work somewhere I was like where is a company where you can own the stock and it could like 10x potentially but it’s like a really safe place to work where it’s got 500ish employees you can get good matern well it’s cool I think it’s worth saying how old were you guys at this time roughly uh this was uh I was 27 so she must have been 24 so she’s 24 years old most people when they think about a job they’re just like I want a job what kind of job uh good job right like what do you want you don’t even know what you you don’t even really know what you’re looking for whereas Sam you you went all capital allocator onor you’re like look this is not a job this is an investment you trading your time for restricted stock units we’re going to pick the best RSU package that’s out there and you’re going to think about this as one concentrated bet where you’re going to basically get I don’t know let’s say a lot of these companies would give you maybe 40 50k a year of stock in addition to let’s just use round numbers like I don’t know 150k a year of salary and so you’re going to get over a four-year period you’re going to get $200,000 a stock and what you were saying was like how do you become a millionaire right how do you take that 200,000 of stock over that four years how do you become a millionaire without having a great idea without becoming an entrepreneur without becoming a great investor without without doing anything right no Capital no expertise you’re going to join as a as employee number I don’t know not even in the top hundred right 1500 right at a company that we all know about we can touch and feel the product so we’re not betting on thin air here and that fascinated me you told me about this and then we created a whole thing around it called Sarah’s list around her name which was what are the 10 companies or so that we think fit this criteria today and we did this and then we we did like a round of it and they all turned out to be or you know we hit like seven out of 10 that would have hit the criteria that we we had touched on pump we asked you to do your version of this pomps list um do you have any I we didn’t we just told you about the prompt we didn’t hear anything you had to say what are the companies today that you think fit this criteria where could you could go be I don’t know employee 500 or employee 1,000 get 200k of stock and might become a millionaire just off of the company continuing to grow and chug along these sort of later stage private company or public or private companies so I broke it up into three different buckets the first two are like 10x reputation so I don’t think there’s 10x left in the stock necessarily but I do think that if you go and join now they’re still like kind of seen as cool and new and fast growing and so your reputation uh and kind of your resume with 10x those two are like pretty simple open Ai and Ander I think are both at this point where uh if you go and you join like you may be able to make a couple hundred thousand dollar a year and like there’s probably some upside but open AI at like 85 billion basically you have to build a trillion dollar company to get you know 10 to 12x and so uh I think that is like you can make a really nice salary you can probably get some upside maybe you know two to 5x is like uh kind of base case but really why you would join one of those companies is because the reputation and kind of resume 10x uh is kind of the the value that you’re getting there andrel was on our original list my friend we we’ve W up to you on that one I don’t even think open ey really existed uh the the first time existed as like a research lab at the time we did that episode and it was not on our radar we we missed on that one yeah well well and I I think that um you know these companies that’s how they should mature right they should be like 10x economic opportunities and then 10x reputation it never works the other way like there’s no company that there’s a 10x reputation opportunity first and then there’s a 10x Economic Opportunity like the economics have to be captured to some degree and people be like oh that company is successful and then that’s where the reputation kind of follows let me ask you you you worked at Facebook and snap to you know Blue Chip logo type of things but also at one you know at different times have been incredible you know Financial things too when you joined those did you think about them from a a logo collector first mentality or a stock collector first mentality what in your Calculus I’m sure both were were beneficial but which one was more beneficial in your case yeah I mean Facebook’s probably the best example um I built and sold uh this company it was kind of like in social media anal itics we used a bunch of the apis I’d gotten to know some people at Facebook uh when we sold the company I like made enough money to like make more money than my friends who had jobs but not enough to like retire or anything like that uh and the guy said Facebook like what are you gonna do now and like for whatever reason I never even thought that like Facebook has like you know a building with like hundreds of employees or like any of this like it was just kind of like this thing I used and I talk to that guy over email and um so like why don’t you come out here and like interview for a job and I was like cool what job they’re like product manager I had no clue what a product manager was so on the way there on my I bought the art of product management which is a book about product management I read it I went into the interview and I just regurgitated everything I remembered from the book king of king of [  ] but I was just like I mean like that’s kind of what a product manager does right is like they kind of just like get enough information and then just like say some you know buzzword right and like get the product out the door um and so like definitely huge impostor s when I started working there um and I remember the last interview actually was with uh Sam leson uh who now is like you know very well known Etc uh and Sam got on and I didn’t know what to expect because they were kind of like hey like this is like the boss guy right so like you know be on your aame and he got on and he was like let’s talk about beacons and I was like what and like the be Facebook beacons that just come out like kind like RFID stuff and he just wanted to brainstorm and I was like oh this place is different right like like that’s not like a normal interview um and so the reason I took the job was not the money like it was it was good Sal but it wasn’t anything crazy this was at the beginning of 2014 the stock was probably like 50 bucks um oh you got a 10xer then well I sold it uh and bought Bitcoin way better were you about to say the reason you joined was kind of the people and the culture was different because I the first two companies I built I couldn’t get them to grow past a certain point and so I pretty much came to this like fork in the road I was like I can go to business school and like pay to try to get this education where I can just go join the people who seem to be like the best in the world at growing things which was the Facebook growth folks uh and pay me and like that literally was the evaluation and so I went to Facebook and they blew away my expectations like sure you get some you know resume uh benefit and all that kind of stuff uh but what I found in my career is kind of like college like no one actually cares where you went to college after like maybe the first like three to five years of your business career working at a place like Facebook unless you’re one of the first maybe like two to 500 employees um it kind of just is like all right you’re like kind of legit you know you worked at a place that has some sort of high bar but now there’s uh 880,000 people that worked at at Facebook as of like the end of last year so it’s kind of like 880,000 people got in right you know it does it have the same you know kind of cache as it did uh a decade ago unclear dude Sam did I ever tell you when I interviewed at Facebook you didn’t know I did not know that so when we were going to the acquisition process Facebook it was going to go we were going to sell to Facebook not not uh not twitch um they had the higher offer the better offer and they flew us out to to Seattle I guess is where we went and um they were like oh you know as a formality like your whole team has to go through this like kind of like leveling thing so you you interview you’re all in but like you have to get leveled and you you got to do it too and I was like okay great I’m excited I’ve always wanted to know what this process is like but then a part of me was like [  ] I better not blow this one right like the emperor has no clothes let let me make sure I don’t blow this whole deal here by uh by by going in wrong so I do the interview process during the interview I was kind of like you pumped I was just making up like I was literally just making things up every single question they asked I had I had no I had no idea what the answer should be and um you know it was completely out in the in the blue because I had done the interview process with the other people who were looking at buying us right and in theirs it was like tell me about a time where you showed resilience and I was like oh you know whatever this girl rejected me in seventh grade but I didn’t give up eighth grade I got her right like whatever it was like some stupid like character type of tell me a story tell me about of time you disagreed with somebody but you’ve found resolution Facebook was different they go okay let’s pretend you just released a feature and um you know you come in the next day and the chart of the usage looks like this and he showed this curve which like you know it was like normal and then it like drops off a cliff and he’s like but it’s not around the feature You released but this is this adjacent feature here’s what the usage looks like walk me through like all right how would you approach that what would you do next and I was like and I’m so dumb but I was like well I’d go I’m I’d go ask the guy who works on that I’d be like hey do you know uh what’s going on with this feature and they’re like okay I like that and then what would you do I was like well then I’d see what he says and then based on what he says that lead to my next question if he doesn’t know then I would do this what a stupid interview no it was it was honestly it was a great interview it was the best interview had ever done all of the questions were like this where there were real real scenarios where they got you to basically it wasn’t a riddle like some abstract riddle about like how many toilet seats are there in Bay Area and it wasn’t and um you know pre-prepped like character questions where you just cherry-pick one example that makes you look good versus the you know reality I was like oh there this is a problem solving job and they’re trying to see how I problem solve and there were all different variations of try to solve this problem but it’s like a real problem not like a very arbitrary problem that like doesn’t even it’s not even relevant to what’s going on what level did you get now what what was it last last last pod I don’t mean to sh my own horn but beep beep the guy told me that it was the highest it was the it was of all m&a that they had done it was the highest um like feedback rating they’d ever got now when he said that I knew I had been pretty much bullshitting the whole time during the interview so I was like I respected them even more I’m like these guys just want to win the deal like that’s clearly what they want they don’t actually care about my interview they know that they didn’t just flatter me and that this is going to totally work as it is working right now I could feel myself blushing I was like wow these guys are really smart they they threw out the actual interview results and they just told me what I wanted to hear to get me to pick them because they already had decided before the interview that they wanted to buy our company um anyways the last thing I was G to say p though there were so many people that were at Facebook that you’ve never heard of because there’s people you know of at Facebook there’s Zuck there’s Cheryl then there’s like the chamath level then there’s even like Sam Lon the guys I had T they interviewed with us I guarantee you guys have never heard him do you know this guy vij Raji do you know this guy vivec you probably never heard of these guys right they were so impressive these guys were so impressive and not just impressive like in the interview then their track record was impressive I was like so what are you been working on here at Facebook I’ve never you know heard of you guys they’re like well we built the uh games like the HML games inside of messaging and I was like okay how’d that go like do some people use that they’re like well honestly it kind of failed in this way but there was this one part of it that was actually pretty successful and it brings in like whatever like it brings in 500 million a year now and they’re like you know that was a kind of like okay hit but our big hit was working on this and he’s like yeah this guy Vic he’s like you know how office went from like Microsoft Office went from something you down buy a disc and you download and you like type in the key you pay $30 once to like this thing in the cloud Office 365 that you play every month for he goes yeah he created that like he was at Microsoft he like created it at his desk nobody kind of believed that that’s the direction they should go he did it anyways on his own nights and weekends and then like powered that through and got that approved now that’s like the way that Microsoft Works and I was like you guys are the no names at Facebook holy [  ] uh the level of talent at this place is insane dude it is insane I remember taking tours there my wife worked at Facebook and I would just walk around the campus and I would just see some of the conversations and hear some of the conversations and I was just starting the hustle which is just a daily newsletter and I was pumped that I hit 100,00 people a day reading it and I just remember walking around and I’m like I’m I’m a piece of [  ] I’m nothing like I am nobody give me one of these Facebook vests I want one of these I’m in did you see the vending machine where they have like MacBook chargers that you could just like push A3 and a just a giant like brick charger will drop out for you I’m like dude I just bought four computers on Craigslist for $800 a piece and that was a big deal for me and like I’m out here and you guys have a vending machine with mouse and Dr Dre headphones in it like what the [  ] sign me up I’m in the thing that Sean was talking about with the interview um so there’s three different tracks in the interviews when I was there um and I I didn’t believe I was a good interviewer like I didn’t know how to pick Talent basically and so one of the things that you can do is you can like volunteer to do the interviews more often um as a product manager like they don’t have like oh that’s the person who does all the hiring like the current product managers hire the prospective new product managers and so like the current team kind of like does the interviews right and so of these three tracks the one that Sean talked about was the favorite one that I like to do because it was like the most practical and so the example I used to give is like you launch something 50% of your traffic is down uh you come in Monday morning what do you do I probably did over a hundred interviews in like an 18-month period And so you hear all these answers and there’s only one time ever somebody said something to me and I immediately was like higher like strong higher he goes um I would immediately alert the entire team we have a problem like everyone else would jump to solve the problem but it was so obvious like this guy’s worked on teams before he understands like what happens in these scenarios like communication is key like everything that was wrapped in this like one single sentence and I remember just being like man you can tell the greats from like the pretty Goods in you know a 30- minute conversation just walking through a practical example because all of the uh Lessons Learned show up um and so I do think that’s one of the strongest things that Facebook does in terms of like Talent uh filtering what uh what are the other companies that you like all right so uh there’s a a bunch of companies that I’m going to put in like the middle bucket which are like the 10x potentials uh eight sleep I think is a huge business really I think they’re huge you think it’s 10x though think it’s huge but not a business no no yeah I think eight sleep so like you know look I I’m very uh good friends with a lot of folks there uh I think that they are probably one of the best operators uh like team of operators uh they do a lot of Revenue they have only like a 80 or 85 employees uh I believe that they’ve publicly said that the company’s been profitable and they’re selling a hardware product plus all of the software um and some of the things that they’re building now are just like really cool and I think a lot about like 10x Economic Opportunity uh is not just like hey can we make more money but you also have a really really strong Mission and so their whole idea of like for eight hours a day no one tends to a human can they compress that can they make it healthier can they you know do things like body scans Etc like all these kind of cool things um I think that’s a huge opportunity for someone the second is vaa uh the whole idea of like let’s go to space is not new but let’s go to space to help us back here on Earth is huge and so what vaa does is they’ve created uh space manufacturing facilities they launched them up into space they’re right now manufacturing drugs in zero gravity and then they’re bringing it back to Earth and so I think that that’s a pretty big one um explain that I forgot what’s the reason to do the manufacturing in space it’s a little unclear as like what all of the reasons are going to be so far but two quick ones are like there are some drugs that uh it’s either very difficult or not possible to uh currently manufacture you know with gravity so like zero gravity is a huge component of it and then the second thing is if they’re able to do this correctly it actually may be cheaper to do some of this in space than it is on Earth and so like their big macro bed is just like use space for the benefit of Earth rather than everyone else who wants to go to space to like conquer Mars or you the moon or or or whatever else but dude how does that make sense how could it be cheaper to do in something in space you have to get to space in a rocket and you have to have Labor in space like how could it Poss be cheaper dude there’s no labor so that’s the thing is they’ve built this like automated manufacturing like box basically and so you don’t need any labor and then now like the other thing you have to remember is like rocket launches are super cheap uh compared to what they historically were and then it’s not like SpaceX it’s like getting a rocket just for vaa right they’re like bringing tons of things up there all at once and so now you have like shared cost of an already you know 10x or more cheaper rocket and so the math ends up working uh in a really interesting way we got we got to get that guy what’s his name Delan we got to get him on the Pod to explain this I’m be like and I’m not gonna let him do no hand wavy [  ] I’m going to be like no no no no no oh the Box manufactures it in space and it’s cheaper than renting a place in Lexington like all right walk me through that line by line there’s no way right like this is crazy you guys bring him on and we’ll see what he says he’s obviously right like he’s he’s he’s not wrong I just don’t get it and I want somebody to explain it to me because there’s got to be other people out there that are like uh how does this work exactly all right everyone quick break because I’ve got a thrill of the shill I’ve got something to shill so here’s the deal about 8 weeks ago I released this new podcast called MoneyWise where we break down different people’s financials meaning we look at what their income is we look at how much money they spend and they break down their portfolio and then we’ll dive deep on a certain topic that’s a little psychological like what what do you spend on that makes you happy things like that well I said I was only going to make more episodes a few people begged me to make more because they’re really hard to make and you did so I made more so we have a season of seven episodes the first one’s released today right now it’s live and this first episode it’s with a guy who spends roughly $250,000 a month and we broke down exactly what he spends his money on his net worth his port folio everything it’s pretty surprising that people give out this information and so I’m really proud of this podcast so you can check it out the first episode is Live Now look up MoneyWise you can find it on YouTube but uh right now it’s not video it’s only audio but the audio is on YouTube and then Spotify iTunes wherever you get your podcast check it out and then tweet at me the SAR let me know what you guys think because I’ll make more after the these next seven but again only if you love them and I need to know if you actually do so it’s called MoneyWise it’s a podcast by Hampton my compy joint hampton.com and let me know what you guys think the S part as my Twitter all right back to the Pod so the the third one I’m shy to share this one because Sam’s head’s gonna explode but uh figure AI uh definitely I think is one um so for those that don’t understand what they’re doing um you know human labor is becoming a huge problem where there’s just not enough people to do all the jobs people get sick they’re tired they only work so many hours all that kind of stuff and so this rise of like robotics but not just like Bost Dynamic like dog robots actual like what they call humanoid robots um so these are like human looking things that walk around a warehouse they can pick things up they can pack things they can kind of do all the things a human could do um and one of the best things I I texted Sean this like one of the best ways to evaluate a company is like what enemies they pick and so uh here the guy uh Brett who runs figure AI he basically picked Elon Musk as like his competitor and so like you got to be a little crazy you gotta be a little ambitious you to raise a lot of money this guy’s raised you know I think over a billion dollars now um to go after this opportunity but the other thing that’s really interesting is like as an investor historically people paid attention to demographics how old a population was you know how fast it was growing all that now you’re gonna have to actually pay attention to Robotics and BAGI shos has talked a lot about this where uh if you don’t have enough people in society you’re going to have to replace them with robots and so measuring like how many robots are coming off the production line maybe a better sense of like where you should investing versus the human demographics um but I think that’s a big one once they raised their first round at $300 million I went and tour their like Factory or whatever and I went back I go Sarah let’s move there you’re going to get a job there we got and she’s like uh I don’t know anything think about robotics I’m like I already bought the books you got some read tonight uh we’re going to get you to work honey it’s going to be okay we’re g to get you caught up it’s like I’m the tiger mom like don’t worry we we’re enrolled you in Kuman you’ll be ready in three weeks yeah the coffe is brewing it’s gonna be a late night so uh come on Chop Chop let’s get to [Laughter] work the um I’ve got three more for you is uh tra I don’t know if you guys have heard of uh of this company it’s one of the fastest company uh growing companies in Founders funds portfolio what they figured out is uh similar to like uber where you press a button and a car shows up all of these light industrial manufacturing facilities they need tons of Labor so kind of the other side of the problem that figure’s going out after so what they do is they go to these like temp uh work providers but the problem is that the temp work providers you’ll be like hey I need a I need 50 people tomorrow and they’ll be like cool we’ll send you 30 because that’s all they have and then of the 30 that they’re supposed to send you like 20 of them show up and five of them are like hung over from the night before right so it’s just like it’s a horrible experience it’s super expensive all the stuff and this is the company where like the investors brag about the N it’s like on their about page they’re like we’re a 996 company right Savages I I met the founders and they were like have an Olympians work ethic and I was like I’m in like we’re just going to outwork everyone you know the truth about this company so I um I should have invested in this company I had a chance to invest in this I was like and then before I even heard their pitch I said I’m in because I heard something very similar to what you just said P not the Olympians work ethic the spelling be Champions work ethic the guy who started the company went to Duke and I know his brother and they both the brothers were like ESP on the ESPN spelling be like you know one of them won it and then the the guy who started tra he’s the guy who fainted midw do you remember that clip of the guy who starts spelling the word he passes out stands up and finishes the word it’s the most incredible clip I did not know that in ESPN history forget LeBron forget Michael Jordan this kid starting to spell a word passes out gets up says nothing about passing out and just finishes spelling the word flawlessly was absolutely incredible he’s the founder of tra when I heard that I’m like I’m in just send me tell me where to wire the detail uh wire the money and then unfortunately got too smart to ask my partner who knows a lot about Staffing he’s like well it could be hard for all these reasons and I was like I guess you know more than I do I’m just basing this off the spelling be performance turns out I should have just trusted my gut turns out he’s done all right I met him I met his brother at a party and he had won the the script spelling be right I’ve seen him on ESPN I see him at a party I recognized this kid from ESPN I’m like you I’ve seen you before I was like you’re the spelling kid he’s like uh yeah how how you know that was years ago and I go dude and this is annoying drunk Sean dude dude everybody wait dude spell my name he goes and he goes I don’t I don’t know your name I go it’s Sean and he goes I don’t know s h a WN I go no I beat him I beat him as if I spelled something as if he him spelling my name s h a an meant anything and that was the only time I ever interacted with this guy the next day I was mortified I was like dude what a absolute douche I was last night and I’ve been hoping to meet this guy again so I can apologize for this 15 years ago like bro sorry I made you name at that point now we know why he didn’t send you the wire details no no that was his brother that was his brother two different guys he beca his brother became like a a very successful poker player and then and did a bunch of interesting things that way both I think spelling be is like one of those hot beds of of like if you can get obsessed and about this like intellectual Pursuit you know means two things your parents are incredibly overbearing and you’re incredibly smart and so you know that usually will lead to to success 100% um next one is a placer.ai uh so I I’ve invested in most of these companies the only one uh open Ai andil and figure AI I I wish that I had um but uh Placer they basically uh it’s this Israeli guy and he was like Hey I’m gonna use like cell phones to create better mobile analytics not like what you’re doing on the phone but like where you are so originally his like pitch was like Hey I’m gonna like be able to tell people when you drive into the parking lot and like what aisles you walk through in the store and we’re going to sell all this analytics like really really granular uh kind of location data they just publicly announced that they’re doing a hundred million doll in annual revenue um and so when you look at that again like it’s for real estate right that that’s where they’ve seen a lot of people buy but like I think also like some hedge funds and a couple of other folks uh buy the data as well um you know $100 million is pretty much dris it and this is like if you want to have a career in like B2B you know software or analytics like obviously you’re not going to go to like an andil right this kind of like offbrand off industry but I think placers are like still got probably a 10x uh potential upside what’s their valuation in their latest round I think the latest public one is like a billion dollars so kind of like 10 times Revenue um so it’s not hard to see a business that you know already doing $100 million doll in annual revenue uh growing pretty quickly um you know still got some upside to it this is probably my favorite one of yours so far you got any other ones you had one more maybe I I’ve got two more that are kind of related so um I every’s all excited about like the Deep Tech stuff uh I I invested this company called rain maker and so rain maker makes it rain they’re flying Precision drones into clouds and they’re dropping chemicals in the clouds to Make It Rain um and so like that’s kind of crazy that is probably the riskiest one wow and then um kind of simultaneous to that uh if you look at like what’s like the cyber security version of all these deep tech companies there’s this guy Joshua Steinman who left uh I think he was on the National Security Council uh in the Trump Administration and he like realized wait a minute like there’s no companies that protect all of our public infrastructure so like the example he gave me was uh imagine what happens if someone can hack like the water treatment plants and change the pH levels of the water and have like massive you know Carnage or like you know really really screw with like a local area by simply hacking this like one facility that’s public infrastructure and doing something enough areas and so he’s creating a company called galvanic uh again super small probably you know on the higher end of the risk Spectrum but just like a really cool mission of um if you’re able to protect public infrastructure there’s like unlimited demand for this type of service uh and you can see how these businesses could get quite big uh given you know all the concerns with our adversaries and people kind of getting better at cyber warfare Etc dude I love that idea that’s a great idea that’s great and and what was that called Galvin g a l v n i c k wow that one and this make rain thing are are pretty wild yeah the the rain maker one like um people have been doing it’s called cloud seeding people have been doing that for a while uh and they’re specifically doing it in like China and the Middle East and stuff but uh there’s a world where like not only can they make it rain but also if you can change the weather pattern like you may be able to like prevent uh hurricanes from hitting land and you know doing stuff like that now of course you get into this weird world that like the second someone’s like hey I can like change the weather people are like right no like yeah you’re trying to play God whatever um but but I think that uh where they’re starting in terms of like going to Farmers and being like hey you know get what is basically precipitation in this in the clouds just to fall um you it’s a worthwhile Mission and and the founder is awesome he’s got a mullet he he works out he has a squat rack in the office and he’s just like we are going to be successful so you know let’s see what happens dude maybe I should do that for all my portfolio companies just gift them a squat rack just increase returns in my portfolio 20% I mean there there is definitely uh got to be some sort of study that like one people who just are in better shape like you have more energy you think clearer you know all that kind of stuff dude we got to ask you about two things this salana bet you did explain this this was uh this was baller Sam do you know about this no what happened so um I had a bunch of uh eth ethereum uh back from when I was mining it um and it was just kind of like sitting there gone up a lot and uh at towards the end of last year uh I was sitting there and I was just like why am I holding this like deciding to hold an asset is an active decision every day so I’m basically like saying I should go long ethereum every day that I don’t sell this and I’d been scared about uh like triggering taxes and like all like the normal lies you tell yourself as to like why not to make a decision and and I just said to myself like okay if I am going to sell this and not buy more Bitcoin what else would I buy and so I like went through a bunch of the cryptocurrencies and I was just like I think salana is going to go up a lot it’s gonna go up a lot more than Bitcoin I think it’s gonna go up a lot more than ethereum uh in this specific bull market because a smaller market cap there’s a lot of energy and excitement around it and and all that and so um over the years I’ve learned how to kind of like put positions on which I think is also like a very underd discussed thing I didn’t like sell everything and just buy buy this asset instead what I did is uh I bought a little bit of salana at $48 it started to go up a little bit more and usually when that happens people are like oh cool I was right instead I doubled the bet at 55 like the position is going in your favor and so I doubled down because it’s telling me like the market is telling me I’m right it kept going up uh I then sold 100% of the ethereum and I bought salana at $73 I think it was and so it gave me like a uh Blended price around like 65 bucks and so salana just went on a tear it went to $120 and I was like oh wow that was awesome like hopefully it keeps going and that was it I was like done but then the price started to fall and as it fell it fell from like 120 to 110 to 100 and I woke up one day and it was at $80 and over the years I’ve just learned like nothing’s changed with the thesis I got no more ethereum to sell to like you know convert over so like I’m going into the bank account and I just went and got more cash and bought it at 80 which happened to be about a 30% draw down which historically in crypto has been like a pretty good spot and then it’s ripped all the way up to like 190 is um and so it’s been a great trade but also it is uh I’m only able to do it because I’ve been doing this long enough and like learned how to put the positions on how to think about like when the position goes in your favor to add not like sell and take profits um but you also have to know what you own and like I don’t think I’ll own salana like five or 10 years from now it’s very much like for the next year on very bullish on this um and then like we’ll see what happens whereas Bitcoin like I’ll hold forever and don’t think that I’ll ever sell it first of all I mean kind of very uh you know good trade so first of all the very very well done not not easy to do what you just described the psychology around what you just described is I think more important than than the why but I do want to ask you you said the word thesis on salana so I have a buddy who has a insane amount of salana he owns like 40 or 50 million dollars of salana and I think this guy’s nuts for doing it he’s a very smart guy in general but I’m I ask him I’m like why why do you own this absurd amount of salana this is like what do you know that I don’t know please tell me so I can go buy it if you have some like incredible thesis and he’s like I just I li I think it’s going to go up that number go up thesis and he’s like well I think it’s going to be a bull market and a bull market it’s usually these kind of like second thir third fourth fifth coins that like get the highest runup um I see a lot of energy in the Eos people like these like all of a sudden it starts to sound a lot like I don’t know like uh you know we’re talking like horoscope type language for me and so I’m like and I’ve been telling him I’m like dude please just sell this thing and he’s like oh I just feel like the energy I feel like I see it a lot on Twitter it’s like oh my god dude are you sure that this is the reason to have 4 or50 million dollars of salana that is an absurd amount of this thing yeah on one hand it sounds crazy you’re like oh it’s like the energy whatever on the other hand like in this person’s defense what I would say is um when I first started investing somebody told me like follow the developers like that’s like a great investing strategy and so there is like a lot of development activity that’s Shifting the other thing is there is a pretty like wellth thought out investment strategy of like I want to buy the things that everyone’s gonna buy tomorrow today rather like I like if everyone else is GNA build a thesis around something then I want to buy it uh before they do like be contrarian that becomes consensus and I love the George Soros quote he’s like when I see a bubble I rush in right like like the whole point is that bubbles kind of like go bigger and further than you think that they can um and so let’s just say that like salana is a bubble selling an asset at the beginning of a bull market is usually in crypto like a pretty bad strategy um but also uh as assets get bigger the returns go down and so I don’t think it’s crazy to say like oh there’s a lot of activity around this there’s a really strong narrative or meme um there’s tons of coins and and things that are being launched on this and Bitcoin ethereum and Salon probably all go up but if you had to pick one of the three that goes up the most well it’s probably the smaller market cap asset that likely will outperform and and so I don’t think it’s like the craziest uh Theory the question is what is your thesis on when to sell and that’s what people in crypto including myself over the years like we have messed that up over and over and over again because timing markets is nearly impossible and when an asset goes up hundreds of percent you’re like well of course it’s going to double from here and then next thing you know it’s down 50% you’re like [  ] so what are you thinking with the salana one what are you going to do my theory in crypto now is uh selling is less to do with price levels like like in um the public markets people will hold a stock and they’re like okay if this ever gets overvalued I’m selling I’m trimming the position in crypto it’s much more cyclical and so I actually think that selling is more about what where are we in the cycle like time than it is like value right because there it’s hard to like what is the value versus price and is this overpriced or underpriced like it’s very difficult to do for these assets so I think about it a lot more as like is it the end of this coming year is it you know the beginning of next year is it the summer of 2025 like there’s some time frame that I’ll come up with and I’m like I don’t care what the valuations are like I’m just selling because it seems like the right time in the cycle more so than I have a price target for any one of these assets what was the second thing you were going to ask him about Sean Andrew tapate uh pomp interviewed Andrew tape before he was Tate you you you were on Tate before Tate uh what’s the guy like you you met him in person right um I did meet him in person he uh uh did an interview together in Miami um why’ you interview him at that time was he kind of big is that was it like kind of interesting person or what was the context I don’t really think that he had maybe he said a couple of crazy things online like crazy in the sense that you know people were like oh whatever like reacting to it but um you know he’s a four-time world champion kickboxer uh we had like dmed a couple of times um I I actually thought that he was just like an interesting person from the perspective of like he had a lot of uh uh commentary about things that people either weren’t willing to say or um like made me think and didn’t mean I agreed with everything it just like when you want when you find those people you kind of like hey tell me all your World Views and then like I’ll sift through the [  ] and figure out like what I agree with and what I don’t um and so I interviewed him and he definitely said some like things that I was like oh I I can’t release this interview like you know this is kind of like a little uh little spicy um and so what was interesting is I was like hey I don’t know if we’re going to like actually ever release this thing like let’s just kind of put it on ice and and we’ll go from there and then a year later like Society had changed culture had changed and he started to like become much bigger he went on a couple podcasts he said a lot of the exact same things and people didn’t have a problem with it so like it it’s interesting like he was saying the same thing for like a year or two years but actually culture became like a little bit more acceptable of some of the commentary and including things around like you know uh um the vaccine and like that type of stuff and like I think people just had more information to kind of evaluate these situations and so I was like all right it’s still a little spicy but like let’s release it and one of the like final points to deciding whether we were going to release it or not was I didn’t really care so much about the like really hardcore uh perspectives as much as like who are you as a person like how do you make money like kind of like you know the business and the person behind these thoughts what was his business at the time Hustler University like his course he he had a bunch of them they were like online businesses uh he you know he described them actually it was the first time that ever a podcast episode I had done was like cited In Articles where people were like writing hit pieces or like you know critiquing him and then they were like referencing things on the podcast so I’d get like a Google alert notification like oh like you’ve been mentioned in like the New Yorker or whatever and I’m like oh must be awesome like obviously I’m a cool guy and then you go you’re like oh I’m in an article where they’re like you know talking about misogyny and like all these things like oh okay um and so uh at the end of that interview he he asked me he’s like what’s the one thing you disagree with me today and what I say to him in the interview is I said to him I said every single thing that you’re saying has like this like kernel of truth but then you like extract it and have this like bombastic rapper that basically is gonna go viral online and he kind of like cracks a little bit and breaks character and he’s just like ah you’re a smart man he like shakes my hand and I think like that was the biggest takeaway was people don’t become viral and successful without being highly intelligent and he very well understood the human psychology and the way the internet worked um and so he had a message he wanted to get that message out to people he was able to communicate in a very effective way um and so people might not agree with everything he said but if you look at his tactics they have pretty much become standard in a lot of people’s like marketing today and so people kind of like saw this guy be successful on the internet get a message out and now you have a bunch of companies and individuals that are trying to replicate it and maybe it’s not the same message but like that structure was pioneering and so you’ve got to be able to like evaluate people and say hey I understand you for who you are I agree with some things you say I disagree with other things you say and then like can I learn something from you and to me the learning was uh he really really understood marketing and communicating on the internet in a way that I don’t think a lot of people did before they kind of saw what he did yeah and he kind of paid the paid the [  ] price for it too well in hindsight like that’s the second You Know lesson is like don’t become the main character right like or if you are you better be ready to pay that price yeah and it’s just you know I ask myself a lot look I I have a number of very successful friends who um nobody’s ever heard of before right and I’m sometimes like man that’s an amazing life like like you figured it out you fig how to be super successful and also no one knows who you are um there’s a lot of other people who like they enjoy talking to folks right you know uh Patrick bavid I saw a clip of him recently and he was talking about the fact when he sold his insurance company he was like I wanted to do something for the rest of my life that I enjoyed and talking to people and learning from them was like the thing and so he went he did all this Media stuff and and whatever and so I think you just gotta like know who you are as a person like what are you trying to accomplish professionally what what is your uh Comfort level with like privacy and like personal you know know kind of notoriety um and it’s different for everybody and so yeah if you want to become the main character then definitely you got to be ready for you know everything that comes with that good or bad well dude you’re dressed as the main character today you came on here you’re looking good best dressed award for 2024 is in your hands somebody has to come take that belt out of your hands for my first million thanks for coming on dude it’s always fun to talk to you thanks for having me all right that’s the pod