3 Business Ideas You Should Start in 2024 (ft. Pomp) (#524)

Sam Parr

Well, I guess we're live. Pompe, do people ever introduce you by your real full name, or are you just Pompe at all times?

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, some people do. But people get offended if I go to a conference and I introduce myself as Anthony. Then later they're like, "Wait, you're Pomp? Who knows you as Anthony?" Well, that is, you know, my name. My parents did name me that.

Sam Parr

Well, well then, we're going to keep you as Pomp. We have Pomp here! You've been on the pod a handful of times, and we've talked about you a handful of times. We've also been on your pod a handful of times, so it's nice to have you back. Congratulations on the new family member! You're here recently after doing it, so we appreciate that.

Anthony Pompliano

yeah of course just just 3 dads hanging out on the internet who who could've guessed I had

Shaan Puri

A good joke that I didn't get to tell the other day was when Sam Altman was in the news. Then, like, Jack Altman comes out and says something, and then Max Altman comes out and says something, and his sister Annie Altman comes out too. I'm like, "How many Altmans are there?" There are more Altmans than Pampillanos now! What's happening here? I feel like you have brothers coming out of the woodwork as well. Do you feel that your sibling dominance is threatened in any way by the Altmans right now?

Anthony Pompliano

I did see people making that joke, and I did Google how many Altman's there are. There are not more Altman's than Papillano, so we're safe for the moment.

Sam Parr

What? I don't even know how to describe you. I think a lot of our listeners will know who you are, so we don't have to spend that much time on it. You started out as kind of a one-trick pony. You were basically the guy on Twitter who talked about Bitcoin. But now you've evolved significantly beyond that. You've got the Pump Media empire, and you've also started, I don't even know how many businesses—many, though.

Shaan Puri

Hold on, Sam. Can we do an analogy? You know, going from Bitcoin with laser eyes to real estate and all kinds of other things that he's doing now. Is this like Justin Timberlake from *NSYNC* going solo? What’s the right analogy here? Who has made such a transition, such a life pivot like this? Is there anyone that's done this in Hollywood?

Anthony Pompliano

Well, here's the thing: it's not really a pivot if you kind of expand out off of the internet. If you think about it, I started my career building companies. Then I went and worked at Facebook, and then I started investing. Once I was investing, that's really where kind of the Bitcoin stuff happened. But even the stuff on the internet, I worked directly with, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg for a short period of time at Facebook when they were trying to figure out how to grow their audiences on Facebook. I remember early on when Fuck Jerry, the Instagram account, was trying to go from Instagram and figure out what their Facebook strategy was. So the reason why I say that is, like, I don't know, think of someone like Kim Kardashian. She goes from a sex tape to a reality TV star, to an entrepreneur billionaire, to now criminal justice reform. I think she's going to be President of the United States one day. You look at that and you're like, actually, the same thing that makes the sex tape go viral gets you elected to be president today. So, in some ways, it's actually the exact same skill set, just packaged up in a different way and with different ambitions or aspirations.

Sam Parr

You have this really good job of like brute forcing yourself into interesting networking opportunities. I feel like Sean is actually better at this than I am, but I just hang out with a small crew of internet nerds. You've done a really good job of meeting actual big shots, I think. Right? I mean, I don't even know all the people that you know, but you were telling me how you met Julian Robertson, who's the guy who started Tiger Management.

Anthony Pompliano

tiger management

Sam Parr

But you actually, like, you just... you aren't trying to, but you just name-dropped Zuck. I think you've worked for Snapchat and hung out with Evan a bunch. You've done a really good job of meeting all these crazy, fascinating people, you know what I mean?

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, I mean, I think it's just like if you're a curious person, other curious people want to be around those types of folks. Also, I probably, more so than many of my friends, say yes to opportunities even when it's not very clear what the purpose is for doing this. If you do that enough times, it's just kind of like shots on goal. You will meet some of these fascinating or successful people, but each one of them is very different. I mean, Julian Robertson's story is interesting. Mark Yusko, who started Morgan Creek Capital Management, and I did a joint venture with him to raise a couple of venture capital funds. Mark was this former CIO of the UNC Endowment back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At that time, Julian Robertson was kind of like in his heyday. Hedge funds were really getting off the ground, and Mark Yusko and UNC had a really big hand in getting the endowment specifically to invest in these hedge funds. Julian Robertson was on his board, so that's how Mark and Julian met. Now, as Mark would tell the story, eventually Julian was like, "Hey, this kid Chase Coleman, who now runs Tiger Global, is leaving. I'm going to give him some money," and he sent him down to go talk to Mark. Mark gave like $6 or $7 million to Chase Coleman to start Tiger Global. Now, when you look at that, you're like, okay, Mark Yusko and Julian Robertson had known each other for 20 or 30 years. I think it was 2019 when Mark called me up one day and said, "Hey, now's the time. We're going to go meet a bunch of the legends of Wall Street," and one of them was Julian. Julian was actually the first stop of the day. The things I remember from it are, one, you kind of feel like you're going to meet a legend, so more so than usual, you're nervous but excited. We walk in, and he's had the same office for a number of years. He had three secretaries, which I thought, first of all, is just like, that's baller. They all sat outside his office and each had different responsibilities. So I was like, okay, that's different. Mind you, Julian at this...

Anthony Pompliano

Is... I think like he's definitely in his eighties. So, we go in to see him, and he sits down kind of in this almost like living room area in his office. He was the single most curious legend of Wall Street I've ever met. He sat with us for an hour and just kept berating me with questions, trying to actually understand Bitcoin and blockchain technology and all these things. You're just like, "Man, this guy does not have to be here right now. He does not have to be doing this stuff." Like, he is rich on rich on rich, and he's also pretty old. He's gotta know that he doesn't have another 50 years to live, but he's sitting here trying to learn. So, about halfway through the conversation, all of a sudden, you could see like the proverbial light bulb go off in his head. He just sits back on his couch, looks up at the ceiling, and starts talking to the ceiling. I remember being like, "Damn, am I boring? Did I lose him?" He had a microphone in the ceiling and a speaker so he could talk directly out to the three assistants. He basically just started asking, "Hey, send so-and-so in here," like, "Go find this whatever." I was like, "This guy built like Jarvis in his office way before anyone else has." He is absolutely a legend. So, it was a really cool experience. Unfortunately, he passed away, but things like that are just, you know, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that are pretty cool. I can't find this client info.

Shaan Puri

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Sam Parr

And what I know about Julian—and maybe Sean, I don't know if this guy has ever researched this—I'll explain to you, but also to the listener. Julian, he... what was it called? Tiger, right? I mean, it was just Tiger Management. So he started Tiger, which was revolutionary and made him worth, I don't even know how many billions.

Shaan Puri

It was revolutionary. Why? Because what did they do differently? Did they just make good investments, or did they actually do something different?

Anthony Pompliano

He’s one of the very first true hedge fund managers. He basically said, "Hey, I'm not just going to do value investing; I'm a true hedge fund." I think he had a lot of what we all look at on the internet today, where we say, "Oh, that person's doing something interesting." It was different. He had high conviction and ended up being right. As a result, he was able to gather a lot of assets and drive a pretty good return. He did this at a time when the whole concept of hedging or going long and short wasn't necessarily the traditional way of investing. I don't know if they actually consider him the godfather of hedge funds, but he could be considered that. The lure of Julian expanded even more when a bunch of people who worked for him left. He would seed them, and when he would seed them to get them off the ground, those guys, now known as "Tiger Cubs," became very successful. Tiger Global is probably the most successful among them. So, it was like he was good as an investor, but he was even better at identifying talent and seeding these people to create great firms.

Shaan Puri

tiger cubs is like paypal mafia basically of finance

Sam Parr

But it's way bigger. So, Google "Tiger Cubs Finance Wikipedia," and you could just go to the Wikipedia page. They have sections called "Tiger Cubs," "Tiger Grand Cubs," and "Tiger Great Grand Cubs." It literally looks like, if I'm just scrolling through, it looks like 100+ names. I guess he found these guys, and because of his culture and kind of his vibe, they've all taken a little bit of him. It's some of the biggest names, including that guy... what was the guy's name? Bill? Who had like that... who like brought down the economy? Was it a...?

Shaan Puri

he like unplugged the he unplugged wall street accidentally he like tripped over the cord and unplugged it

Sam Parr

Yeah, he like brought down the economy through a couple of bad bets. Then there's Chase Coleman, who is worth, I don't know, $20 billion. He has Tiger... man, what was it called? I'm getting all the names wrong. Tiger... and then you have like Couture. I can't even say these names because these are all names that...

Shaan Puri

oh juicy couture oh wow this guy's prolific man

Anthony Pompliano

you started gucci couture

Shaan Puri

These are... no, I don't think it's a word you've only read. You've never had to say it out loud. Like, you know, yeah, it's embarrassing. It's so funny. I was just reading this word and I don't know what the hell it is. What's her name? I have no idea how you say this.

Anthony Pompliano

it's the words that you accelerate through you just say them really quickly and hope no one noticed that you mispronounce them

Sam Parr

What attributes do you think, other than curiosity, he had that kind of spread to all these other guys? For example, Chase Coleman is an interesting one because you can't really... if you Google Chase Coleman, the guy's worth, I think, $15 billion, something in that range. There are like four pictures of him on the internet. Like, what? These mysterious guys are always fascinating. What attributes do you think some of these people have that started with Julian?

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, so I obviously met Julian. There are a bunch of other folks that I've met over the years who would kind of fall similar to Julian. Unfortunately, it is usually not in a situation where I'm like, "Hey, I just want to learn from you." You're usually going to ask them for something, whether it's for money, for an introduction, or whatever. So, the power dynamic is definitely off, and it would be weird to sit there and say, "Hey, by the way, now that the pitch is over, let me grill you for 30 minutes." But in those conversations, what you basically find is that they're all very, very curious. Two is that these guys just have like **brass balls**. I don't even know how to describe it other than that. They are willing to make insane bets at times when other people are not. Another person that maybe doesn't get the same fame or recognition as Julian, but I put up there as one of the best investors over the last 50 years, is Bill Miller. In the late nineties, people were giving him a hard time because he said he was a value investor, but he started to buy tech stocks. Obviously, tech exploded, and he was outperforming everybody. There's a book that I recently read where he was the only investor to outperform the S&P 500 for 10 years straight in the nineties. Everyone was like, "You're not a real value investor." First of all, it's stupid to say, "Oh, your results don't count because you didn't actually do it the way you said you were going to do it." But Amazon was one of his big bets. When Amazon crashed like 90% in the dot-com crash, Bill just backed up the truck and bought more. I think at one...

Anthony Pompliano

He was the single largest outside shareholder of Amazon. It only put like 15%. As you look at that, you're like, okay, one, you have to find Amazon. Two, then you have to not get scared when it drops like 80-90%. And then three, even if you're not scared, you then have to hold your nose and put way more money in to buy all of this extra equity. I think that is a common theme. It's just like conviction and the ability to bet over and over again, regardless of what's happening. Then the last one is like, these dudes are junkies, man. They're obsessed. I almost think of it like kind of a gym rat. They not only are curious, but they do the work. In that book about Bill Miller, they talk about how he was in Baltimore and he had seats behind home plate for the Baltimore Orioles. He used to bring research reports and read them in the stands in between innings. It's just like, okay, nerd, right? That's insane! But also, that's why you end up owning 15% of Amazon. It's because you did the work; it doesn't happen by accident. I think that's just a great example of all of these folks who've been super successful. Those are common themes that they all share.

Sam Parr

That's intimidating, I think, right? Like to hear the story, it's like... when I hear that, I get... my reaction to the... there's...

Shaan Puri

No more intimidating phrase than "that's intimidating," I think, right? I'm scared, right? Guys, no, you're right. Also, I think the hard part is that the line between genius and idiot is so, so thin. It's like, "Oh, am I Bill Miller backing up the truck when Amazon crashed 90%?" Or am I just a fucking idiot putting all my money into a loser that is showing it's a loser right now? You know that history is told years later. So I think that's the hard part. You have to have not just conviction in the investment; you have to have conviction in yourself. Despite the market conditions and the current results right now, you have to be able to correctly differentiate between a winner and a loser. If you don't have that conviction in yourself, you can't even have the conviction in an investment to pull that off.

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, you're basically saying, "I'm smarter than everyone else," right? Like, everyone else is selling this thing, and I'm going to go buy it. I mean, again, that's why they call them, you know, kind of like the "masters of the universe" in the hedge fund world. The people who end up making a lot of money actually seem to be smarter than everyone else. Now, how many of those are there? Well, there's way less than the number of people who claim to be, you know, those masters of the universe. And that's, I think, Sean, the difference between the fools and the geniuses.

Shaan Puri

I'll tell a story that's like that. My friend is in real estate, and he was making his early fortune in his mid-twenties, around 2006-2007. Then 2008 happened. He went from $0 to $25,000,000 in like 2-3 years, thinking he was super smart. When 2008 hit, he described it later, saying, "There was like a tunnel, and everyone was running out like there was a fire on the other side of the tunnel. They were running out and they were like, 'Here, take this!' I was like, 'Wow, they're just giving me this! This is amazing! This price is fantastic!' I just kept marching forward while everybody else was running away, screaming 'Fire!' and handing me their assets on the way out." It turns out he should have run away from the fire because he lost everything in that 2008 crash. That same feeling was present during the dot-com crash. Everybody was yelling "Fire!" and running away, selling things for pennies on the dollar. The difference, I think, ultimately comes down to whether you can tell yourself why you were buying something when everybody else is selling. Do you have a belief in this? I heard someone say once, "I had somebody else who made a fortune during the dot-com crash. She said, 'Yeah, it was amazing! Everything was on sale! It was Black Friday! Everything was 80% off! I couldn't believe it! The best companies in the world were 80% off!' I don't know if they were going to return back to where they were then, but I just knew these were still the best companies in the world, and now they were 80% off." So, you hear stories on both sides. You just have to be careful. You don't want to be the guy running into the fire. How do you differentiate? I think you have to have some ground truth that you believe in, something you're willing to stand on. You're willing to lose on it, and you're willing to look back and say, "I'm okay if I'm wrong on this. I'm willing to lose the money I lost if it turns out this idea was incorrect."

Sam Parr

But when you guys hear those stories, is this like one of those things where you're watching a UFC fight and you're a little drunk, and you're like, "You know, I think I could maybe get a lucky punch and compete"? You know what I mean? Or do you guys hear this and you're like, "I'm just not in the same league," or "I don't even want to be"? Do you know what I mean? What's your reaction when you hear those stories?

Anthony Pompliano

I mean, I think it just depends on this "circle of competence," right? You know, if you look back, there's only one time in my life where I've had the conviction, felt like I did the work, and really backed up the truck. That was with the Bitcoin stuff. Bitcoin had gone from $1,000 to $200,000 in 2017, then crashed down to about $32,100. I went on national television and basically said, "You guys are idiots. This thing is going to come flying back. We're buying," you know, blah blah blah. One of my favorite memories, which has kind of gotten lost in the internet archives, is that we issued a $1,000,000 bet to anyone on Wall Street. We said, "We'll take Bitcoin; you take any other asset. Just pick anything over the next 10 years. If you beat us, you get $1,000,000. If Bitcoin outperforms, we get $1,000,000." And no one took it. At some point, you're just like, "Okay, that's enough of a signal that people may not have conviction, but they also know the person not to bet against." I think that's something in UFC. You may look at a UFC card and think, "Okay, I think I know who's going to win these five matches." But for that one match, you might think you know who's going to win, but you're not going to bet against the other person, so you sit that one out. I feel like a lot of times there's that level of conviction across the market. With Amazon, for example, people knew it was a pretty good company, but no one had the conviction to buy. The same thing happened with Bitcoin when it crashed. Everyone was like, "I think this is interesting, but I don't have the conviction to buy." So really, it's less of a leap sometimes than people realize. But again, I've been doing this now for a decade, and there's only one time I can think of where I was like, "Oh yeah, I think I actually know something everyone else doesn't." Any other time I even tried to think that way, I was like, "I'm probably going to lose all my money. I should just sit down."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think that's good. You have to identify that these things shouldn't be like once every month. You have this grand new conviction bet. It's like maybe once in a decade that you see something that is so non-consensus but you believe in. It's also hilarious. Did anybody consider taking you up on that deal? Were they just like, "Somebody walked into Tiger and they're like, 'Sir, Tony Pompliano has offered a $1,000,000 bet,' and they're like, 'I don't know, Tony, about all that.'" Did anybody even register? Like, what happened to that? No?

Anthony Pompliano

Like, CNBC wrote an article about it. It was definitely out there, right? But here's the funny part about the whole thing. The people who were even considering it were all the fools that just wanted media coverage. They were trying to come up with these weird aspects of the deal. Like, "Okay, I'll take your bet, but we have to take the return, divide it by 2, multiply it by the number of times I jump on my head," you know? And then also, "I get to multiply..." We're just like, "Dude, you're way too smart for us. Obviously, we just want to straight up bet." If you're interested in that, let us know.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, also they could have perfectly hedged that bet. I think if they just bought Bitcoin in addition to making the bet, right? So, like...

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, I like to think we issued the bet before the smart people started paying attention. So, like, you know, we were good, or somebody would have figured out how to definitely beat us on it.

Shaan Puri

Were you inspired by the Warren Buffett $1,000,000 S&P 500 bet? Is that where you took it from?

Anthony Pompliano

I think that was one of the smartest things that he's done. Warren Buffett is interesting because a lot of the advice he gives is, you know, pretty solid. For example, the **circle of competence** is one, and then there's value investing. All these things we're kind of talking about here, I think, very much draw back to Buffett and then obviously Graham and Dodd and all these guys. But he is also a master marketer. Warren Buffett was the original finance influencer, right? I've joked a million times that if he were alive today in his thirties, he'd have a Substack, a Twitter account, a podcast, and he'd be streaming on TikTok, doing all this stuff. He understood how to leverage the tools he had at the time with the media. He didn't need to do it, but a way to really continue to drive the allure of Warren Buffett is to issue the bet and say, "No hedge fund manager can beat the S&P over a decade," or whatever. We just talked about in the nineties, only Bill Miller did it, right? So it's very hard.

Sam Parr

There was a time when I was really beating myself up over this podcast. I was asking myself, "Am I going to be a content creator, or am I going to be a businessman who actually does the damn thing?" I started reading a lot of biographies, and I began to think about it differently. You realize that many of these great people, whether in business or not, actually had newsletters. I remember Chamath recently came out with a newsletter, and I thought, "Why the hell does this guy need to do this? Why is he doing this paid newsletter?" But then I thought about Warren Buffett. His annual letters were basically newsletters; he wrote them as such. I also read about Ben Franklin, who had a newspaper and wrote constantly. Then there's George Washington, who frequently wrote editorials. Bill Ackman does this too; he uses Twitter now, but before that, he had other platforms. I remember thinking, "No, actually, some of these greats who are successful businesspeople are also content producers." Maybe that's not their primary income source, but they really are wonderful content creators. You know what I'm talking about?

Shaan Puri

I like how you just used "content producer." "Content producer" is nice. That's better than "content creator," which is better than "influencer." Actually, I think that's all that we need, guys. You just laid out your options: do I want to be a content creator, like an influencer, or a businessman? I think we actually just need to be content men. We need to level up the phrase so that we don't sound like little bitches when we say, "Oh, I'm a content creator who tweets all day." It's like, no, no, no. You're a businessman. I'm a content man. We're just a couple of producers. Well, I...

Sam Parr

Remember one time we had this guest on, and Sean asked this particular guest who created courses. Sean said something like, "You know, I create courses too, and sometimes I feel like a fraud because if I'm so good at this, instead of teaching it, I should just go and do it." I thought that was a really good question, but it really offended this person. Sean, you didn't mean to offend them, and I didn't think they should have been upset. However, I also had that same thought: "Am I a fraud?" But then you start thinking about it. Well, you know, Warren Buffett actually taught a Dale Carnegie course. He also taught a finance course—I forget at which university—but it's actually common for some of these people to be teaching while also creating. That has kind of helped me feel less embarrassed sometimes about what I do.

Anthony Pompliano

I think that you can go through tons of entrepreneurs and tons of financial managers. This is very, very common. There's a question of, if you can't teach it, do you actually understand it? It's almost like a flip side to it. But if you really kind of just zoom out, you're like, "Okay, what is all this content stuff?" I've been there. People would be like, "Oh, he has a podcast," and I used to be like, "Cringe!" It was like somebody stabbed me in the stomach and twisted it when they would introduce me that way. I felt like they were disrespecting all the other work that I did to say that I have a podcast. Yes, I'm a podcaster, but also, like, I wear shoes. Are you going to introduce me as, "Oh, he wears shoes?" So I remember kind of going back and thinking about, "Wait a second..."

Sam Parr

it's it's it's it's like calling milk cat food you know what I mean

Anthony Pompliano

it's like same thing to the cat food

Sam Parr

yeah it's like you that that that's not totally fair

Anthony Pompliano

So, what you eventually realize is that it's just marketing. At the end of the day, it really is just marketing. Whether it's Twitter, whether it's a podcast, the people who tend to be good at it don't think of it in that way. They don't sit down and create a marketing calendar. It's more like they're just doing it casually, like when they're taking a poop.

Sam Parr

they pull up their phone

Anthony Pompliano

They start tweeting random things, and like, they go viral, right? At the end of the day, it's just marketing. So, in some weird way, maybe we all shouldn't be ashamed or cringe when people say that stuff. If you're better known for how good you are at marketing, maybe that's actually telling you something, right? I think we all have that as almost like something that eats at us or is like an insecurity. But whatever, who cares? If they could do it, they'd do it themselves.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and to clarify, Sam, I never said "fraud." Fraud means one thing. I said I feel like a *little bitch* when I do courses, and there's a big difference. Fraud means you're misrepresenting yourself. A *little bitch* means you're representing yourself as a *little bitch*. You have to ask yourself, is that accurate or is that not accurate? And yeah, that's how I felt sometimes. I felt like a *little bitch* for doing courses when it's like, should I?

Anthony Pompliano

should I

Shaan Puri

I should be doing something else with my time. I like to teach, but maybe that's not the best use of my time.

Sam Parr

Sorry, I paraphrased that incorrectly. I was trying to... I actually think I made you sound better, but you know.

Shaan Puri

I'd be honest, I'd rather be honest. Okay, Pump, you brought some ideas for us. You know that this is the Idea Podcast. You brought some ideas, so let's rattle them off. Start with number 1: What ideas, trends, or opportunities do you see right now in the market?

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, so this first one is something we're actually doing. I thought a lot about it. **Housing affordability** is the worst it's been in this century. We continue to see people worried, like, "Hey, I want to buy a house. Should I rent? Should I buy? What are interest rates going to do?" All these different things. But there's no dominant voice in terms of news commentary and data. So, we started a company called **Resi Club**. The idea, really in the beginning, is just to educate people about what is happening. I'm not an expert on residential real estate, and I don't know that many other experts in the field. So, we were able to partner up with a gentleman named **Lance Lampert**. Lance was the real estate editor at **Fortune Magazine**, so he's like, "coo coo legit," right? He's got 75,000 followers on Twitter, and a lot of people in the industry follow him. We basically just said to him, "Look man, we want to build the dominant platform in residential real estate coverage. Why don't we do it together? We know how to scale things, we know how to grow this stuff, and monetize the content. You are the expert, so let's partner up." We've gone ahead and just got started; it's about two months old. I love these types of businesses because they kind of look stupid almost in the beginning. They're like, "Oh, you guys just created a newsletter?" Like, "Yeah, that's exactly what we did." Then it turns into a media site, and then it turns into a data product. I don't know, ten years from now, are we going to have the information to go and seed general contractors in different markets to actually build affordable housing? Maybe. So, you start with this small little thing that you can build profitably, and you don't have to raise money or do anything where there are these huge expectations. But as you grow the business, you can increase your ambition over time. I think a lot of people start with massive ambition, like, "Let's go to Mars." Sure, there are some companies where that definitely makes sense. But for businesses like this, it's just like, "Hey, there's a problem around housing affordability. A lot of people aren't talking about it. We should have more people talking about it." Then we'll figure out how big it can get and how ambitious we can be over time, but we kind of earn the right to go do that. And so, that's what we're doing. How much?

Sam Parr

did you fund it with

Anthony Pompliano

Way less than people would think. We were profitable within the first month, and so we actually wouldn't have even needed to put money into the bank account. But I think we put $100,000 to get started and never touched it because, basically, within the first week we were profitable.

Shaan Puri

And the market for this is... Is it brokers, real estate agents that want to pay for this? Or are you looking at investors? Or is it the average person who might be, you know, on Zillow looking for a home?

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, so the beauty of residential real estate is that it's the largest asset class in the world. However, none of us who are like, "Oh, we're so smart. We're business people, we're finance people, we have podcasts," ever think about residential real estate as the largest asset class in the world. Instead, we think about stocks, crypto, bonds, or whatever. What you end up getting is a very niche thing in that it's residential real estate, but it's also a very big thing because it's the largest asset class in the world. This involves home builders, real estate agents, people who want to buy or sell homes, and people who are doing mortgages, like lenders, etc. So, there's a huge ecosystem of folks who all need to be aware of what's happening in this industry. It's one of these great businesses where it's small and specific, but also large and broad at the same time.

Sam Parr

And I think you're doing it wisely. So, I'm looking at your paywall, and you're saying that basically you get access to a regional housing tracker data, like some type of dataset. I think that's smart. Who was it? Just Lance? Because it looks like Lance is doing all of the writing. Is he also somehow aggregating all of this data as well?

Anthony Pompliano

So, Lance is like the editor-in-chief. This guy is lights out! As soon as he showed interest, I thought, "Oh, what do we need to do? How do we run through brick walls to work with you?" It's very much about finding partners that you look up to and want to learn from, etc. He handles all the content today. Eventually, there will be an entire team, but I think one of the big lessons I've learned over the last 5 or 6 years of playing on the internet and building these businesses is that you just don't need that much. Yes, we have an advantage; I've got a big audience. Lance has been doing this for a long time and really understands how to create content, write articles, and interview people, etc. But at the end of the day, we've now created multiple businesses like this where we start with just 2 or 3 people. You can run for 6 or 12 months and get them profitable with serious cash flow. Then, you start to hire a team—salespeople, other editorial folks, etc.

Sam Parr

Can I give you a critique? Yeah, I think this is awesome. I love the real deal, which is the real estate blog. Your premium pro plan is $150 a year. That is so stupid, man! Why aren't you charging way more? It's so hard to do stuff on $150 a year.

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, we eventually will, like for sure, increase the price. But if you think about it, a lot of times—I'll give you another example. So, Barry at Times is a kind of daily news for tech, business, and finance. It started as an email. When you're building these businesses, you basically have a choice: you can have a high CPM and be okay with not selling out 100% of the ads sometimes, or you can have a lower CPM and just sell out the ads. I tend to always go for, like, "Let's sell out all of the ad inventory and build the muscle of being able to do it." You can always raise prices later. The same thing here with the subscription for Resi Club is starting at $150. If you're interested in this and we're actually creating something valuable, there is zero friction for you paying $150 a year. Over time, we will increase the price, but that's much better and gives us a better signal than, let's say, we came out with $1,000 a year. People might say, "Man, this is valuable, but it's not worth $1,000." At least now we know, okay, we have something that people want. It's helpful to them, they're not churning, and now we gotta go and do price discovery over the next 12 months or so, and we'll figure out what that price is.

Anthony Pompliano

I'd rather start with a lower price, make sure we've got the right product, and then raise prices later.

Shaan Puri

I like this idea a lot. I think it's a really good idea. This is like a $50 to $100 million win, bootstrapped. I think it's going to be great, you know, maybe more. But I gotta ask you, it's interesting to see ideas when you're at the end of the idea maze. Meaning, like, you figure out, "Oh, this is the opportunity we should go with." You're a guy who's got a thousand different opportunities, a thousand different ideas of what you could go do. Can you walk me through the idea maze? How did you land at this? What were the other paths that you considered? For example, this is residential. Why not commercial? Should it even be real estate, or should it be finance? Because actually, you have a good foothold in finance. I'm sure we haven't talked about this, but I am sure that there was a little bit of a walk down the idea maze looking for, "Oh wait, what is the real opportunity here?" Then it all starts to come together. You get the right operator, you figure out the right idea, the right brand, then you go for it. 100%. So this one's actually...

Anthony Pompliano

a great one to talk about this because we actually I'd call it like a false start we had partnered with somebody else who they were not in residential real estate the way that they cut the market was by geography and so they were very focused on south florida and so it was like okay we think that there's a massive business to build that content first that eventually leads to kinda data products that is in the real estate market and when we got started we didn't know a lot of people right and so I went around and talked to a couple people I found someone I said hey they do really good work it was a person I really enjoyed kinda working with and and talking to on a day to day basis and so we got started but it was very much like small geography all about south florida and then the idea was like we'll go to like tampa and then we'll go to like orlando and then we'll go to atlanta and then we'll like just go through these geographies and it didn't work for a whole bunch of different reasons probably some of it was our fault some of it was the other person was you know very focused on like what they wanted to do in terms of the the content that they had already been creating and and so we kinda just were like hey this isn't that this like explosive thing the market isn't like pulling this into existence and so like rather than bang our heads against the wall for the next 10 years together like you had a great thing going before we came along and try to convince you to do this with us like why don't you just keep doing that thing I don't wanna like you know hinder your success and your growth and then we'll like go back to the drawing board and so that's the second attempt was with this resi club and so you're right that like one there's an idea made but also I think a lot of people don't realize how often there's false starts to these businesses nikita baer who is I I think friends of all of ours he's talked about this a bunch with consumer social apps he's like product market fit is not a single metric like you just know right it's like everything's exploding and you obviously have product market fit but in both of the apps tbh and gas that he launched and eventually sold to facebook and then to discord I think he's publicly described many times he would launch it it wouldn't hit they would go back like make a couple changes like launch it again and sometimes he would launch like 5 6 7 8 9 10 times and then eventually there was the right combination of all these things that work and so there's 2 ways to do entrepreneurship 1 is like I'm gonna bend the world to my will and like here's the thing that's gonna work regardless of what the market tells me I'm gonna make it happen and then there's like this iterative approach and a lot of these things that I work on are much more iterative and so you just have to be really good at like go a 100% in run the test as perfectly as possible but be willing to cut bait and try a different combination of the inputs if for some reason it's not exploding in the way that you want it to

Sam Parr

sean you gotta tell the nikkita story

Shaan Puri

which one

Sam Parr

just just the the this last one this last thing that he did

Shaan Puri

Yeah, he was telling us about how he was building the app and launching it over and over again, renaming it each time. One time, they renamed it to something that took off in the gay market. He said all he did was change the name of the app, and it appealed to, you know, only gay people. Then he changed the app name again, and it went back, and it changed how the app was performing. I think he said something like, "The most important thing for a consumer startup is to develop a machine that will allow you to launch tests—like real, high-fidelity tests of your product." He believes that is actually your most important product at the beginning, which I kind of agree with, but I also kind of disagree with. I think that's a really good way to approach the apps he's trying to create, which are designed to be viral. It doesn't work if it doesn't have a K-factor over 1, right? If it's not viral, his apps literally don't work. This app was like, "I don't really care about long-term retention." It was more about getting users in, spamming invites to their friends, and then hitting them with a paywall. He needs about 2% of people to buy the in-app purchase. If under 2% of people do it, it doesn't really make a lot of money. But if he can get 2% or more, this thing could make a few million dollars in profit in the next 90 days.

Anthony Pompliano

you know so that worked really well for that

Shaan Puri

But if you go look at how some of the great consumer products are built, they didn't do any of that. Like Pinterest, it's not like Pinterest is sitting around saying, "Okay, I need to create a system where I can launch systematically in high schools over and over again until I get this correct," right? And you know, Facebook and Snapchat, they did eventually figure out a way to roll out and grow, but they didn't have this "1,000 shots on goal" with different variations trying to get the virality just right. I think what Nikita is doing is awesome because it's such a different game than what anybody else really was playing. However, his advice is based on how to build a virus, not how to create the next social network. I think people think of him as the genius consumer social network guy, and it's like, no, he's basically built viruses that go on teens' phones. And you know, he's very, very good at that. It's like, what are...

Anthony Pompliano

You’re optimizing for... right? You know, if you want to build the next great social network, like, yeah, K-factor matters in the beginning. But actually, what matters more is: what is the 30, 60, 90-day retention? If you want to just go viral and be on every single 14-year-old's phone in America, then the only thing that matters is K-factor. Right? And what...

Sam Parr

do you think both of his apps

Shaan Puri

Both of his apps, within I don't know, a hundred days of getting acquired, or two hundred days of getting acquired, you know, shut down and ran it off to zero, right? Because they didn't have retention. But the one thing I would give him a ton of credit for, which I think was really impressive, was that he went back to the well. What most people don't do is they do a space, they become super knowledgeable about it, and then they get so jaded and have so much scar tissue that even though they are the best equipped person in the world to go back and build in that space again, they are so turned off. They go become a beginner at something else, which I think is a fine life choice to make from a variety of perspectives, but it's not optimal from the standpoint of playing the game of entrepreneurship. The second thing is, he was in the world of, "I'm gonna build a hit social app." The way that a hit social app works is to get a hundred million plus users and then start to make money on ads and raise venture capital, do all this. When he went back the second time, he broke down the fourth wall of Silicon Valley. He was like, "What if I don't fund this? What if I just charge a little bit of money? What if I just make a few million dollars of profit every month?" And like, I don't know how long it'll last, but I think I can make, like, whatever, you know, it's like $5,000,000 in the summer. That sounds pretty awesome. Let me try to do that. Nobody in consumer, so like the mobile gaming guys were like, "Yeah, of course! Get a bunch of downloads and then charge a small amount and see if you can make, you know, your key metric is ARPU." But like the mobile gaming guys don't build social apps, the social app guys don't build mobile games, and those guys don't build enterprise sales. People very rarely are able to rethink the rules of their game, and he rethought the rules of the consumer social game and was like, "I'm gonna build a consumer social app, but it's gonna have the monetization of a mobile game." In basically like a six-month span, it made like seven or eight million dollars in gross revenue, and it was very profitable for him in that time.

Shaan Puri

Of time, then he sold the thing. You know, that is a very impressive way to do things. Most people can't do that. Most people can't rewrite the rules of their industry or their game. There are two things that you may want to think of. The first is there's a whole group of...

Anthony Pompliano

These people who are trying to rewrite the rules or think about this differently... One of my favorite examples, and I don't want to share who it is because I don't know if they're okay with it, is someone who created the ability to make photos in your Instagram story blurry. Basically, you would have to pay via Apple Pay to "unblur" the photo. So, obviously, all the OnlyFans girls would put it on their Instagram story, and it would be just blurry enough where people would think, "Oh, that looks like something I might really like looking at." Then they would pay like $2, $5, or $10, depending on what it was set at. So you're bootstrapping off of these massive audiences that these people already have, but it's just a little feature. They don't raise money for it; it's just about how much money they can generate as quickly as possible. I mean, they make a lot of money, right? And so it works. So, it is possible. Speaking of folks who go back to the well, do you guys know who Brad Jacobs is?

Shaan Puri

yeah he created like $6,000,000,000 companies now or something like that he's the guy

Anthony Pompliano

he's the goat we're I'm trying to I I've

Sam Parr

been trying to get him on the pod I've been trying I I can't I can't he's

Anthony Pompliano

got a book coming out he'll he'll definitely come on he's got a book coming out so he's 100% going on

Sam Parr

I can't get in touch with them

Anthony Pompliano

We'll talk later, but I'm 100% going on everyone's podcast because he's got a book coming out, which is like the best time to get these guys. So, about 4 or 5 years ago, somebody—almost like a back alley drug deal—was like, "Check out Brad Jacobs." I was like, "Never heard of him. Who's that?" I got on Wikipedia and literally for a week and a half, I didn't sleep. I was just all over scouring the internet trying to figure out what obscure podcast this guy did because he just did it over and over again. What he essentially does is roll-ups. Wayne Huizenga is another guy who's famous for doing this. What Brad did was figure out a business model, figure out a funding mechanism, start winning, and then go around and tell everyone, "Hey, I'm going to do the same playbook and I'm going to win again." Then people gave him money.

Sam Parr

so explain what he did

Anthony Pompliano

So, one of the things that they did was in the waste industry, which I think Wayne Huizenga had a big role in as well. Basically, he didn't start in major markets or even in what he calls secondary markets. He went to small towns and said, "I'm going to buy the landfill." Once he bought the landfill, he noticed that there were about seven companies that picked up trash in the surrounding area and brought it to this landfill. He started "sniping" off each one of them. He'd buy the first one, then the second, the third, and eventually, he'd own all seven of the companies plus the landfill. He did this across the country. That company was called United Waste Systems, and he took it public in the early nineties. It ended up being a multibillion-dollar outcome. He's done that same thing about six or seven times now. So, you're just like, okay, building a billion-dollar company is cool. Building two? You're like, "Damn, you've got the golden touch." If you do more than five, there's like one of you.

Sam Parr

I think he's done it with... So he did the waste management thing. Then he did United Rentals, which was like renting heavy equipment, like dump trucks, porta potties, bobcats, and things like that. Then he did it with XPO Logistics, which is currently a publicly traded company. I think he did it two or three other times. I mean, he's done it many, many times. I think his book is called "How to Make a $1,000,000,000" or something like that. It's a pretty... it's a pretty baller title.

Shaan Puri

he's like

Anthony Pompliano

and if you

Shaan Puri

go coming on my first million look quite literally beneath me

Anthony Pompliano

You want to know something funny about how he describes himself? He's like, "You know, I'm a career CEO, a serial entrepreneur." He's very much like what you would expect from a guy who's built multiple $1,000,000,000 companies. But if you Google his name, you know how there is like a preview of the website on LinkedIn? It says, "Brad Jacobs is an influencer." I think he has like the influencer categorization on LinkedIn, and they just autofill it. But it's like the classic... imagine telling Brad Jacobs, "You're not really like a multibillion-dollar entrepreneur; you're just an influencer."

Shaan Puri

he would like

Anthony Pompliano

blow a gasket

Shaan Puri

Yeah, that's so true. That's what it says: his first top link on Google, Brad Jacobs is an influencer. Got to stop disrespecting that man.

Sam Parr

The reason he's cool is like, okay, so he lives in Greenwich, Connecticut. He wears a suit and tie most of the time. He looks like a suit, and I'm sure he's very professional and a wonderful CEO. But if you actually listen to some of the things he says, he's way more entrepreneurial than his picture looks. Know what I mean? He's got that artist vibe a little bit. The guy is special; he's very fascinating. But before his book came out, or is coming out, he's been really under the radar for how successful he is. He's a really fascinating person.

Anthony Pompliano

One of my favorite activities is reading articles, like those from Bloomberg and the Financial Times. They often randomly talk about really wealthy people, and I immediately copy, paste, and Google, "Hey, who is this person?" Recently, I did this and let me see if I can find this guy's name real quick. It was one of those situations where, as soon as you go down the rabbit hole, you're like, "Wow, this is a whole different game." What is this dude's name? Oh, here you go: Benny Steinmetz. They call him an Israeli tycoon, but he got into a bunch of trouble. There was fraud, and I think he maybe even got arrested, etc. But he's in the commodities game, and you're like, "I've never heard of Benny Steinmetz." He sounds like he's built some massive companies. In the commodities game, sometimes there's gold in the mine, and other times there's just a promise of gold in the mine, you know? So, you start to wonder how many of these people are out there who are not on the internet or not well-known in the online circles. Sure, you can look at the Forbes 400 or all these lists that people put together, but there are way more people who are completely unknown than I think are known. It does kind of remind you that you only have to be right once or twice to achieve an immense amount of wealth or success by doing just the basic things—like going out and buying assets that end up being valuable.

Sam Parr

If you Google this guy, he looks like one of those people who can find a pressure point on your neck that makes you collapse. He looks very legitimately like a killer. I've researched him as well; he was in the IDF, so he's a trained military guy. If you Google him, he looks scary. He looks like he'll put you to sleep. What other ideas are interesting to you at the moment?

Anthony Pompliano

So, I'll give you a couple of categories. There's one that I think is the best: persistent patrol companies. If you think about one of the big problems that city-states and national governments are going to have, it's that they have to get more money. They're broke, right? If you're broke, you either cut your costs as much as possible or you go make more money. They're not going to cut costs; they're going to make more money. One of the best examples is in New York City: the congestion tax.

Sam Parr

that's one of the few taxes that I'm on board with

Anthony Pompliano

You're on board? Okay, alright. Let me explain what it is first, and then we can debate. The way it works is like this: I don't know, from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, if you drive from outside of Lower Manhattan into Lower Manhattan, they charge you like $20. It's a pretty large tax every single day. So, it only is charged one time, but you can imagine all the cars that are driving from above 59th Street to below 59th Street between 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, and they're getting hit with this $20 tax. It's a way for the city to raise more money and get more income. It's called a congestion tax. It's the first one in the United States, but this has been happening in Europe and other places for quite a while. So, it's not a new concept; it's just new to America.

Sam Parr

They're also considering charging people like **$1,000 a month** or something really high in order to own a car in the city.

Anthony Pompliano

There are all kinds of ideas because it all comes back to this thing that they need more money, right? They're broke. Over the last couple of years, in cities like New York, people who were paying a lot in taxes left. There's the infamous story of David Tepper. He was in New Jersey and he was responsible for 3% of the state's budget from the taxes he personally paid. He moved to Florida, and there are all these articles that were like, "The state of New Jersey is gonna go broke because David Tepper is moving." I think it was for some sort of family medical situation that he moved for a couple of years. When he moved back, the way the story goes is that he called up the state treasurer and was like, "Yo, you got $120,000,000 coming to you next year. Put it into your budget."

Shaan Puri

a back there man

Anthony Pompliano

Wealthy people... yeah, it's New Jersey. It's not like it's North Dakota, right? The state of New Jersey was dependent on this guy for a material percentage of their state budget. So, wealthy people have been moving. My idea is, well, how are they going to get more revenue? Right now, a lot of revenue is derived from things like parking tickets or other trivial matters where they have humans walking around trying to catch people doing things they're not supposed to be doing. I think there's going to be an entire rise of businesses that just use computer vision to do the same thing. Anything that can be automated will be automated. Rather than having humans with their lazy eyes walking around, we could have computers that constantly monitor everything. Parking tickets are an easy example. Fire marshals... how many times have you gone to an event and it's like, you know, the fire marshal said 220 people can be here, but you look around and think, "I think there are 1,000 people in this room right now." So, they can just automate that. You hit with a $500 fine every single time at this event venue, etc. Elevators... you can just go through this and see over and over again that computer vision will just become like the persistent eye. It's scary. I don't like the idea of this, but I do think someone's going to build this technology, and it's not going to be the government. So, we're likely to see a huge rise of these businesses that use what is pretty standard technology at this point.

Anthony Pompliano

To just count the number of humans walking into a building and stay on top of it so that the government can generate more revenue.

Shaan Puri

Well, there's also, like, in LA, don't they have the mansion tax? Right? It's like, "Oh, if you sell a home for more than $5,000,000, there's just like, here's a new tax." And they're like, "What? What are these people, new?"

Sam Parr

york has it too

Shaan Puri

Live in small homes. Like, they'll never do it. They'll never downsize. We got them; we can charge literally anything we want, and they're still going to pay it. You know, I kind of agree with you that getting this revenue stream is going to be important. Obviously, I hate the idea of the persistent patrol computers basically finding you for taking every misstep. But I think you're right. The root thing you're talking about—how do you help governments make more money—is going to be a business opportunity because you're right, they do need it.

Anthony Pompliano

There's a competition right now between taxes and tipping. When you go to the coffee shop, there's literally going to be a competition between what's on the bill. If it's itemized, does the government get more money out of the bill, or does the tipping? We've become this tipping society where somebody pours a coffee and they're like, "That'll be 15% on top of the bill." So, if the government continues to increase sales tax significantly, these bills are going to get inflated because everyone's got more hands in the cookie jar.

Sam Parr

So, Sean, New York has a mansion tax. Do you want to know what the threshold is in order to pay it?

Shaan Puri

no what is it

Sam Parr

Alright, so keep in mind, I think the average sale of a New York home is around $800,000. The mansion tax starts at $1,000,000, so basically you're...

Shaan Puri

like you have a second bedroom mansion

Sam Parr

Yeah, so their mansion tax... I think it's close to 4%. It ranges, I think, but I believe it goes up to 4%. So basically, if you purchase a 2-bedroom apartment in New York City, you have to say, "Alright, here's an additional $40,000 just for buying." Or is it for selling? I don't remember which one, but someone pays roughly $20,000-$40,000 for a 2-bedroom apartment. They have it as well in New York City. It's pretty wild.

Anthony Pompliano

I mean, that's like a $5,000 mortgage payment, right? Like, if you're like, "Hey, I don't want to pay $7,000 or $8,000 for a 2-bedroom, I'm going to instead buy, and I'm going to have to pay $4,500 or $5,000 with 8% interest rates on my mortgage," like a $1,000,000. Like, yeah, you're getting hit with the mansion tax.

Sam Parr

It's pretty wild, but yeah, New York has that. New York gets you in so many different ways. It's a very challenging place to live because of that.

Shaan Puri

you live in new york right

Anthony Pompliano

I do live in new york

Shaan Puri

like what will it take for you to move basically

Anthony Pompliano

Nothing like this. I'm not gonna move. I moved, and I think that I've come to the realization that I'm willing to pay for the experience. Yes, the taxes are higher, but I feel like the money that I give in those higher taxes is very much in exchange for the density of New York City, the experience, all of that. To some degree, it's like the biggest expense I pay every year, but it's because of the quality of life, or a specific type of quality of life that I want. So, I've just come to terms with it and, you know, stroke the check every year.

Sam Parr

And compared to other cities, New York does a half-decent job of making it feel like you're getting what you paid for. You know, you've got good parks, a subway system, whatever. But damn, it's still challenging. Particularly, I mean, you were in Florida for a while. I'm in Texas at the moment. When I'm thinking about going to New York, I'm like, "Golly, this changes the math."

Anthony Pompliano

a lot

Sam Parr

the math changes at a significant amount

Anthony Pompliano

yeah just close your eyes and don't look

Shaan Puri

yeah I've alright I got one I got one

Anthony Pompliano

More ideas before we go, which is AI agents. I don't know, I sent you guys the link, but this kid, I don't know, this guy Jacob Greenfield...

Sam Parr

love this we love him I don't know him either but he posts amazing stuff

Anthony Pompliano

He immediately is awesome in my book because he posted this yesterday. I was thinking about what we could talk about today. He basically used these AI agents, which, like, that's all I know about them—they're called AI agents—but they go and do these jobs. So he was like, "Alright, I'm gonna go have an AI agent that finds opportunities, and I'm going to score the opportunities based on how much money I could make and how difficult it would be to execute." He basically populated this whole list. Then he's like, "But I'm gonna create a second AI agent that looks at all of the opportunities that have high earning potential and low difficulty. I'm gonna have them create a plan on how I could actually execute that." Then he's probably gonna create a third AI agent and say, "And then I'm gonna have them carry out the plans from AI agent number two." But it's just like, again, yes, you have to be technical to figure some of this stuff out or work with technical people. The world is changing at a very rapid pace. What we're seeing is that everyone was worried about the blue-collar worker being automated away. Like, damn, it sounds like Jacob is automating away my first million! But now, all of a sudden, no one has listened to podcasts. They're just gonna get an Excel sheet with, "How do I get rich without doing a lot of work?" and go do those opportunities, right? So, it's cool to see, but I do think that there are a lot of things that people are gonna figure out here about how to find better opportunities without having to spend thousands of hours doing the research.

Sam Parr

this is awesome this tweet is awesome I'm looking at it now this is very good

Shaan Puri

They are awesome, but also, like... okay, I like the... I think it's one of those things where the demo shows you what's possible, but the demo is not really usable. I feel kind of the same way about VR right now. Every time I buy the new VR headset, I put it on and I'm like, "Holy shit, this is amazing! I can't wait to show five other people this!" Then I end up putting it on the shelf and not touching it for a year. But soon, this will be... it'll solve all the pain points. You know, you used to have to be tethered to a computer; now you don't. It used to be really hot and sweaty in there; now it's not. You used to not be able to see the room when you were in there; now you can see through and see the room. They're improving it one step at a time. For example, the things on...

Anthony Pompliano

this list are you

Shaan Puri

Know, like, clean energy solutions for shipping. Innovating fuel alternatives. Like, okay, yeah, yeah, sure.

Sam Parr

money maker

Shaan Puri

You know, a battery that lasts forever? You know, cool. I got you, Pom. Why?

Sam Parr

isn't real estate blog on here

Anthony Pompliano

not enough money and way too difficult

Sam Parr

where's real estate blog it didn't make the top 30

Shaan Puri

So, I think the idea of this is really cool. But, you know, in practice, if somebody sat down and said, "Great, I'm gonna do that thing. I'm gonna go use that to make it happen," I don't think any of it's usable at this point. I will give you one example that I think is usable.

Anthony Pompliano

so

Shaan Puri

I think somebody could do this right now. I think, you know, someone who wants to play a different game could go play this game. Upwork has like $3 or $4 billion of GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) every year, with people basically paying for tasks that get done on Upwork. I'm pretty sure a huge number of Upwork tasks and Fiverr tasks are automatable right now. They might not be 100% automated, but you could take that same person and use AI and technology to increase your output by 5x or even 10x. This would give you better operational leverage. I think if someone combined private equity and AI, they could go roll up and buy the top profiles on Upwork and Fiverr. Essentially, you would be buying the search juice that these profiles have, so they would get the top jobs, like logo design, because you're the number one rank since you were there since 2013 on Fiverr or whatever. You could buy all of those profiles and put them under one roof. You could say, "That's wild! We're going to use AI to fulfill a huge number of these tasks." You could make a lot of money because those little properties on top of Fiverr and Upwork are essentially valuable rental properties. They generate income every month, but now you have a way to get more margin out of that rental income. I think you could already buy them at a good price because nobody else is really buying those. On top of that, you could probably gain some more operational leverage out of it.

Anthony Pompliano

This was the whole idea that like Thrasio and other Amazon aggregators had. They were going to buy up a bunch of Amazon stores. I know somebody who financed a lot of them, and his thesis was like, if you're the first search result for a very popular product, that is like real estate. It's like "location, location, location." You are the first search result, and so you'll constantly get traffic. Obviously, there's platform risk if there's some sort of algorithm change or whatever, but they're able to kind of model out that risk. The hard part is that you're dealing in physical goods on Amazon, and what you're talking about is like you're basically just dealing with software. There is 100% somebody, some obscure place in the world, who is like the best Fiverr logo designer right now. They are just like a Midjourney power user, right? So it's like, okay, I used to be able to design X number of logos per month. Now I can do 100 times that. Oh, you want to give me feedback? No problem! I'll just change the prompt to make it exactly what you want, and I can do it in, you know, 1/100th of the time. Yeah, that sounds awesome to that person. Frankly, that's how the world should work. You should pay the same for the results you're buying. You're buying the result, not the amount of work. That person, after having figured out how to do it, is going to be financially rewarded. We want that financial or economic system to be exactly how business works.

Sam Parr

Do you, of all these companies that you're working on, how much time are you allocating to each one? How many businesses do you have now?

Anthony Pompliano

I don't know how many, but let's just call it around 10. I think of it kind of like a 2 by 2 matrix to some degree. There are some businesses that are young and need lots of time, and then there are a lot of companies that are older and don't need as much time. The only thing that changes between those two things is like... fires. If you look at my day, it is mostly distributed to the companies that are just getting off the ground. We're trying to figure out how to build momentum, get to profitability, and make sure we've got the product correct. We're also figuring out the first couple of hires and all those types of things. Then maybe 15% to 20% of my day is spent on issues like, "Oh, we just lost a big customer," or there's some fire to put out with one of the companies that's already pretty mature. But after the first, I don't know, 6 months, the company works or it doesn't. If it works, then I'm probably doing the company a disservice if I'm still meddling in the day-to-day decision-making and leadership of the business. We have somebody who runs the company; they should be the ones to sink or swim. I think they appreciate the autonomy to just go do it themselves without me micromanaging them over their shoulder. The only thing that I do is every week I get a weekly update. Frankly, I read them. I give a little bit of feedback here and there, but it's more so for the people who run the company because it forces them to write down what they got done that week. No one, including myself, ever wants to send an update if we feel like we had nothing done. So that's really the only thing that's persistent week in and week out, regardless of the age of the business.

Sam Parr

How are you balancing the two things of "buy versus build"? I think Sean and Andrew Wilkinson are toying around with the idea of buying parts of companies or wholly owning the companies that they buy. They are also focusing on the idea that these one or two things could have outsized returns, so they should only do those.

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, so buying versus building is really interesting. I've gone back and forth over the years. We've bought a couple of businesses—not a lot, but a few—and then we've obviously built a number of them. Right now, there's a sector I'm looking at in the media space. It's a very specific type of audience, and I think it's kind of a unique thing. I'm not usually big on the idea that ideas are valuable, but to me, this is just like we understand something about an audience that most other people haven't yet discovered. We think it could be interesting to go after. There are two players in the market that are well-known in that industry. Again, it's a niche but also very big. Both players would probably require you to pay over $100 million to buy them in total cost, and you probably can't buy a minority stake. Given our track record, I could probably try to figure out a bunch of these big institutional investors who want to buy media businesses and put it together. It's a lot of work. You have to convince someone to sell it to you, get the terms right, and handle integration. There are a lot of challenges. But then I'm like, "Dude, I think for $100, we could create a competitor." It's not going to be worth $100 million within the first two or three years, but could we take a big dent into their businesses? Probably. So when it's that skewed, I tend to lean towards building versus buying. I think where it's harder is when the business is worth like $10 million or $5 million. That's like two years of progress versus not spending the money upfront and maybe getting there. That's where I probably lean much more towards buying versus building. It's just a lower risk, and the deal's easier to get done than trying to buy these huge things that, frankly, there are only so many people in the world who are actually good at doing.

Sam Parr

and what about the focus thing

Anthony Pompliano

I mean, I only do one thing. I remember your face; it's seared in my brain. Last time you asked me this, I was like, "No, I don't do a lot of things. I do one thing: we provide capital and distribution to businesses."

Sam Parr

I think that's inspiring. I think that Sean and I fall on different sides. I actually think, Sean, I'm slowly buying into other viewpoints.

Shaan Puri

oh shit I'm trying to go over to where you're at I'm trying to focus more

Anthony Pompliano

Sam, hold on a second. This is a lie. Sam, you have multiple businesses. You're not just doing one thing. Although you think of, like, I don't know, Airbnb or short-term rental, right? You built that out. That's a project that you were working on. At the same time, you were getting Hampton off the ground. There are all these things where sometimes it's not like, "Okay, I'm going to raise money and go build this big business." It could just be like projects. But you're constantly doing multiple things.

Sam Parr

I call them hobbies. So, I have a 40-hour-a-week job, which is actually... I'm disproving my own point. It's actually podcasting and Hampton, but that doesn't exactly make my... But that's like my 9 to 5. Then, I've got weekend projects, is how I consider it.

Anthony Pompliano

So, meet Sam Parr. He's a podcaster with the "Weekend Hotties" podcast and an influencer content creator.

Sam Parr

**Producer... content producer.** I think we've done a really good job of rebranding that. **"Creator"** just sounds weak for some reason.

Anthony Pompliano

People are changing their X bios right now. They're just deleting "creator" and putting "producer."

Sam Parr

Yeah, it's just for some reason, "weak" is a weak word. I don't know what it is, but we do need to rebrand that.

Shaan Puri

Well, it just bulks you in with everybody else. That's the problem. It's like, "Oh no, I'm not like them." No, no, no, that guy's just unemployed. There's a difference, you know? I'm a different thing. I need to have a new name.

Anthony Pompliano

I met a guy who was one of the early hires at Palantir. He essentially, like, I don't know, he didn't tell me this, but I think he was basically the COO in the early days. He was like, "Yeah, one of the cool things about the culture is that you kind of jointly with your boss made up your title." So his was "Risk Identifier and Destroyer."

Shaan Puri

right and it's just

Anthony Pompliano

Like, man, names do matter. What does that guy do? I wanna go work at the company where that could be my title, and it's very clear inside the organization what the president does. At different companies, it may be different, but the guy whose title is like "Risk Identifier and Destroyer" is 100% focused on risk. So, same thing with "Content Creator" - maybe it's the wrong name. Just change the name, and then all of a sudden everyone's really excited about it. Chamath has a...

Shaan Puri

Good story about this. He says when he was at Facebook, they were trying to hire, like, you know, some PhD-level math and stats guy. They were like, "Cool, you can come be a data analyst." He's like, "I don't want to be a data analyst. I'm going to go get my PhD instead." He's like, "I don't know, did I say data analyst? Data scientist? We have a new field called data."

Sam Parr

science and

Shaan Puri

You're one of the first to be a data scientist on Earth. And he's like, "Yeah, I invented the term 'data science'." Now it's like, you know, a whole prestigious job title in Silicon Valley—data science.

Sam Parr

is that story true that's that's a that's a hard story to believe is you think that's true

Anthony Pompliano

yeah I believe it

Shaan Puri

I don't know I have no reason not to believe it

Anthony Pompliano

I did. I love those guys so much on the All In podcast. But I was laughing that people are giving them shit about using Scaramucci as a measuring stick. Do you guys see this?

Sam Parr

yeah yeah what's that

Anthony Pompliano

like scaramucci was the white house communications director for oh

Sam Parr

yeah yeah yeah

Anthony Pompliano

I think, right? I mean, like the infamous photo. He's got the sunglasses on with the finger guns. It's probably one of the greatest stints in the White House of all time. So, people always tweet at Scaramucci, like when Emmett Shear was the CEO of OpenAI for like 48 hours. They're like, "Hey, how many Scaramuccis did he last?" Scaramucci calculated like... you know.

Shaan Puri

know 0.2 or whatever

Anthony Pompliano

and so the all in guys they had been saying it for a while and they were like yeah we invented that

Shaan Puri

They were, they were like on Twitter, "Give us credit if you're going to use it." And then, yeah, well the...

Anthony Pompliano

The internet loves to hate on those guys, especially if you're not in the tech industry. They were waiting for them to say something, and of course, they all started pulling up articles and whatever. I thought, "Man, this is like peak internet." It's like somebody wants credit for a term that no one's really clear where it came from. Then, a bunch of people who don't like that person want to critique them, yell, scream, and do a bunch of work to disprove them. I was like, "We are all wasting our time. We should just get off the internet and go do productive things."

Sam Parr

It's kind of like when I say MFM, we get credit for making Andrew Huberman and Brian Johnson, the longevity guy, famous.

Shaan Puri

according to us

Sam Parr

yeah you're welcome world

Anthony Pompliano

I actually think that kim kardashian's famous because of you guys didn't wanna get to a better early on

Sam Parr

yeah it's like you ever heard of rob bierdek you're the first one to watch her work

Shaan Puri

I think yeah it's great

Sam Parr

pom thanks for doing this man we love hanging out with you

Anthony Pompliano

absolutely I appreciate you guys very much can I plug one thing before I leave

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah

Anthony Pompliano

We have a job board. It's called **DreamStartupJob.com**. It used to be called **PopCryptoJobs**; it was just for crypto. We've now expanded it to include crypto and everything else. We've helped an average of three people a day for over two years get a new job. There are currently 10,000 open roles on the site. If you want to get a job at your dream startup, you should go to **DreamStartupJob.com** and check it out.

Sam Parr

Alright, I appreciate it. It looks good. I remember what it used to be. I think this is a smart move.

Anthony Pompliano

well we'll figure it out

Shaan Puri

I appreciate you fellas good to see you man

Sam Parr

that's the pod