The Man Who Owns 1% Of ALL Bitcoin

Shaan Puri

So, I can borrow **$900,000,000** at like **0.1%** interest and put it into Bitcoin, which averages a **100%** annual appreciation for the last **10 years**. Okay, what's... yeah, why not?

Anthony Pompliano

Yes, but there's another detail to it.

Shaan Puri

So Tom, dude, welcome! Last time you were here - I just went and looked it up - 4 months ago, the Bitcoin price was $37,000. Today, what is the Bitcoin price? Today, Bitcoin price is sitting at $69,000. In 4 months, that's kind of amazing. And my question to you to start it off: **Why is the Bitcoin price going up?**

Anthony Pompliano

Well, prices go up because more people want to buy than sell. That's like the simplest example or explanation. But if you think about what's happened in those four months, probably the biggest thing is that the Bitcoin spot ETFs got approved. These ETFs basically give a ton of people access to the asset that previously didn't have it. Historically, we've seen these ETFs for certain asset classes get approved, and lots of money comes in, causing the price to go up over a long period of time. I think people are surprised at how quickly assets have come in. There's over $10,000,000,000 that have flowed into these assets, and also how quickly the price of Bitcoin has gone up, setting a new all-time high within two months of the ETF approval.

Shaan Puri

Sam, have you followed this? Have you been watching this, like the ETF stuff?

Sam Parr

I know that when I tracked my net worth, which I look at every 6 months, it changed. Yeah, it changed. I saw that it went up, and I had no idea why. Fair enough.

Shaan Puri

When the net worth goes up, do you strut a little differently around the house? Do you look at Sarah a little differently? Do you expect her to look at you a little differently? Tell me the truth.

Sam Parr

**Baby, we done it! We made it, baby!**

Shaan Puri

Paul was right.

Sam Parr

It's red panty night! We made it! We done it, baby! That's what we say.

Anthony Pompliano

I'm surprised you only check every 6 months. I check on a weekly basis and track it pretty religiously. I feel like things you measure move.

Sam Parr

And so.

Anthony Pompliano

If you want it to move, then you gotta measure it.

Sam Parr

I track income; I don't track net worth because there's nothing I can do about that, right? I'm not like you guys. I've done it, set it, and forget it. But now that Bitcoin and Ether are close to an all-time high—Bitcoin is, I think—should I just sell it all and get out?

Anthony Pompliano

The number one rule of Bitcoin is: you don't want to sell your Bitcoin, obviously.

Sam Parr

no

Anthony Pompliano

I mean, look, the long-term thesis around Bitcoin is no different than it's always been. You have a scarce supply asset, and there are 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. They're large institutions that have billions of dollars they're obviously allocating to it. Probably the most exciting part over, you know, call it the next 12 months or so, is that at the same time all this demand is coming in, the Bitcoin halving is coming. That's just when the daily incoming supply—the number of Bitcoin that gets created each day—is going to get cut in half from 900 Bitcoin to 450. So, like I always joke, if you went to an 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. We've seen this happen before, and it'll probably happen again.

Sam Parr

Is most of your net worth in crypto stuff now? Pumps? I mean, no, I know it was. You're still holding strong.

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, I haven't sold anything. I bought more crypto stuff, but also we've built a number of other businesses and done a bunch of different things. It's not the same percentages, but it's still, you know, definitely over 50%.

Sam Parr

Do you remember about three years ago, Sean made a tweet? I forget what the tweet said, but some Indian newspaper picked it up. What was it? It said something like, "Entrepreneur Sean Perry puts all of that worth in crypto." What was it?

Shaan Puri

I love how you can 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 we got bought by Twitch, I had a bunch of cash come in. I was like, "You know what? I'm moving." I tweeted out, "I'm putting 25% of my net worth into Bitcoin." That was it; that was the tweet. Then a bunch of blogs, like Bitcoin.com and stuff like that—not necessarily intended—but they all were like, "Twitch executive says he..." or then someone was like, "Amazon executive," because Amazon owns Twitch. They were like, "Amazon executive, Twitch executive says he's moving 25% of his net worth into Bitcoin in a stunning move." And it's like, you know, my net worth is like... we're talking about like, "Oh, I put quarters in the vending machine here," right? These are not huge sums of money that are moving. It should not make news when I do something. But yeah, that was the story, and honestly, one of the better moves I ever did. That was in 2019, so that was a good bet.

Anthony Pompliano

I've always thought that the media, if they really wanted to get the clickbait, instead of labeling someone as an "Amazon executive" or whatever, they should just label everyone as a "future billionaire."

Shaan Puri

Right, like you can't help aspiring billionaires.

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, like you can't just prove that, right? They just... everyone will click on every article, so.

Sam Parr

We had Michael Saylor on, like, a year to maybe two years ago now. We got in a little tizzy at the end; he got angry at me. I remember that's about the only thing that I truly remember from that podcast. Yeah, why? Because I go, "Michael, what's the downside of this bet you're taking?" And he's like, "There is no downside." I was like, "Well, that's dishonest because with every decision, there's an upside and a downside. Even if the downside is minimal, there is also a downside." And he's like, "No, there is no downside." I remember I think I said, "Well, I don't trust you then because if you're not admitting that there's a downside to this decision, you're just being dishonest. What else are you lying about?" It kind of got weird, and I still feel that way. I still feel that way. But on here, we're on what you wanted to talk about. You're talking about Sean, I think, asked if this is the craziest bet of all time. It appears as though it's working, right?

Shaan Puri

I want you to do two things. First, I want you to explain, like I'm 5 years old, what did Michael Saylor do. Then, after you've explained the mechanics of it, I want you to discuss the bet that this guy has been placing, kind of from the start until now, because he's evolved it. Finally, I want you to tell me if you think this falls on the spectrum of idiotic to genius. Where does this bet fall for you? Because it is a colossal, colossal bet. So, explain what he's done.

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, he has definitely bet the company and burned the boats for sure. The way to think about, you know, kind of how it started was he had a bunch of cash. I think he had like $500,000,000 in cash, give or take.

Sam Parr

Because he owned a publicly traded software company, MicroStrategy.

Shaan Puri

Which is like a 20-year-old company at that. They did something completely unrelated to crypto.

Anthony Pompliano

They do business analytics, right? So, they do business analytics. The $500,000,000 was sitting on the company's balance sheet. He personally started to get interested in Bitcoin. He bought some—personally, I think he bought like $250,000,000 of Bitcoin. He disclosed that, and then the company said, "Hey, well maybe we should buy Bitcoin as well." I think there are two different types of people who buy Bitcoin, especially for a company. Some are like, "I'm gonna go day trade the balance sheet," which is a horrible idea and will end in, you know, sorrow. Then there's another idea, which is, "I want to have an asset on my balance sheet that I have confidence in over the long run." What he basically came to the conclusion of, along with the board of directors and some of the shareholders, was, "Wait a second, the dollars are being devalued. Inflation is really high, and so we're losing purchasing power." The number of dollars is staying the same, but inflation is eating away at our purchasing power. So, he said, "Let's go try to buy something else." They supposedly did this entire analysis. They looked at real estate, stocks, Bitcoin, gold, you know, all these different assets. They came to the conclusion that Bitcoin was the thing they should buy. 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 like $10,000,000, no one would care. But this was a company that was like a $1,000,000,000 company with $500,000,000 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 kinda crazy." But then he like doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on it. He began to raise a bunch of money via debt offerings. So, he would sell bonds, get really good terms, get that cash, and buy more Bitcoin. Then he was like selling equity at one...

Anthony Pompliano

Whenever the value of the company was higher than what he thought it was actually worth, he would sell equity. He used that cash to buy more Bitcoin. He went from owning 0 Bitcoin in July of 2020 to today, where he has more than 210,000 Bitcoin, which is more than 1% of the Bitcoin network. It's worth, you know, something more than $10,000,000,000. So yeah, it's an insane bet, but if it works, then we'll call it a genius bet. History is written by the victors. Let's see what happens.

Sam Parr

Alright everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot. 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 it. I've got this company called Hampton. You can check it out at joinhampton.com. It's a community for founders, and one of the ways that we've grown is by creating these surveys. We ask our members certain questions that a lot of people are afraid to ask. So, things like what their net worth is, how their assets are allocated, and all these interesting questions. Then, we'll put it in a survey. I went and made a landing page, so you can actually see it at joinhampton.com/wealth. The hard part with Hampton is that we are appealing to a sort of higher-end customer, sort of like a Louis Vuitton or a Ferrari. So, I needed the landing page to look a very particular way. HubSpot has templates—that's what we use. We just change the colors a little bit to match our brand. It's 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. Once it's made, I then shared it on social media. We had thousands of people see it and thousands of people who gave us their information. I can then see over the next handful of weeks how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did. I can track where the revenue came from—Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever. I can actually go and look at it and say, "Oh, well that worked, that didn't work. Do more of that, do less of that." If you're interested in making landing pages like this, I highly suggest it. Look, I'm actually doing it! You can check it out; go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started. Alright, now back to MFM.

Shaan Puri

So, he currently has **$14,960,000,000** of Bitcoin in MicroStrategy, and it's up **97%** all time. He has put in **$7,300,000,000**, and now it's sitting on **$15,000,000,000** of assets. Now, I think there's one other piece to be honest about, which is that it wasn't just that he was like, "We have **$500,000,000,000** on the balance sheet. What can we invest in?" I think the truth was—and this is what we were trying to get at 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." I kind of wish he was a little bit more upfront about it. His stock was flat or going down for a long time. If you look at the MicroStrategy chart from, I don't know, **2002** to **2020**, the stock was basically flat from **2007** to **2020** before he started making his bet. That's a long time, right? That's **2007** to **2020**—that's **13 years**. What he realized was, "Why are they not giving us any credit? We're basically valued at the amount of cash we have. They're not valuing the business really at anything." The business is going to produce more cash, but they don't believe that we can invest this well or that we can reinvest our cash well to grow the enterprise value of the company. So, we have two choices: either dividend out all the cash, or we have to do something with it that's going to get our stock price to go up. I think the reality was he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He had this business that was too successful to not continue, but his share price would not move because investors simply did not believe any of the stories about what they could do with the cash. So, he kind of had to do something. I think that's the part that's a little bit left out.

Anthony Pompliano

Oh, I completely agree.

Sam Parr

And he was very loud about it on purpose, which I don't blame him for being.

Anthony Pompliano

I also think that, like, it may be an extension of this. Whenever you have a company that has cash on their balance sheet and it's accumulating cash, it's usually because they don't know what to do with it. There's not a clear way to reinvest in the business and drive more cash in the future. Historically, what those companies have done is either dividend it out or buy back their shares. But what if your shares are flat and there's not a lot of volatility? There's not a lot of opportunity to buy back the shares for less than what the company is worth. This is definitely, like, that's why I say it's like a "burn the boats" situation where he went all in on this strategy. Now, what I think is very interesting about it is he essentially has pioneered this. He has a business that does software analytics and kind of business analytics, and that's supposed to throw off cash. Then he has a treasury strategy. But if you really think about it, maybe companies in other countries, like this is not foreign to them. If you're in a country where the currency is very volatile or could lose value very quickly, a lot of times you're managing foreign currency risk and trying to get into dollars or something that's more stable. It's just that no one in the U.S. ever thinks about this or worries about it. Now he's doing it with Bitcoin. I actually think one of the most interesting parts of this story is that no one has followed him. There hasn't been a second MicroStrategy. I talk to a lot of people and I'm like, you know, one company is a data...

Anthony Pompliano

**Would begin the trend.** So, I actually don't have a good answer as to why, if this guy has made basically $7,000,000,000 off of this bet, no one has followed. Usually, in public markets, when somebody does something, you know, back in 2017 or 2018, companies started changing their names to include "blockchain." For example, Long Island Iced Tea changed to Long Island Blockchain, right? They just started doing anything they possibly could. Now, with AI, everyone is adding ".ai" at the end of their name to try to get some sort of boost in their stock price. But no one's following Sailor. The omission of everyone else may actually be a data point that we should pay attention to as well.

Sam Parr

Well, 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 have to be large enough to be in that ballpark. I don't know how much he must own, the majority of the company, because there's been so many times where it could have been justifiable to fire him over all this.

Anthony Pompliano

I think he has voting control but not majority ownership. However, he's got voting control.

Shaan Puri

He has about, I think, 50% ownership of the stock. So, you have the unique combination of a cash cow business that's been around forever, a founder CEO, and a publicly listed company. He's able to do these bonds because when you listen to him talk, he's like, "So I can borrow $900,000,000 at like 1% interest and put it into Bitcoin, which averages a 100% annual appreciation for the last 10 years." Okay, what's... yeah, why not?

Anthony Pompliano

Yes, but there's another detail to it. I'm definitely not an expert on convertible bond offerings in the public market, but these are convertible bonds. They convert at a premium to the current price. Without getting into all the intricacies, it's basically like people can get paid back, or they could convert to equity at maybe, let's say, 50% higher. So if the company is worth $10,000,000,000 today, it'll convert at $15,000,000,000. If the company goes up a lot, you'll obviously convert rather than get paid back. So it's not exactly the cheapest capital if you know you're basically selling equity, but you are selling it at a 50% premium. It's still attractive to do.

Shaan Puri

And so, when you look at this, are you like, "Wow, this is genius," "This is terrible," or "This is riskier than it appears?" What's the main takeaway? Because you've talked to this guy multiple times, right? We did an interview with him years ago and haven't really paid too much attention since. You live in this space day to day, and you know this guy a lot better than us. What's your honest takeaway from this?

Anthony Pompliano

I think it is riskier for a company to sit with **$500,000,000** in U.S. dollar cash on their balance sheet than **$500,000,000** worth of Bitcoin. The reason being, 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 at protecting your purchasing power over the next 10, 15, or 20 years than the dollars will. So, it's a unique aspect to be able to not only have the cash but also not need it to run your business. And so, yeah, I think that he's actually taking less risk than most of the public companies. My expectation is actually that shareholders at some point will start turning on some of these public companies that have tons of cash and saying, "Hey, if we're sitting there with, you know, I mean, Warren Buffett sitting with **$100,000,000,000** of cash, how much money is he losing for the business by leaving it in cash?" It's unclear what else he could do.

Sam Parr

Dude, you know what's crazy? Have you guys read the book *The Outsiders*? It's about nine different CEOs, and the whole thing is that they've gone from CEO to capital allocator. That phrase is thrown around a lot, but that's actually a really hard transition. For a person who starts and builds a company from scratch, typically their skill set is 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. I have found, amongst my friend group, that this doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be good investors. It's pretty interesting to watch someone go from being whatever they are when they start something—a tinkerer—to a proper capital allocator. That transition is pretty rare, I think. Typically, the people who are good at being investors kind of start as investors. They either buy a company just so they can get the cash flow to invest. But to see someone transfer those skill sets or evolve as an operator, that's actually really fascinating to see.

Shaan Puri

The way I call it is you go from **product manager** to **people manager** to **money manager**. That's the transition, right? Those are the levels of the game in business. Rarely do you find those three... yeah, very, very rare and very hard. Warren Buffett has a great quote. He says, "I'm a better investor because I was a businessman. I'm a better businessman because I'm an investor." 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 have both gears.

Sam Parr

Like Sean, you and I, I think, are quite good. I know I'm sure you are too, Pump. I know Sean more intimately. We're pretty good, I think, at going from 0 to 1. Do you think that? And you also invested. Do you think that you are better at starting versus investing? And how's that evolution been so far?

Shaan Puri

Definitely not better at investing than I am at building because I spent 15 years building and then probably 4 years seriously investing. Right? So just in the learning curve, I'm more of a white belt. 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, arm's length away. They take everything at sort of face value. There's a skepticism that gets built up—a healthy skepticism—when you've actually seen how hard it is to do some things. For example, a lot of times in the stock market, people react to the news. It's like Google puts out an overly woke AI thing, and people are like, "Oh, Google's dead." Google's not dead! Do you know how hard it is to compete with these companies? Do you know how durable, how strong these businesses are? Do you know how hard it is to create one of these? The market goes up and down in its mood. It gets euphoric and it gets depressed. But a business builder has trained themselves to not have that same swing of psychology. They don't go from peak euphoria—everything is amazingly going to go up—to, "Oh my god, it'll never recover again." A builder 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 the worst investors do. What do you think, Pump?

Anthony Pompliano

I think that's dead on. You see this not only in the public markets, but you are also starting to see it in the private markets. How many of the great angel investors today are really just running companies or building things themselves? Then they kind of angel invest on the side, or vice versa. Founders Fund may be the best example where they're really putting a flag in the ground. They're saying, "Look, we want to be operators, and we want to invest. By operating day to day, we learn, which makes us better investors, and vice versa." To win in the dynamic world we're headed into, you have to be a ball player. I always go back to when you're 12 years old playing little league baseball. There's, "Okay, hey kid, today you're the pitcher. Tomorrow, you're going to play shortstop. The next day, you're going to be the catcher. Oh, now you're the designated hitter." You just have to be able to do all the different positions. There's not really this specialization that you get when you move into high school, college, or definitely at major league baseball. In entrepreneurship, being able to stand in all those positions is the most coveted position. If you're a ball player, you can build things, invest, hire, manage, and fire. You can do all these different things, but it takes practice, and it's difficult to do, just like anything. Being the ball player is really what Warren Buffett figured out, what Jeff Bezos figured out, and what Elon Musk figured out. That involves not only building things but also understanding capital markets. It looks like Michael Saylor has figured out a way to tap the capital markets in a unique way.

Shaan Puri

It's a good transition because you went from being the "Pump Bitcoin Crypto Guy" as your main brand. Then, you know, it's like, "Oh, Pomp's doing this real estate conference." Pomp's buying these, you know, these sweaty businesses. You've shown some range, I guess, in the last few years. I don't know if it has a hedge or just where your curiosity went or whatever, but talk to us about some of the non-crypto weird stuff that you've been looking at. I know you were looking at some, like, what was the line painting business? Talk about that. Talk about some of the weird stuff you're doing and why you do it.

Anthony Pompliano

So, I've always been doing this stuff; I just never talked about it publicly. You know, if you go all the way back to when I was a kid, we always had some business we were trying to do. I built two companies right out of college, and in between those companies, I remember that I taught myself how to do WordPress websites. I would go around to small businesses and say, "Hey, pay me $5, and I'll build you a website." That wasn't going to be some big thing, but it was just a way to figure out: could you gain a skill? Could you solve a problem? Could you make money? I did it over and over again. Over the last couple of years, we've been doing quite a bit of work, building companies or trying to buy these businesses. But crypto definitely was the thing that I think most people weren't talking about online. We felt like we had a unique kind of narrative or perspective. The line business is a perfect example. I was reading the biography of Elon Musk, and in it, every Sunday, he would have the Tesla team bring him a car. They would take him for a test drive of the self-driving Tesla. There was this one area on the highway where it was kind of 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. So, what the engineers figured out was that the road painting was actually degraded. They were tired of Elon yelling at them every Sunday, so they called the Department of Transportation and said, "Hey, get out here and repaint this road so that the car stops messing up." They fixed the road, not the car, and then the car could drive correctly. Elon stopped yelling. This made me think: these line striping or line painting businesses are going to be exponentially more valuable in the future. 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. You could probably buy these line striping businesses right now for about three times EBITDA. You start to scale them, and then as the government mandates more frequent road painting, revenue will go up, and there will be multiple expansion. There's this thesis of having smart cars on dumb roads. Everyone wants to compete with the smart cars, but maybe the best way to make money is to figure out how to take the dumb roads and make them smart, interacting with the tech. If we really want to dig into the nitty-gritty details, one of the hardest parts for people coming from the tech industry when doing deals with those who are not in the tech industry is the drastic asymmetric information advantage that tech people have. What I mean by that is, let's say you guys start a company tomorrow and say, "Hey, I'm going to raise $1,000,000 on a SAFE note." We can pitch, have a conversation back and forth, come up with the terms, and the SAFE document is already pre-drafted. We can have that done in like two or three days. Tech has basically figured out that these long-term oriented people value reputation. There's some baseline shared knowledge, so deals get done very quickly, and there's not a lot of friction. Because it's a power law game, investors are incentivized to invest in tons of companies, and founders understand that there's a lot of capital available. When you go into these blue-collar, industrial manufacturing businesses, sometimes these people have been building the company, like the line driving business, for 20 years. This is their life. When we were having negotiations with them, we were starting out with...

Anthony Pompliano

Of the board of directors, right? Like, there's an education that goes into it, and so it makes getting deals done very, very hard because of that friction that exists. 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 doing their first deal. Like, this is the big one. We're still trying to figure out how to solve that problem, but it's just something that we've noticed doesn't get talked a lot about online.

Sam Parr

What were the numbers of this company?

Anthony Pompliano

I don't want to say this because they're super great guys, but these businesses are bigger than you think. I've looked at a bunch of these businesses. So, there's line striping, and another one is traffic cones and barricades. If you think of that business, every construction site has to have 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 a hip-height, you know, like a 4-foot wide barricade for about $400, and then they rent them out for $5 to $8 a day. Once you're on-site, you're not allowed to leave the site with the equipment until the job's done. For example, LaGuardia was under construction for like 10 years, right? So, someone was just renting those cones, getting paid $5, $6, or $7 a day for 10 years. These businesses are really interesting. What ends up happening is my buddy Brent Bishore has this quote: "Small businesses don't stay small on purpose." A lot of times, they dominate a local area, but they have a very hard time scaling. You can expect revenue to be in the mid-7 figures. Usually, they can get to about $1 million to $1.5 million in EBITDA. The owners often take quite a bit of compensation for themselves. If you're taking $500,000 and you live in a rural area or not a major metro, you're rich, right? It's a pretty good job to have, especially with the freedom it comes with. If you do that for a decade, you know, you could get paid $5 million and probably live pretty well.

Sam Parr

There's also a generational aspect to consider. My father is a small business owner, and my father-in-law is also a small business owner. My father owns a produce brokerage, meaning he buys fruit from farmers and sells it to Walmart. My father-in-law owns a moving company. I've asked them questions like, "Do you have managers? How does that work?" and they're like, "What do you mean? I only have 18 employees. We don't really have meetings; I don't do one-on-ones." Or they'll say, "How do you hire?" and I'll hear, "Well, usually one of the people who work there might have a buddy who hopefully could do okay." You know what I mean? The mindset is different when you come from a different generation, especially if you come from poverty and a blue-collar background. You're like, "Dude, I make $800 a year; I'm rich! Why would I do anything else?" Do you know what I mean?

Anthony Pompliano

I also think that there's this element of ambition that can kill companies if you're in the wrong business. We all get excited because, like, Elon is saying, "We're going to Mars!" or "I'm going to put a chip in someone's brain!" That's awesome. But I have one friend who has a retail store with three locations in the United States. One of them is in New York. I was talking to him recently, and he said, "Yeah, all of our profit comes from the New York store. I might actually be better off if I shut down the other two stores." So it's like, you know, when you're in business, everyone wants you to expand, get bigger, and do all these things. He started down that path but realized, "Wait a second, maybe the value of this business is that I know one market really well. I picked a great location; it's a great business." If he becomes too ambitious, he risks sucking all the profits out of the business, trying to reinvest it, and ultimately just blowing up. So again, if you're running a tech company, you have to be ambitious the whole time.

Anthony Pompliano

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 the odds of success don't actually line up with how much money you could make. So I do think a lot about, like, there's an ambition, product, and market fit. Where it only pays to be ambitious in the right market with the right product.

Sam Parr

Dude, my father, when he travels... my parents, now that they are older, 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. He's like, "Well, I have to have my work equipment. I can't work without this stuff." I'll get texts from him, and I'm like, "Dude, are you trying to post on Facebook right now? This is a Facebook post, isn't it?" He's like, "Isn't that what I just did?" So, the idea of evolving to some of these tools is like, "Dude, I don't give a shit about growing this. I'm just gonna bail, and it's gonna die. There is no exit." What are you talking about? The exit's when I die.

Anthony Pompliano

I also think that small businesses are often misunderstood. People might think, "Oh, of course the business just runs," as if it's similar to a tech company. However, small businesses make up **50% of jobs** in America, and the country is literally built off the backs of these small businesses, especially in terms of GDP growth and all this stuff. We all probably know stories similar to this. For example, I know someone who is an extended family member. He has a business that involves chemicals, where he mixes things to create the product. He won't fly anywhere; he will only drive. This way, he can put all of the materials in his car and then show up. When I was living in Florida, he showed up and asked, "Can I just take over the garage?" I walked in there, and I was like, "This looks like a science lab!" It was just like a physics lab.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and then he makes the product.

Anthony Pompliano

And he goes to the post office every day and drops the product off so they can ship it. All the stuff! You're just like, "Man, this is incredible!" What goes into building these companies compared to the tech world? We're just like, "Oh, somebody wrote some code and it just operates 24/7, 365." Money keeps coming into my account because Stripe's awesome.

Sam Parr

It's.

Anthony Pompliano

Just a whole different way to kind of play the game of business.

Shaan Puri

Dude, there's a great quote in venture capital: "You can't put rocket fuel into a car." Rocket fuel is great, but if you put it into a car, the car explodes. That's what your ambition is like. Ambition placed into the wrong vehicle will often just result in pain, not growth. I heard another interesting thing while talking to a guy who's probably one of the most successful VCs in the last, I don't know, 20 years. He was discussing AI and mentioned that he met with a guy who is a megabillionaire, private equity type of dude. This guy is about 80 years old. He goes to him and says, "Hey, you know, I'm here. I want to get your advice, your wisdom on what I should be investing in. I feel like the whole world is changing. AI is super exciting. I want to be in the game. I want to invest in the right AI projects, but I'm not sure. OpenAI could kill any project at any given moment if they just release any feature. The valuations are a little bit crazy. What should I do?" The 80-year-old private equity guy responds, "I think you should buy railroads." He goes, "What? Shit!" The guy explains, "Well, Warren Buffett has this great quote: 'Change is the enemy of the investor' in their style of compounding. If you want something that's durable and 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 great on the way up, but it's terrible on the way down." So, he was like, "It sounds like everything is changing so much. My approach is to go find the things that are not going to change. They probably have less people interested in them right now; they're probably undervalued." What I like about your line striping business, Pump, is that it's a mix of both. It's like an 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. One of the big advances is self-driving cars, so you would be the beneficiary without the competition. Versus if you said, "I'm going to go create a better LiDAR system or a simulation system for self-driving cars," okay, cool, but you're competing against the smartest people on Earth in the most competitive field ever, where technology is going to make everything obsolete every three years. That's just a very hard way to win. Somebody's going to win for sure, but it's a very hard way to win versus what you're talking about with the line striping business.

Anthony Pompliano

If somebody's listening to this and they have a line striping business, I know how to grow this nationally. Please get in touch with me; I will help—100%. Another... no, no.

Shaan Puri

No, don't sell to that suit dude. Don't be in Sam. You're relatable, you're relatable guys, you know? I got a baseball hat, he'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.

Sam Parr

Sean, have you ever been inside a Home Depot your entire life?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, dude. I go in there all the time for advice. I'm like, "I'm looking for some men. Could some boys come fix some things in my house?" So... what is my car go?

Anthony Pompliano

What are the other, like, maybe an extension of this? It's not only about what's going to change and what's not going to change, but can you bring fresh ideas to old industries? There's this new podcast that I've been listening to that's fantastic. It's called *Rainmakers*, and there's this guy out in LA who is basically trying to find investors that no one's ever heard of before. He went and found them. I think it's not that no one has heard of them, but just that the new generation hasn't heard of them. One of the guys that he profiled was Philip Anschutz. He owned a bunch of real estate, did a lot in oil and gas, and bought railroads. There's a thread through this guy's career where he basically tried to find value that no one understood. He would buy up railroad companies not for the railroads, but because there was oil underneath the ground. He also bought a bunch of local sports teams because he figured out a playbook of how he could get the stadiums for free. He had a lot of real estate, but the one I loved was when he bought Regal Cinemas, the movie theater chain, when all of the movie theaters were crashing. Everyone was saying, "Oh, this is a horrible business. You can't make money on tickets and food." What he realized in that moment was that for 20 minutes before the movie starts, you have a captured audience. They're just sitting there looking at the screen. So, he started to sell ads and transformed the movie theater into an ad business. All of a sudden, he completely changed the unit economics, and Regal Cinemas became this huge success. He sold it, etc. So, okay, that's awesome. But also, part of being a ballplayer and understanding this—I listened to that podcast episode, and we had a conference coming up. I thought, "Oh my God, I have the same thing as the movie theater! All these people are going to be sitting there." So, they went to advertisers and asked, "Does anyone have a TV commercial that they've already made? Pay us, and we will just play the commercial in the middle of the conference."

Shaan Puri

and and

Anthony Pompliano

We did it! So, you start to realize that not only are you taking new ideas to these old industries, but once you see it, you can bring this across all sorts of different applications. I really think that is the beauty of what you guys do on "My First Million," but also with these podcasts and Twitter, etc. It's just about finding the ideas, capturing them, and then applying them to your situation. This has been going on for a long time, but now all these ideas are just much more readily available.

Sam Parr

Dude, this guy Philip Antruis. Have you... do you know who this is, Sean?

Shaan Puri

No, I've never heard of him, dude.

Sam Parr

Savage, savage! He's super low-key, but yeah, he started in real estate and oil. Now he owns AEG. Do you know what that is? The entertainment thing? Yes, the entertainment thing. It's basically, I think, the second largest ticketing service provider behind Live Nation. AEG owns music events like Coachella. So this old guy owns Coachella. You know, AEG, you buy tickets through there. He owns all types of sports magazines, a couple of sports teams, and entertainment parks. He's prolific! This guy is super prolific. And you guys want to know something else about him? You probably didn't realize this. I was reading a lot of history, and I bought this book about the American West. This guy is the author! He wrote the book on America expanding into the West. This guy is super prolific! How do you say his name?

Anthony Pompliano

Philip Fitzgerald Anshowitz. AEG is literally Anshowitz Entertainment Group, right? It's the AEG. He's super legit.

Sam Parr

He's amazing. This guy's amazing. I've been fascinated by him, but he's pretty low-key. I don't think you could find a biography on him. He's very under the radar. This guy's super fascinating.

Shaan Puri

That's cool! Okay, I like it. I'm sold. The fact 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.

Sam Parr

Very fascinating guy. Can we talk about Pomps list? So we have this segment, Sean, and we have to do a redo on this segment. It started out right with, like, years ago when my wife wanted to go work somewhere. I was like, "Where's a company where you can own the stock and it could potentially 10x, but it's like a really safe place to work?" Where it's got around 500 employees and you can get good maternity leave.

Shaan Puri

Well, it's cool. I think it's worth saying, how old were you guys at this time, roughly?

Sam Parr

This was when I was 27, so she must have been 24.

Shaan Puri

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? A good job." Right? They don't even really know what they're looking for. Whereas Sam, you went all capital allocator on her. You were like, "Look, this is not a job; this is an investment. You're 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." You're going to basically get, I don't know, let's say a lot of these companies would give you maybe $40,000 to $50,000 a year of stock in addition to, let's just use round numbers, like $150,000 a year of salary. So, over four years, you're going to get $200,000 of stock. What you were saying was, "How do you become a millionaire? How do you take that $200,000 of stock over those four years? How do you become a millionaire without having a great idea, without becoming an entrepreneur, without becoming a great investor, without doing anything?" Right? No capital, no expertise. You're going to join as employee number, I don't know, not even in the top 100, right? 1,500? 1,500, right? Yeah, at a company that we all know about. We can touch and feel the products, so we're not betting on thin air here. 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?" We did this, and then we did a round of it, and they all turned out to be, or you know, we hit like 7 out of 10 that would have hit the criteria that we had touched on. Pump, we asked you to do your version of this. Pump's list. Do you have any? I don'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? You could go be, I don't know, employee 500 or employee 1,000, get $200,000 of stock, and might become a millionaire just off of the company continuing to grow and chug along. These sort of later-stage private or public companies.

Anthony Pompliano

I broke it up into three different buckets. The first two are like **10x reputation**. I don't think there's necessarily **10x** left in the stock, but I do think that if you join now, they're still seen as cool, new, and fast-growing. Your reputation and kind of your resume with **10x**—those two are pretty simple: **OpenAI** and **Anduril**. I think both are at this point where if you join, you may be able to make a couple of **$100,000** a year, and there's probably some upside. However, with **OpenAI** at around **$85,000,000,000**, you basically have to build a **$1,000,000,000** company to get, you know, **10 to 12x**. So, I think you can make a really nice salary, and you can probably get some upside—maybe **2 to 5x** is kind of the base case. But really, why you would join one of those companies is because of the reputation and the kind of resume **10x**—that's the value you're getting there.

Sam Parr

And Joel was on our original list, my friend. We've one-upped you on that one. I don't even think OpenAI really existed.

Anthony Pompliano

First time.

Shaan Puri

You probably existed as like a research lab at the time we did that episode, and it was not on our radar. We missed on that one.

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, well... I think that, you know, these companies, that's how they should mature, right? They should be like: 1. 10x economic opportunities 2. Then 10x reputation It never works the other way. Like, there's no company that has a 10x reputation opportunity first and then a 10x economic opportunity. 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. So let me ask you...

Shaan Puri

You worked at Facebook and Snap too, you know, blue-chip logo type of things. But also, at one point, they have been incredible financial opportunities too. When you joined those companies, did you think about them from a "logo collector first" mentality or a "stock collector first" mentality? What was your calculus? I'm sure both were beneficial, but which one was more beneficial in your case?

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, I mean, Facebook's probably the best example. I built and sold this company; it was kind of like in social media analytics. We used a bunch of the APIs. I'd gotten to know some people at Facebook. We sold the company, and I made enough money to make more than my friends who had jobs, but not enough to retire or anything like that. The guy at Facebook asked, "What are you gonna do now?" For whatever reason, I never even thought that Facebook had a building with hundreds of employees or any of that. It was just kind of like this thing that I used, and I talked to a guy over email. So, I wanted to come out here and interview for a job. I was like, "Cool, what job?" They said, "Product Manager." I had no clue what a Product Manager was. On the way there, I bought "The Art of Product Management," which is a book about product management, on my Kindle. I read it, went into the interview, and just regurgitated everything I remembered from the book.

Shaan Puri

The King of Kings.

Sam Parr

Of bullshit.

Shaan Puri

But I...

Anthony Pompliano

Was just like, I mean, that's kind of what a product manager does, right? It's like they kind of just get enough information and then just say some, you know, buzzwords, right? Right. And like, get the product out the door. So, like, definitely huge imposter syndrome when I started working there. I remember the last interview actually was with Sam Lesson, who now is like, you know, very well known, etcetera. Sam got on, and I didn't know what to expect because they were kind of like, "Hey, this is like the boss guy, right? So, you know, be on your A-game." He got on and he was like, "Let's talk about beacons." And I was like, "What?" The Facebook beacons had just come out, like, kind of like RFID stuff, and he just wanted to brainstorm.

Shaan Puri

Oh...

Anthony Pompliano

This place is different, right? Like, that's not a normal interview. The reason I took the job was not the money. It was a good salary, but it wasn't anything crazy. This was at the beginning of 2014; the stock was probably around $50.

Sam Parr

Oh, you got a 10xer then?

Anthony Pompliano

Well, I sold it and bought Bitcoin. Wait a minute.

Shaan Puri

Were you about to say the reason you joined was because the people and the culture were different?

Anthony Pompliano

I built the first two companies, but I couldn't get them to grow past a certain point. So, I came to this realization: I could either go to business school and pay to try to get this education, or I could join the people who seem to be the best in the world at growing things, which were the Facebook growth folks. They would pay me, and that literally was my evaluation. I went to Facebook, and they blew away my expectations. Sure, you get some resume benefits and all that kind of stuff, but what I found in my career is kind of like college. No one actually cares where you went to college after maybe the first 3 to 5 years of your business career. Working at a place like Facebook, unless you're one of the first, maybe, 2 to 500 employees, it kind of just is like, "Alright, you're kind of legit." You know, you worked at a place that has some sort of high bar. But now, there are 80,000 people that worked at Facebook as of the end of last year. So, it's kind of like 80,000 people got in, right? Does it have the same cachet as it did a decade ago? Unclear.

Shaan Puri

Dude, Sam, did I ever tell you when I interviewed at Facebook?

Sam Parr

You didn't know? I did not know that.

Shaan Puri

So, when we were going through the acquisition process, we were going to sell to Facebook, not Twitch. They had the higher offer, the better offer, and they flew us out to Seattle, I guess is where we went. They were like, "Oh, you know, as a formality, your whole team has to go through this leveling thing." So, you interview, you're all in, but you have to get leveled, and you gotta do it too. 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, "Shit, I better not blow this one." Right? Like, the emperor has no clothes. Let me make sure I don't blow this whole deal by going in wrong. So, I do the interview process. During the interview, I was kind of pumped. I was just making things up. I was literally just making things up for every single question I asked. I had no idea what the answer should be. This was completely out of the blue because I had done the interview process with the other people who were looking at buying us. In theirs, it was like, "Tell me about a time where you showed resilience." I was like, "Oh, you know, whatever. Yeah, this girl rejected me in 7th grade, but I didn't give up. In 8th grade, I got her." It was like some stupid character-type story. Then they asked, "Tell me about a time you disagreed with somebody but found resolution." Facebook was different. They said, "Okay, let's pretend that you just released a feature, and you come in the next day, and the chart of the usage looks like this." They showed this curve where it was like normal, and then it dropped off a cliff. They said, "But it's not around the feature you released; it's this adjacent feature. Here's what the usage looks like. Walk me through how you would approach that. What would you do next?" I was like, "I'm so dumb, but I was like, well, I'd go ask the guy who works on that. I'd be like, 'Hey, do you know what's going on with this feature?'" Then they were 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 would lead to my next question. If he doesn't know, then I would do this."

Sam Parr

What a stupid interview.

Shaan Puri

No, it was honestly a great interview. It was the best interview I'd ever done. All of the questions were like this, where there were real scenarios that got you to basically... it wasn't a riddle, like some abstract riddle about how many toilet seats are there in the Bay Area. It wasn't canned, you know, prepped character questions where you just cherry-pick one example that makes you look good versus the reality. I was like, "Oh, this is a problem-solving job, and they're trying to see how I problem-solve." There were all different variations of trying to solve this problem, but it's like a real problem, not like a very arbitrary problem that doesn't even relate to what's going on.

Sam Parr

What level did you get?

Shaan Puri

Now, what was it... last, last, last pod? I don't mean to toot my own horn, but beep beep! The guy told me that it was the highest... it was the highest feedback rating they'd ever gotten for all M&A they had done. When he said that, I knew I had been pretty much bullshitting the whole time during the interview. So, I respected them even more. I'm like, these guys just want to win the deal. That's clearly what they want; they don't actually care about my interview. They know 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’re throughout the actual interview results, and they just told me what I wanted to hear to get me to pick them because they had already decided before the interview that they wanted to buy our company. Anyways, the last thing I was going to say... there were so many people at Facebook that you've never heard of. Because there are people you know of at Facebook: there's Zuck, there's Sheryl, then there's like the Chimoff level. Then there's even like Sam Lesson, the guys I had talked to that interviewed with us. I guarantee you guys have never heard of them. Do you know this guy, Vijay Raji? Do you know this guy, Vivek? You've probably never heard of these guys, right? They were so impressive. These guys were so impressive, and not just impressive in the interview; their track record was impressive. I was like, so what are you working on here at Facebook? I've never heard of you guys. They're like, well, we built the games, like the HTML games inside of messaging. I was like, okay, how'd that go? 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, it's like it brings in $500 million a year now. And they're like, you know, that was kind of like an okay hit, but our big hit was working on this. And he's like, yeah, this guy Vivek, he's like, you know how Microsoft Office went from something you bought on a disk, and you downloaded, and you typed in the key, you paid $30 once, to like this thing in the cloud, Office 365, that you pay for every month? He goes, yeah, he created that! He was at Microsoft; he created that 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 we kind of 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 shit! The level of talent at this place is insane.

Sam Parr

Dude, it is insane! I remember taking tours there. My wife worked at Facebook, and I would just walk around the campus. I would see some of the conversations and hear some of the conversations. I was just starting to hustle, which was just a daily newsletter, and I was pumped that I hit 100,000 people a day reading it. I just remember walking around and thinking, "I'm a piece of shit. I'm nothing. I am nobody." "Give me one of these Facebook vests! I want one of these. I'm in!"

Shaan Puri

Did you see the vending machine where they have MacBook chargers? You can just push a "3" and a giant brick charger will drop out for you.

Sam Parr

I'm like, "Dude, I just bought 4 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 heck? Sign me up, I'm in!

Anthony Pompliano

The thing that Sean was talking about with the interview... So, there are three different tracks in the interviews when I was there. I didn't believe I was a good interviewer; I didn't know how to pick talent, basically. One of the things you can do is volunteer to do the interviews more often as a product manager. They don't have a specific person who does all the hiring, but the current product managers hire the prospective new product managers. So, the current team kind of does the interviews, right? Of these three tracks, the one that Sean talked about was my favorite because it was the most practical. The example I used to give is: you launch something, and 50% of your traffic is down. You come in Monday morning, what do you do? I probably did over a hundred interviews in about 18 months. You hear all these answers, and there was only one time ever that someone said something to me, and I immediately thought, "Hire! Strong hire!" He said, "I would immediately alert the entire team; we have a problem." While everyone else would jump to solve the problem, it was so obvious that this guy had worked on teams before. He understands what happens in these scenarios. Communication is key. Everything was wrapped in this one single sentence. I remember just thinking, "Man, you can tell the greats from the pretty goods in a 30-minute conversation just walking through a practical example." All of the lessons learned show up. I do think that's one of the strongest things that Facebook does in terms of talent filtering.

Sam Parr

What are the other companies that you like?

Anthony Pompliano

Alright, so there's a bunch of companies that I'm going to put in the middle bucket, which are like the 10x potentials. **8 Sleep** I think is a huge business.

Sam Parr

Really, I think they're huge. Do you think it's 10x, though?

Shaan Puri

I don't have a huge business. No, no, no. Yeah.

Anthony Pompliano

I think 8 Sleep is a great company. You know, I'm very good friends with a lot of folks there. I believe they are probably one of the best teams of operators. They generate a lot of revenue with only about 80 or 85 employees. I believe they’ve publicly stated that the company has been profitable. They're selling a hardware product along with all of the software, and some of the things they’re building now are just really cool. I think a lot about the 10x economic opportunity. It's not just about making more money; you also need a really strong mission. Their whole idea is about the 8 hours a day when no one tends to a human. Can they compress that? Can they make it healthier? Can they do things like body scans, etc.? All these kinds of cool things represent a huge opportunity for someone. The second company is Varta. The whole idea of going to space is not new, but going to space to help us back here on Earth is huge. Varta has created space manufacturing facilities. They launch them into space, and right now, they are manufacturing drugs in zero gravity and then bringing them back to Earth. I think that’s a pretty big opportunity.

Shaan Puri

Wait, explain that. I forgot, what's the reason to do the manufacturing in space?

Anthony Pompliano

It's a little unclear what all of the reasons are going to be so far, but two quick ones are: 1. There are some drugs that it's either very difficult or not possible to currently manufacture on Earth due to gravity. So, zero gravity is a huge component of it. 2. If they're able to do this correctly, it may actually be cheaper to do some of this in space than it is on Earth. Their big macro bet is to use space for the benefit of Earth, rather than everyone else who wants to go to space to conquer Mars, the Moon, or whatever else.

Shaan Puri

But dude, how does that make sense? How could it be cheaper to do something in space? You have to get to space in a rocket, and you have to have labor in space. Like, how could it possibly be cheaper?

Anthony Pompliano

Do you have to labor? So, that's the thing. They've built this automated manufacturing box, basically, and so you don't need any labor. Now, the other thing you have to remember is that rocket launches are super cheap compared to what they historically were. It's not like SpaceX is getting a rocket just for Varda, right? They're bringing tons of things up there all at once. So now you have shared costs of an already, you know, 10 times or more cheaper rocket. The math ends up working in a really interesting way.

Shaan Puri

We gotta get that guy, what's his name? Delian. We gotta get him on the pod to explain this. I'm gonna be like, and I'm not gonna let him do any hand-wavy shit.

Anthony Pompliano

I'm gonna be like, "No."

Shaan Puri

No, no, no, no. Oh, the box manufactures it in space and it's cheaper than renting a place in Lexington? Alright, walk me through that line by line. There's no way, right? Like, this is crazy.

Anthony Pompliano

You guys bring him on and we'll see what he says.

Shaan Puri

He's obviously right; he's not wrong. I just don't get it, and I want somebody to explain it to me. There's gotta be other people out there that are like, "How does this work exactly?"

Sam Parr

Alright 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 a new podcast called **Moneywise**. In this podcast, we break down different people's financials. This means we look at what their income is, how much money they spend, and we break down their portfolio. Then, we dive deep on a certain topic that's a little psychological, like, "What do you spend on that makes you happy?" Things like that. Well, I said I was only going to make more episodes if you people begged me to make more because they're really hard to create. And you did! So, I made more. We have a season of 7 episodes. The first one is released today; right now, it's live. In this first episode, we talk to a guy who spends roughly **$250,000 a month**. We broke down exactly what he spends his money on, his net worth, his portfolio—everything. It's pretty surprising that people give out this information, and I'm really proud of this podcast. You can check it out; the first episode is live now. Look up **Moneywise**. You can find it on YouTube, but right now it's not video—it's only audio. The audio is available on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts. Check it out and then tweet at me, **@thesampar**. Let me know what you guys think because I'll make more after these next 7, but again, only if you love them. I need to know if you actually do! So, it's called **Moneywise**, a podcast by Hampton, my company, **joinhampton.com**. Let me know what you guys think. Thus, **@thesampar** is my Twitter. Alright, back to the pod!

Anthony Pompliano

So, the third one... I'm shy to share this one because Sam's head is going to explode, but **FigureAI** definitely, I think, is number one. For those that don't understand what they're doing, human labor is becoming a huge problem. There are just not enough people to do all the jobs. People get sick, they're tired, and they only work so many hours—all that kind of stuff. So, there's this rise of robotics, but not just like Boston Dynamics' dog robots. I'm talking about actual humanoid robots. These are human-looking machines that walk around a warehouse. They can pick things up, pack things, and do many of the tasks a human could do. One of the best ways to evaluate a company is by looking at the enemies they pick. Here, the guy, Brett, who runs FigureAI, has basically picked Elon Musk as his competitor. You have to be a little crazy, a little ambitious, and you have to raise a lot of money. This guy has raised over **$1 billion** now to go after this opportunity. The other interesting thing is that, as an investor, historically, people paid attention to demographics—how old a population was, how fast it was growing, all that. Now, you're going to have to actually pay attention to robotics. Balaji Srinivasan has talked a lot about this. If you don't have enough people in society, you have to replace them with robots. So, measuring how many robots are coming off the production line may give you a better sense of where you should be investing versus just looking at human demographics. I think that's a big one.

Sam Parr

Once they raised their first round at $300,000,000, I went and toured their factory or whatever. I went back and said, "Sarah, let's move there. You're going to get a job there. We got it." She's like, "I don't know anything about robotics." I'm like, "I already bought the books. You got some reading tonight. We're going to get you to work, honey. It's going to be okay. We're going to get you caught up." It's like I'm the tiger.

Shaan Puri

Mom, yeah.

Sam Parr

I was like, "Don't worry."

Shaan Puri

We're enrolled in Kumon. You'll be ready in 3 weeks.

Sam Parr

Yeah, the coffee's brewing. It's going to be a late night, so come on, chop chop, let's get to work!

Anthony Pompliano

The I've got 3 more for you is trauma.

Sam Parr

I don't know if...

Anthony Pompliano

You guys have heard of this company. It's one of the fastest-growing companies in Founders Fund's portfolio. What they figured out is similar to Uber, where you press a button and a car shows up. All of these light industrial manufacturing facilities need tons of labor, so that's kind of the other side of the problem that Fig's going after. What they do is go to these temp work providers. But the problem is that the temp work providers will say, "Hey, I need 50 people tomorrow," and they're like, "Cool, we'll send you 30," because that's all they have. Then, of the 30 that they're supposed to send you, like 20 of them show up, and 5 of them are hungover from the night before. It's just a horrible experience, and it's super expensive.

Sam Parr

All this stuff, and this is the company where the investors brag about it. It's like on their about page, "So, like, we're a 996 company," right?

Anthony Pompliano

Savages. I met the founders, and they were like, "We have an Olympian's work ethic." I was like, "Ah, we're just going to outwork everyone."

Shaan Puri

You know the truth about this company. I should have invested in this company. I had a chance to invest, and I was like, "I'm in," even before I heard the pitch. I heard something very similar to what you just said: **not the Olympian's work ethic, but the spelling bee champion's work ethic**. The guy who started the company went to Duke, and I know his brother. They both were like **ESPN spelling bee champions**; one of them won it. Then, the guy who started the trial is the one who fainted mid-word. Do you remember that clip of the guy who starts spelling the word, passes out, stands up, and finishes the word? It's the most incredible clip.

Anthony Pompliano

I did not know that.

Shaan Puri

In ESPN history, forget LeBron, forget Michael Jordan. This kid starts to spell a word, passes out, gets up, says nothing about passing out, and just finishes spelling.

Sam Parr

The word.

Shaan Puri

Flawlessly was absolutely incredible. He's the founder of Traba. When I heard that, I'm like, "I'm in. Just send me... tell me where to wire the money." And then, unfortunately, I 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 bee performance." Probably turns out I should've just trusted my gut. Turns out...

Sam Parr

He's done alright.

Shaan Puri

I met him... I met his brother at a party, and he had won the script spelling bee. Right, I've seen him on ESPN. I see him at a party, I recognize this kid from ESPN. I'm like, "You! I've seen you before! You're the spelling kid." He's like, "Yeah, how'd you know? That was years ago." And I go, "Dude, this is annoying." And drunk Sean goes, "Dude, everybody wait! Dude, spell my name!" He goes, "I don't know your name." I go, "It's Sean." And he goes, "I don't know S-H-A-W-N." I go, "No!" I beat him! I beat him as if I spelled something, as if him spelling my name S-H-A-W-N 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 an absolute douche I was last night." I've been hoping to meet this guy again so I could apologize for this 15 years ago. I'm like, "Bro, sorry I made you..."

Anthony Pompliano

Now, we know why he didn't send you the wire details.

Shaan Puri

No, that was his brother. Yeah, that was.

Sam Parr

His brother.

Shaan Puri

Two different guys. He began, there was a brother who became a very successful poker player and then did a bunch of interesting things that way. Both, yeah, I think a spelling bee is like one of those hotbeds of... if you can get obsessed about this intellectual pursuit, you know, it means two things: your parents are incredibly overbearing and you're incredibly smart. So, you know, that usually will lead to success.

Anthony Pompliano

100% Next one is Placer.ai. So, I’ve invested in most of these companies. The only ones I wish I had invested in are OpenAI, Anduril, and Figure.ai. Placer is basically this Israeli guy who said, "Hey, I'm going to use cell phones to create better mobile analytics." Not like what you're doing on the phone, but more about where you are. Originally, his pitch was, "Hey, I'm going to be able to tell people when you drive into the parking lot and then what aisles you walk through in the store." We're going to sell all this analytics—really, really granular kind of location data. They just publicly announced that they're doing $100 million in annual revenue. When you look at that, again, it's for real estate. That's where they've seen a lot of people buy, but I think also some hedge funds and a couple of other folks buy the data as well. You know, $100 million is pretty much derisked. If you want to have a career in B2B software or analytics, obviously you're not going to go to like an Anduril, right? This is kind of like an off-brand, off-industry. But I think Placer still has probably a 10x potential upside.

Sam Parr

What's their valuation in their latest round?

Anthony Pompliano

I think the latest public one is like **$1,000,000,000**, so kind of like **10 times revenue**. It's not hard to see a business that is already doing **$100,000,000** in annual revenue growing pretty quickly. You know, so it's got some upside to it.

Shaan Puri

This is probably my favorite one of yours so far. Do you have any other ones? You had one more, maybe?

Anthony Pompliano

I've got two more that are kind of related. So, everyone's all excited about the deep tech stuff. I invested in this company called **Rainmaker**. Rainmaker makes it rain; they're flying precision drones into clouds and dropping chemicals in the clouds to make it rain. That's kind of crazy! That is probably the riskiest one. Now, simultaneously, if you look at what's like the cybersecurity version of all these deep tech companies, there's this guy **Joshua Steinman** who left, I think he was on the National Security Council in the Trump administration. He realized, "Wait a minute, there are no companies that protect all of our public infrastructure." The example he gave me was: imagine what happens if someone can hack the water treatment plants and change the pH levels of the water, causing massive carnage or really screwing with a local area by simply hacking this one facility that's public infrastructure and doing something nefarious. So, he's creating a company called **Galvanic**. Again, it's super small, probably on the higher end of the risk spectrum, but it has a really cool mission. If you're able to protect public infrastructure, there's unlimited demand for this type of service. You can see how these businesses could get quite big, given all the concerns with our adversaries and people getting better at cyber warfare, etc.

Shaan Puri

Dude, you know I love that idea. That's a great idea!

Sam Parr

That's great. And what was that called?

Anthony Pompliano

**Galvanick**

Sam Parr

Wow, that one and this "make rain" thing are pretty wild.

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, the "Rainmaker 1"—like, people have been doing it. It's called cloud seeding. People have been doing that for a while, and they're specifically doing it in places like China and the Middle East. But there's a world where not only can they make it rain, but also if you can change the weather pattern, you may be able to prevent hurricanes from hitting land and, you know, doing stuff like that. Now, of course, you get into this weird world where the second someone says, "Hey, I can change the weather," people are like, "Right, no, God! You're trying to play God," whatever. But I think that where they're starting, in terms of going to farmers and being like, "Hey, you know, get what is basically precipitation in the clouds just to fall," is a worthwhile mission. And the founder's awesome! He's got a mullet, 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.

Shaan Puri

Dude, maybe I should do that for all my portfolio companies. Just gift them a squat rack. Oh yeah, just increase returns in my portfolio by 20%.

Anthony Pompliano

I mean, there definitely has to be some sort of study that shows people who are in better shape have more energy. You think clearer, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Shaan Puri

Dude, we gotta ask you about two things. This Solana bet you did... explain this! This was baller. Sam, do you know about this?

Sam Parr

No, what happened?

Anthony Pompliano

So, I had a bunch of Ethereum back from when I was mining it, and it was just kind of sitting there. It had gone up a lot. Towards the end of last year, I was sitting there and I was just like, "Why am I holding this?" Deciding to hold an asset is an active decision every day. So, I'm basically saying I should go long Ethereum every day that I don't sell this. I had been scared about triggering taxes and all the normal lies you tell yourself as to why not to make a decision. I just said to myself, "Okay, if I am going to sell this and not buy more Bitcoin, what else would I buy?" I went through a bunch of the cryptocurrencies and I thought, "I think Solana is going to go up a lot. It's going to go up a lot more than Bitcoin. I think it's going to go up a lot more than Ethereum in this specific bull market because of a smaller market cap. There's a lot of energy and excitement around it." Over the years, I've learned how to put positions on, which I think is also a very under-discussed thing. I didn't sell everything and then just buy this asset instead. What I did was buy a little bit of Solana 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. The position is going in your favor, so I doubled down because the market was telling me I was right. It kept going up. I then sold 100% of the Ethereum and bought Solana at $73, I think it was. This gave me a blended price around $65. Solana just went on a tear to $120, and I was like, "Oh wow, that was awesome! Hopefully, it keeps going." That was it; I was done. But then the price started to fall. It fell from $120 to $110 to $100. I woke up one day and it was at $80. Over the years, I've just learned that nothing's changed with the thesis. I had no more Ethereum to sell to convert over, so I went into the bank account, got more cash, and bought it at $80, which happened to be about a 30% drawdown. Historically, in crypto, this has been a pretty good spot. Then it ripped all the way up to about $190, and so it's been a great trade. But also, I'm only able to do it because I've been doing this long enough and learned how to put the positions on. I know how to think about when the position goes in your favor to add, not to sell and take profits. You also have to know what you own. I don't think I'll own Solana in 5 or 10 years from now. It's very much for the next year. I'm very bullish on this, and then we'll see what happens. Whereas Bitcoin, I'll hold forever and don't think that I'll ever sell it.

Shaan Puri

First of all, I mean, that's a very good trade. So, first of all, very, very well done. It's not easy to do what you just described. The psychology around what you just described is, I think, more important than the "why." But I do want to ask you, you said the word "thesis" on Solana. I have a buddy who has an insane amount of Solana. He owns like $40 or $50 million of Solana, and I think this guy's nuts for doing it. He's a very smart guy in general, but I asked him, "Why do you own this absurd amount of Solana? This isn't like... what do you know that I don't know? Please tell me so I can go buy it if you have some incredible thesis." And he's like, "I just... I like to think it's gonna go up." That's his thesis. And he's like, "Well, I think it's gonna be a bull market. In a bull market, it's usually these kind of second, third, fourth, fifth coins that get the highest run-up. I see a lot of energy in the ecosystem." People like these... all of a sudden, it starts to sound a lot like, I don't know, you know, we're talking like horoscope-type language for me. And so I'm like... I've been telling him, "Dude, please just sell this thing." And then 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 I have $40 or $50 million of Solana? That is an absurd amount of this thing."

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, on one hand, it sounds crazy. You're like, "Oh, it's like the energy, whatever." On the other hand, in this person's defense, what I would say is when I first started investing, somebody told me, "Follow the developers." That's a great investing strategy. There is a lot of development activity that's shifting. The other thing is there is a pretty well-thought-out investment strategy of wanting to buy the things that everyone is going to buy tomorrow, today. Rather, if everyone else is going to build a thesis around something, then I want to buy it before they do. Be contrarian before it becomes consensus. I love the George Soros quote: "When I see a bubble, I rush in." The whole idea is that bubbles can go bigger and further than you think they can. So, let's just say that Solana is a bubble. Selling an asset at the beginning of a bull market is usually a pretty bad strategy in crypto. But also, as assets get bigger, the returns go down. I don't think it's crazy to say, "Oh, there's a lot of activity around this. There's a really strong narrative or meme. There are tons of coins and things that are being launched on this." Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana probably all go up. But if you had to pick one of the three that goes up the most, it's probably those smaller market cap assets that are likely to outperform. So, I don't think it's the craziest theory. The question is, what is your thesis on when to sell? That's what people in crypto, including myself, have messed up over the years, over and over again. Timing markets is nearly impossible. When an asset goes up 100%, you're like, "Well, of course, it's going to double from here." Then, next thing you know, it's down 50%, and you're like, "Shit."

Shaan Puri

So, what are you thinking with the Solana one? What are you going to do?

Anthony Pompliano

My theory in crypto now is that selling has less to do with price levels. In the public markets, people will hold a stock and think, "Okay, if this ever gets overvalued, I'm selling. I'm trimming the position." In crypto, it's much more cyclical. I actually think that selling is more about where we are in the cycle—like time—than it is about value. It's hard to determine what the value is versus the price. Is this overpriced or underpriced? It's very difficult to assess for these assets. So, I think about it a lot more in terms of time. Is it the end of this coming year? Is it the beginning of next year? Is it the summer of 2025? There's some time frame that I'll come up with, and I'm like, "I don't care what the valuations are. I'm just selling because it seems like the right time in the cycle," more so than having a price target for any one of these assets.

Sam Parr

What was the second thing you...?

Shaan Puri

Were gonna ask him about Sean Andrew Tate. Pompe interviewed Andrew Tate before he was Tate. You were on Tate before Tate. What's the guy like? You met him in person, right?

Anthony Pompliano

I did meet him in person. We did an interview together in Miami.

Shaan Puri

Why did you interview him at that time? Was he kind of a big deal? Was it because he was an interesting person, or what was the context?

Anthony Pompliano

I don't really think that he had maybe a couple of crazy things online. Crazy in the sense that, you know, people were like, "Oh, whatever," reacting to it. But, you know, he's a four-time world champion kickboxer. We had DM'd a couple of times. I actually thought that he was just an interesting person from the perspective that he had a lot of commentary about things that people either weren't willing to say or that made me think. It didn't mean I agreed with everything. It's just like when you find those people, you kind of like, "Hey, tell me all your worldviews," and then I'll sift through the bullshit and figure out what I agree with and what I don't. So, I interviewed him, and he definitely said some things that I was like, "Oh, I can't release this interview." You know, this is kind of a little spicy. What was interesting is I was like, "Hey, I don't know if we're going to actually ever release this thing. Let's just kind of put it on ice and we'll go from there." Then, a year later, society had changed, culture had changed, and he started to become much bigger. He went on a couple of podcasts and said a lot of the exact same things, and people didn't have a problem with it. So, it's interesting. He was saying the same thing for like a year or two, but actually, culture became a little bit more acceptable of some of the commentary, including things around, you know, the vaccine and that type of stuff. I think people just had more information to evaluate these situations. So, I was like, "Alright, it's still a little spicy, but let's release it." One of the final points in deciding whether we were going to release it or not was I didn't really care so much about the really hardcore perspectives as much as, "Who are you as a person? How do you make money? Kind of like, you know, the business and the person behind these thoughts."

Sam Parr

What was his business at the time? A Hustler University, like his course?

Anthony Pompliano

He had a bunch of them. They're like online businesses. He described them, and it was actually the first time that a podcast episode I had done was cited in articles. People were writing hit pieces or critiquing him, and they were referencing things from the podcast. So, I'd get a Google alert notification like, "Oh, you've been mentioned in The New Yorker" or whatever. And I'm like, "Oh, must be awesome! Obviously, I'm a cool guy." Then you go and you're like, "Oh, I'm in an article where they're talking about misogyny and all these things." I'm like, "Oh, okay." At the end of that interview, he asked me, "What's the one thing you disagree with me on today?" What I said to him in the interview was, "Every single thing that you're saying has this kernel of truth, but then you extract it and have this bombastic wrapper that basically is gonna go viral online." He kind of cracks a little bit, breaks character, and he's just like, "Ah, you're a smart man." He shakes my hand, and I think that was the biggest takeaway: people don't become viral and successful without being highly intelligent. He very well understood human psychology and the way the internet worked. He had a message, and he wanted to get that message out to people. He was able to communicate in a very effective way. 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 marketing today. People saw this guy be successful on the internet, get a message out, and now you have a bunch of companies and individuals trying to replicate it. Maybe it's not the same message, but that structure was pioneering. You've got to be able to 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 can I learn something from you?" To me, the learning was that he really understood marketing and communicating on the internet in a way that I don't think a lot of people did before they saw what he did.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and he kind of paid the fucking price for it too. I'm...

Anthony Pompliano

Well, in hindsight, like that's the second lesson: **don't become the main character**, right?

Sam Parr

Or, if you are, you better be ready to pay that price.

Anthony Pompliano

Yeah, and it's just, you know, I ask myself a lot. Look, I have a number of very successful friends who nobody's ever heard of before, right? Sometimes I'm like, "Man, that's an amazing life! You figured it out. You figured out how to be super successful and also no one knows who you are." There are a lot of other people who enjoy talking to folks. You know, Patrick Bet-David, I saw a clip of him recently, and he was talking about the fact that when he sold his insurance company, he wanted to do something for the rest of his life that he enjoyed. Talking to people and learning from them was the thing. So he went and did all this media stuff and whatever. I think you just gotta know who you are as a person. What are you trying to accomplish professionally? What is your comfort level with privacy and personal notoriety? It's different for everybody. So, yeah, if you want to become the main character, then definitely you gotta be ready for everything that comes with that, good or bad.

Shaan Puri

Well, dude, you're dressed as the main character today. Yeah, you came on here.

Sam Parr

You're looking good.

Shaan Puri

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.

Anthony Pompliano

Thanks for having me.

Sam Parr

Alright, that's the pod.