#709 Building a Media Empire w/ Rich Antoniello

Rich Antoniello is the Founder & CEO of Complex (now Complex Networks). They recently sold the business for approximately $300 million to BuzzFeed. In this conversation, we discuss media, entrepreneurship, capital markets, bitcoin, NFTs, and some of the CRAZY stories from over the years. ======================= My friends at Coin Cloud will give you $50 in FREE Bitcoin when you buy $200 or more at any of their 4,000+ machines. Use promo code POMP to get your free Bitcoin. For details or to find your nearest Coin Cloud machine, visit www. Coin. Cloud/Pomp Coin Cloud has been serving customers since 2014 and has established itself as the world's leading digital currency machine (DCM) operator. More than just a Bitcoin ATM, Coin Cloud machines make it easy to buy and sell Bitcoin and 30+ other digital assets with cash. To get your $50 in free Bitcoin, visit www. Coin. Cloud/Pomp ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= AG1 by Athletic Greens, the category-leading superfood product, brings comprehensive and convenient daily nutrition to everybody. Keeping up with the research, knowing what to do, and taking a bunch of pills and capsules is hard on the stomach and hard to keep up with. To help each of us be at our best, they simplify the path to better nutrition by giving you the one thing with all the best things. ONE scoop of AG1 contains 75 vitamins, minerals and whole food-sourced ingredients, including a multivitamin, multimineral, probiotic, greens superfood blend and more in one convenient daily serving. The special blend of high-quality, bioavailable ingredients in a scoop of AG1 work together to fill the nutritional gaps in your diet, support energy and focus, aid with gut health and digestion, and support a healthy immune system, - effectively replacing multiple products or pills with one healthy, delicious drink. To make it easy, Athletic Greens is going to give you an immune supporting FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit athleticgreens.com/pomp today. Again, simply visit athleticgreens.com/pomp to take control of your health and give AG1 a try. =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Rich Antonello is the founder and CEO of Complex, also known as Complex Networks today. They recently sold the business for approximately $300 million to BuzzFeed. In this conversation, we discuss media, entrepreneurship, capital markets, Bitcoin, NFTs, and some of the crazy, crazy, crazy stories from over the years. I really enjoyed this conversation with Rich, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is CoinCloud. Did you know you can buy and sell crypto with cash? I want to introduce you to my friends at CoinCloud.

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:25Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Keeping up with the research, knowing what to do, and taking a bunch of pills and capsules is hard on the stomach and hard to keep up with. To each of us, be at our best. They simplify the path to better nutrition by giving you the one thing with all the best things. One scoop of AG1 contains 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole-food sourced ingredients, including a multivitamin, multimineral, probiotic, green superfood blend, and more in one convenient daily serving. The special blend of high-quality bioavailable ingredients in a scoop of AG1 work together to fill the nutritional gaps in your diet. They support energy and focus, and they aid with gut health and digestion. Support a healthy immune system, effectively replacing multiple products or pills with one healthy, delicious drink.

• 3:41Anthony Pompliano?

  To make it dead simple, Athletic Greens is going to give you an immune-supporting free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit athleticgreens.com/pomp today. Again, simply visit athleticgreens.com/pomp to take control of your health and give AG1 a try. All right, let's get into this episode with Rich. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement. To make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 4:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm excited to talk to you today because I feel like you have a a combination of a ton of business experience, a great pulse on culture. And then also you got a ton of crazy ass stories that you can share with us as well.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Good combo. I like that. It's the way to have it. You gotta have some fun doing this shit.

• 4:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you're literally the perfect person to talk to. All right. First thing I want to start with, we're just gonna come out of the gate with a great one. You guys supposedly sell tens of millions of dollars of hot sauce. How the hell do you sell tens of millions of dollars of hot sauce?

• 5:02Speaker 02

  By the way, it's, it's actually no longer like small tens of millions either. By the way, we have, we have like literally the number one selling game on Amazon right now as well. Um, it literally, no, it's, it's crazy by the way, right? So we started this little show about five and a half years ago called Hot Ones, right? Very simple. And we had none of our own hot sauce on it at first. And it was this little interview show where it was like 10 questions. They, the questions get harder and the wings get hotter. And we would have, you know, initially we obviously couldn't get any big celebrities. We had some fun people on, but

• 5:43Speaker 02

  what ended up clicking was the celebrities would forget all of their media training with these hot wings. So they would say the craziest shit possible. And then we had a ton of people just become this ridiculous army slash community around Hot Ones. And we were like, this is nuts. We should go to like the best hot sauce developer and make our own instead of giving all of our money away and promoting somebody else's hot sauce. So now on any given season, we have between four and five of the hot sauces are our own in-house friends.

• 6:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And so people can just go and they go on a website and they can just buy them. So you're going like direct to the consumer or can you actually go get them in stores too?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can go to Heatness, which is our partner, or you can go to Amazon and buy all these sauces. Now you can also buy, we just launched, you could preorder right now. We, we will have, I believe we will have the number one hot chicken nugget in all of Walmart. So you can go to Walmart.com. It's crazy, dude. You can go to Walmart.com and buy preorder packs of the different flavors of our hot sauce on Hot Ones McNuggets.

• 7:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, let's go back in time 20 years for before we continue and people are like, what the hell?

• 7:05Speaker 02

  This was my plan. This was my plan all along, if you couldn't tell.

• 7:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So you started Complex almost 20 years ago now.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 7:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And it now lives at the intersection of, I, I think of it as business, investing, culture, et cetera. Like it occupies this really, really interesting place in society. What was the original idea and how the hell did you start?

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, the original idea, I'm gonna, I'm gonna use this term concentric circles. It's very popular now. 20 years ago, everything was very verticalized, right? Like we launched as a magazine 20 years ago too. You have to remember back, back then magazines were a huge part of meat, like very popular media. Very popular medium, but also wildly verticalized. So for fashion, you had like GQ and Esquire. For music, you had The Source and Double XL. For skateboarding, you had Thrasher and other. And what we never understood, Mark, Echo, my partner Seth Gersberg,

• 8:07Speaker 02

  we never understood how most people would read all those magazines. You'd go to like all cool people or go to cool stores and all those magazines would be out. We believed in a confluence of all of those topics together. And I just didn't understand how. You couldn't, if we used hip hop culture as the cartilage to tie all of these verticals together. So it's music, fashion, sneakers, art and design. And all of this sounds done now, but if you really think about it, that what all of those subcultures were on the outside

• 8:47Speaker 02

  that drove popular culture to the middle. Now the world's flipped where all the subcultures are in the middle. And if you, the only way to influence the whole pyramid is to start at the top with the most, the most important topics and own those conversations.

• 9:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of the questions I have is as you did that, right? You pioneered a whole new way for people to think about, uh, kind of creating content, eventually selling physical products, um, in, in kind of the, uh, the analog world as well. But did you understand, um, kind of the, the culture of society? Did you understand the way that people, uh, were kind of interacting with each other and you covered it? Or do you think of yourselves more as, uh, you dictated it, right? Hey, this is us and we're going to put this out in the world and then people kind of coalesce around what we like. So which, which one is it?

• 9:34Speaker 02

  It's a great, that's a great question, but it's actually, neither one of those are right. It's not binary in that respect, right? We always say, we don't report on the news, we define it, we make it ourselves, right? So we are at the forefront of creating a lot of content and conversations, not just participating and amplifying others. So there's that aspect. Um, and the fact that we were very early, like, I mean, obviously when we started and we found sneakers so important to us, um, uh, we would, yeah, just wait until literally that every, every single young man is going to be all over this and also not just young men, but young women. So there's the topic side where you're always early in defining

• 10:18Speaker 02

  where it's going and having a strong narrative to show people where it's going to go. But even more so, why I think on a foundational basis, we were so much better and been a better company than other people is that we were really the first community-driven media. Company. If you really think about what we did was organize a whole bunch of verticals that everybody ignored as subculture and niche. And we got all of them together. Now, I didn't foresee, you know, Facebook becoming as big and Twitter and all of those things to, to, to be able to blow up communities. But what we just did is organize a whole bunch of slightly ignored, but massively impactful communities.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  That then, when social media democratized it and allowed all those communities to talk together. We were already, we, we were defined as the leader within each of those verticals and it just blew up organically. So I just look at us as the first organ, like truly organic, community-driven media company. And now everybody goes community first.

• 11:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, because it works. What in 20

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, but you know, they're biting off of our ideas. So it's all good.

• 11:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I feel like you're dancing on graves a little bit here and I'm not mad about it. You can, you can take your victory lap all you want. For those that don't know, Rich just sold Complex to BuzzFeed for about $300 million. We can get into kind of why you did it in a second. But what is over the last 20 years, the craziest thing you've had to do to keep the business alive and thriving?

• 11:51Speaker 02

  Um, okay. Well, there's two. Number one.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  One of my former partners, this guy Seth. We, we, at the end of 2006, we broke even as a magazine, as an independent magazine. And I went to him and I'm like, good news, bad news is, good news is we broke even, bad news is I'm not going to start paying you back. We're going to take every dollar of profit and go hard into digital at that point. Um, not just developing complex.com, but really the entire complex network. And he goes, uh, no, I want my money. And I'm like, well, then all I need is like a million bucks. And he goes, all right, I'll wrestle you for it.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  And he goes, I'm like, he's super professional, by the way. He goes, he goes, no, let's wrestle for it. Um, little did I know he was actually a wrestler at Rutgers.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  And but but I'm like I'm a dirty fighter from Brooklyn. So I'll always take the dirty fighter from Brooklyn over the trained wrestler. Um, especially because once I get on top of you, it's going to be a problem. And um, so anyway, net net is we won. I won that. We got that money. We launched the complex ad network, which, by the way, really throttled our growth. Two thousand and seven couldn't have been a better year to do that. We were so early and we had organized all those best in class sites. And then all of the social media explosion happened and we just it was it was the beginning of our rocket ship. Second thing is, and there's two of them, and I'm sorry, but they're both important

• 13:29Speaker 02

  stories, is from an entrepreneurial perspective, everyone's going to have to go through different sorts of pain. Echo's business um was having a real problem in two thousand at the end of seven going into eight. Um, streetwear had stalled. They had gotten into brick and mortar from a like a retail perspective selling. And then the world fell apart. So all three of those things caused their line of credit to go away, a big line of credit operating their business. And I went to Mark and Seth and I'm like, listen, you guys need cash. We're a differentiated business from your core.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Um, let me go raise capital um and buy you guys out to a certain degree, give you some cash, alleviate, make the business cleaner so you could repackage it financially someplace else um and make it work. And I, with no experience whatsoever, started cold calling um venture firms. So uh, we ended up getting a deal with, by the way, not like low grades, Excel Partners, Austin Ventures, like the top of the top. I'm like, yeah, I got this thing called Complex. It's like a hip hop magazine and a digital ad network. And they're like, we ended up having meetings. It went really well. We got an offer.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  But before we got our term sheet signed, we ran out of working capital.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  So for three different pay periods, I had to pay 41 people, we were only 41 people at the time, I had to pay them out of my personal bank account. And by the way, just because you have a signed term sheet, doesn't mean that deal is going to close. So I could have been shit out of luck completely. And when people say like, what are you willing to do to make your business work and win? I don't think most people understand where, how far you actually have to go when you actually talk about stuff that way.

• 15:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Rich, you wrestled a man for a million dollars?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Well, no, a million dollars of OpEx, not a million dollars outright. If it was a million dollars outright, I would have tried, probably tried to go for a bigger bet.

• 15:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So, I mean, I gotta ask, just let's talk about the wrestling one first. You're wrestling this guy. How long does it take?

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Can I ask one question before you ask about the wrestling?

• 15:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Sure.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  How many of the motherfucking Pompalon?

• 15:57Anthony Pompliano?

  There, there's five of us, but you're only talking to three of them. The other two are waiting outside your house, depending on if this interview goes well or not.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  I figured that.

• 16:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And Rich, if we wrestled, I would win. No one's debating it. No one, no one questioned it.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  No one questioned, that's right.

• 16:19Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So how long does it take for you guys to determine a winner? Is this like a, all right, we just go at it, whoever pins who wins? Or was there like a referee? You guys put on singlets?

• 16:30Speaker 02

  We got up on our marble conference table. I was really like, I had my office manager, this woman Cheryl Maglio, like referee for all intents and purposes. And it was basically till someone gave up.

• 16:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Can you imagine being the office manager? I got the, I got my two bosses about to wrestle each other and I'm the referee.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Well, you have to remember, you have to remember, like, I'm not sane. And then I'm like, I make,

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Seth makes me look like a normal person.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Train, it's strange combo.

• 17:05Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Second question is around when you're paying people out of the bank account. Forty one people, I don't care if you're paying them not that much or a lot. It's a lot of money. Right. And you did this multiple times. Does anybody at the business know you're doing it? Or are you doing it and they just gotta think that payroll's all?

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Here's the thing is if you tell people, they don't look at it like you're doing the right. You can tell them later, which I have, but if you tell them during, then they panic and go, oh, my God, I need to find another job because I'm, I gotta get out of here. This is a sinking ship. Right? So unfortunately, I would love nothing more than to have been able to be transparent about that. But the, the paranoia and havoc that it would have wrought would have been way worse than the net effect.

• 17:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that makes complete sense. All right. Complex, you guys cover everybody. Literally, whether it's the sneaker show, Hot Ones, everyone and their mom has been on Complex. And you guys get to interface with these people in very intimate situations. Obviously, something like Hot Ones where they lose all the media training and they just say whatever's on top of their mind. What's the craziest thing you've ever seen a celebrity do with money?

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Uh, wow.

• 18:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Whatever you just thought of, that's a story.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  No, no, no. I mean, no, no, I like, unfortunately, I can't even legally say the, the real one. Just I, that would be real problems, but uh, the, the craziest thing I've ever seen anybody did. Honestly, I'm gonna make it about, I'm gonna make it business oriented.

• 18:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Honestly, I watched Kanye bet and, and he's crazy, but I've watched him bet on himself over and over and over again. I watched him set up deals, have everything in place, and then blow deals up of brands. The fact that he continues to bet on himself and he walked away from a Nike deal to go to allow himself a much larger percentage of ownership and control with Adidas. Like, I don't think people understand, like, You know, yes, he's a lunatic, but you know what? He, I don't know if there's anybody more truly entrepreneurial, artistic and creative than him.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Um, definitely from the hip hop world, but even more so like just in general. I, I give him a lot of props. I think he's crazy and smart and you're just willing to take the big bet always.

• 19:34Anthony Pompliano?

  When he walked away from the Nike deal, was that like a known thing to you? And did you have any thoughts?

• 19:39Speaker 02

  It was known to everybody. It was very, it was very public. You know, we had the, he had the red Octobers, the, like the Yeezys.

• 19:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  And then, and it was like, dude, those were selling for, I mean, that was like 15 grand back then, which is, you know, like 800,000 for like inflation right now. And, um, and literally, you know, he was like, all right. Sneak it for the masses and I have a design idea and a vision and, um, you know, like Nike. You gotta remember, he was also the first non-athlete Nike ever did a shoe with. They were a sports company back then, not a culture company. And so that was a big statement. He got Nike to give a non-athlete a shoe. That's one major thing. And then he built a business within Adidas.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  And to me, those two things alone make him a god. That's just awesome.

• 20:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I have said for a very long time, I love that you brought him up. Uh, he is not only one willing to bet on himself, but two is he is a business person. Who happens to also understand music and culture and like all this type of stuff. And to me, the, the part that is fascinating is he constantly forces people to treat him like a business person. Right? There's a, there's a lot of artists.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Hold on, hold on, hold on. But the, I, I, I agree to a degree with what you just said, but not holistically. Because here's the one thing is he'll then turn around. It's like, I'm going to force you to treat me like a business person. But I'm going to remind you that I will pull the, I will never be pragmatic about my, my income statement. I'll, I'll pull product if I don't like it. I won't, I'm not, I will not drop an album until I'm ready to go. Like it's, you got like, I mean, which is nuts by the way, right? So, I mean.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  It takes a lot, it would take a lot of patience to be his business partner. Let's put it that way.

• 21:35Anthony Pompliano?

  He's worth six plus billion dollars, they say now. So he's doing something right.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Dude, I mean, look at what he just pulled off. I mean, his, the drop of Donda is, is gonna be, it's a business case study in and of itself. It's amazing.

• 21:51Anthony Pompliano?

  What'd he do? He, he sold out Soldier Field, he sold out Mercedes Benz Arena twice, I think, right?

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Not just that, think about like the lead up. Like when you talk about 360 degree marketing, dominating a conversation, creating your own narrative, like he just, he just understands how to tap in and start and own every one of those. He owns the air, he owns the space, he owns the narrative. Like he just doesn't even let people not let him win. And I, I just, I don't think people understand that, that his use of, of his social media currency and leverage, I don't, just don't think anybody is better at using it, ever.

• 22:39Anthony Pompliano?

  His greatest moment by far was still when he was tweeting at Zuck and Jack Dorsey to give him like a billion dollars. He said, I got ideas, I need a billion dollars.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Which, which I'm blown away that Dorsey didn't, didn't do it.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Am I wrong?

• 22:57Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, listen, again, it, it, there's plenty of people who disagree, but I think that he is one of the best entrepreneurs of our lifetime and people get all worked up when I say that, but the guy's worth six billion dollars and he's convinced you that he's crazy while you buy his $300 jacket, right? That doesn't ship for nine months.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  But you're like, go back and pull a string on what you just said. He's convinced you, you're, he's crazy. If you don't think that that's in, like, I'm not saying there aren't some issues and whatever, but I'm not questioning the validity of his medical side of it, but if you don't think that he uses that to his advantage, to allow him to do things, not just do different things, but do everything differently than other people. And then that is both a justification, a shield, a strategic element, like.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Dude, he is a marketing genius. He's, you know what he is? He's Steve Jobs 2.0.

• 23:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  From that perspective.

• 23:57Anthony Pompliano?

  What's he say? He says, uh, in one of the like viral videos from one of his interviews or whatever, he says that he's, uh, I think he might be at the Breakfast Club or something and he's talking about how he's, um, the Walt Disney. He's like, I'm Walt Disney or whatever. Right? So he gets it. But still, by the way, the absolute best thing he's ever done is when he was on with Sway and Sway said he had the clothing company.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Not Ralph though. Not Ralph though.

• 24:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. He said, what's the name? We don't know, Sway. We don't know.

• 24:24Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Rich, what's the dumbest thing you ever spent money on?

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Oh, hands down, like, you know, I tend to, uh, once I get rolling with the wine, it gets a little crazy and the dumbest thing you could ever do is buy really expensive wine at restaurants. So there were a couple of dinners where, um, you know, things got rolling. You're drunk out of your mind and then you're ordering very expensive Grand Cruze and Bordeaux's. When by the way, you couldn't tell the difference between that and Sprite.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  And, uh, you know, you're just like, you're like, all right, we're in, it's all in. Like the next thing you know, it's like, how did I just spend six figures on a dinner? And like, what the fuck just happened? I mean, I'm not that crazy, by the way, I'm very conservative. I like, I'm just some Brooklyn kid. So for me, like, it's hard for me to go and spend a lot of money. Cause I, all I do is hear my dad in my ear going, you're an idiot. Don't be an idiot. Don't be an idiot. Don't be an idiot. So.

• 25:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Unsurprisingly, our dad has said that to us every day of our lives. So like, I hear you. Have you ever spent a million dollars on dinner?

• 25:41Speaker 02

  No, not even, not even close.

• 25:44Anthony Pompliano?

  All right.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Not even close.

• 25:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Just check it.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Like a good, a very nice chunk of six figures, but never seven.

• 25:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Like 500K?

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Over a hundred. Oh yeah.

• 25:54Anthony Pompliano?

  No, 500K.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Depends what the tip was.

• 26:05Anthony Pompliano?

  There was one that was close. He's like, I actually went to dinner with Kanye.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  A lot of people and I got into a huge debate over that Italian wine is food wine and French wine as much and we ended up like just buying verticals.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  So I could prove my point like I don't like to lose like it's a real problem for me. So I have to like prove my point. And yeah, it was.

• 26:32Anthony Pompliano?

  When you come to Miami, we're gonna bring you, we're gonna get in a real big debate about wine.

• 26:40Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. If you had to pick one person, influencer, athlete, musician, just anyone in the world to pick them and say for the next 10 years, I'm going to build a brand around you. Who would you pick and why?

• 26:52Speaker 02

  You know, um, first of all, it's, it's a good question. Let me, let me, let me take a step back and, and because I know you're asking it for the thought process behind it.

• 27:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  I think the, the bigger problem that I have is right now I look at so many influencers as amplifiers only, right? So for me, there's a handful of people, I call them originators, um, that, that I believe influenced the influencers. And I know this sounds like a whole bunch of jargon, but if you really think about it, there's like, if you look at like who follows who, who retweets who, who really starts a conversation, not just amplifies it. There's a lot, everybody and their brother can amplify a situation because there's so many sheep out there. There's so many followers and I'm not discounting people's reach and scale. I just say, but the ones who dictate what those influencers are thinking

• 27:50Speaker 02

  about are the originators. And there's some people with the onset of like DAOs and things like that. There are some people who disproportionately I see influence others that have big followings, but don't have the biggest followings. Like, you know, you're kind of a blend, right? Like, you could be in the, like, you're putting out your own narrative every day, as well as jumping on other people's narratives, right? Most influencers, dude, are not, they're just amplifying somebody else's stuff, right? Correct. They're not the originators. Like, I look at somebody like, yeah, like, one of our mutual friends,

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Jack Butcher, right? I'm not saying he's the one, I'm just, but we're talking now philosophically. Like, when I think about somebody, business acumen, understands communities, which, by the way, is the future, because fragmentation and segmentation is not a trend, it's a permanent cultural shift. So if you can organize those verticalized communities, then you could stack multiple lines of revenue on top of it, and then you have actually, like, business starters, the way Amazon Prime is the ultimate flywheel, right? So when I look at somebody who understands that, who can influence the influencers, who understand how to start the conversation, like, that's the archetype and the way I think about it. And if I, if I had to start something right now, like, I would think

• 29:14Speaker 02

  about twisting, I love DAOs, and I, but I, and I love what's going on in the NFT space, but I think the NFT space needs to fundamentally change from the transaction being around the ownership of the JPEG and the, and the string code, to the IP value of what that character is, and then the usage of the IP. So rather than have a one-time collector's transaction, I think it's you're buying the IP, and then that usage going forward. Like, you saw, you saw Bored Ape just signed with Guy Oseri. Correct.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  An investment perspective, but to like build out movies around the IP of their characters and everything else. All those people who bought those individual characters and those JPEGs, they don't own that IP. Board Ape still does, right? If you think about bringing DAOs in so that you could have fractionalized ownership of communities to support individual artists, but have a long tail on the actual piece that you're buying as IP, not just an art transaction, that to me is the boom, the mind blower. And that's where you want to see communities organize and truly democratize dollars and then actually have a correlate of a value exchange of influence. To me, that's the way it has to correlate.

• 30:45Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you see the metaverse and DAOs playing out? Like, are you into this stuff? Or you think this shit's all bullshit?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  I am into this. I am.

• 30:52Anthony Pompliano?

  How's this gonna play out?

• 30:53Speaker 02

  When I say into this, when I say into this, I'm like, first of all, anybody who's going to tell you how this is going to play out is like, you want to talk about like guessing of a guess of a guess of a guess of a guess. DAOs to me are really exciting because it's going to change the participation of who can participate into everything that goes on and then to what and they can organize themselves as well. It doesn't, you know, previously groups had to be organized usually by the platforms or the businesses. Now it's

• 31:32Speaker 02

  like wide open and to me, that's more exciting because of what you can do with those groups and who that's going to disrupt. This, the metaverse stuff, I'm torn on because look, we have, you know, we did a virtual, we've done two different virtual versions of Complex Gone. We've done Complex Land twice, which was kind of very early in the metaverse stuff. And we built out our own world and everything that goes with that. But I will tell you, like, I'm still bullish on the physical world in combination with the metaverse,

• 32:12Speaker 02

  not the metaverse replacing the physical world to the degree that a lot of people are jumping. And I just feel like the establishment of the metaverse will be more effective and foundational if there is physical, there are physical extensions of the brands, the products and the conversations that are going on, rather than go all in vertical faux world. And, and like, I know that's a big general statement, but I just, I, I don't, I don't think that the monetization is where, you know, talk, talk to all the gamers, talk to gaming manufacturers, talk to the game owners.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  The monetization is not where they thought it would be, even for those rabid fan communities. Um, you know, I think people have to realize like the advertising side and the brand inclusion side was not what everybody thought it was going to be. Everybody thought that gaming was going to be the new internet ad placements, right? And it just never has panned out that to that same degree. I think people have to think about this. It's going to take a much longer time than you think. And I think it's going to have to go in tandem with some semblance of physical to make it really work.

• 33:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I got one more question and my brother's got questions for you. You own any of these NFTs, like what's the craziest one that you own?

• 33:38Speaker 02

  I, you know what's funny? I'm actually an investor in several of the platforms. Uh, I don't own any individually. Um, cause I, and I see that as a little bit of a conflict for me right now. Like I've participated, I've bought and sold a couple of smaller ones, um, just, just to go through it from an experience perspective, but you know, with what? You know, OpenSea is a very interesting platform. SuperRare is an unbelievably interesting platform and what they've done with their tokens to allow the community to help define the direction of where that business is going to actually go. You know, Nifty's is interesting,

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Nifty's Gateway. You know, Nifty's is one that I'm advising and they're going kind of very mass market and commercial to complement the very verticalized other side. So it's, they're not competitive to a lot what's going on, but I think it'll open up the aperture of the entire NFT funnel. I think it's fascinating and I mean, I'm just spending a lot of time learning a ton.

• 34:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe, what questions you got? Rich, what's going on, man? Good to see you. So I got two of them. First one.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  How come you guys didn't send me the SoFi hat so I could put it up on my shit? And then you can get extended.

• 34:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll send you the Bitcoin 100K one first and then we'll move to SoFi.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 35:00Anthony Pompliano?

  So first question, who is your favorite entrepreneur, operator, CEO right now and why?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Um, look, and not just because I was listening in earlier, but you know, for me, my hero and I think who's one of the craziest, most intelligent people ever and the balance of everything is Bezos, right? And let me explain why. Is no one has ever been as good of a public, he took a private company public and then was like, oh, don't worry about my losses. Don't worry about my quarterlies. We're going to keep investing in all this. Name another CEO that could have a $2 billion mistake, $2 billion mistake,

• 35:50Speaker 02

  like the Fire Phone, as early as he did it in the public markets and not lose his job. Not only did he not lose his job, it was barely a blip in the grand scheme of things. You want to talk about somebody who's mastered the public markets, the internal development and operations, always hedging his bet? In the grand scheme of things of new businesses at different maturity lines, maturity points within each of the curves. You know, they have a ridiculous advertising business. They have AWS. They have Prime, which is the greatest individual flywheel. Any brand, any business is ever built in the history of the world. And he's managed the external, you know, the government,

• 36:35Speaker 02

  you know, anti-trust stuff as well as the analysts that are out there. No one's ever done all of that as good as he does in total.

• 36:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So second question would be, you've run Complex for almost two decades now, I think. If you had to start all over, forget Complex, thrown out the window, what would you do if you were 20 years old, 21 years old?

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Honestly, I would do exactly what I just said before, not to be repetitive. I would actually use DAOs to build an NFT platform and code that is not about the physical individual asset in JPEG, but it's an IP play. And then show how creators can share IP with their communities, not just individual pieces of art, and have tales on all of this. To me, I think it's the ultimate in democratization of creativity. And that's the business I would build right now.

• 37:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Gotcha. John, what questions you got?

• 37:31Speaker 03

  What's up, Rich?

• 37:33Speaker 03

  So what advice would you give someone who is young, hungry? They have an idea, but they don't know where to start in building a company?

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Well, look, the good thing is that money has never been easier to get, right? I mean, that's the amazing thing. But let me, let me say this, and this is a little bit of a comment, comment. The one thing I see with, and I'm a very, I'm in like about 31, 32. I just finished, I think, my 32, my 32nd angel investment in some companies. And I will tell you, the one thing I see, I see a lot of smart people. I see a lot of people trying to move really fast. I see a lot of people who understand how to exploit white spaces. I see a lot of people who know how to do a lot of things.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  But I see more jack of all trades, not experts in a lot of things. And when I say experts, I really mean an expert. I don't mean someone who just is like really good at doing like a tweet, like tweet stream. Like, that's not an expert. Like, okay, you spent four hours doing it. I'm really glad for you. Uh, like, show me someone who's put in the 10,000 hours and has become a real like, I don't think there's enough people that become experts in certain verticals or expertise that are, that are completely differentiated so that they can have an influence um, in understanding the true white space.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  And once up an aspect of your business doesn't work, you have, when you have that level of foundational expertise, your pivoting ability to be nimble and already have worked through all the if thens and not have to panic. Um, you know where to go and how to manage those and how to like be super quick. Um, and be constantly iterative. The bigger the expert, the more you can iterate more effectively with a higher batting average. But I don't see as many experts. I see a whole bunch of people who are somewhat educated on topics and have a good idea. Make it great and make yourself a fundamental expert. That'd be my advice.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  Great advice, I agree.

• 39:53Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. I got one other question that we're going to talk about the acquisition. Uh, I feel like you are very similar to us. When we were kids, we used to uh, literally spend all week thinking about like, how can we make money this weekend so we can go do dumb shit with it? Um, we weren't spending $500,000 on dinner, but we were definitely doing dumb shit. Uh, trying to buy.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  By the way, I didn't do that until I was, that was, I've done so much dumb shit. I've never done expensive dumb shit until after.

• 40:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I hear you, I hear you. So if you were, again, a kid, high school or college, and you had to make a thousand dollars this weekend, is there like one thing that immediately pops to mind like, oh, I would go do this? Cause it's just enough money where it's meaningful, but it's not like you gotta go build a whole business to make a thousand bucks?

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, I can't believe I'm gonna, I'm gonna say this, but um, if, and by the way, are you starting with any money?

• 40:45Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Or you're gonna like, you just gotta go, you gotta go and make it from nothing?

• 40:48Anthony Pompliano?

  From nothing.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Okay, I will tell you that I can't believe I'm gonna, I'm gonna say this, but I'm gonna give props, like, dude, have you watched what Gary does, Gary Vee does at the garage sale shit?

• 41:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  The, the ability to make money and turn around and flip, my point there is, you can do this, you don't have to do garage sales in a traditional sense, there's a, I tweeted something out like a couple of weeks ago, it's like, there is a market for everything, and we are so spoiled that we, we discount everything, your trash, believe me, has a, and not your literal trash, but things that you are no longer interested in at all, has so much value, and people are willing to like, give stuff away all the time, the ability to go out and organize, like, man, that might be a great iteration off of a, um, you know, like, people who like, come and clean your house out for like, junk, like, when you're

• 41:46Speaker 02

  gonna move, or, uh, like, get rid of a whole bunch of shit, if they, instead of just dropping it off, if they actually had someone go and through that, and then putting like, eighty percent of it up on eBay, I bet you they'd have a whole nother revenue line right there.

• 42:00Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great idea, that's a fantastic idea, actually, all right, BuzzFeed, three hundred million dollars or so, that, uh, acquisition.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  It'll end up being more, but that's fine.

• 42:13Anthony Pompliano?

  How much more?

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Well, it depends on the performance, right, because it's not all cash.

• 42:19Anthony Pompliano?

  What is it, two hundred million in cash and a hundred million in equity or so, to start?

• 42:22Speaker 02

  I cannot confirm or deny that, unfortunately.

• 42:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so, uh, you made a billion dollars, okay.

• 42:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk to us about what the thought process is behind combining the businesses. And then you signed on, not a CEO, but as an advisor, from what I understand. What was the thought process there?

• 42:42Speaker 02

  So those are two big questions. Number one, really, you know, we saw, this is the second time I'm selling Complex, by the way. I sold it five years ago to a JV, joint venture of Verizon and Hearst. And JVs are great because you don't have a lead, but JVs are also bad because you don't have a lead. So we continued to run ourselves for the last five years as an independent media asset that has been profitable and had done distributions to our owners. The issue is, is that we, the good thing is, we never integrated into either of those firms, Verizon or Hearst, because we would have probably been swallowed up.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  But what we, we continued to run as an independent, but we haven't invested the money that we really wanted to. We have an asset and a brand and quality of the brands in our portfolio that are the best community-driven, qualitative, brand-oriented plays out there. And we were starving them. We were not investing to the degree we should. And the only way we had, we could do that is if we changed the context. So we found a partner, not only that would be able to help us when we combine the assets, go public and put a lot of money on the balance sheet, therefore increase the investment

• 44:02Speaker 02

  in the current brand portfolio, but even more so, we found a company that is almost 100%

• 44:12Speaker 02

  complimentary to us. We're a brand play, they're an audience play. They are really good at social and amplification. We're good at creating the narratives. You know, if you even look at our e-commerce businesses, they're incredibly complimentary. We make very high-end individual merchandise on a collab basis. They do a ton of affiliates links with Amazon. So even like, We have very complementary businesses from the top of the funnel and macro. And then even the way we behave and the uh skill sets are very similar thought process with non redundant skill sets. And so BuzzFeed was perfect in that respect. For me, I'm 20 years in on this.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  And I love this brand and I love this company and it was very important for me to get it to a home where it was funded and can continue to grow and thrive and the people to continue. I mean, I will continue to be very involved on a strategic basis. The frank answer is I really do not have the level of energy that I used to have to operate a 24/7 media business anymore. The day-to-day operations, I just, I'm more excited on a personal basis about sitting on some boards and advising some very interesting companies.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Learning about these other spaces and being constantly challenged with problems that are strategic, not operational tactical things. And I'm just, it was the perfect time for me to do that.

• 45:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it makes complete sense too, right? Because if you essentially, you still have a great influence and kind of this advisor position with the business. But if you're out learning about new things, you're going to come back, some of it will just naturally permeate into the business. But you don't have to be worried about, uh, you know, hey, are we hiring or firing that person? Uh, or kind of what's going on?

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Believe me, that is at the top, I make the joke, the top of my list is the fact that I don't have to have a conversation with HR possibly ever again in my life is the best gift ever.

• 46:25Anthony Pompliano?

  HR departments are amazing until you have to deal with them.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  No, they are amazing. It's what HR has to do. I'm not talking about the people. I love them. It's those decisions are just, when a decision comes down to HR, you are guaranteed to be picking between a lose and a lose.

• 46:46Anthony Pompliano?

  It's true. It is true.

• 46:50Anthony Pompliano?

  We're gonna let you go now, but the only thing I have left is we didn't ask you about Bitcoin specifically. You got an end of year price prediction for Bitcoin?

• 47:01Speaker 02

  103. I think there's a crazy run. I think there's a crazy run. Um.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  I want to say it out loud.

• 47:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Say it, say it, say it, say it.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no. So let me just say this. Um. There, I think there is going to be very large scale announcement from a large scale company. Um, and not, and not, not somebody putting it on the balance sheet, even like, and I, I, I agree with you, the two or 3% from Amazon would be de minimis for them, but massively impactful. Um, I actually think you're going to see somebody accept this. That is going to surprise and open the aperture of the usage of Bitcoin before the end of the year.

• 47:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Complex pays employees in Bitcoin.

• 47:58Anthony Pompliano?

  That would be big time, dude, John. That's a good one.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  That would be, first of all, I'd love to do it for my employees. I don't think many of them actually would do it.

• 48:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Can you give us more in terms of your thought process? Is there like an industry or like, why do you think it's somebody accepting it would be such a big deal?

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Um, because I think, I think, like, look, it's more of a strategic thing. I think, um, uh, Ethereum is a very interesting, you know, coin in general. In that it's, it's usage, the more I've learned about NFTs, the more I've learned about Ethereum. Um, I think that the popularity of Bitcoin, irrespective of some of the technological limitations. I think there will be a provider, a platform and a sector that is going to finally transition

• 48:57Speaker 02

  from a, um, to allow it to behave more like a currency is my point.

• 49:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Very interesting.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  I'm not trying to be vague. I'm not trying to be vague. I literally, it's, there is, I've heard some rumblings of some very interesting conversations. My mind was blown and I was like, oh shit, that would really change the way people would look at the limitations of Bitcoin, more so than the possibilities only. I don't think anybody's debating, there's tons of possibilities, but everybody keeps going to the limitations all the time, right? Look at what you have to stump for and overcome every day. You have to overcome as many limitations as you actually do have to talk about the possibilities. Could you imagine trying to run a business that way? That'd be insane,

• 49:45Speaker 02

  right? So I think if they, if there, if the community was smart, they would change some, some of the limitations. And I think there's some conversations going on there that could be interesting.

• 49:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not going to ask you to say more. All I'll say is people in the chat are like, oh, he's got that inside alpha.

• 50:06Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. You guys got anything else for Rich? No, we're good. Thanks, Rich. I appreciate it. Dude, thank you for coming. I, this was even funnier and more enjoyable than I thought it would be, which, which is hard to usually do. So.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Thanks for having the bar so fucking low for me.

• 50:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, if you, if you come on and say you dropped $500,000 at dinner because you got in an argument with somebody over wine, I mean, it's.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Well, look, I look forward to getting together. We'll see you guys soon.

• 50:33Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Sounds good, buddy. Talk soon.