E242: How an 18-Year-Old Harvard Dropout Raised $47M

Can a 23-year-old Harvard dropout build the next billion-dollar company? In this episode, I talk with Steven Wang, founder and CEO of dub, a U. S. copy-trading platform that lets you automatically mirror the portfolios of real investors and traders. We get into why he thinks most retail investors won’t get good at stock picking, why the future is about picking people, not tickers, and how dub is trying to turn social-media-driven, mimetic trading into better financial outcomes. We also cover the retail trading boom, meme stocks, the “retail army,” what dub’s top creators actually do to generate alpha, and how a creator-led marketplace for strategies could reshape how the next generation builds wealth.

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

• 0:00David Weisburd?

  You dropped out of Harvard at 18 years old. You've since raised $47 million for Dub. What is Dub?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Dub is the very first regulated copy trading platform. And very simply, instead of trading stocks in our app, we actually just copy what other people are doing. The whole thesis is that most retail investors will never get good at investing. Figures put at 70 to 90% of retail investors underperform. They love the action of sort of trading. So how do we channel that into a better way for better financial outcomes? There's no better thing than just following what proven experts are doing in the markets. If you take a big step back, it's actually nothing new what we're doing with copy trading. When you have money, you've got $50 million. You're not trading yourself. You're hiring a fancy wealth manager at Goldman Sachs. You go into a hedge fund like Citadel. You're trusting the experts to deploy your capital. We want to enable anyone with $100 to do that same experience.

• 0:49David Weisburd?

  Preparing for this interview, I did some research. I was shocked 20 to 25% of all trading in the market is retail. What are the confluence of factors leading to kind of such a large chunk of trading mean retail?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's actually exploded over the past 10 to 15 years, probably doubled at least in terms of the retail trading volume. It's gone as high as like 35% today in many estimates now, and it's only going to increase. And this is really the experience that I felt, the revolution of the retail investor. Since really Robin Hood ignited the wave with free investing. And over the past, I think, if you look at the 10 years, there are traders like me that grew up as kids, who were sitting by a bunch of screens. Now we're able to invest for the very first time and streamline and open up brokerage account in 10 minutes. And that accessibility, Cambrian explosion was one of the first parts. Right now, many more people can get access to trading. But two was really retail investing becoming part of the cultural zeitgeist. Think about what happened in 2020, 2021.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Many estimates show 30 million new retail investors came online for the first time. And it wasn't about behind, sitting by them on screens anymore and looking at the fundamentals. It was about following people, ideas and narratives to invest. We saw this in meme stocks. We saw this in crypto. Elon is moving the Dogecoin markets every tweet. And superstar fund managers like Kathy Woods, Bill Ackman, raising tens of not, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in their funds. So and I think that was just emblematic of really many ways just social media, mobile era, coming to investing and that drove a lot of this ability to have these online communities with Wall Street Bets, Reddit, X, and everything that we've seen about social finance, the confidence of that.

• 2:28David Weisburd?

  It's almost like this memetic behavior. People were sitting around COVID with nothing to do and they started trading, almost like playing Warcraft or playing Halo.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And that was me. That was the original inspiration for Dub. I was 19 years old. I was sitting in my dorm at Harvard and we were part of the first COVID generation at school. So we're basically locked up in our part in our dorms. You couldn't go to anyone else's room. So all I did was I was just trading and I'd grown up doing a lot of trading. I started in second grade, but I got really serious during the COVID era where everyone was getting stimulus checks. Everyone had a thousand dollars to deploy in the market and no one wanted to miss out. The memetic desire and FOMO where every single last person, your dumbest friend was now making a hundred thousand dollars in Dogecoin, right? Who's not going to give that a shot?

• 3:12David Weisburd?

  It's hard to lose when there's so much money printing.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And also I think what people don't see about that narrative was in 2022, when the markets mean reverted, it crashed, the markets came down and we had a couple of years of sort of choppy, choppiness. That's where a lot of people lost money. GameStop, 80% of people who invested in GameStop actually lost money in totality. But the only thing that people hear about is the run up. So this is part of Dub's mission is how do we get people not to just invest, but invest better?

• 3:43David Weisburd?

  You dropped out of Harvard at 18. Hopefully your mother did not have a heart attack. But when did you know was the right time to drop out and what did you need to see in order to do that?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I was actually pretty lucky where I, my first time leaving or dropping out of school was, was in high school. So I left high school when I was 16 to do my first company. It was a virtual reality ed tech company that absolutely failed. It was called Realism, but that was my school apart Knox. I moved my two co-founders to Boston. We raised a little bit of venture capital. We lived in one bedroom and we all had like three air beds. And then I think after that experience, we, we were lucky. We sold the company. We had some patents pending. We had some good IP. But the business didn't work. That gave me the fortitude and the know how like at least how to get started. So when this time came around and I saw this opportunity, I'm a product on myself and I was going to be the customer because I was participating in this wave.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  I was like, how do I get the ball rolling? And the first people I called were my previous investors from the company that I'd sold in the past. And they're like, blank check for you. No matter what, we're going to do whatever.

• 4:43David Weisburd?

  So they de-risked it.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  They really did. And that gave me the confidence to go, go to the next step. And then I actually didn't even tell my mom when I decided to leave school to start this company because I had already raised money. And I was able to pay myself. I guess I was financially free and I knew this is what I wanted to do. I think in many ways, also COVID school kind of sucked. So it was a natural path to go, go and build. And I sort of saw this consumer behavior wave that was might come once in my lifetime with how retail investing was changing. And I wanted to seize the moment and go build something pretty incredible.

• 5:19David Weisburd?

  A lot of people think that these kind of quitting, quitting college, like Mark Zuckerberg also quit after he had traction on Facebook. So a lot of people think he decided to quit and then he figured his way out. It's not necessarily binary. It's not like you have to quit and come up with an idea or never quit. It's about a risk adjusted decision making.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  I was in a very fortunate place. Also, 2021 was definitely one of the top peaks of the venture market. So, and it just happened that Robinhood IPO, Coinbase IPO, fintech was the hottest thing on the market. So I also saw that and then wanted to seize the opportunity to go build something where there is true enterprise value being created and customer demand. And I think that's exhilarating for me to go work on too. And you can see the impact of what you're doing.

• 6:04David Weisburd?

  How long did it take you for to talk about your story that year, this 18, 19 year old? I'm sure there's some hesitation to kind of come out of the closet of being young and being such a young entrepreneur.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  The one thing that's unique about Silicon Valley is there are a couple of these stories now. So they really appreciate you more for your substance and your intellect and the logical outcomes of what you're doing rather than sort of the age. And part of it too was, I think, like, how do I de-risk? That right in in many ways I knew building this business was going to require a lot of skills that I just never never was able to accumulate or may may never go have just because I've been in the industry for that long. Like I don't know the first thing about back then about like compliance. I don't I didn't know sort of all the regulatory regimes. I didn't have any licenses, right? I would it might take me years to go get those things done. So I hired a phenomenal chief compliance officer that's double my age and now he covered that.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  A big part of building the business has been covering my weaknesses and really allowing myself to focus on on the superpowers and that applies to everyone.

• 7:01David Weisburd?

  It's interesting because there's certain things that need to happen in every business and every business kind of hits this roadblock. And sometimes it's not obvious what the founder should be doing and what the founder should be hiring for. Or sometimes the founder figures something out enough to know what to hire for. Walk me through as you scale, you've scaled out to millions of users. How do you solve those problems? How do you know when you should be doing something when a current team member or whether you should hire someone?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Uh, it was a lot of fall on my face and screwing up. Yeah, in the very beginning, I think one of the biggest lessons I learned was what got me here is not going to get me to where I want to go. And when I started the business and the way I grew up was like very individualistic. I we were poor, but I had very tough Asian parents are like very disciplined. You got to do everything follow by the book and that's what I did. And I grew up in a in a environment of fear, but I was motivated by fear to go succeed. And I thought that was the right way to manage as well because that's how my parents managed me. So when I first started the team, I was the worst micromanager. I was up in the weeds of sort of every single person. I thought everyone had to stay late until eight, nine o'clock. This is the startup grind. We got to live like how everyone else is.

• 8:10David Weisburd?

  Nine nine six.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Nine nine six. I still do it first. I do nine nine seven, whatever, but I'm in a different boat.

• 8:16David Weisburd?

  I've had the same issue. Like I think everybody should be hardcore as Elon puts it. If you're too flexible on that, you end up having a mediocre culture. How do you balance this need for like extremely great culture with not being a psychopath?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  It's very difficult. And the one thing that I think has worked for me has been filtering and hiring for people that are innately that. That will do it without me asking. I've realized the better way to. And what's been working much better for me, or at least has been working for our team as I've recovered from these mistakes has been motivating, leading not through fear, but inspiration, opportunity and driving outcomes in the success of what we're doing. And when you can have the intrinsic motivation come out. There you go.

• 9:03David Weisburd?

  Zoom background has made a lot of noise.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  It's kind of banger.

• 9:07David Weisburd?

  That's that's sometimes that happens at a New York Stock Exchange.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Sometimes, yeah.

• 9:11David Weisburd?

  Wow.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Good, good.

• 9:16David Weisburd?

  So double click on that. So you're looking for people with that kind of drive. Are many of your employees today kind of 996 or more realistically working till seven or eight or working in the evening after they come home?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:29David Weisburd?

  And talk to me about the culture today.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  And my policy now of the team is I don't inspect first, I expect greatness out of you. And I think when you are sat down and you're expected and your boss tells you, I'm expecting really great things, you're just naturally more motivated to go crush it. And I don't actually care if you're in the office when you're working, right? I think like I, when I hire you, I'm giving you an immense amount of trust and I trust that you know your best work style, your best work environment. So if you gotta go home for the rest of the day at like five or six o'clock and you're just gonna be better at home grinding for two or three more hours, I completely, no questions asked.

• 10:06David Weisburd?

  How do you determine whether you want someone that's gonna work their ass off or somebody that's gonna, that's has 20 years of experience doing this one thing and could literally check out at five o'clock and be five times more effective than this person?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  I don't think it's binary. Some are best guys in our team, the older folks, my executive leadership team, they're maybe double my age, but they're still grinders. They might have kids, they're much older, but they just love staying in the game.

• 10:30David Weisburd?

  Do you have any of those though that are just so good? They just come in for eight hours and they just crush and or does that hurt your culture?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  It's not aligned with their culture. Yeah, I think especially.

• 10:39David Weisburd?

  It affects other people as well on the team.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I don't think like people who come in for eight hours and crush, they may be good at repeating their skill set and their experience, but to me, if they're just. There for eight hours, they're not truly bought in, right?

• 10:52David Weisburd?

  They're just checking in and checking out.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's emblematic of some, I want people who love what we're doing, are students of the game and care about being in the arena. And I try and viciously filter for that in my interviews now. And one thing that I was too scared to do in the past was anti sell during my interviews. Of course, it's just selling the pitch of sort of getting someone in, inspiring them by the vision and the traction. But now it's like, hey, rank yourself on a scale of like one to 10, how gritty are you? If I talk to your former boss, would they say the same thing? Because at the end of the interview process, I'm going to get references. I'm going to talk to people who worked with you in the past. So, and then like, I'm just straightforward, like if that doesn't align with what we're doing, I don't want to set you up for failure to come into dub, right? So I think I've just gotten much more comfortable, just being open and honest about this is our culture.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  This is the way that we operate. This is the way that you buy in. It's not going to be for everybody.

• 11:43David Weisburd?

  What's the second order effects of anti selling in this process?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  And yeah, I usually do at the end, I think it hasn't like been bad. It hasn't had any negative effects. I think it's been beneficial in the sense that like it's helped, it has helped us filter out people. And in the moment, they may not give you the per, the answer that they think you want to hear. They'll probably give you an answer that you want to hear. But I think we have seen some folks drop out of the process because this just isn't for them. And that's actually what we want to have happen. Yeah.

• 12:11David Weisburd?

  So there's a hundred trillion dollars, a hundred thousand billion going from baby boomers to Gen Z and some younger millennials. How is that going to affect the marketplace, trading, dub?

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And my generation, Gen Z, the younger millennials, we live in a more polarized environment than we ever have in history. Maybe sort of modern history. And part of that is just we see in our politics, we see on the ground, the wealth gap is growing faster than ever. And also this change in how people view wealth building. Like you just statistic, we just did a survey with the Harris Poll, a nationwide survey with thousands of US Americans. And now the Gen Z, majority of Gen Z believe that the fastest way to become a millionaire is through investing. And they want, on average, they want to become a millionaire by 32 years old through investing. That rises to 64 years old when it comes to baby boomers or the older folks that were created.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  I think this comes down to this psychological shift where people are super risk on when it comes to the younger generation where all this money is going to go to. And what they crave more than anything is the dopamine hit, the agency having control over the decision making. And that's why we've seen risk assets like crypto options and all these things to have a mega boom over the past couple of years. It's reflective of the product that consumers demand, right? Not all that is going to be able to funnel into that, right? There's some things you can't move around, whatever trust structures and stuff like that. But if we think about what the next generation wants in terms of investing products, it's scary, right? Most retail investors don't know how to trade these effectively. They're very esoteric assets. The volatility is incredibly high.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  I think that's Dub's onus here is what I think I respect guys like Robin Hood in the platforms that made investing free and opened it up. And that's been incredible for industry. It's increased the market share and market size drastically, but it's not enough, right? You're giving people the keys to the casino, but you're not teaching them how to play poker. And I think Dub's onus and like the next generation of companies is not just increasing access to investing, but how do you educate people to invest better? And if that's not there, people are just going to continue losing money. That's the missing part of the equation. And that's what I'm afraid for during this great wealth transition. If that's not there, I think we're set up for in many ways, failure, protecting those assets well for the long term.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Double click exactly on what do users go on Dub to do? Yeah, so when you sign on to Dub, you open a brokerage account like you would with Robin, you were a broker dealer as well. But when you deposit money, you see sort of portfolios or these baskets of assets that you can invest in. And it's not single stock trading, you're investing in a portfolio strategy essentially. It's kind of like you can think of it like investing in an ETF. The whole idea is that these portfolios are managed by people on the platform who have real track record. So today we have hundreds of these creators who are existing or former hedge fund managers. advise RAs that have hundreds of millions of dollars of assets. These financial influencers of like 500,000 followers that you see on X.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Who have been some of the most prolific traders that have engineered some of these retail. Sort of meme stock movements over the past couple of years. And the whole idea is like, hey, with a tap of button, you can follow everything they do in their portfolio automatically. And of course, that's not going to guarantee better investment outcomes, right? But I do think on a probabilistic scale, when you're following someone who has a proven track record and you can see their whole transparent. Trading history is probably on average better than trading yourself.

• 15:44David Weisburd?

  Let's say you don't believe in alpha, which I believe in the mostly efficient. Market hypothesis, I do think there's some alpha, but let's say you don't even believe in that there shouldn't be negative alpha. So if we just invest in all companies with the letter A or with the letter B. You shouldn't do that much worse than than picking, quote unquote, picking. And I think what's what's important there is the agency that people feel on platforms like DUB. My mom will give me a call and she said, hey, I watched an interview with Alex Karp or Uber, like, should I buy Palantir? Should I buy Uber? And I'm always like, you know, do whatever you want because you can't really do wrong. The worst thing is actually not being in the market and not investing. If you just randomly pick stocks, you're actually doing pretty well.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. And part of it is just.

• 16:25David Weisburd?

  Which by the way, is not the case for crypto or random meme coins, which sometimes there's like ruck bulls, it's not an efficient market.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:31David Weisburd?

  It's not very similar.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  The alpha is more important, the fund manager. I think you hit on a really key point for us is like, part of it is even just simplifying investing, you need people more into investing. Right? Like it's hard to learn which stock to pick, just like your mom, like, what do I actually do? When you trust a human being, which we're much more. We're born to do that. We do that subconsciously. We understand humans. It's really the influencer economy in many ways coming to investing. And most of my product decisions today, I go on Yelp to decide what restaurant I go. I decide what I buy through this Instagram influencer. It's the same thing for now, we're bringing it this new behavior to how you deploy capital. And I think that just done well will onboard more people in investing, get them more comfortable, get them more familiar.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  If we do that, like this is right now, it's like 40 to 50% of Americans do not even own a single stock today. Participating in the greatest wealth creation engine capitalism, the American dream. It's the ownership economy. And I think it's kind of scary to think that in AI, like we're going to be creating more market value than ever before. If a lot of Americans aren't participating in that, we're just going to perpetuate.

• 17:33David Weisburd?

  And even worse, some people believe that truly rate of inflation is higher than the CPI.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:38David Weisburd?

  And assets bubble up and incomes stay flat or go up by a little bit. So there's this increasing wealth gap between the rich, those who own assets and those who don't.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that's if we can make investor simpler, more familiar and bring more even a 10% debt in that, I think we will do so much change for the market. Thing that shocked me is like Amazon, when they IPO in 1970, since IPO to today, adjusted for all the stock splits, the stock is up 225,000% with three zeros.

• 18:10David Weisburd?

  Post IPO.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Post IPO, not as a private company. Not even as a private company. So that to me is like, if you draw that parallel to AI and the mag seven has a very similar profile as that, everyone needs to participate in that. So that's why I'm really excited about some of the things that I see in the current administration where Trump accounts, right? Like whatever you want to label, whatever you want to call it, starting out every kid in the US with a thousand dollars in their bank account, they're going to inevitably participate in the future American innovation. And that is the one thing that I, the more that we've grown and the more that we've scaled, I get more passionate about is how do we get everyone level the playing field of participation and what it means to be American? And that's why we immigrated here as my parents came, who's to.

• 18:51David Weisburd?

  Me as well.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Ownership. Yeah. And that is the beauty that I think a lot of people forgotten with all the noise today.

• 18:56David Weisburd?

  I think if you bring it down to neurobiological level, so in our brain, whenever we have a new activity, a new neural pathway is formed, negative and positive. So smoking, same thing. That's why it becomes habitual, but trading too. And if you could get people just doing right action, even in small dollars.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:11David Weisburd?

  Even in these esoteric trades, which I want to get into.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:14David Weisburd?

  It's, it's very pro-social for them and it completely changed the trajectory of their life.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 19:20David Weisburd?

  Yeah. So speaking of traits, tell me about how I could follow Nancy Pelosi's traits. It's a meme. I didn't know that you could actually operationalize that. So tell me about that.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Absolutely. So Nancy Pelosi, the queen of investing, our favorite. By the Stock Act of 2012, every single sort of person in Congress needs to file any stock trades or their spouse's stock trades or the immediate family within 30 days, right? And this is part of disclosures and they get fined if they don't. So Nancy Pelosi just happens to have made some really phenomenal trades over the past 20 years. And it's actually not her, it's her husband, Paul Pelosi, who is a, like, he's made a bunch of money as a VC, private equity investor, but their spouses, they talk pretty much every single day. Nancy's probably denied, she's shared any information, but just can't. She's the Speaker of the House, she's one of the most, she was at one point the most powerful woman probably alive, or at least within the US, right? On dub, as of today, I checked today morning, she's been up since inception,

• 20:14Speaker 01

  which was I think in September of 2024 or 2023, she's up 188%. We bait our customers tens of millions of dollars through copy trading Nancy Pelosi's picks. And yes, there's a 30-day lag, she has a 30-day window to file her trades, but Nancy mostly does long-only stocks or leaps, sort of far out options calls. So she doesn't trade too much. So she's been long-only and she's been really long-only, the top AI stocks, Nvidia and a couple esoteric ones, like some biotech stocks that absolutely popped. And now it's pretty cool because like you see whenever her filing comes out, she moves the markets and we see what dub.

• 20:49David Weisburd?

  So it's now, now it reflects that not only does she have insider information, she's also moving the stock.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Cause there's so many people paying attention to what they're doing and we've got enough capital on the platform where it kind of follows through now. Yeah. And, but I do want to highlight that Nancy Pelosi, she's viral, she's famous. Yes, she's made a lot of money, but who knows if the alpha will continue, she'll not retire soon. But it's only one of hundreds of different investing strategies that you can now copy trade on the platform. And I think the vision has been like, hey, we got a lot of early success because we got, we leaned on the viral distribution, the viral content Pelosi, and we did make a lot of money, but now it's like, how do we build this entire marketplace, the investing strategies across asset classes, across discretionary, quantitative strategies, and really bring on the best talented sort of managers or creators or traders, the platform?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  To deliver alpha for our customers.

• 21:41David Weisburd?

  You're kind of like creating a mini Citadel where you have, you give people money or they come in with a track record. They're able to raise some money and prove themselves in the market. And then the good ones get promoted with more capital and the bad ones basically get fired.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. We're a meritocracy marketplace, right? With Citadel, Ken Griffin, I guess it's controlled and centrally, but any PM can plug into this phenomenal system and infrastructure that they built. Data, systems, trading, risk management, and Ken gives you the money and then you go trade. And they've got hundreds of portfolio managers and they scale that system up. We're dubbed the same thing. We've got hundreds of creators or traders now on the platform. Their money's not coming from me, but from our customers, our retail investors, maybe a hundred dollars, but you multiply a hundred dollars over a million. That's a lot of money and it's a substantive sort of move in the market. So that's a lot of assets. And then we give them the execution or the brokerage. We give them the data. We give them the tools. And then we also give them, I think, the most important piece, which is visibility and distribution.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  The moment you come onto Dub, if you make it onto our leaderboard, we're putting you in front of millions of eyeballs. And we're helping you attract capital and we're doing the marketing. And I think that's probably the most powerful.

• 22:50David Weisburd?

  You're separating the skill from the marketing. So if you think about a stack of skill, you have some really great investors that are really great marketers, but it's a completely different skill set. Most great investors are great investors and sometimes it's because they're super nerdy, super introverted, never talked to anyone and almost autistic. And then you have the marketers that are just really good at sales and it's just two different.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think that's one of the problems we're solving in the market too. It's so easy to go and act, you might've been great at marketing, but you might suck at trading. But everyone might think you're good at marketing because you made this call and you deleted your 30 other tweets.

• 23:20David Weisburd?

  We're not going to mention any of those names.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  We won't. But now there's on Dub, you can't fake your track record. It's fully transparent.

• 23:29David Weisburd?

  A lot of institutional investors, they saw what happened in GameStop. And it was kind of almost entertaining to see this kind of meme stock. There was no such thing as a meme stock before, I believe, GameStop and before that whole craze. And they saw it again, then you could dismiss that as a COVID thing, but now it's coming back. You have open, what just happened, like the business. Hostile takeover, Open.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:51David Weisburd?

  Some stocks, without disparaging them, are seen as meme stocks. It's not binary. Some are somewhat meme stocks. What do you make of this? And how does social media play into the trading of stocks? Because this is a completely new phenomenon.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's very hard to model out, but it's the, to me, it's like the little guys finally come to the table and the individuals are in many ways eating the institutions. With the GameStop, we took down one of the top hedge funds, Melvin Capital, who's very short. It's like we're with what we talked about earlier. Retail volume is 20 to 35% of the daily tape. That means that's significant. Even just a chunk of retail investors coalescing together, you're going to destroy and go through the order book. It's you're going to make a significant impact in the market. I think people are waking up to the reality that because these new distribution channels of social media and places like Dub that are creating, we're giving power back to the individuals. I think that's so important and part of the individualism that is so important is part of a fundamental American ideal.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  And I think empowering that helps people be better fiduciaries to the company. And that's part of the beauty of also being a public company. You have retail investors being part of your company now that can vote, that can drive social influence. So I think it's a really good phenomenon that's happening. Yes, it may make people, I guess, like running these companies a little more scared of not doing well. I think it drives accountability, will ultimately help companies be better. And that's what we saw with Open, right? Like, I guess the retail army, the stock at the high was at $35. At the bottom was at 50 cents, dropped by 98%. Basically synthesized over the past two or three years. Clearly, the management team isn't doing something right, right? So the retail army forced their way back in, bought the co-founders Eric Wu and Keith Rorbo back on the board.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  And now the stock is back up to $7. It's up 1,209%. Not close to 35, but still a big jump from 50 cents to 7. That may be just not be based on fundamentals yet. But I think that is the power to drive change and that company might have just died.

• 25:47David Weisburd?

  It's not purely a momentum trade because they turn momentum into intrinsic value. That's the interesting thing. GameStop started essentially looking at themselves as an asset manager, not as a gaming company. And just walk me through that. So at which point? Does the momentum turn into something real?

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:02David Weisburd?

  And what is that real?

• 26:03Speaker 01

  This is where it kind of cuts both ways is when your stock goes up so high, right? Then you can leverage that stock price to do a lot of things and bring more assets, stock buybacks. You can get debt on sort of that stock, right? So now the company all of a sudden has a lot more money to work with to go do other things. So in the GameStop case or a lot of these meme stocks, right? Maybe the core business isn't doing that well, but you can take those assets to go do a Bitcoin sort of fund strategy, right? Micro strategy. You can take those assets to go do a lot of things that may have actually real intrinsic value. I think that's a playbook that you're seeing, and I think management teams are getting more creative. Even AMC, right? They issued like two second class of shares, third class of shares, and they're able to bring a ton of money back in their coffers. Some of that financial engineering broadly is good.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  I think some of it is bad. I think there needs to be some more transparency around that. But part of it is like some retail investors are kind of blind going into this. So part of the job is, I think we're dovetailing comment is like how to deploy that capital better. Trust someone who actually knows what they're doing, how to read sort of some of these financials, understand the basic mechanics of these complex financial instruments. And actually decide, should we go into that or not?

• 27:11David Weisburd?

  So I have Cliff Asness from AQR, founder and CIO. He talked a little bit about his quant, yeah, legend, quant strategies. Outside of following Nancy Pelosi, which is clear, clear alpha trade.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:21David Weisburd?

  In terms of her information. What do you believe is behind the alpha in your top traders? What are they doing outside of getting insider information illegally? What legal strategies do you think that they're doing?

• 27:35Speaker 01

  I see this in a couple of them in slivers. One is a lot of our sort of top traders, they are focused not on the large cap growth stocks, but they're mid cap, small caps and micro caps. Because they're, you just can't inject as much capital into there. The bigger funds traditionally just don't focus in those stocks. If you have $10 billion of assets, you can't put it in a $300 million company. I still think there will always be alpha in smaller cap companies because there's just less attention. There's more divergence, a sort of asymmetric information where you can still have an edge by talking, getting to meet these management teams that you may have not sort of had in the past. So I think that's one bucket. Two is like, we just have some. These old school style Paul Tudor Jones, sit a bunch of screens, reading the tape traders that sit stare at the screens all day long. They truly have this incredible intuition and

• 28:19Speaker 01

  they do mainly swing trades, a quick sort of in and out. Maybe you might the holding period might be sort of a day or two or a week at max. And I just don't know. I think there's something that the magic spice sauce, right? Of some of these guys who just kind of know the flow and they're so good at sort of that. I think the final bucket is really the emergence of leveraging social influence to drive alpha. When you can do something like open door, which came out of the retail army with one person, Eric Jackson, this famous hedge fund guy who orchestrated the Carvana rise. He similarly pushed up sort of open and he made a lot of money. He had a big position to open, right? So if you see a lot of these guys now with the massive audience, you got a couple million followers, you can now start leveraging sort of your sort of base to

• 29:02Speaker 01

  galvanize them behind your views. And yes, some of this might get a little tricky with sort of disclosures and stuff, but it's just, it's kind of like going on CNBC in the old days, right? And talk and shop about your stock. There's new distribution channels that are much more close to the people and less centralized in terms of power where it's anyone can make a Twitter account and gain a following. And then you can drive real change and price movements.

• 29:23David Weisburd?

  Similar to the Bill Ackman, Bill Ackman, a friend of the pod, he would send out these research reports, these very long research kind of activist trades. This is why this is overvalued. This is why this is undervalued and, and basically take come in and do an activist takeover. This is kind of the same thing, but bottoms up from the crowd. It's like crowd source activism.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that term. I think that's spot on. Yeah. And then I think it's just that the power of that just amplified to the, to the nth degree now. It's so easy to sort of for something to go viral. The algorithms, I think the social media algorithms are trained to drive this sort of content. So I think you've got all the factors sort of coming in to sort of drive this push

• 30:04David Weisburd?

  Preparing for this interview, I found that we had a lot of great friends in common, Dash, Bradley Tusk, a lot of some of the smartest and most contrarian thinkers in New York City. How do you build out your advisory and your information diet? And how do you make sure that you're talking to the smartest people and getting the best people around?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  When I first moved to New York City, I think we had some phenomenal investors. You got the CEOs and founders of Uber, Airbnb, Robinhood around the table. But a lot of those investors, right, they're like, you might get an hour of their time. And it's great that sort of the hour of time that you get every quarter or a year is very valuable, but it's not enough to build a real in-depth relationship. So I think for young folks who moved to New York City without a network, I made it my mission in the first year or two to find the smartest people I could in New York City. What I did was, I love food. I found a couple of restaurants that I absolutely love. I host these dinners where I'd ask the smartest people I know to bring a plus one. And within two years, I'd built this phenomenal network of the smartest people I know. I keep it tight. I don't have that many friends, but I'm truly a believer of that you're the average of five people you spend the most time with.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  And I really just focus on those in-depth relationships, on the one-to-one stuff. I do sort of selectively, by trade of the business and bill and dub, I meet brilliant people every day, especially on the investing side. On the personal information diet, honestly, these days, I just spend a lot of time talking to ChatGPT. Even on my way home, I just talk to audio mode. Helps me become more articulate, helps me sort of synthesize information faster. Outside of that, I'm a big fan of, I know, friend of the pod, David Senra. I love reading autobiographies and I'm a huge fan of philosophy, too. I love thinking about life and ever went back to school, I'd probably be a philosophy major. I think there's a lot of open-ended questions of like the stony of like the hardships and like, for what cause, right? We're all gonna die one day and sort of nihilism, absurdism, but so why do we build what we do?

• 31:49Speaker 01

  And like finding passion in the day-to-day. I think one thing I like to say is like, I don't know if I'm actually happy every day and probably not. There's a lot of things I do that I don't want to do, from admin work to like going to work out at the gym. But am I fulfilled over the long term? Hell, yeah. And that, to me, I think is the propelling force over the long run that drives sort of the human existence and ability to grind it out for a long time.

• 32:12David Weisburd?

  I got to shadow Jim Jordan. One of the top private equity investors back in the day in college and I was like this wide eyed kind of college guy that really loved business and loved everything about it and I was sitting next to him and he was signing documents. I'm like, are you passionate about what you do every single day? He's like, look at how passionate I am signing these documents. And it was pretty brusque, but the point was made, which is like, it's absurd to think that if you're doing something and you're not loving every single second, you're doing the wrong thing. There's this meme out in the market that's so destructive to people creating great things.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 32:45David Weisburd?

  If you're lucky to have 30, 40% of what you're doing, like bring you energy and bring you happiness, you're on the right path. And a lot of people kind of like, well, I'm not constantly smiling, not every, I have to file my taxes. So this can't be the thing that I dream of.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:58David Weisburd?

  It's kind of like one of these very destructive memes out there.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  I completely agree with you and I think you're just grappling with reality right now. Everything's going to be perfect. And my most influential book, I think I read during high school was the myth of Sisyphus. It's by one of my favorite philosophers, Albert Camus. And Sisyphus is the god that's condemned to pushing a boulder up the hill. Then it gets stopped, it resets. And Camus' book, this is the final line is, one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Where it was, it was an awestruck moment where it was like, the guy is happy or he found joy in the difficulty of the process of pushing the boulder up the hill. And that's like life. You go up the hill, you reach an achievement, but then you reset, you're back doing the same thing every single day.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  And until you die. So I think that's part of what I've really internalized. That gives me, I think, motivation on some low days. That's some really low days, sort of building out the company. And you kind of, that's been the journey of growth that I've been committed to and I'm excited to continue doing that.

• 34:01David Weisburd?

  I think the way to operationalize it is literally stop and smell the roses. Today I have my first podcast on New York's stock exchange, you know, we're doing this beautiful, I mean, this is emblematic. Get to talk to people like you and just to stop for a second and just be thankful for where you are. I think that's like the operation. It's like, how do you operationalize being more grateful? You literally have to stop and appreciate, take a picture and not always. Take everything for granted. Sometimes we can move so quickly. You've raised forty seven million dollars and it's always the next milestone. You're like, holy crap, I've raised forty seven million dollars. I have millions of users. Like, that itself is incredible achievement. Yes, you want to go, you want to go public here, you want to go, you know, ring the bell, but at the same time, it's, you know, those milestones are meaningful and are things that

• 34:46David Weisburd?

  one in million people are able to accomplish.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Truly, yeah. And I feel very blessed and sometimes like it's hard to internalize that, like you said, every single day. But to me, it's like, I tell my team this, your words are the house you live in. And even like waking up in the mirror and saying like, dang, yeah, you're gonna have a good day today. Those moments of slowing down can really just change the perception of your psychology of injecting a little bit of really healthy energy into your beginning of your day.

• 35:12David Weisburd?

  Are you doing some meditation?

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Walk of meditation, guided meditation. I love the waking up app by Sam Harris. My CEO coach recommended me to it and I've been addicted to that ever since. Yeah.

• 35:23David Weisburd?

  I have been doing a lot of sound meditation and gong, gong therapy, which is, it's crazy. There's a lot of actually scientific literature on it. I was surprised myself.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, to me, it's like, I used to think it was voodoo BS, but now like, think about every great wisdom tradition in, in history has evolved towards bringing some form of meditation into the day to day life and how they perpetuate it. So I think it's just an incredibly powerful tool. It's a technology. It's an ancient technology. And it's a travesty if you don't apply it.

• 35:51David Weisburd?

  If you go back to twenty twenty one, when you were just starting Dub and you could give yourself one piece of timeless advice that would either help you accelerate Dub or help you avoid mistakes, what would be that one piece of advice?

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good one.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  What got you here will not get you to where you want to go. I would say, I thought there was a right way to do things and I tried that and that drove me to the ground in many ways psychologically. The early days of the company, I made a lot of people mistakes and we let a lot of people go. And there were some very low moments that I didn't think we're gonna make it, make it out. And I think it took some of those really low moments and taking a step back and realizing that if you don't kind of change the way that you do things, you're not going to get to where you want to go. And really assessing that I credit some of some incredible sort of investors, Jordan, some of my earliest investors, really helping out and being there in those moments and helping me realize that.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  I think that's been the journey I've been on since that first year started the company is this constant reinvention process of taking a look at my routines, what do I do? How do I lead the team? And improving on that and treating feedback as a real, real gift. And I'd say that's what I tell my team every single day now, and I think it's a real skill that I've had to build up is like, how do I listen to feedback? How do I internalize it? And how do I build a culture where everyone is comfortable and open sharing it? Because everyone, we're just moving towards the same mission. We truly think the best for the company and we want the best for each other. We should be brutally honest and blunt with the feedback that we give. It's all towards.

• 37:23David Weisburd?

  What advice would you have given yourself in those dark moments?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Stay cool, calm and collected.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  It's so easy to feel it in the gut. And some of the worst decisions I've made is like, when I feel it in the gut, I react immediately. And now I tell myself, if you feel it in the gut, don't say anything. Just wait, wait an hour, wait 20 minutes, just let that pass. Think about it with a rational, cool, calm, collected demeanor and you're going to make a better decision.

• 37:58David Weisburd?

  I've been thinking about this paradox. I haven't termed it, but, but as an entrepreneur or as anyone doing anything, you want to be highly ambitious, highly proactive. And yet sometimes being too proactive or too ambitious can become anti fragile and that you're not willing to be a little patient. Being fully proactive is extremely fragile and obviously being not proactive at all is even worse. But is there something there? Is there something that being too ambitious or wanting to move too fast can be self defeating? Could lead you to always start new things and never kind of stay the course?

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Building a startup, I think, filters for a lot of A-type players. And a lot of A-type players, for most of their life, are used to being number one all the time, constant achievement. If you work hard, you're going to be successful, right? If you study enough, you're going to get a perfect score on the SAT. And that's how most of our life was designed. If you did enough, you were going to achieve. And it was more of a, like, expected outcome. The probability of reaching the top was more guaranteed, and it was very linear and correlated to the work. But in startups, it's not. You could try the hardest, you can work the hardest, and still most fail, by all probabilities. And the smartest people I know have completely flopped their companies, right? So I would say, I think it's important to have the mindset where, yes, I think it's important to channel that ambitious energy, especially as the founder, because you need

• 39:19Speaker 01

  to be that spiritual soul, the inspirational leader of the company. But you can't do that at the cost of being irrational to the team. And you also will inevitably hit those moments where your ambition's going to get hit, you're going to have a low moment. And I think those are the moments where, what I just said, like, I feel in the gut, how do you slow down and actually process that this is just reality? And I think it's a maturity, sort of, it's a process of maturation to realize that, yes, it's important to always maintain the ambition, but sometimes you need to channel it in other ways to get across the next hump. And I think that's definitely a process that I've learned.

• 39:57David Weisburd?

  Kind of think of the world as driven by deterministic and physics, kind of the physics of business and life. And whenever I don't get an outcome, it's because I didn't follow the rules. The world does not owe me to change the laws of physics to make me successful. It's because I did the wrong thing. So instead of thinking, oh, you know, I'm a victim, or why isn't it working? It's like, no, you're following the wrong physical laws. So what should you be doing that actually leads to the outcome? You're kind of going from this emotional, kind of, almost like, childlike state to this highly rational, like, what needs to be done that would lead to this outcome?

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And it's probably one of the hardest things to do is also, like, what is the outcome that you want to go towards? And having a clarity of vision, because I think it's very easy to live in a ambiguous life and not choose and clarify. But once you do, it's all about just closing the gap between sort of your vision and reality. It's the steps that you can map out. I think that's so important for a startup on a day to day basis. I do it every morning is from everything that's small to sort of large. What is that clear picture that we're going towards? I think that's essential as a leader to describe your team.

• 41:02David Weisburd?

  It's a novel, novelism. Sometimes there's a time for exploration, figuring out what you're doing. And sometimes exploitation, just doing the thing every day. That is a thing. It's not sexy. It's not something you could talk about on a podcast. What did you do? I just did more of what I did yesterday and faster. And I hired more people to do the same thing.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  And then the beauty of compounding, and I think that builds up over time. And that's what you can never measure in 10 minutes or talk about on a podcast. But probably the most powerful thing you can do.

• 41:28David Weisburd?

  Well, on that note, Stephen, thanks so much for being the first guest for me and Capital Series for New York Stock Exchange Wired and looking forward to continuing this soon.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, David. This is incredible.

• 41:38David Weisburd?

  Thanks. That's it for today's episode of How Invest. If this conversation gave you new insights or ideas, do me a quick favor. Share with one person in your network who'd find it valuable or leave a short review wherever you listen. This helps more investors discover the show and keeps us bringing you these conversations week after week. Thank you for your continued support.