358: Shaan Puri on Building Companies & Riding Trends

Shaan Puri is the Senior Director of Product for Mobile Gaming at Twitch. He previously built Bebo, before ultimately selling the business to Twitch. In this conversation, we discuss startup studios, getting startup reps, how to sell a company, project selection, the issue with dabbling, scaling tech companies, and why anyone can be an entrepreneur if they really focus on it. =============================== Our second sponsor is Choice, a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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

• 0:00Anthony 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. Let's kick this thing off. Sean Puri is the Senior Director of Product for Mobile Gaming at Twitch. He previously built Bebo before ultimately selling the business to Twitch. In this conversation, we discuss startup studios, getting startup reps, how to sell a company, project selection, the issue with dabbling, scaling tech companies, and why anyone can be an entrepreneur if they really focus on it. I really enjoyed this conversation with Sean, and I hope you do as well.

• 0:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is BlockFi. I'm an investor in the business and a really happy customer. BlockFi has three products. You can buy and sell crypto on their crypto exchange, you can deposit crypto and take out a US dollar loan against your collateral, or you can use their new interest-bearing account, which allows you to deposit cryptocurrency or a stablecoin and earn up to 8.6% APY in interest. It's a really, really compelling product. It's much higher rates than you can earn in the legacy fiat world. So go check out BlockFi. Again, you can earn up to 8.6% APY in BlockFi's new interest-bearing account. You can go to blockfi.com/pomp.

• 1:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, blockfi.com/pomp, and you can start using the products today. blockfi.com/pomp. Next up is Choice. Choice is a brand-new self-directed IRA product that essentially allows you for the first time to buy Bitcoin in your retirement account and hold your private keys. That's right. Choice by Kingdom Trust has created a way for you to set up a self-directed IRA product. You then buy Bitcoin using the tax-advantaged dollars in your retirement account, and you still get to hold on to your private keys. This is an absolute game changer. There's more than 7 million Bitcoiners in the world who don't have Bitcoin in their retirement account.

• 2:05Anthony Pompliano?

  So now you can go to Choice by Kingdom Trust, open up the IRA Buy Bitcoin, hold the private keys and do all of this with your tax advantaged dollars. No brainer. Go to retirewithchoice.com/pomp. Again, retirewithchoice.com/pomp. I've got a Choice account. You need a Choice account. Retirewithchoice.com/pomp. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com.

• 2:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Sean. I hope you guys really enjoy this one.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:21Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got a special, special treat for you today. Sean, thanks for doing this, man.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  What's up?

• 3:29Anthony Pompliano?

  How are you?

• 3:30Speaker 02

  I'm doing well, man. I'm thriving. So, you know, people always say, you know, how are you doing? And you say, good or whatever. So I had this personal trainer I started working with, and whenever he comes over, he's like, how's it going? I'm like, I'm doing good. I'm doing great. But no matter what I say, he one-ups it. So he'll be like, I'm fantastic. I'm tremendous. I'm thriving. So like, whatever I say, he has like a better word. And so now I'm like, it's this little game I play with other people who are unsuspecting little, you know, civilians, because they'll just be like, you know, how's it going? I'll be like, today is one of the top three days of the week. And they'll be like, what?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  But I like it. It breaks up the, you know, normal small talk.

• 4:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, look, and people love to be around people who are just enjoying life. So let's, let's get into it. Let's just start with your background. You've done all kinds of cool stuff and have an absolute wild story as an entrepreneur. But what did, where'd you grow up and kind of how did you get into entrepreneurship?

• 4:20Speaker 02

  All right. I grew up all over the place. I lived in maybe nine different countries in my life. I finished high school in China, started it in Texas. I lived in Australia, then I moved to Silicon Valley because I was like, that's, that's the Hollywood for startups. Let's go there. My story is pretty cool. You know, it's pretty, I don't know, it's not like some rags to riches story, but it is interesting. You know, I thought, I went to Duke University. I thought I was going to be a doctor. I finished all my pre-med requirements and took the MCATs, was ready to go to med school. And I had one class credit left and I was like, all right, what do I want to do? So I said, I talked to my friends. I said, you know, isn't it weird? We've never taken a class together and let's take the easiest, most, you know, biggest blow off class that there is on campus. And so we went, there's this website called ratemyprofessor.com where it has like ratings.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  And, and so I go on there, I try to find the biggest blow off class offered on campus. What's the easiest thing I can do? And I see this class called getting rich and it's a five out of five on ease. It's a five out of five on like, I don't know, teacher help. And then there's a chili pepper next to her name and the chili pepper means like the teacher's hot. So I was like, okay, this is, this is a winner. So we enroll in this class, basically, you know, it's called getting rich, but it's basically a personal finance class. The teacher herself had graduated 10 years earlier. And she went and got rich doing stuff, you know, she was, she had a degree in Mandarin. All her friends were going to banking, law school, and they were like, good luck with that Mandarin degree. What, you know, what are you going to do with that? And this is, you know, 20 years ago. And so she was like, I bet I can get a job in China. So she goes to China.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  She realizes Chinese companies want to do business with the West. She becomes the face of those interactions and she makes a killing. She invests that money into the stock market in 1999. She's like, the internet seems cool. She rides the run up of the dot com boom. And just happens to luckily pull out before the bust because she's like, oh, I want to buy a house. Actually, I'll get into real estate. And then she rides a real estate boom for another five years. And so by thirty, she's retired. She's rich. She married the guy of her dreams and she's like, what I want to do, I want to go back to school and I want to teach what I wish I had learned, the stuff that actually helped me, you know, make it. They should teach this stuff in school. So I end up taking this class of hers and it's basically, uh, one day would be a personal finance class, like what the hell is a mortgage? And like what compound, you know, interest does to you over time. And then on the other

• 6:33Speaker 02

  side, it would just be stories of entrepreneurs. And I, as I was listening to these, which is, you know, if you're listening to a podcast, you probably like stories of entrepreneurs as well. I was inspired. I was like, this guy has, lives a sweet life, or this girl lives a sweet life. They are clearly not that smart. Like they're not that much smarter than me. And what they're telling me is, look, when I started, I didn't know jack shit. Um, and so if they didn't know it when they started, um, they didn't know anything when they started. I also don't have to know anything when I'm starting. And also they're telling me, look, everybody's resume looks alike anyway. So if you do want to go get a traditional job later, it's better to have a story that stands out. And so, uh, that's a long way of saying, I had decided to skip med school and I took the first dumbest idea I had and started a business, which was,

• 7:17Speaker 02

  um, I started a cloud kitchen before cloud kitchens were a thing. I didn't think it was, I was just doing it because I didn't have money to get a restaurant. So we created the Chipotle of sushi and I partnered with this Food Network chef and I tried to create this cloud kitchen for sushi. It was a delivery only restaurant. Um, and that took me down this adventure. I did that. I did a biotech thing with this billionaire guy in Australia. So I, um, I come to Silicon Valley because I'm like, look, this is where the action is. And, um, I beat this guy, Michael Birch, and Michael Birch has made it big. He sold a company called Bebo to AOL for $850 million. He's had all, all other wins too, that were, you know, tens of, he's built probably four different products to tens of millions of users. And so

• 7:59Speaker 02

  anyways, the guy made it and he decided he's going to open up his own idea lab. So it's his own little, you know, he built the most like, you know, pimped out penthouse office in San Francisco. I, I still think it is the best office in San Francisco. Uh, he hired up 20 badass engineers and he's like, let's build it. We own everything. No, no external investors. We'll self-fund the whole, whole thing. And let's try to find another home run. And so I was like, hey, this sounds awesome. Um, my, my whole mindset moving to Silicon Valley was, look, I've done a couple startups myself, uh, but I want to learn from somebody who's done it before now. And, um, and so I, you know, this guy had, this guy done it before. And I said, how do I pack for, you know, uh, 20 years of learning into the next four years of work? Um, and so that, that was my mindset.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  And, you know, how do I pack 20 years of learning into four years of work? I thought this idea lab will be great because I'm going to get so many different reps on a whole bunch of different projects. And not as an investor, but like as the person building them, um, building them with a team. And so anyways, I did that with him for about five years. We had a whole bunch of flops. We had a couple of things that actually took off and, you know, got to like number one on the charts, you know, but didn't quite have the longevity that we wanted. Um, and then the last thing was sort of the, the, I guess, most successful one out of it, um, which was a company, uh, we had actually bought the company Bebo back. So after he sold it to AOL, AOL does nothing with it. He comes to me one day and says, look, it's Bebo is going to just be off, you know, off shed and go into bankruptcy. We have the chance to buy it back, uh, if you want to do something with it.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  So we buy it back for a million bucks. We, um, reinvented it as something new as an esports platform. And, uh, ended up selling that last year to Twitch. And so, uh, exited Twitch and since then have been, uh, at Twitch, kind of, um, enjoying that experience, earning out my, my deal and, um, and getting to know something new. And so, uh, that's what I do is I, you know, I'm an entrepreneur, built a bunch of stuff that didn't work. Uh, got a couple of wins under my belt, sold, sold the last one to Twitch. Also host a podcast as well, um, that I think you're going to be on soon called My First Million, uh, where we just brainstorm business ideas, me and Sam. It started off as an interview show, but we quickly realized what people liked more was when we would shoot the shit and just brainstorm half baked

• 10:09Speaker 02

  business ideas that you could use to, you know, make a million bucks. Uh, we don't have the time to do it, but so we just give away the ideas for free because we're, we already have our hands full with our own projects. And so, um, yeah, that, that thing took off as well and it's doing pretty well.

• 10:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So one thing that's really interesting is the idea lab concept, uh, is not new, but, um, the way that it was funded and kind of all of the different iterations, what were some of the biggest lessons you learned going through, you know, all the, uh, kind of start and stop and failures and successes, uh, in that concept?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  So I learned a lot about the individual ideas and what how to make an idea successful or when to kill an idea, which is really hard to actually learn as an entrepreneur. You can only learn that the hard way. But on the idea lab front, I learned that idea labs suck. Like, don't do an idea lab. It's a super sexy, tempting thing to do. Like, every successful entrepreneur, like, you know, Kevin Rose, after he sells his company, he starts his own studio. Garrett Camp, after, you know, Uber and StumbleUpon, starts his own studio, Expa. Mark Pincus, after Zynga. Like, this is the thing to do, you know, because it makes sense. You still want to create new stuff. Like, you're not going to stop wanting to do have new ideas. You can't turn that switch off in your brain if you're wired that way. But now you got money, and now you feel like you kind of know what the hell you're doing. And so you're like, cool, I'll bet on myself, bake up a bunch of different ideas.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Because, again, focus is really hard to do. What's not hard is being ADD and starting a bunch of different projects. And so it's this tempting, really fun thing to do, but ultimately, I think, quite a bad idea if success is your metric. If you're trying to enjoy yourself, it's great. If you're trying to be successful, I wouldn't do an idea lab. And I advised a whole bunch of other people who were trying to do their idea labs, because they would say, hey, you know, you seem pretty smart, and you've done this for years. Like, I want to do mine. And, you know, these are some of the successful wealthiest people in the world that are trying to do this, and they're failing too. And so I think that the challenge is, you get all these good things with a startup studio. You get a bunch of at bats. That's good. You have the ability to carry over learning. So when one project fails, you don't have to go get a job. You just start the next project. That's also really good.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  What you lose, though, is the critical thing that makes startups work, which is relentless focus and back against the wall. I have to make this work. I told my whole family, I told the whole world I'm doing this. I got to find a way. And with an idea lab, it's sort of like, you're doing this project. It's exciting at the beginning. It kind of starts, you know, you build a prototype. Oh, that feels like progress. You get a few users, that feels like progress. And then you hit some wall or some plateau where it just doesn't take off right away. And, and what ends up happening is, as an entrepreneur, normally, you just power through that wall. As an idea lab, you're like, oh, you know, fuck that project. I'm going to go do this other thing. How about that other idea we have that's kind of still in that sexy fun, early stage? And so you end up giving up a little too soon on all these projects, or just being distracted and not being relentless about it.

• 12:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk to me about when you guys sold Bebo to Twitch. Obviously it sold for a million bucks. So there was some sort of appreciation in the value you guys created. And then the transition from kind of that entrepreneurial mindset and going to work every day, trying to build stuff from scratch to now be an executive at, you know, a pretty impressive company.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, selling it was interesting and I'll share the story because there's, there's two types of sales. There's type one, which is your Instagram, like you built the thing, it's taking off. Twitter wants to buy you, Zuck is trying to buy you, like, you know, everybody wants you, investors are banging down your door, they're saying, no, stay independent and you decide to sell.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  In that case, you've been, you are on to something, you're winning, you have a lot of momentum and you're a threat to the industry. That's why you get bought. Then there's everybody else and I have this like, you know, speech I give entrepreneurs privately, which is like, you are not Instagram. Cause if you're talking to me, you're not Instagram, meaning like, if you're trying to figure out, how do I sell this thing? You're in the, you're in the camp of you're selling, you're not getting bought. And so what I always joke is that I sold a failing company. Now, in truth, we weren't failing. We actually had like, you know, decent momentum, but like, we weren't a breakout superstar company that just everybody wanted to buy. I'm fucking manufactured that sale and you know, it was because I realized, look, if, if we keep going down this path, I think winning looks like kind of a middle of the road, medium sized company.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  That's not what my investors signed up for. That's not what I signed up for. It's going to be just as hard as building a big company, but we're going to end up at a medium sized company in the success case. So I was like, look,

• 14:25Speaker 02

  let's sell this baby.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  So I was like, look, let's, let's sell this baby. And so I went out and I pitched and I figured out, how do you sell a company? And I have this like whole deal framework of our whole process of like, how to sell, you know, a not Instagram company. And we ended up getting a couple of offers and decided to go with Twitch, which was awesome. Like, you know, we, we sold it for eight figures. Like I can't say the exact thing, cause you know, I don't want Jeff to get mad at me, Uncle Jeff to, to come down and bring the wrath of Bezos on me. But actually, you know, some stuff got leaked. So that, that, that wasn't my fault, but, but basically we sold it for a good outcome, you know, personally, life-changing money. And you know, now I got a new experience, which was go to Twitch and now boom, I'm at a 2,000 person company. You're the market leader. It's like the exact opposite of a startup.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Like startup, you're small and you're nobody, nobody knows you. And now you're at Twitch and it's like the exact opposite. And I got to, you know, see what that's like for the past year, being at an executive company and it's very, very different.

• 15:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Give me the 60 second overview of how you sell a company.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  How you sell a company? You figure out first, everyone wastes their time thinking about why they're so great. And you need to figure out what story you fit into for the acquirer. So what I did was I talked, I went to, I thought about each acquirer. I talked to people on the inside to figure out, hey, what are the big problems you guys have to solve this year? Like, what are the urgent problems you have? What are the either opportunities you need to be chasing or like headaches that like the CEO is worried about? And then I just asked myself, how can I pitch my company as a solution to that problem? It's very much like building a product, but like most entrepreneurs don't go about it that way. They just start to focus on themselves. Here's what we do. Here's what industry we're in. Here's how much traction

• 16:11Speaker 02

  we have or don't have. And that's why they get stuck because that's not an easy to understand thing for an acquirer. So I went out and I mapped out 40 acquirers. I figured out what's, what's the angle? If I'm them, what, what's problem does buying Bebo solve for me? And then I ranked them on like strongest fit to like weakest fit. And I started with the weakest fit and went pitch, practiced that pitch and got good at actually like answering their questions and figuring out what data they need and how to organize it. Because I got some great advice along the way, which was you need to turn your company into a giant buy button, like a one click purchase from Amazon. So like, get your docs together, get your data room together, clean up your cap table, clean up any messiness you have, figure

• 16:53Speaker 02

  out, you know, your, your three sentence story that they're going to go pitch in their boardroom when they have to go get board approval for this. And like work backwards from that. And the last thing is get what I call your deal doulas. So like I just had a kid this year. I just learned about the, you know, the process of having a baby. And you know, a doula is some, you know, somebody who really helps and assists you birth that baby. And you need the same thing with a deal. You need a deal doula to help you. You know, A, keep your head straight because it's really like, it can be very stressful for people. B, like negotiate, figure out how negotiations need to work. And three, like, you know, they, they open doors and they can kind of back channel for you in a way that really helps you. And so when the CEO or the kind of whoever's your champion at the company who's going to buy you,

• 17:37Speaker 02

  they need to hear from multiple sources and they need to sort of get reaffirmed because you don't want them to get fired for acquiring your company. So they need to have high certainty that this is a good deal, which is done in two ways. They understand it. Other people tell them this is a good deal and they see that other companies want to buy you. So you gotta get multiple offers. And so that was my trick was get multiple offers. Pitch myself as somebody that they, you know, put myself in their terms, how I solved their problem this year and, and get, yeah, just have, have people back channeling for you.

• 18:11Anthony Pompliano?

  You've got a number of what some would consider irrational or counterintuitive ideas. I want to go through those and you just kind of spitball at me why you believe these things. The first is real estate is full of rich dumb people. What is that?

• 18:28Speaker 02

  It's not that it's full. Oh, it is full of it. I got in trouble for this, but I believe it to be true. Real estate has the highest percentage of dumb, rich people. And people took that as an insult. I didn't mean it as an insult. I meant it as a compliment. It means, hey, you can get rich in this area without having to be a genius. Like, dude, I was trying to create the next Twitter, the next YouTube, but that's hard to catch lightning in a bottle. If I had just gone and done multifamily real estate, that does not take the same level of luck and genius that other things take. So that's why I say that. And, you know, people, real estate, people get all pissed when I say that, but A, it's true and B, it's not an insult. It's a way to say, look, if financial gain is your number one thing to do and you're not, you don't have the ego of trying or the, you know, the creative juices aren't just flowing out of you.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Real estate is a great way to go. Dumb, rich people everywhere. It's awesome.

• 19:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, who cares if you're dumb or smart if you're rich, right?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 19:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Project selection is more important than hard work. I actually agree with this, but explain what you mean by that.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so hard work is this like thing everybody grasps grasps onto. And I had trouble with this because I'm not that hard of a worker. I'm actually quite lazy. And I thought for a while I believed what society tells you, which is that you have to work really hard to be successful. Sure, sure, it helps, but like, hey, I got successful and I still didn't work that hard. And like, so I definitely proved the sort of counter narrative. And there's plenty of people that are like this. A far more important factor to success is project selection. Most people choose the wrong project. So here's kind of how I think about this. I used to play poker a lot. And in poker, I found that I would crush it at certain games. Like if I played at certain soft tables, like I lived in Australia and it's just dumb tourists playing poker. Or online, I'd go to the low stakes, you know, the one, $2 limit tables and I could just crush it.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  But then I would get my ego, you know, I'd want to go heads up for, you know, high limits. And I'd, you know, be sitting there with 50 grand at a table, trying to beat this guy because he's good. And like, what a dumb thing to do. If my objective is to make money, that's a really dumb way to make money. I'm going where I don't have an edge. And so I learned in poker, they always say table selection is, you know, one of the critical factors is more important than being, you know, sort of this genius bluffer. And so in the same same vein for startups or projects you're doing, you want to work on the projects where you are, where success is in your favor, not against you. And too many people try really hard things and then try to hard work their way out of it. And that's a terrible idea. I want to go to a waterfall and just get wet.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  I don't want to go in the desert and find water like, and I learned that the hard way because I did a bunch of projects that were like going in the desert, trying to find water. And then I now experienced the opposite and I, I will tell everybody this because I think it'll save you a lot of pain. Project selection, not hard work.

• 21:10Anthony Pompliano?

  So I agree with everything you said with one caveat, which is if people could select the right project and then work hard, it's like, it's like rocket fuel, right?

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Turbo, it's a turbo for sure. And like, but what I'll say is it's not an absolute requirement for success. But of course, if you're both in the same, if you're, if two people go into the same project and then one works way harder than the other, they're going to get better results. And, and so, yeah, it's for sure additive, but it is misprioritized. If people, people say it because it sounds really good to say, it sounds like, like, for example, I'm always wary of things that sound good when you say them. I'm like, is that really true? So like, for example, you, it's unpopular to say, um, intelligence really matters. Because it sounds like something that's kind of outside of your control. It sounds kind of elitist, uh, or saying like, resources really matter, or like, whatever. Your background really matters.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  And these may or may not be true, but like, they don't sound good when you say them. You don't, you don't get props in the, you know, on Twitter. You don't get retweets for, for saying this stuff. But if you say hard work really matters, everybody likes to agree with that. You sound good. It sounds like every, it sounds very fair. Everybody's got a fair shot. And the harder you work, the better results you get. In my experience, that's not really true. Hard work, it helps. It is additive, but it is by no means the like, you know, the, the thing that correlates best to success. Much, but there are many other fact, four or five other factors I would put over hard work. Number one, I would say is choosing the right project. So, so that's kind of like my, my little, my cheat code I would always use is, anytime you see some, something that is just universally, you'll get a pat on the back for saying, should really question if it's true.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Or if people say it because it signals, uh, you know, a good thing for them.

• 22:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Lots of people saying things they think they should be saying, right? It's the, uh, it's the seeking of consensus instead of truth.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 22:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. People shouldn't join early stage startups.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the caveat here is you shouldn't join it from, it's a dumb decision from a financial perspective. Uh, I love early stage startups. I, you know, I've turned down a lot more money to do early stage startups. I think you should, if you're really optimizing for like, let's say, financial gain.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  And that's not the main thing to optimize for, but if you are optimized financial gain, you should either start your own company and own the equity. Cause the founder, the founder will get like, you know, a hundred or 50% of the company when they start it. And then the first two employees who are gonna be just, work just as hard, take just as much risk, uh, pretty much, they will be, you know, 3% or less. Uh, you know, by the fifth employee, you're getting 0.25, 0.3, 0.4% of the company, which is ridiculous. Uh, but that's the norm. And so joining at an early stage, you do, you work really hard, you just don't get the same upside. So I like to say, if you're thinking about money, which again, you don't have to think about, but if you are. Own the, own the company, own the equity yourself, or go work at Fang, dude.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  There's people, you know, who work at Fang companies that are, you can go out of college and be making 300K a year. If you're an engineer, I know people that are making a million dollars a year and they live a very, very lax lifestyle, taking none of the risk and headache that an entrepreneur makes or, or a early-stage startup person does. Now, if you're trying to learn, which is how, kind of how I thought about it when I was young in my career, I was like, look, I'll earn later, I'm going to learn now, I'm going to optimize for learning, working at an early-stage startup is great.

• 24:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I completely agree with both of those things. The difference between acting like a lion versus a cow, and this might be my favorite thing that you've said.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  I stole this one, so this I can't, I can't take full credit for, but hey, I, I steal 90% of my ideas. I just, you know, my job is to find good ideas and share them, not claim to be the owner. So Naval actually is the one who said this, but it lined up with what I have experienced, which is, most people work Monday through Friday and they work roughly like a nine to five schedule. And I always, when I was trying to work that way, it never felt right, you know, like, I had always done my best work in like extreme bursts where, once I had clarity on something or motivation to do something, like, don't talk to me for like 16 hours, I'm going to just work on this thing like crazy. And then like, I'll go two days, I won't do anything. And you know, my mom thinks like, what are you doing? Like, you should go to work. And for creative people and ambitious people, I worked, you're not like a factory worker.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  You don't just go in Monday through Friday like a robot and work for eight hours straight and get the same output per hour. It's definitely not that way. Not all days are created equal, not all hours, not all weeks are created equal. So if you recognize that, you should say, well, then how should I work? And I think you should work like a lion. So the way a lion works, and this is kind of the framework of all you said I like. He goes, a lion will sit and they'll wait, they observe the surroundings, they wait to see their prey appear, like, what do I want to eat? And they, they won't just run around aimlessly, you know, fake hunting, they wait till there's actually prey. Then they sprint and they sprint until they catch their prey and they hunt it down. Then they eat and enjoy, uh, they, you know, they enjoy the fruits of their labor. And then they go back to resting and waiting again. And, um, that's not how most people work. What most people do is like a cow.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  They just stand, stand out there in the field with their neck down and they graze on grass all day. Eight hours a day, just slowly chomping up the grass and they don't really make much progress. And so if you're an ambitious and a, a creative person, you're in a creative field, like probably most people listening to this are. Just say to yourself, I literally say this to myself, like work like a lion. I'm going to work like a lion today. What that means is identify the one thing I'm going to kill today. Sprint, hunt it down, kill it, enjoy it, and then rest.

• 26:35Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so on the podcast, you and Sam Parr sit and basically just come up with idea after idea after idea. Uh, I've listened to many episodes, uh, some with people that, uh, we have mutual friends that, that have come on and some with just you guys, uh, ideating. What are some of your favorite ideas that you guys have come up with?

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Sure, so I, I shortlisted a few. I'll just hop around, I'll, I'll just go through them. So, so we'll, we'll do, we'll do it fun. I'll go quick and you give me your hot take reaction, uh, to each one of these. You can say, that's a dumbass idea, or you can be like, I think there might be something there. Okay, so the first one is, uh, is Hooked for Romance Novels. So, okay, so I'll tell you the quick background. Hooked is a, is a company that, uh, is like, if you ever read Goosebumps back in the day, like when you were a kid, I, I read them. It's basically like kind of scary stories, but they tell it through the phone. So it's like, it's in a text message format. They, the app just like, each line of the story is like a text message and you just read it. So Hooked has taken off, it's got 50 million readers, they do like 60 million a year in revenue. Uh, nobody really talks about them.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  And so, uh, turns out people still like to read, they just do it in new ways. And so I think you should do this for romance novels. So I was surprised to learn that, um, Romance is like one of the fastest selling categories. It's the biggest selling category in, uh, in books, um, outside of the Bible, basically. So like, you know, the best selling book is 50 Shades of Grey, uh, but there's also, um, you know, the Twilight series. Um, there's also, um, you know, Danielle Steele, who's got a house on Billionaires Row here in San Francisco. That house was paid for through romance novels. And so the average reader of romance novels will read like five times as many books as the average person who reads books, as average book reader. And so there's just this carnivorous appetite and there's just not enough supply. And so, um, I think you should create a lightweight

• 28:24Speaker 02

  mobile platform where you subscribe 7.99 a month and you get, uh, you know, regular dose of, uh, romance novels, romance short stories. And, um, actually a listener heard this idea on the podcast and went and did a weekend prototype. So what he did was he took it to an extreme. He created, uh, newsletters instead of a book and no app, just created a newsletter because it's quick, but he did it for erotic stories for black women. Um, black mommy porn, basically, and it's told through, through, you know, written stories. And in two weeks he's built it up. He's doing 10K a month now on this, uh, thing with basically no investment. He just ran a few hundred dollars of ads on porn sites to acquire his users and he's already doing 10K a month as passive income now off this, you know,

• 29:06Speaker 02

  like of a, uh, you know, a piece of this idea. But I think this idea is big and most people who build apps are kind of like dudes who are, you know, like white dudes who don't read romance novels. And so I like opportunities where it's not going to be as competitive because it's the average builder doesn't know about this opportunity.

• 29:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and I also wonder, uh, where's he getting the content from? The person who created it?

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Like just hired a, uh, so Wattpad is like a free writing platform where people write stories. So we found a writer on Wattpad, I think, and was like, hey, I'll pay like a hundred, a hundred, 200 bucks a month because writers make no money. So it's like very easy to be like, I'll give you a hundred dollars per story or $10 per story, whatever it is. And these are very short stories that are just quick to consume.

• 29:49Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy. And I think that the key piece of that whole thing is one, people definitely still want to read. Two is just a different delivery mechanism, right?

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 29:56Anthony Pompliano?

  The things that I keep thinking about is just like books and audio books. Where else are people reading content that just they're going to turn into an audio format? Right? Like, that's absolutely going to happen in other verticals other than just books. People have tried it with articles and all this kind of stuff, but like, that just feels like a natural progression that'll occur.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Exactly. Like, if you want to think of new ideas, if you want to get good at thinking of ideas, here's a framework that's real easy. Everyone makes fun of you because I'm always talking about frameworks. I'm like the, I want to be like the framework Don, but I don't think you could be a Don if it's something as lame as frameworks. But it's like a two by two matrix, like two by two grid. And you just write, is either old problem or a new problem? And then it's either an old solution, new solution. And so like old problem, people want to read stories, like romance stories. But new solution, I'll deliver it through your phone, through this new packaging on a subscription basis digitally, rather than traditional books. And then there's sometimes there's new problems like, oh, I bought Bitcoin, I need a place, I need a way to store it securely. That's a new problem and I need, I can use an old solution. Actually, I can use, you know, like, you know, those guys who do cold storage like in a vault.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  It's like a bank vault. So they took an old solution and applied it to a new space. And so that's just an easy way to look at things. Old problem, new problem, old solution, new solution. And you can't, the only square that's invalid is you can't do old problem, old solution. That's done. All the other grid, all the other squares are up for grabs.

• 31:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So an iteration of this that I've told multiple people they should go build is what I call business text, which is, there's tons of newsletters right now and they all summarize the news, right? They basically just put links and things like that. Somebody should create a text based service. You put your number in and then every day at the beginning of the day, it texts you and here's all of the headlines that you need to know around business. And it's got a link and you can click through, read the article if you want. If not, you basically get all of them. You can easily put some sort of advertising in it and you're off to the races. And it probably takes somebody half an hour, maybe an hour, you know, max to go collect headlines and links and kind of format and send the text message. It's like, that's just a super layup one that you get tons of distribution right out of the gate. And then you can do all kinds of things to monetize with.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  I love that one. That's great. That's, that's why you're going to have to be on the podcast because you got the gem, you have the idea switch. Some people don't have it, you have it.

• 32:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I have way too many ideas.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  The test is like, if someone wants to be on the podcast, I'm like, show me the notes app in your phone. Like, I'll tell you in five minutes if you'll be good on the podcast or not.

• 32:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. What other ones do you guys have?

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Uh, okay, here's, okay, I did kind of a raunchy ones. Let me do a very safe, uh, safe for work one. Okay. So beautiful bibles. So this, this came on a podcast, uh, one, one of the episodes we did, we came up, which was that there are tons of Christians out there. The Bible is the best selling book of all time. There's like 40 million, I think, met new Christians a year and Christianity, religion, people think it's going out of favor. But actually there's this resurgence. So like you have, you know, Kanye releasing gospel albums, Bieber, you know, went all righteous. Uh, there's guys like Carl Lentz, who are like, kind of like celebrity preachers now, um, that are like, kind of cool and like they can do TikToks and shit. Um, and so, um, so anyways, religion is kind of on this upswing, but the Bible itself, the book that sells the most copies

• 33:03Speaker 02

  still looks kind of like the dusty old brown Bible. And so there's a few people trying this, but I think there's still just plenty of opportunity. If you're just a person with good taste and design, you should create a beautiful Bible. Here's why. You're just repackaging the existing content and you just need to package it with either photos, better cover, different form factor, something like that, either something that's, you know, easier to take around or just looks good on a coffee table. It doesn't like, sort of look like a dusty old Bible and, um, religion is like the most, you know, popular free IP in the world. So I have a whole set of religious ideas because where else can you get IP that is like universally known and loved? Um, you know, by, you know, hundreds of millions of people know and love this brand and you don't have to pay a dollar for the rates.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  And like, that's just an amazing premise for any business, uh, just start with that. And so one of the men, one of my religious, uh, ideas is beautiful bibles. What do you think?

• 33:57Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no brainer. Um, and, and I'd even go a step further as like that entire mechanism of take some sort of content that already exists and repackage it and make it look much better. Uh, you could literally go all the way back to, uh, articles, newspapers, religion, you know, all this kind of stuff. I think it's very smart to just tap into a massive market where you don't have to pay for the IP. Oh, that makes sense. Uh, but the other piece of it too, is, uh, you can actually go ahead and, uh, marry the first idea, the second idea, right? So you could even do a super beautiful designed, you know, app where you can read it. You know, there's all kinds of things that you can do off of that. And there's plenty of, I think that some of the most popular apps in the App Store are around religion or bibles.

• 34:39Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but I do think that there's another piece of this too, which is, uh, I, I'm fascinated by the idea of taking a piece of content and then either, uh, making it more mature or less mature. And what I mean by that is, uh, you know, all of these books that are basically like the picture book of the Bible, right? Or the, uh, if you went and you looked at Bible sales, how many of the bibles being sold are in the like old, uh, James? You know, like super hard to read, like old English type, uh, language versus just like, I think it's called like new American, you know, uh, which was very easy to read. My guess is actually that more and more the new language. And so it's like finding any sort of content that you can, you know, basically translate into like very simple, uh, kind of concise language,

• 35:24Anthony Pompliano?

  whether that's, you know, for children or for kind of adolescents. It just seems like it's pretty easy to do and the demand's not going anywhere.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  There's some group that's trying to do this on YouTube. They just took every like story from the Bible and they're just animating it into a YouTube series. And their YouTube channel is like super popular. Their Patreon has like tons of, you know, supporters or whatever. They have like a whole animation team, like a Pixar team, basically. This is again genius idea. It's like deliver in a new way, um, the old content. And again, it's like this, this is IP more popular than Pokemon or anything else. And, um, you know, you can get the rights without permission and without a dollar. So that's really cool, uh, for somebody who doesn't have a whole lot of resources, but wants to make something big.

• 36:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Look, I think that there's an entire industry of people just reading things that are in written content. Like literally go find, you know, information that you know, people find valuable, whether, uh, books are hard because there's IP concerns, but there's all kinds of content that exists, you know, everywhere. Uh, and literally you just read it and it's not very, you know, intelligent heavy in terms of what's needed for you to be able to create the audio content. But again, going back to all of these books, eventually audiobooks exploded. Every piece of written content is essentially going to at some point have the, um, have, have the audio version.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Like you could do the audio version, kind of like, like, so my friend started Calm, the meditation app. And, you know, Calm was like, I remember early days was like, just Alex and he, there's, you know, it was a slow slog, people weren't meditating. And then like, as that came more in vogue, it grew, but it still wasn't taking off. And then they did their sleep stories. And sleep stories was like a game changer, because A, more people wanted to sleep than meditate. And B, they had like, they took an old problem bedtime stories and did it in a new way. They did bedtime stories for adults, driven through an app. And so you could do the same thing. So say you did the audio version of the Bible, like, maybe you actually do the same thing they do, which is they go partner with like Matthew McConaughey, and they get him to read a story at night. And it's kind of like this cool branded thing. So how many celebrities

• 37:20Speaker 02

  out there actually, you know, are have faith and would love to be paid almost in a masterclass style to record a high quality reading of a religious short story. And then you could off package those up and offer them to people who want something. It's not just that it's audio, but it's audio done by celebrity. And you're just mashing these things together, remixing them till you get an idea that works.

• 37:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. One more. What's one more you got?

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Okay, um, okay, pick a number between three and 10, and I'll read the number, I'll read that idea off. I have 10 ideas on this list, but I'll let you pick a number. Lucky. Three. Okay. A no code PE shop. Okay, so here's this idea. Private equity, you know, known, known thing, you go buy up companies and you sort of, you either, you know, you have some way to increase revenues through either maybe a roll up or something like that, or you're shedding costs. So this is the shedding costs version. There are a ton of apps or software businesses out there that are like, doing like 700 K a year. But then they take like four engineers to like, maintain and build and they employ people. And so they're not making any money. And so you can buy these apps for, you know, 2X revenue, because they have no exit. Nobody's

• 38:26Speaker 02

  going to buy this, like, no, no, Apple's not going to go buy this, Facebook, Facebook's not trying to buy these companies. So they're, and they can't go raise money because they're not like, in hypergrowth mode. So they're kind of in no man's land. So you can go, you can acquire these companies. And you just need a no code backend, basically where you're able to take everything that they're doing with their developers, and you're going to turn it into a no code platform, that can be managed and maintained without having to write code. And so you would lower your, your operational costs, and you'll turn these things that are like, break even on 700 K a year, to like, profiting 400 K a year. And I think that any individual could do this, and you can create a whole shop that expertise is doing this.

• 39:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think that you're going to continuously see this. I've got a friend who he's from South America and he went in partnered with a private equity shop. And they bought a very specific type of business. I won't kind of reveal their strategy, but a very specific type of business. And then the whole idea was we're going to use technology to replace much of the human labor. And then on top of that, my buddy really understands how to use the platforms to grow and kind of operational efficiency. And we're working with some large tech companies and you just start to implement all of those lessons learned and tactics. And next thing you know, the business, not only can you, you know, kind of make it more profitable by saving costs, but also you can double or triple the top line revenue simply by like using the internet, right?

• 39:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, like, like super, super easy stuff, but I think that more and more of these kind of private equity-esque type companies or shops are waking up to this idea of, you know, you don't have to necessarily go buy the technology enabled company. It may be better to buy the one that has no clue about technology and then just quickly get them onboarded to the technology world and create much value.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's exactly right.

• 40:11Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. I took a bunch of questions from online on Twitter beforehand. I'm going to just run through these and you fire off answers. Adam Singer asked to talk through mobile end versus mobile first and how do you think about that?

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. So what he's asking is, you know, your company, should you be thinking we are a mobile and company? Meaning it's mobile and web or mobile and TV or whatever, or are you a mobile first company? Like when Facebook went all in on mobile. And, you know, it's, I think there's context to this, like not every business necessarily makes sense this way, but like the world has gone mobile first. So you need a damn good reason to not be mobile first. You know, if you're Netflix and you're like, look, people truly enjoy to watch more, a higher percentage of this on TV than on mobile. Like mobile sizable for them. It might be like, I don't know, 20, 30% of their overall watch time, but still majority is TV. So like they should be TV first, but if you're a social media app, you should definitely not be TV first. You should be mobile first, right?

• 41:13Speaker 02

  So I think the context depends here, but like. In most cases, and is a wuss word, and is I can't make a decision. So I'm going to say both because then I'm not pissing anybody off. And in reality, I'm probably going to fail because I don't have the ability to do both at a world-class level. So be really worried whenever your strategy is this and that, instead of this, not that. I would always bet on an entrepreneur who's saying it's this, not that, even if they're wrong, because they'll find out that they're wrong and they'll be able to pivot. When it's this and that, they'll never know if they're wrong because everything will just be half-baked execution. And so you never know, was the problem the execution or the strategy? It's hard to tell.

• 41:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Literally, my number one lesson from working at Facebook was this exact framework that you're talking about, which was you have to have a strategy and then you have to have perfect execution of the test for the strategy for that exact reason, right? If it doesn't work, you never want to be questioning, well, was it the right strategy? We just implemented incorrectly because if that's what you're...

• 42:10Speaker 02

  You're lost.

• 42:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, there's no, there's no point in running the test then.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Right. Were you, were you ever there when they did a lockdown when they were like, I don't know which years you were there, but like when it was like existential threat, nobody leaves, we're fit, we're going to figure this out. We're going to shift the whole company in this direction.

• 42:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So not necessarily for that. So I worked there in 2014, 2015. There was plenty of people who, you know, had the stories of that. When I was there, we went from, I don't know, I think I was like, maybe right around 4,000, 3,800 employees, something like that, to when I left, I think we had crossed over 12,000. So like, you know, hyper growth, everything's going crazy. But the thing that a lot of people don't remember about Facebook is that most of the executives have been there for a very, very long period of time, right? And so on the growth side, you know, you've got Havi, Naomi, Alex Schultz, like, like these people who have been there just for so long. And I think part of what was so fascinating was they had the muscle memory of doing that.

• 43:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And where it would show up is there wasn't necessarily like company-wide lockdowns, but they would do like war rooms for product launches, right? So kind of everyone go in here for two weeks or, you know, that type of stuff. And then the other thing that a lot of people don't remember is when they were doing those lockdowns, a lot of times they would literally stop development of everything at the company. And say like, we're gonna fix the data issues that we have. So going forward over the next thirty years, like it's built on a good foundation.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Or there's this existential threat, like we're gonna address that today. We don't care if we don't make progress on anything else. And it goes back to your idea of like, it's not just startup entrepreneurs that need to focus. Like, if you want to be really, really good, you've always got to understand like, what's the most important thing? And like, how focused are we on that thing versus distracted by everything else?

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 43:53Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Uh, biggest lessons learned from Monkey Inferno from Marvin?

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Uh, so Monkey Inferno was the idea lab. So I talked a little bit about that of, you know, some of the, the things that don't work great. Um, I'll, I'll, I'll share with you my, my philosophy around this. So the biggest lesson learned was don't be a dabbler. Okay. So what's a dabbler? So here's the, here, here's the story on this. So, um, let's say you decide to go and, um, and you, you go to the gym and you see your gym has a racquetball court and you're like, oh, let me try this out. I'll, that looks fun. Let me see what they're doing. So you go inside and you start playing racquetball and you're like, holy shit, this is fun. I'm smashing this ball against the wall. This is great. Next day you go and you buy a bunch of gear. You got your shorts, your headband, your goggles, whatever. You're like, I love racquetball now. So you start playing racquetball for a couple of weeks. Um, and then, you know, a couple of weeks go by and you, you know, the

• 44:43Speaker 02

  initial fun of smashing the ball around is sort of worn off. And you actually started playing with somebody who, who has been playing for a while and, um, they're just mopping you up. You, you know, they're just putting the ball in places you can't hit. And you're getting frustrated because it's not, you're not getting the level of progress or victory that you really want, uh, as fast as you want. And so, you know, average person's like, you know what? Uh, fuck racquetball. What am I doing in this box anyways? Uh, this is hot. Uh, you know, this is a stupid, stupid game. I'm gonna go play a different game. I'm gonna go play tennis. And so they go, they go outside and they start playing tennis. Same sort of curve happens. Uh, initially starts out fun. You're doing all right. You feel a sense of progress, but then over time you start to, um, You know, you hit plateaus and you stop getting better at the same rate you were getting better before.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  And when you really want to compete, you realize like, oh shit, like I still have a long way to go. And this is, this is not going as fun as, it's not as fun as it was the first few days. And so most people, you know, they quit, they, they say tennis, what is this? You know, I'm out here in the sun all day. This is, this is dumb. I'm, I'm done with this. And then they go and they, they're like, I'm gonna play golf. And then, you know, day one of golf, they're like, fuck. You know, golf doesn't even give you that initial hit. And so, you know, the, the, there's three, that, that's the story of a dabbler. And this happens in business all the time. We start a project and you initially have hopes and dreams and it starts off going great and you're excited. But then as you hit plateaus or resistance, which is like what it takes to get to the success. You give up and you switch, or you change your strategy, or you just change everything.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  And you're not changing because that's actually what it takes to get better. You're changing because you're impatient or you're frustrated. And so this was really easy to do in an idea lab because it's like, dude, we got a ton of ideas. It's natural to just quit one and do another, focus your attention a little more the next day on the other projects. And so it was really hard to do that. And there's really three types of people. There's a, a dabbler who that's the pattern they go down. There's what I'll call the stressor achiever. And this is where most people fall, most successful people fall here where they're gonna fight through. They will persevere, but they're stressed the whole goddamn time. Every time they hit the plateau, they're angry, they're frustrated, but they, they, they don't quit. But their, their journey is painful. And then there's a master, and this is what I've learned from Monkey Inferno. My time at the idea lab is how to become a master.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  A master is you are doing something, you would get excited about the early days. Then you hit your plateau, but you don't, you're not surprised, you're not angry. You say, you treat it like an old friend. You're like, ah, like I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Hello plateau. You, you know, what are you here to teach me? Where do I need to grow to get better? What area of my business is weak that I need to get stronger? What area of my body do I need to change to get better? And so now a, a master treats the plateau like an old friend, greets it, goes through it, overcomes it, and enjoys the whole journey along the way. And so it's kind of a more philosophical, personal lesson. But that's what I really learned from the idea lab was, don't be a dabbler. Also, don't be a stressor achiever. Learn to be a master in, in your adventures and then you'll enjoy the adventure and you'll, you'll, you'll have the endurance to continue.

• 47:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Australia, what's going on in the startup scene there?

• 47:41Speaker 02

  I have no idea. I was there like 10 years ago. Back then, it was like every smart person I met was on their way out. Like the brain drain was real. And then there was like two companies that were successful, like Atlassian and now Canva. And everybody always points to those as like, no, look, see, we could do it here. And like, of course, you can do it there, but there was a real brain drain at the time. Maybe it's changed, but in Australia, the startup scene was more, it was like five to seven years behind. It was the same way the TV, you know, when I was there, they would show like the TV station would hype up like, oh, coming up this week, House, this new show. House MD and like House came out in the States like seven, eight years ago. And they were like, no, so House is starting here now. And that's how I felt about the startup kind of

• 48:26Speaker 02

  being on the edge of things. I didn't feel like they were on the edge and like, no knock, I love Australia. You know, I'd live there again in a heartbeat, but you know, in terms of the startup scene, it wasn't, it wasn't the forefront.

• 48:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense. Remote workspaces being, everyone's going to remote work in some form or fashion, but then people basically going into a space while they're working remote. And so you got a bunch of people in the same space. They just work for different companies remotely.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  What do you think of remote work? Do you like it?

• 48:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's a little bit different. Yeah, on the investing side, obviously, it's a little bit easier to do that. And I've been doing it pretty much for, for four or five years now. And so like, you know, works all the kinks out. It's fine.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Like, do you work, is this your desk where you work right now?

• 49:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Right now during quarantine, yeah. But, but at one point, we had an office, right? Then we didn't have an office. And the way that I kind of look at it is it's one of these things where like, I actually don't think it's a company specific thing. I think it's an individual specific thing. So some people like really don't mind it at all. They actually enjoy it. They want the freedom. They, you know, they want kind of all these things. And other people are like, I absolutely hate working remotely. Like I want to go do, you know, go into an office. I want to be around people. I want to like, you know, sit at a conference room table, like all that kind of stuff. And so to me, it's like less about like, Is the company going to be successful or not? Or can they be successful? Like again, yes, of course they can be.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:47Anthony Pompliano?

  But it's just like, who are the people, I guess?

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that makes sense. I think two things. I think people are missing the big story about the remote stuff. So most people are thinking about, at least people I see kind of on Twitter and whatnot is like, oh, how is my job going to work? Am I going to be remote? Am I going to go into these little coworking pods? Are we going to, is our office going to open back up? And they think like, that's the extent of the change that's happening. But what's actually happening is actually in some ways much more scary for that person, which is, I like, I live in Silicon Valley, right? People here are divas. They're like, you know, making a ton of money and unsatisfied the whole time. And like expenses are really high and all this stuff. And what's going to happen is when you're remote, you don't have to pay Silicon Valley prices for talent anymore. So it's not going to be, the problem you're going to have isn't,

• 50:34Speaker 02

  do I prefer working out of my kitchen? Or do I want to come in three days a week or two days a week or five days a week to the office? It's going to be, holy shit, they just found somebody in Canada that's going to work for a third of my price. And so most people are going to, you know, when the talent pool opens up to global, because the default work system is remote, either remote only or remote friendly. Then people who are, you know, you really have to be a 10x'er to get paid like a 10x'er. And most people think they're a 10x'er because they're getting paid like it today. But that's just because they happen to be, you know, an engineer, designer, PM that lives in, you know, the Bay Area or New York. And that's why you're getting paid these like, you know, high wages. But if I can, if, if you're sitting on Zoom and so is some guy in Pittsburgh or Czechoslovakia,

• 51:17Speaker 02

  yeah, sorry, you're not going to be making, you know, half a million bucks a year anymore. Because I don't have to pay that anymore. I'm getting the same output or better for somebody, you know, a faceless, you know, output person. Just think about it like, they're just going to measure output per Zoom endpoint. And, um, you know, that's going to happen, you know, they're going to pay 80 grand for it or a hundred grand for it. So I think companies are the ones who win big in the end with this and not so much the individual employee.

• 51:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's companies and then it's also people who are potential employees but don't currently work at the company, right? So if you are anywhere internationally, for sure, a huge win. And then even here in the United States, if you're in the Midwest and certain areas right now, all of a sudden, you've got much more opportunity and you probably actually get paid a premium on what you would get paid locally, which is still a significant decreasing cost for the company that

• 52:08Speaker 02

  was Exactly. It's a win-win, right? Company gets at a half the price and I get double my local wage. So they're happy. And so there's that phrase like talent is universal, but opportunity is not, or something like that. That's what's, that's what's going to happen. The talent that is already universally distributed is now going to receive a larger share of opportunity to earn and prove themselves than is happening today. Same thing's going to happen on the funding side where, cool, if I'm doing all my funding over Zoom anyways, and I don't just fund Bay Area companies, I'm going to fund companies everywhere. So more people get opportunity.

• 52:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that there ends up being these like pods or remote workspaces?

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Probably, but I don't think it's that big of a thing. So like, maybe I'm just skewed because I like just being on my own. In fact, I just consider myself like a solopreneur now. I don't even want to, I don't want any employees. I just want to build my own business and run it with just me and maybe one sidekick, you know, who I talk to online. But yeah, I think people will have coworking spaces because not everybody's house is like kind of suited for it. And companies will need to make concessions and say, cool, you can go get this space. Kind of, you know, we have, we have spaces in every city center that you can go work at and it's coworking like WeWork or Regis or whatever. But I don't think it's like what the, I saw the question on Twitter and who's like, are groups of kind of friends from different companies going to like form their own little co-office?

• 53:25Speaker 02

  It's like, yeah, well, like in the sitcom friends that will happen where like, you know, they meet at the perk every day at 3pm and like, you know, they live in New York in these like, that's not real. Like that's a show, that's a TV show, and that's not real. And so, you know, just think logically, most people are not going to like set up this like very perfect scenario where my best friends from different companies get together and we pal up in a coworking space. I don't think so.

• 53:49Anthony Pompliano?

  So the other thing that I think is definitely going to happen is people are going to start building homes with two offices, right? So like in suburbia somewhere, it's going to be like, hey, you know, three bedroom, three bath, two office.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. And, and they're not going to just be like, um, you know, when I was growing up, you'd go to like a friend's house and they would basically call it like a home office, but it's more of like a den. So kind of have like, you know, glass little doors or whatever.

• 54:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And you, you're just like, wait a second. Like that's not going to be what this is. I'm talking about a full on office, like maybe be hooked up with some sort of audio, video capabilities.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and actually serve, uh, maybe even be soundproof to some degree, like you, you can start to see, and it's going to be promoted that way.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Yes. I would add to that. Also, I think multifamily real estate is going to look very different. So, uh, you know, today where you have these lobbies where people play shuffleboard and there's like a, you know, whatever, like a, a movie room or some, some amenity, like they're going to just build co-working spaces into every multi, multi condo, um, apartment rental place because you're going to have all these people, they're going to be in small apartments that two people trying to work from home. And so a, a good differentiator will be to take one or two floors of your building and just build out, we work inside. And, um, I, I know some people, some places already do this, but that will become very much the norm, just like the way you're talking about the office thing. Like I'm selling my condo right now in SF. We took our second bedroom and we staged it as an office, not as a bedroom.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  And like, that would have been crazy, you know, three years ago, but now it's like made sense. People want a, a big spacious office with a good door and good light, um, more than they wanted a bedroom.

• 55:21Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to know my wildest idea when it comes to the remote work and housing?

• 55:25Speaker 02

  Hit me.

• 55:26Anthony Pompliano?

  So, uh, malls absolutely getting decimated. Uh, I think that somebody should go and you'd have to have a lot of capital. You have to be super ambitious and, you know, kind of do all the right things. But, uh, if you think of how the mall is basically set up is, uh, at the, at the ends and kind of in the middle, there's always the department stores.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 55:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So you go in, you buy mall with huge acreage, whatever. Uh, you turn the department stores into, uh, essentially just apartments, right? And then all of the interconnectedness of the mall, which used to be retail stores, you basically build like a little village. And so you take like the quote unquote new. New York experience or like the San Francisco experience and you pack it into like a mall environment. And then you use the outsides. You can either have some parking or you can actually build like walking paths and all kinds of crazy stuff. And what you're doing is you're almost giving like the urban type experience or like a college dorm type experience. Uh, but I think that in the right city done correctly would be like incredibly attractive to people who all want to work remotely.

• 56:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, and also then you get kind of this bounce between work, life and outdoor experience into experience, all that kind of stuff.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, totally. And i- if somebody resonates with that, now's the time because now you you'll get the you'll get a seventy million dollar. Um, property, you know, for for twenty two million bucks right now. If you if you go try to buy up these malls that are dying and all their stores are dying and and all that. It's either that or or they become, you know, Amazon distribution warehouses. Like it's it's gonna be one of the two. Like it's gonna be an endpoint for e-commerce. Or it's gonna be co-working with Froyo shops in between.

• 56:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Uh, what are the pros and cons of my first million success? So you guys obviously have, I think, uh, your two plus million downloads in the first year. Uh, what is kind of the pros and cons of that success?

• 57:11Speaker 02

  Uh, well, pros is easy. Uh, it's fun to just shoot the shit and then you get like a bunch of people telling you how great you are. Like, that's never bad. Um, so so that's cool. And, you know, it's a good platform to have. The cons would be, um.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  It's very tempting to think you're smart when other people think you're smart. And my whole life, I I think I actually kind of got smart because I thought I was dumb and I was always trying to learn. And so when you're, uh, when you're on a podcast, you you're basically kind of giving answers. You're giving like information and. I want to be the, you know, dumbest guy in the room. Um, I want to be somebody who, um. Is like learning more than I'm I'm teaching, right? So, um. So that's my mindset. So I would say the only con is, um. The only con would be falling for falling for your own bullshit. You know, don't don't start to believe your own bullshit. So like, if I start to think I'm smart and. People should look to me for information or advice like like they do, then I've lost and I've stopped growing at that point.

• 58:11Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a fantastic answer. What's the one product that doesn't exist that you would hand over your credit card immediately for?

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Uh, that's a great question. Um.

• 58:24Speaker 02

  Okay, here's one right now. That's kind of top of mind. So my wife started an e-commerce thing during the last couple of months as like a side thing and it kind of took off. She basically heard people on the podcast talking about stuff and was like, I could do that. And so it actually worked. And so I haven't talked too much about it. I haven't really told anybody it's happening. But one of the problems we have is like, cool, it's outgrown like our whole house of like inventory, like our whole house is filled with inventory. And then the next shipment's coming in, it's even bigger. And so what most people do is they go to a 3PL, which is like a third-party logistics company. Basically, you send them your inventory, they fulfill it, and they charge you for the storage, they charge you for the picking it out when an order comes in, packing it and shipping it. And they have like kind of crappy service because they're trying to do this for a whole bunch of companies.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  They don't really care like you care. We care about our customers. They don't, they don't care. It's not their customer. And so what would be better is like, I would pay today for a WeWork for warehouses. And so I saw this guy Jay tweet this out and it struck a chord with me because I would say his last name, but it's like a crazy Indian last name that I don't, I don't know how to say. And so what, what you would want is I would rather hire my own people to go do the pick, pack and ship. But I don't want to lease out a warehouse and buy the forklifts and buy the racks and like, you know, set this whole thing up and like, no, I would rather just say, give me 3,000 square feet. That's what I need right now, or 10,000 square feet, or whatever it is. And I'll expand to 20,000 square feet if I want to. But like, I want to do my own fulfillment. Like, I don't mind

• 59:53Speaker 02

  having my own people there. So it's like our space, we can control it, we could control quality, accuracy and costs. And so I would hand over my credit card today if there was somebody in the Bay Area that said, we are, we are turnkey, we work for, for warehouses.

• 1:00:08Anthony Pompliano?

  What type of e-commerce is she doing?

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  Oh, right. E-commerce, you can never tell what you're doing. There's 10,000 drop shippers sitting out there, ready to knock you off in a second. When people, I have this tweet, which is like, before I do something, I tell the whole world about it. Once something starts to work, I don't tell a soul about it. And so this falls into that category. I'll share all my half-baked ideas I'm not doing. But if I'm doing something that is working, you, you don't even know I, it exists.

• 1:00:33Anthony Pompliano?

  That is a fantastic way to look at it. All right. Last question I have for you from the audience before we go to wrap up for rapid fire is what are your post-Twitch plans?

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  I don't know. It's a good question. So I set this goal for myself that I want to, I want to teach 1% of humanity. So like, I would love to basically take the top 1% of most hungry, ambitious people and, and help them, you know, tap into more of their potential in some way. So like, the reason I say this is, everything in society is set up for the average person, right? You have to, like, there's so many people. So we set up our school system, our work system, our life philosophies for the average person. And most people follow most people. So like, which is crazy, because most people hate their job, most people are fat, most people, most marriages end in divorce. So like, why the hell would you ever follow what

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  most people do? That's crazy to me. So, you know, for the top 1% of people who are creative and ambitious and want to really make something of their life, I want to create sort of the alternative school system for them. That might just be podcasts and books and, you know, places where you places where you can go self-learn. I might go buy a university campus and start my own, start the next Stanford. But it's going to be something in the education space and it's going to be something for the top 1% of talented people. I want to reverse the brain drain. They're all going and wasting their time. It goes back to project selection and kind of following the herd. I don't think you should follow the herd, and I don't think you should pick the wrong projects. I think you should apply your talents in a way that like, works for you and you'll get the most out of your talents. So I want to help that. So after Twitch, I'll probably just start

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  on that. And that'll be like, my last project. I don't want to like, build something to sell it. I want to build something that like, you couldn't buy off me.

• 1:02:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And is the idea that those people would eventually like, go and create companies? Or they could go do anything?

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, go do anything. So like, you know, the same philosophies that helped me build businesses, would help somebody become an investor. It would help somebody become a musician and be like, hey, Cool. If I'm a musician, like a big part of this is standing out, getting my stuff into customers' hands, building a community, you know, maximizing my revenue opportunities. So like, doesn't matter whether you want to kind of go in the creative fields like music, film, you know, that side of things, or in the business side, but those would kind of be the two main areas. Not really for somebody who's like, you know, if you want to become a doctor, go to med school. Like, that's probably the best way. But if you want to be some kind of creator, you know, creating either content, creating businesses, this would be a creator school.

• 1:03:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And before I wrap up, I'll ask everyone the same two questions. First being, what is the most important book you've ever read?

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  I'll give you two. The first most important book I ever read was The Game, which is a book about picking up chicks, basically. Great book, entertaining read, this guy becomes a pick-up artist. It's more just entertainment than anything else, but it helped me because I was an 18-year-old kid in college and I wanted to have a girlfriend and I didn't know how the hell to do it. And I was, when you don't know how to do something, I should just speak from the "I." When I didn't know how to do something, I would kind of like just either, again, follow the herd or like just act in weird ways out of kind of insecurity. But once I got confidence that, hey, if I just do this, this will work. And I'm in, this is aligned with my values, like I was just at ease. I was at peace and I had much better results.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  But it really teaches you about human psychology. So the same things that that book teaches you about how to approach, you know, a group of girls in a club is very much how I do cold emails for, you know, outreach to customers. And, you know, how I would pitch an investor, how I would get an investor to want to invest in my business and get that attraction and get them excited. That's the same way I would, you know, the same thing I would use to build attraction with an investor and get an investor excited and want to take action would be the same thing that this guy's saying, this is how you pick up chicks at the club. And so I really liked that book. I thought it taught me a lot about the way human psychology works. And then the second one is this book called Storyworthy that nobody really talks about. It's probably the best book I've read the last two years. This guy, Matthew Dix, he's a storyteller.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  He, there's this thing called the Moth Storytelling Competition. You might know it in New York. I'd never heard of it before, but it's like a... You know, talent show or whatever. It's like a kind of a local, uh, open, open, um, open mic for storytellers. So this guy's like the 20 time champion of moth or whatever. He's, he's won a whole bunch of these. Um, he's just a third grade teacher, I think in, in Connecticut. And that's like his day job and his, like his night job is he teaches people how to tell great stories. And this book is awesome. It's such a good book for, for learning how to tell stories. And most of what we do is telling stories. Like, if you're still listening like an hour into this podcast, probably because you're entertained by something I said, if I didn't get you, it's because I didn't tell a good enough story at the beginning. And, um, it's one of those universal skills that I think people should learn. And Storyworthy

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  is an awesome book that I'd never heard about until my friend Trevor told me about it. Now I, it's the most gift, it's the book I gift the most. I sent it in the mail today to two of the, of the other execs at Twitch, um, to be like, hey, this book is amazing. It'll change your life.

• 1:05:41Anthony Pompliano?

  I've never heard of it. I'm definitely gonna have to read that now. Uh, I got one more question for you and then we're gonna end. You get to ask me one. So start thinking. But, uh, the last question is more fun. Aliens believer or non-believer?

• 1:05:54Speaker 02

  It's a good question. Um, no, I'm a non-believer. I do think, I think that's so sort of this is a simulation is more likely than, um, than anything else. And if this is a simulation, you wouldn't really need to build aliens, or maybe you would and some simulations are not. Um,

• 1:06:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Or, or maybe the aliens are the simulators?

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  Maybe they're the, yeah, you know, anything that's kind of foreign, a foreign, uh, you know, intelligent body would appear to be an alien to us. Um, so yeah, I'm not, I don't believe in aliens the way that like, you know, kind of area, what is Area 51 or whatever, like ET. Like I don't believe in that alien. I don't believe in ghosts. Um, but I do think that there's a, there's a decent shot that this is, this whole thing's not real where, you know, you know, when you get in a plane and you start to fly up and then your house starts to look like a little ant colony and the roads start to, you know, like cars start to look like ants and houses start to look like the colony and like, You start to realize like, oh shit, we might just be in a Petri dish somewhere. Um, yeah, like I believe that a little bit more. I also had this one really delusional thing when I was little.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  That I got paranoid when I was like in fifth grade that I was like, wait, what if, um, I was like, what if I, you know, what if I'm not like mentally all there? I was like, what if I'm special needs? And then my parents convinced me like all these things that I believe to be like normal society are not like. School. Well, that's just like a daycare where they put, they put me. Uh, and I was like, what if like, you know, I'm drinking orange juice? And what if this is not what people, what, what real people actually drink? What if this is just what I drink? Cause I'm in part of this like, and I got really worried about it. And, uh, then by sixth grade, I was like, I don't, I think I'm okay.

• 1:07:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Look, and when you're a kid, you don't know, man. You ever go to like, uh, I had somebody come on the podcast. This is actually, uh, wild. So I grew up in North Carolina, uh, and this kid Caleb Presley, who works at a Barstool Sports comes on. Uh, he grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. So people that grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I think Asheville is like the Boondocks, right? And vice versa. And, uh, he said that I think he was 18 years old. The first time he ever heard of, uh, evolution theory. Right? And he was just like, look, man, at every school, school I went to, you know, in, in frigging Nashville, North Carolina, like that wasn't a thing that they covered.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:08:04Anthony Pompliano?

  There is this like whole idea of like, like that sounds crazy, right? You know, once you kind of understand the internet and all stuff, but it's like, well, it's just an exposure thing. Right? And so

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  You know how many years I was taught like the fricking, uh, photosynthesis cycle? Like, why do I need to know that? Why was that taught to me seven times in my life? Like, that's crazy. It's crazy. Everything that gets taught is crazy. Like everything that's taught that you memorize essentially. And actually you're just, you just, you just look that up whenever you need it. Like memorization is, is bogus. Uh, learning about plant cells rather than like nutrition for humans. That's crazy that we do things this way. So I, I'm not surprised. He didn't learn about evolution. I didn't learn about nutrition in school. And that seems like a really important thing for everybody to learn.

• 1:08:46Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of my favorite videos on the internet is there's a mom who has her phone and she peeks around the corner, her son's sitting at the dinner table, but he's like six or seven, right? And he's kind of like too small to sit at the chair. So he's literally propped up like standing on it, kind of leaning over the table. And there's an Alexa and he's got a piece of paper and he's holding his pencil like a, you know, six year old does. And he goes, Alexa, two plus three, you know, or whatever he says. And Alexa says it back. And then all you hear the mom is, boy, she's about to, you know, get just get him. And I'm like, look, actually, that kid's gonna be super successful.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's got it down.

• 1:09:26Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. What one question you have for me to, to finish this up?

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Um, okay. I didn't prepare for this, but I actually have a great question for you. I, I, I am the master of questions. So I, I, I'm not surprised. I have a great question. All right. So you are, you, I didn't, I never heard of you until like, I don't know, 18 months ago, two years ago, something like that. Whenever kind of Bitcoin started going, and then this guy on my feed and he was branded pomp. And I was like, that's a cool little personal brand to have. And you like, seem to be all in on Bitcoin and like crypto and like, I kind of, I was like, okay, so like, you know, who's this person? Is this like some hedge fund guy? Is this like, and I still actually don't even know your full story, but like you worked at Facebook and you seem kind of like, you seem like you came out of nowhere and you seem like

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  you created this pop guy. Like to what extent, like, okay, first, am I wrong? Was this like, were you always kind of a notable person doing notable things? It seemed like you went from a kind of normal, successful, smart person to like a standout. And you, it seemed like you did it off this Bitcoin wave. And it seemed like you almost consciously branded yourself as pomp, the Bitcoin kind of champion and cheerleader on Twitter. Was that conscious? Is my, is my perception of this accurate? I'm just curious.

• 1:10:45Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's a whole bunch in there. The key pieces were, I have this general belief that like, if somebody can be successful at one thing, they can be successful at many things, right? And it's kind of the repetition of memory. To some degree. Now, again, look, there's also elements that like you win the ovarian lottery, like, you know, you have extra resources, like all that kind of stuff totally helps. But I do think that there's like this confidence game. There's also just if you can tell stories, right? If you are good at communicating with people, like you can replicate it over and over again. So I was in the army, deployed overseas. When I came back, like just that one experience alone, you kind of just have this different, like I was very different when I came back because you just

• 1:11:29Anthony Pompliano?

  kind of like are forced to grow up, built and sold to like pretty small technology companies. But again, like learning muscle memory, when I got to Facebook, that's when I think I realized like, oh, wait, like I may actually like be good at some of this growth and tech stuff and all that. Eventually got hired at Snapchat as the head of growth for a short period of time. And then like went and started investing full time. And I only went and started investing full time because like I didn't have an idea of like what I wanted to do, like in terms of there's no company to build yet. Like I just was like, there's nothing worth it. So like, let me just go help other people pretty much. And in 2017, at the beginning of 17, the only thing I could keep thinking about was like, when I was at Facebook, I ran the growth team for Facebook pages.

• 1:12:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I helped all of these different brands and individuals, all stuff, build massive audiences, right? So like I met the fuck Jerry guys, like all these guys, and not necessarily that I did the work, but just like I understood how the system worked.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  You were front row at the least, yeah.

• 1:12:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So I could just explain to them like, hey, here's how the algorithm works. Here's the things that you should do. Here's the things you shouldn't do. Like, you know, here's how you increase your reach or decrease your reach, like all that type of stuff. And what I had realized is like, I had sat and watched so many people do this with that information. I was like, why hadn't I never done it for myself? And this is like before all this, like now, like everyone's talking about creators and audience and like all that kind of stuff. And so I looked at the platforms and I was like, okay, which is the one that I think you could basically do this the fastest on? And that was Twitter.

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  Like because because retweeting is

• 1:12:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Just the virality. Yeah. And it was the one that had the least amount of algorithmic disruption, meaning that like Facebook was very obvious, like they were taking away reach, like all that kind of stuff. And Twitter seemed to still like have a pretty long way to go before they got to that point. And also, it was like easier to create content for, right? If you get to sit in my right of Facebook.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  Second, yeah.

• 1:13:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I just tried everything and anything in the book, like whatever I could. And that year, I went from, I don't know, like low single digit thousands to 100,000 or like 110,000 followers. So I was like, okay, like, here we go.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  So, so, so you said you tried a bunch of things. What's an example of something you tried that you don't do anymore, or that you were trying at that time?

• 1:13:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, literally, I come from like that growth mindset. So it was like, what are all the things that you could possibly do that could like drive people to your profiles and hit the follow button? So follow one, follow like, reply to tweets, tweet, you know, 50 times a day, retweet your own tweet, because there's different time zones that people may be logging in. Like, I mean, like, everything in the book that you could possibly think of. And three or four years ago, some of the stuff worked that doesn't work now. Some of the stuff didn't work, but actually would work now. Like, it all is just testing.

• 1:14:09Speaker 02

  How'd you decide your angle?

• 1:14:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  To me, the angle was twofold that I recognize you for. One was a memorable kind of name that like, yeah, it's easy, easy to kind of click on to. And the other is you were talking about a topic that was like, super relevant, and everybody wanted more info from. Did you consciously decide that? Or did this kind of happen?

• 1:14:27Anthony Pompliano?

  No. So this is the craziest part of the whole thing is, for whatever reason, I grew up with four younger brothers, there's five of us, like, we're all just like, pretty authentic, like, I'd like to think down to earth, like, you can go grab a beer with us, and I don't care if you're a billionaire, or you're a nobody, like, you know, we're just us, right? And I think that what I started to do was just talk about the things I was interested in. And I was trying, and I was talking about all kinds of stuff, everything from technology to startups we had invested in, to Bitcoin, to, you know, whatever. And naturally, the thing that most people I think do on Twitter is they fight what's actually working like like they want to talk about Bitcoin. They want to talk about what they eat.

• 1:15:12Anthony Pompliano?

  They want to talk Lakers and yeah, all this stuff and it becomes like not obvious like, what is this account for? And I knew from Facebook like, oh, no, no, no, like, super focused is actually the best thing. And so in the beginning, it was just like, oh, Bitcoin tweet went viral. Then another Bitcoin tweet went viral like two weeks later. And I was like, wait a second, like, okay, let me try another Bitcoin. Like, okay, viral. And it was just like the algorithm, basically, like, it was just obviously double and triple down on this. The name, people have been calling me POMP since I was, you know, in middle school, right? And it was just like, these confluence of events that in hindsight, like, oh, yeah, I'm just like master genius. There was no master plan. Like, it was just, I just knew that, like, building the Twitter audience would be effective. And then I think the advantage that I've had is because we've

• 1:15:56Anthony Pompliano?

  invested in so many companies and, and I've just seen like what works and what doesn't work. I've been able to kind of like, pretty intelligently, I think, navigate like, okay, once you build a Twitter audience, like, now you've got platform risk, like, okay, can you port that audience to an email? Okay, now you got that, like, how do you get another platform? Okay, let's go to audio, right? And you just kind of like, do that. And then all of a sudden, you're like, okay, now we're in 2020. And like, everyone's talking about like, oh, if you have audience, you can like, build businesses. And I'm like, yeah, of course, like, no brainer, like, I've got an audience. So yeah, so basically, there was no master plan from how to go, you know, from where I was to today. But it's one of these things where like, when you find yourself in a certain position, like, I think generally, if you've just got sound decision making, like, you can make the best of it. And so, yeah.

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  Now, what's, what's the best version of how this plays out over the next five years, roughly? Like, what's, what's the best outcome of where this whole thing goes for you now? Then where does the pump train go?

• 1:16:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Short answer, I don't know, is all of these, like, influencers, celebrity, you know, people with audience, whatever. Historically, they've basically said, give me money and I'll advertise for your business. Or they say, you know, the smart people will say, give me money and give me equity now. But I think actually, it's going to flip. And what you're going to see is the people with audience are just gonna say, I'm just gonna build my own company. Right? So like, the Joe Rogan example, like, Joe should have gone to Trigger Girls and said, hey, I'm not advertising Trigger Girls anymore. Let's create an entity. We're gonna call it Joe Rogan Girl. I think that's where the world's going. And more and more people will figure that out.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  POMP's Instant Pot. Got it. It's an Instant Pot with your face on it.

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  It plays your content while you while you cook your food. It's excellent.

• 1:17:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Nah, I think I stay out of the kitchen. I don't think the kitchen items are going to be my thing.

• 1:17:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Sean, listen, thank you so much for doing this. Where can we send people to to find you on the internet? Or or find out more about some of the stuff you're working on?

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, just follow me on Twitter. That's where I put out most of my my stuff. So it's just Twitter slash Sean VP. So it's S H A A N VP. So so Sean VP and then subscribe to My First Million, the podcast, if you like, kind of what we were doing here, just shooting the shit, talking about different business ideas. That's basically what we do twice a week. And it's got a good thing going. So so if you like that, go go subscribe to My First Million.

• 1:18:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm a big fan. You don't even know this, but I've listened to a lot of the episodes, so definitely people go subscribe. No brainer for that.

• 1:18:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think we got you scheduled on next week, maybe something like that.

• 1:18:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we're gonna do it.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:18:25Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, man. Thank you so much. We'll have to do this again in the future.

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  Cool. Peace out.