#710 Decentralizing and Open-Sourcing a Web2 Business w/ Sahil Lavingia

Sahil Lavingia is the co-founder and CEO of Gumroad, a technology platform that helps creatives earn a living selling the stuff they make directly to their audience. He is the author of the new book, The Minimalist Entrepreneur and a prolific investor. Sahil was previously the number two employee at Pinterest. In this conversation, we discuss asynchronous workflow, open-sourcing a traditional business, hiring people without talking to them, decentralizing ownership and work, and investing. ======================= If you haven’t started building your crypto portfolio on Okcoin, there’s no better time. They’re one of the fastest growing global exchanges around and they have some promotions happening right now to help even more people be part of the future of finance. If you have an account already, you can split $100 in BTC with a friend when you invite them to sign up for Okcoin if they buy $100 of crypto in the first month. The more friends who sign up and buy, the more BTC you get. And I always recommend dollar-cost averaging as a way for investors to have more control over their average price when building their portfolio. Now you can automate dollar-cost averaging with completely fee-free daily, weekly, or monthly recurring buys on Okcoin until November 1. That’s no fees at all on your purchases until the holidays. Get started on the web or on their new super easy-to-use app at okcoin.com/pomp ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Sahil Lavinga is the co-founder and CEO of Gumroad, a technology platform that helps creatives earn a living selling the stuff they make directly to their audience. He is the author of the new book, The Minimalist Entrepreneur and a prolific investor. Sahil was previously the number two employee at Pinterest as well. In this conversation, we discuss asynchronous workflow, open sourcing a traditional business, hiring people without talking to them, decentralizing ownership and work, and investing. I really enjoyed this conversation with him, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode,

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

  on your reoccurring purchases until the holidays. Get started on the web or on their brand-new, super easy-to-use app at OKCoin.com/pomp. Again, OKCoin.com/pomp. The setup recurring buys, no fees till November 1st. OKCoin.com/pomp on the web or on their new, super easy-to-use app. Next up is LMAX Digital. LMAX Digital is the number one institutional crypto exchange. They offer clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet, underscored by 100% uptime track record through volatility spikes. Leveraging LMAX Group's liquidity relationships and ultra-low latency technology, LMAX Digital is the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading and custodian.

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:38Speaker 01

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

• 3:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Sahil, when you think about the asynchronous element, I want to start there because this sounds insane and I think you know that, but it seems to be working. How do you operate an entire business basically asynchronously?

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think the simple analogy that we use whenever we kind of onboard people to Gumroad and when I talk about it, write about it publicly is it's like working on an open source project, except you get paid for it and it's not actually open source. Right? And so it works. There's all these sort of these parts of, you know, different industries that work in this sort of asynchronous way. I just read this book, The Confucial and the Bazaar, I think it's called, about sort of the origins of Linux and how everyone was like, there's no way you're going to build this thing in this way where everyone's just kind of hacking on this thing. And it's chaotic, right? It's super, super chaotic. And crypto, I think, is the other one that I've sort of paid a lot of attention to. I think crypto is a great example of an industry in which a lot of people have never met each other. They've never heard each other's voices.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  They've never seen each other in person or even over video. It's, you know, pseudonymous, et cetera. And I think I don't know, I find that incredibly, incredibly inspiring, to be honest. And the reason that I think it's so interesting is because I just don't think you need to bring your whole self to work, right? Like, if you can provide value, if you can create value, if you can do the job, like, to me, it's sort of, you know, the other stuff doesn't really matter. And I think in the era of, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion, you know, people sort of spending a lot of time thinking about race and gender and all these sorts of things, I think one answer is potentially, like, just, it doesn't even show up, right? Like, everyone I gumrote is like a cartoon avatar, and maybe their first name, but they

• 4:45Speaker 02

  can select any nickname they want. And, well, like, why do I care? You know, we pay everyone in the world the same rate, no matter where they work. So, you know, in theory, besides sort of taxes, there's no reason for me to know, you know, where and when people work. And that was another big reason we went async, was, you know, as we started to hire people in all of these different time zones, we now have people in 17 different countries. Any time you say, hey, we're meeting at this time, or we have this sort of schedule, you're inherently creating sort of this, like, hierarchy, right? Where you're gonna say, oh, you know, the sort of, I live in, on the west coast, so now all of a sudden, Pacific coast, you know, PST is now like the default time, we're gonna speak in PST, and I just don't, I don't like that, you know?

• 5:30Speaker 02

  I just, I'm not a huge fan of that. I remember when I moved to Provo, Utah, journalists would be like, hey, you know, which coast are you on? Like, they would just assume that, you know? You must either be on, you know, in this time zone or this time zone. There's like no other options. And I'm like, actually, I'm in like the middle. And so I just, I don't know, maybe that was part of my sort of life experience, you know, growing up in Singapore perhaps, where I just felt like constantly not, you know, the sort of, like, people weren't talking to me. And so I felt like I wanted to build a company where, you know, it's a sort of 11th level playing field for everybody, which certainly means it's, you know, maybe not as ideal for someone who lives in San Francisco and wants to work at a startup with an office. You know, and beanbags and ping pong tables and all these sorts of things.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  But, um, but yeah, that's kind of some of the, some of the reasoning behind it.

• 6:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what changes for somebody on a day to day basis, right? If I'm an employee, I work at the business. Do I just not go to meetings? Is there like some other workflow or system that's in place? Like, like, what is my day to day experience in asynchronous work environment?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I can, I can speak to my day and it probably, you know, translates pretty well to a lot of the other folks in the company because effectively in, in, in this way of working, everyone is almost like a CEO, right? Where they have their own sort of set of priorities. They have a ton of things coming at them and it's kind of their job to communicate to, you know, let's say their board, which may be me in this case, or other folks on the team, you know, what they're working on, what their KPIs are, how their, the work is actually going to make those things happen. And if they do that in this sort of ambient way, and, and I think Twitter is a really good analogy for this, right? You no longer have to say, hey, what are you up to today? You can kind of just go on Twitter and, and learn about all the stuff people are doing. So like, think about an internal kind of Twitter, right? Where everyone is constantly just sharing.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  If people are doing that super effectively, then I don't have to spend any of my time and nobody else has to spend any of their time. Kind of like, what's actually happening, right? What's actually going down? And so I think that's, uh, sorry, that's really, really important for me. But yeah, I wake up, I could wake up, it doesn't really matter when, uh, you know, one great perk about this way of working is you can take vacation, you can travel, doesn't really show up to anybody. I'm in New York right now. No one in the company really knows. I wake up, I answer all of my inbox, right? So Slack, GitHub, and Notion is like where 99% of the communication happens. So those three channels, I make sure that I answer any of those things. I have a sort of a 24 hour SLA, which means I basically get, try to get back to everyone within 24 hours, which is a, you know, quite a long time, but you have to work assuming that.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  And then once I do that, then it's kind of deep work for the rest of the day, you know? I, I just pick one or two different things that I'm working on and I just sort of, you know, I write or I design or I code or, or whatever I may be doing. But there's no meetings to distract me to, you know, I frankly suck. At working when I know there's like a meeting even in three hours, you know, my brain can't like every five minutes. I'm like, is it, you know, am I missing the meeting? And so I I find that I just I'm just so much more productive if I know that I have a free day ahead of me. And so that's kind of how everyone works. They wake up, they they kind of do this, the stuff they're assigned. And then they start working on whatever they they feel is most important. And then they communicate that, you know, to the rest of the company asynchronously via Slack

• 8:45Speaker 02

  or Notion or GitHub. And then if I feel, you know, every once in a while, like, hey, I haven't heard from this person in a week or two, I'll go check Slack first. That's kind of the cash, right? And so I go check Slack, I check GitHub, I check all of the places first before I interrupt them, before I I require them to contact switch. Because I think it's just super expensive. It's just super expensive to ask someone to say, hey, stop what you're doing and focus on me, focus on what I want. If the assumption is everyone is doing what they feel is most important, that, you know, inherently what I'm suggesting to them is is not going to meet that bar, right? And so I should avoid doing that as as much as possible. So.

• 9:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you think about the downsides to this, like, the benefits are very obvious, right? Deep work, no meetings, you know, you probably can recruit all kinds of people now. What are the downsides in your mind? Or like, what have you seen so far? They're like, hey, we still got to figure out one or two things.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's there are quite a few downsides. I'll be real. One of the downsides is that it's much, you know, there's a lot of hard conversations that I think are just easier to have in person, right? You can really coach someone, you can sort of be a therapist, psychologist, you can, you can help the people in your company grow, which I think if you're hiring a lot of junior people, like, I would not recommend this way of working at all. And so, yeah, that's definitely a downside is we I I kind of, you know, there's this sort of the saying, hire for white, why slope, right? Or slope, not why intercept, right? You want to hire people based on where they're going to be in six months, not maybe where they are today. And I found that just at a company like Gumroad, we just, we we obviously care about slope, but but intercept is also really important. You have to start out at an incredibly high bar, because things like, you know, if you're not

• 10:20Speaker 02

  motivated to work and you need an office and you need a team, you know, you're going to struggle here. Like, that motivation really has to come sort of intrinsically. Uh, there has to be a lot of self motivation, which is great if you have those characteristics. But I think, and you just want, you know, what you want to do, you just want to work. But if you're not, then you know, I, I, I would say it, it, it is pretty, pretty difficult. To sort of find success at Gumroad. And then I would say just mental health. I think this is the, you know, it's a sort of a big topic of conversation right now. And I personally believe that your workplace is not responsible for your mental health. You should find professionals, you should find people in your life. You should have friends and family and all these sorts of things. Outside of work, I don't think work is a great place to find a lot of these sorts of things.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  But I do think it's a struggle for people generally, especially in a pandemic. And so I think that's one of the things we have to figure out is, you know, how much support, quote unquote, do we want to provide to, to our quote unquote employees or contractors? Right? And so that's, that's a big one, you know, when, when, when someone, you know, passes away, you often, you know, or it's your birthday, often those needs are met, you know, for better or worse by the company, right? And sort of lack of religion, lack of neighborhoods, a lot of people find that at work. And so I think that's something that we have to figure out, like, you know, right now, we're sort of very extreme in terms of we don't do any of that sort of stuff. There's no even social channels and Slack.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  But, uh, but we might introduce that depending on if we continue to scale. And we feel like some of those things are sort of necessary. The other thing I would add is, is there's not a lot of like career growth, right? There's no ladder decline. You, you get a job at Gumroad as an engineer, you do an amazing job. You get paid an extra 25 bucks an hour or 50 bucks an hour. Or you get a, a spot bonus in the form of equity at the company or something like that. But it's not, you know, like L1, L2, L3. You can't really map out the next five to 10 years working at this company like you might be able to do at some of these other, some of these other places.

• 12:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So obviously the work environment is very different than most places, right? And there's a lot of people who are attracted to this. You also are, I'll say experimenting, I don't know how you would describe it, with the hiring process as well. Talk me through this. I saw this the other day and I, I frankly haven't looked into it enough. So I feel like I'm going to hear right from you now. You guys are trying to hire people without ever talking to them?

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. So yeah, I tweeted out a couple of days ago, uh, you know, you can now get a Job at Gumroad without talking to a human, which is kind of a joke in the sense, it's true, but it's a joke in the sense that, you know, like people complain, you can't cancel your near time subscription without talking to a human, right? So I said, well, why can't you get a job without talking to a human? You should be able to do all the things in life without having to talk to it, to a human. And so, yeah, I mean, the, the reason I did it is because we were almost there, right? We basically had this, you know, you have a job post, then you have like a phone interview, you might have a coding challenge, you might have like reference calls with other people. Then you put them on a trial period, you know, that takes three or four weeks. Once they succeed, they get a job at the company, right? That's sort of the traditional workflow.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  And I felt like, well, the trial period is the job. Like, if you can do the trial period, then I don't, why do I need reference calls? Like, why do I need to even talk to you on the phone? If you can like provably do the work, and I had this other tweet, which I, again, I inspired by crypto, proof is greater than trust. Which is if you have proof that you can do the job, then I don't need to even trust you. I don't, you know, you don't even have to tell me anything. If you can just give me a URL and say, hey, I built this, right? That's how I got the job at Pinterest. I said, here, here's an app that I built. You download the app, you use it. You don't need to interview, you know, anybody, you don't have to talk to anybody. And so I just felt like, well, if we work this way internally, where we have no meetings, you know, I basically don't talk to anybody on the phone.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  You know, minimal meetings, et cetera. Like, why don't we just, you know, eat our own dog food and make that part of the hiring process? And my guess is there's some people who are like, and there are some tweet responses that were like, really? Like, you want to work with people you've never talked to in your life? Like, that seems weird. It seemed very transactional. But the answer is, yeah, like, I'm some of, you know, some of the people I feel like I'm closest to, I just have a totally text-based communication channel with. You know, we're both busy, we can, you know, text and, and we respond when we respond. I assume this is how a lot of people talk to their friends in this era. And so, you know, applying that to work didn't feel like too much of a stretch, a stretch to me.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, basically now you, uh, it, it's funny, we have this internal Notion doc, which is, it's called a phone call, um, in quotes, because it's basically, and this is, was part of what I realized was, I would do this phone call with every candidate. And I would, I would. Answer the same like five to 10 questions over and over and over again. And so instead, I just basically, the next time I had a phone call, I wrote out our entire conversation. I answered every question. I wrote it all down and then I created a sort of a text macro that anytime someone applies for a job and I want, you know, they they completed the challenge and I want to hire them. I just sent them this notion doc that says, hey, instead of a phone call, we're going to do it, you know, here's an asynchronous version of a phone call. If you really want to talk to me on the phone, I'm happy to do it. Uh, but it turns out when we like hire this way

• 15:21Speaker 02

  and we're very public about it, literally, you know, in the last two weeks, maybe, you know, from that tweet alone, probably like, you know, a dozen people have applied uh, to Gumroad, zero percent of them have asked, you know, to, to, to, to talk on the phone. It turns out, uh, that people just don't want to, uh, you know, people want to get the, you know, people want to do the job. They want to write code. They want to get paid to write code. And then generally they want to turn off their computer, go for a walk, go for a hike, spend time with their family, friends, do whatever the hell they want to do. Right? We have rock climbers, we have professional marathon, you know, ultra marathon runners. Like there's a bunch of things out there to, to go experience that, you know, that, you know, that, that isn't work, that isn't the stuff around work. Um, and so, yeah, that's, that's, that's sort of the process now is you, you do the challenge, you succeed, you do this asynchronous phone call.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  And then you start the trial period and you start, you know, you just start doing the work. My goal is how fast can we get you to actually doing the work, right? Because ultimately that's the, that's the true test. It doesn't matter. I mean, there's, I mean, you know, this like in, you know, at Facebook, at all these companies, you do all of this work to make sure you're hiring the right kind of people. And then you still make mistakes like an insane amount of time, right? Everyone says that the recruiting process is broken. So my guess, my, my feeling is like, well, then just get rid of the recruiting process. Just give everyone a job and see how it goes. And, and that's probably, you know, my guess is if we sort of draw the line out into the future. Again, kind of inspired by crypto, my guess is a lot of this will look like, well, open source Gumroad, people will, you know, will get a job just by like contributing to the code base, fixing a bug or two.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  If they do, maybe let's say two of those, they automatically get into the trial period. Get paid a hundred bucks an hour for three or four weeks. And then if they succeed, they they get the job at Gumroad, right? And so I I think there's even for it's funny because people think I'm extreme or or what have you. But I'm like, no, there's. There's a whole world out there that we haven't even gotten close to. You know, if you think about, you know, we've been doing this remote work async thing for. You know, as a as a society for like eighteen months now, you know? Like, it's been it's a very short amount of time compared to, I don't know, when we started working in factories, right? Like, you know, eighteen hundreds or.

• 17:24Anthony Pompliano?

  How important is it? How important is it for people to be able to communicate well? Like, all of a sudden, right? If you and I were on a phone call, even if I'm a bad communicator, like you could ask some questions and kind of quickly iterate to, okay, this is what he's saying. Uh, but now all of a sudden, in asynchronous, I think of it almost like shots on goal, right? In a conversation, every time I speak or you speak, that's like a shot on goal. And maybe there's, I don't know, a normal conversation, five hundred shots on goal between the two of us. But if I send you one Slack message and then, you know, eighteen hours later, you respond with one message back and then I respond again. We had three shots on goal in, let's say, a twenty-four hour period. It's way harder if one of us is a bad communicator. So what have you seen there? Or there are things that you guys do to help people become better communicators in this environment?

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that's totally true. I mean, you you know, the friend, right? Where you like text, text them like, you know, and they and they just like, hey, do you want to hang out on Thursday? And then it just goes back and forth and back and forth. And then there are certain people who are like, hey, Thursday, five P M. At this place, does that work for you? Right? And so you just have to find those kinds of people who minimize those feedback loops. Because you're right, they're insanely expensive at Gumroad. I mean, if you say, hey, Saul, I need this, I'm blocked on my work. I need an answer from you on this A or B. And then it takes me twenty-four hours to get back to you. I mean, that's just not going to work, right? And so, yeah, you have to find people who are. The way that I think about it is you basically have to predict. The questions that people are going to have, right? So imagine, you know, you write an essay. What do you do? You send it to a bunch of people. They read it, they have a bunch of questions, you make the essay better, right?

• 18:49Speaker 02

  And so when you ultimately hit publish on that blog post about N F Ts, like it's a very sort of thought through piece. And it means that all the questions people like, people will still have questions, surely, but they're going to be better questions, right? Because like you've answered the first, second, third order of questions that they've had and and the conversation. And if you jump on the phone with them after they read that sort of thing, like your conversation with them is going to be so much more productive. Right. And so it's kind of a similar thing at Gumroad is I just ask everybody in the company and we use this sort of mnemonic is save people time. Uh, but basically you should do as much as possible so that when you do send that message, it's kind of like, almost like publishing a blog post. Right. Instead of a tweet, like you've done a little bit more work, you've thought through some of the back and forth that would have happened.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  You know, if Sahil says, A, this is what we're going to do next. If Sahil says, B, this is what you just like lay it all out as far as you feel like you want to go. Um, and it just, yeah, you, you want to save as many people, uh, as much time as possible. And you want to, yeah, you want to minimize that back and forth, the rally and tennis or what have you, right? Like, and it is expensive and there's certain people, I would say the number one reason. Besides just competency at the job, the number one reason that people don't succeed at, at a company like Gumroad is because. They just, they're just so unfamiliar with this way of working and they're like, hey, Sahil, I need to talk to you about, you know, for five things about why you believe this is the right approach and what KPIs. Instead of going to Notion, instead of going to get up, instead of reading my blog post on the internet.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  And getting a sense of, okay, this is probably what you think, right? And you can even say that in a thing, this is probably the answer I think you're going to give me. Um, let me know if that's true. If not, tell me why not. And so I can incorporate that into my mental model of you, right? Because ultimately scaling a company is kind of like scaling your judgment, right? It's like, if you, if you can teach people. How to make the same decisions you would have made, that's ultimately the way that you kind of get free. Um, from your own business, which I think is kind of an important step for, for a lot of founders and entrepreneurs. So you can be free to tackle new problems. Um, within the company or outside of it. So yeah, that's, it is, it is super, super important, like the ability to communicate. And specifically to communicate writing, right? Which doesn't mean you have to be like an amazing, you know, you don't need an MFA in English or anything like that.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Um, you know, you can have broken grammar, you can have all these sorts of things, but your ability to think and then communicate those thoughts. Effectively, I think is is super, super, super essential. My guess is that's essential in life today, right? And the more that we spend time in the metaverse or Twitter or all of these different places, like I think the more important those skills just broadly are, right? So I think it's important to learn those skills, even if you don't, you don't, you don't plan to work at a company like Gumroad in your life.

• 21:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think at all about like remote work and this asynchronous workflow? It actually increases the odds that people will have two or three jobs. They may work at Gumroad in other places. One, do you think that'll happen? And then two, are you worried about that? Do you encourage that? Or is that a company policy that I'm allowed to do that? How do you think about it?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I love it. I mean, frankly, I run Gumroad and then we, you know, we both have funds that we we run on the side and and I wrote this book with Penguin Random House. So like certainly it would be hypocritical for me to say, you know, you should stay focused on Gumroad. Gumroad should be your primary focus. A lot of the people at Gumroad specifically choose to work at Gumroad because they have another thing that frankly, they think is more important than Gumroad. Circle, that SO is a great community platform. Sid, who started that, was VP Product for Gumroad. He left Teachable. And there was kind of two, two, two things he could have done, right? He could have signed up for another job, or he could have started the company, you know, basically burned through his, you know, his savings and hoped that it worked out, right? And he found this new third way, which was working at Gumroad. He did, I think, around 30

• 22:21Speaker 02

  hours a week, you know, Monday through Wednesday, Thursday-ish. And then he would, he would work on the side project Circle with his co-founder, which he also brought into Gumroad. So there were two part-time people at Gumroad, and they co-founded this company Circle, and they just closed this mask around. So like, it's, it's, I think it does work for those kinds of, for those kinds of, for those kinds of people. But yeah, there's, there's a lot of people who just would, would freak out. But I encourage it. I think it's great. If you want to start a company, you know, I would love to help you do that. You can work at Gumroad. You can be incredibly productive here. You could do it 20 hours a week, and then you can spend 20 hours a week on your, on your side project, side hustle, podcast, book, company startup, whatever it may be.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Are people actually doing that? Honestly, I think no, like, it's so draining. Like, I think very few people are really truly capable of like clocking in at some place and And also doing other stuff. It's it's it's, you know, I think the bottleneck on that is not going to be companies allowing. It's going to be how many people have the energy and actually want to do these sorts of things, right? But I would love to see it, honestly. I would love to see more people, you know, the way that I think about it is that every employer effectively has a monopoly on their employees, right? You can work and, you know, and and that was sort of mandated by the the office. You can only, you know, you only have one body, one physical body. But the minute that goes away, then, you know, why do employers have a monopoly on their time? Why can't you work 20 hours here, 20 hours there?

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Um, I don't see why not, uh, you know, especially in startups, right? Like, imagine you work at one startup. For five years, you know, you're getting one, you know, to use your, your, your, uh, your thing, like one shot and goal, right? Like, you want to build a diversified portfolio of startups because startups are incredibly high risk. Uh, right? And and and so founders can kind of do that by angel investing. VCs can obviously do that. That's kind of the the crux of the job. But employees can basically, you know, you know, get build a portfolio over decades, like, you know, one or two, three, four years at a time. Um, and I just think that doesn't make sense. Uh, it just, you know, and obviously you're seeing a lot of employees. A lot of people are now investing. I think that's sort of because they want to build this portfolio of of of investments and bets.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Um, and so I think they should be able to do that with sweat equity as well. Um, and and and I I I could imagine a world in the future which like, and maybe crypto is again like kind of, you know, the future is, you know, is already here, sort of thing, where people are already doing that, right? They might be contributing over here, getting some token allocation for this project, doing something over here, doing, you know, and building a portfolio. And obviously, they all of these things are fully liquid, so they can actually invest if they just have the capital to as well. And startups are, they just don't have that, right? They, you know, they're not liquid. You can't just invest. The only way to get equity is by working, you know, Gumroad, for example, you can earn equity in the company by being, you know, by putting in 10 hours a week, 20 hours a week. Like, where else in the world, uh, can you do that, right? It's just not, not there. And my guess is five years, 10 years from now, we're going to look back and be like, really?

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Like, the only way to earn equity and like the greatest wealth generation machine on planet Earth? Not only, you know, not only was to work full time, but, you know, in 2019 was to like literally move uh, to a single place and and work in this company, you know, and commute for an hour and a half or whatever, whatever, all this, all the bundle of work that you have, you had to sign up for before, I just think is is is going to go away.

• 25:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk to me about the idea, would you ever turn Gumroad into like a DAO or any of these kind of new structures? You're talking about open source kind of methodology, right? Even though it's still a company from a legal structure standpoint, are you thinking about this? Because it kind of feels like that's the natural extension is that you would say, hey, we're actually going to open source code. We're going to create the economic structure incentive around like these DAOs that people are talking about. Like what's, what are you optimizing for? Or where do you see this evolving to?

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think that's a, that's super oppression. I, I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think what, what's happening with DAOs is that, you know, and this is, this is the thing that I've seen generally happening in software, right? Which is you build something, you do what you, you, you invent, you know, some new product or technology, you innovate. There's a sort of a lot of creative disruption that's happening. But, you know, Gumroad's 10 years old. We're still innovating. We're still doing a bunch of stuff, but I'm not making as, you know, risky, as risky bets. I'm not, you know, we're not launching new products all the time. And this is the case for tons and tons of software businesses. You kind of solve the problem. And maybe the best thing to do is to kind of keep solving the problem instead of trying to like, you know, add features and, and, and, and charge more and all these things that

• 26:41Speaker 02

  your customers frankly, don't really even want you to do. And so, yeah, I think, I think extracating yourself from the business makes a lot of sense, right? And I think about what do I actually need to do at Gumroad? Like truly actually, you know, need to do otherwise the, otherwise the business would, would fail as CEO. And there's really only two or three things that there, I have a Google Doc of this because I'm trying to get it to zero. And one of them is I need to make sure there's enough money in the, in the bank accounts, right? Which might mean moving money from Stripe to Pay. And that, no one should say that that's something a CEO should do, right? Like that should be purely automated. It's insane that I have to log into Wells Fargo. Like it's stupid. And so that's obviously going to get, you know, automated at some point in the future. The other thing is, you know, like sort of tie breaking, right? Like governance effectively,

• 27:26Speaker 02

  right? Which is like, hey, you know, should we roll back the site because we have a bug? Is it bad enough or not? Should we deplatform this creator for, for posting this kind of thing? You know, a lot of these kind of like decisions that, that feel like only I can make. And I think Dow is like a phenomenal sort of way of thinking about those sorts of things like if if ten out of twenty employees at Gumroad or whatever the numbers may be. Um decide we should or should not do this, or maybe the creators on the platform, right? Um they can decide who who else they want to be able to join their community or not, right? Like, why do I get to decide, oh, like this creator, you know, uh offends, you know, my sensibilities so that they don't get to use Gumroad or they don't get featured on the home like what, you know, these are all a kind of opinions that, you know, uh effectively just reflect the opinions of the of the founders of the company.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Um and so I could totally see a world in the future. I don't know exactly how we get there. Um but I would dream to to to have Gumroad be a Dow, to have Gumroad be a place where I can just empower people um to make their own decisions. Um and and you know, and and then and then obviously, like, I would love the the sort of liquidity of it, too, right? Like, I think. What you know, another big issue you have with these companies is you basically run this thing, it gets to like ten million, or it's a great, healthy business, but you don't, you're not at that scale to IPO, you probably don't want to. You also don't want to like fully liquidate. I don't want to sell Gumroad entirely. I don't want to sell it to another business. But I would love to take a little bit of money off the table, right? Buy a house or or what have you, get into, you know, uh into, you know, buy some Solana or whatever.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Um and so I would, I think that crypto does also solve this sort of problem, whereas, you know, you can kind of, it's fully liquid, you can kind of take some money off the table, you can kind of. Delegate, you know, your your duties over time until you have none left. And then all of a sudden. Just like uh E and S announced, I think, today, right? Like, they're like, they have, they're setting up a Dow and, you know, boom, it's you, you don't even have a company, you can, you can shut down the company. Right? Right now, in this society, we have Visa, Mastercard, like, what innovation is Visa, Mastercard really doing today? I have no idea, but they're effectively charging a three percent tax on the entire credit card economy, right? Hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Like, why? Right? Like, what are, like, it's just doesn't make any sense, but it's a skyscraper. We're building on top of this incredible amount of infrastructure.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  And maybe the answer is that we don't destroy Visa, Mastercard, but we just, you know, all of the value gets accrued to all of the stakeholders in the company. You got to get this with public companies, I guess, you know, in in in the US, but. You know, but going public is, you know, should be a click of a button, right? Which and and and effectively, I think crypto. Has that promise built into it, right? Which is I should be able to hit a button, boom. There's now Gum token, you know, maybe the equity maps into this token sale initially and then boom. You're like, you're, you know, now this, this place votes and obviously a lot of the, the mechanics have to be moved on chain. Like it wouldn't be possible, you know, how do we deplatform all these sorts of things would have to get there. But I think that's, you know, the writing is on the wall in my opinion, like it's, it's gonna happen. I don't know if Gumroad was like too late, maybe we won't be able to switch Gumroad to that new model.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  But certainly like a lot of the companies, frankly, a lot of our competitors. My guess is that they're gonna just build, you know, with a lot of these things just built in from the, from the beginning, right?

• 30:24Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what else are you in, uh, investing in, in crypto or like, what, what else do you find fascinating? Talk, talk to me a little bit, cause you've got a fund, right? So you, you run Gumroad, but you also have the fund, you have the book. On the fun side and from an investment perspective, it feels like you're spending much more time in crypto than you were, you know, two years ago. What is fascinating to you there or where are you putting capital?

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, I would love to do more. It's, it's, it's tough to, to like, I'm, I feel like I'm definitely playing, playing catch up. But I agree with like 10, 10% of my portfolio, you know? The goal would be to get it up to 20% of my portfolio would be in, in, in crypto, you know, in DAOs, web three. You know, no code for crypto, educational stuff in crypto. I think there's just, there's a lot of, of stuff to get built. The way that I like to think about it is like, I am an engineer, I'm a designer, I can build Gumroad all day long. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around crypto. So I'm really interested in how do you really lower the barrier of entry, you know, lower the activation energy required to actually ship value and create value in the crypto kind of ecosystem, right?

• 31:25Speaker 02

  That's why I think Solana, like yesterday on the plane, I was spending a lot of time reading about Solana. And I think that's really interesting to me, uh, just generally, how do you make it easier for people to actually like, you know, ship their first, their whole world? Right? Um, I think that's, that's pretty compelling. I'm also obviously with Gumroad and like, you know, I spent a lot of time talking to creators, a lot of artists, a lot of musicians, a lot of painters, lots of people in the entertainment industry, um, and publishing, I just published a book. So I'm spending a lot of my time thinking about like, is this really the final form, right? Like, is this how we consume content, right? A film? A video. My guess is no. My guess is like, there's more, right? And maybe that's, you know, in the metaverse or some sort of ARVR thing or what have you.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  And so I'm just trying to think about, okay, what, like, who is actually thinking about those problems? Who has the experience to actually solve these problems really, really well? And then who has the credibility, right? Like, who? One thing I've noticed is there's, you know, I get so many pitches on crypto stuff. I would say even though 10% of my portfolio is crypto, I probably get like 80% of the pitches I hear nowadays are like, have some crypto component to it. And so I worry a little bit that there's just a lot of people who are chasing, you know, chasing the zeitgeist, chasing the puck. They probably won't be able to get there fast enough. So I try to find people who have like, kind of, you know, had some of these ideas or thoughts or, you know, have invested in this kind of stuff earlier to kind of, just because I do think that's kind of important to be interested in something, you know, before it's sexy, before it has the potential to make you a lot of money, I think is pretty,

• 32:55Speaker 02

  pretty important. Otherwise, like, I think you're just gonna get outrun. You know, the NFT marketplaces that are doing well today are not the ones that were started in 2021, right? They're the ones that were started in 2017, 2018. You know, OpenSea, I think, was the first. Maker's Place was in 2018. Like, it's very early. Or they were very, very early and they have this insane, you know, moat, I think, because of that. And I also think that the crypto community rewards those kinds of folks. They want to take bets on people who are, who are early. And so, yeah, that's, that's kind of how I think about it. A lot of picks and shovels, a lot of creator economy. Really interested in no code. And then some interesting hook, like, a lot of people are building like the same sort of thing, right? Like, it's like, hey, we want to help creators who aren't technical, like, you know, sell an NFT collection, right?

• 33:40Speaker 02

  And it's like, that's cool and interesting and certainly is necessary. Well, you know, what's the hook? Like, what's unique about you? Right? And then can you get more specific? Who are you starting with? Who's your first customer? I think those, those sorts of questions, I think, are really important and often drive like my investment sort of decision-making process.

• 33:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So I've got two of my brothers here with me. What, what questions do you guys have?

• 34:03Speaker 03

  So my question would be, your company has obviously gone 100% remote now. And you mentioned earlier that you're now hiring people without ever talking to them. I think that is probably relative for some people and shocks some other people. So have you been asked by other founders or CEOs of companies kind of about this process? And if we were to, you know, go to sleep and wake up in five years, do you think a substantial amount of more companies will be doing this?

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would, I would say, I don't know if it'll, it'll be a majority, but yeah, I certainly think like ten, twenty percent of companies that get started will probably pursue this sort of thing. There are a couple of things that I, I've noticed and learned in the last, last year. One is a lot of founders have pinged me, not necessarily because they want to adopt their way of working, but because they're like, look, I'm spending all of my time in Zoom meetings all day long. And going for walks, you know, four or five hours a day with, with my friends and like grabbing coffee and lunch and that, you know. You could do that, but when you're staring in front, you know, staring at a computer for like four or five, six, seven hours a day, like it's just brutal. So a lot of people were asking me like, how do you, how do you, you know, how do you replace the meeting? Like what takes the place of, of this meeting? Which the answer is like a lot of documentation, a lot of writing, a lot of essays.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Right? And, and, and, and so that, that, that's sort of definitely a through line in terms of what people ask. But will people actually adopt it completely in the way that, that we will or we have? I'm not so sure. But I think, you know, I think a hybrid, like I think, you know, instead of eight hours of meetings a day, why not one hour of meetings a week? Right? Like I, I think ultimately the answer is somewhere in the middle. And I, I think it's important for Gumroad to specifically be the overton window kind of pusher, right? And say, hey, look, we're going to run the company in this way. Because we think it's really important to have an example, right? To say, hey, just like Basecamp kind of did, you know, ten years ago, like to show people this is possible if you choose to work this way.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Like is, it, it is possible, not just in theory, but in practice. And certainly it may not lead to the, you know, the highest speed, the highest throughput. You know, if you, if you really just want, you know, if you're, you know, in a super saturated competitive space and you want to grow like crazy, like, yeah, you probably shouldn't. Switch to no meetings, right? But if you have a comfortable business, you're not, you know, you know, your hair is not on fire every day you wake up. And you really feel like you want to optimize for freedom, then, you know, perhaps this way of working, I think will be much more appealing. And I hope that that's true. I hope that in the future, people realize like they can get paid twice as much or they can work half as much. And my guess is there are a lot of people who would love to work twenty hours a week. And, and like I, you know, I, I find that.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  That you know, when I work 20 hours a week, I have 20 hours, I can work some of that. I can work on new projects, but I don't know, I'm just a much happier, more content person when I when I get to do that. So, you know, my guess is more and more and more people as they reach that sort of like post economic or what have you phrase like, I think we'll seek this way of working. The other thing I'll add is, you know, a lot of people, and I try this, you know, Tim Ferriss is in the four hour work week, right? Like they decide to go all the way into basically, you know, the digital nomad lifestyle or retiring on a beach or what have you. And I've just never found that that works for me. Like I do need to be productive. I do like having some level of social kind of almost accountability, you know, feedback loop. I like

• 37:20Speaker 02

  working with smart people. I like working on a product that improves over time. And so I don't think the answer is is is kind of just like piecing out completely. I do think people want to contribute to society in this sort of structured way. I don't think work is going to go away, you know, when robots kind of replace the world or what have you. I think we'll keep, you know, people will like to work. I think working is fun and should be fun. And so, you know, I think in that world, like 20 hours a week to me seems much, much more sustainable for most people, maybe, maybe the majority.

• 37:53Anthony Pompliano?

  John, what do you got?

• 37:54Speaker 04

  So, nice to meet you. Congratulations on all your success so far with Gumroad. I know you founded around 10 years ago. So my curious is, there's been 100,000, around 100,000 creators on Gumroad. What is the craziest thing you've seen someone be successful on the platform with?

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Oh, man. There's the, there's a few different ways to answer this. I will tell you, I have learned a lot of, people are very interested in a lot of different things. There's a lot of like soft core fetish stuff that does really, really well. There's a lot of like weird sports that I didn't really even know were a thing that people are really interested in. You know, people say that riches are in the niches, and I just have learned that there are a lot of niches. There are a lot more programming languages that I didn't know existed, a lot more design aesthetics. There's a lot of, and then obviously, there's like just a ton of like, you know, on the political spectrum, you know, you see stuff from this ultra far left, like That wouldn't even fit on the polit- you know, political spectrum on my footer and then and then vice versa.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  One thing I have noticed, a lot of people, you know, deplatforming doesn't seem to come up as much now. Maybe everyone got what they wanted by getting rid of Trump or something like that. But what I see is that the vast majority of deplatform requests actually hit people on the left. Like, people on the left have crazy, crazy views. Um, obviously, people on the right do as well, but uh, they just don't get nearly as much exposure. And so I see a lot of those sorts of things. Um, but yeah, definitely people, you know, I didn't realize that you can get turned on by, you know, watching someone get punched in the stomach for 50 minutes straight.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  So someone uh.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  I think that's why, they never say that that's the, you know, why they're selling this video where people are black.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  So someone in the que- in the comments uh here on YouTube had a good question and they were, they were asking about how you build the trust with your employees. Uh, long-term trust when you're not necessarily, when there's kind of that transactional feel to it, that you're not necessarily meeting them in person every day. You're not having uh in-person conversations or meetings or coffees. How do you build that long-term trust that you're investing in their career and their future also?

• 39:53Speaker 02

  That's a good question. Honestly, I don't, I don't know if I am. Uh, I think trust is like a very dense, like loaded term and I, I don't like it. Um, I don't like trust. I don't like loyalty. Uh, like why, you know, one, one thing I've, I've learned, you know, working in sort of the fiat credit card payments world compared to crypto is that you, you have to trust in, in fiat because people can, you know, issue a chargeback. Uh, you know, there's real risk to trusting, you know, to accepting a payment from somebody, a stranger on the internet. Crypto, that doesn't exist, right? And so I, I'm not sure if trust is the right thing to optimize for. Uh, look, all I can tell, you know, and obviously there's a sort of a track record of me doing this. Uh, but all I can tell my, you know, the people who work on government is like, look, this is the hourly rate.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  This is how much you get paid. As long as you're adding value to the company, you're going to get paid this hourly rate. It might go up over time. You get this equity bonus. Uh, you can see how everyone else, how much everyone else in the company will make. I promise you that I will be insanely transparent. Like, there's really nothing in the company that I know that you don't know. Besides, I guess, maybe some passwords and one password or something like that. Uh, but there's virtually nothing that only I know. Uh, and so I can at least say that, right? I can say, look, you, you can effectively run the company if you want. If you can, like, if you send me an email and say, hey, I think I can be a better CEO than you based on all the stuff that I've read. Please do. I I I'm sure I can find something better to do.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  So it's almost like that trust is built through honesty.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's it's and and I and I actually remember I was trying to Ben, I I worked at Pinterest pretty early on and and I remember asking Ben, like, how do you build trust with users, you know, in twenty eight, twenty eleven? And he said something really profound to me, which is like stuck with me literally ten years later, which is you don't have to build trust with your users. You can have like a pretty website design and people will trust you out of the gate and it's yours to lose. And I thought that was pretty interesting and pretty true. Like, I think you can almost, it's almost just there. It's people can feel it. You know, you you just know that I'm probably like authentic. I'm probably not censoring myself too much, you know, or I'm really good at it, I guess. But, you know, I think you can just kind of get a sense that, you know, like, I'm probably

• 42:03Speaker 02

  not going to screw you over. I'm probably not going to, you know, fire you, you know, immediately or or, you know, or, you know, censor anything or what have you. I think you can kind of get that vibe from people pretty readily. And I found that, you know, if you're not willing to be super upfront and transparent with all these sorts of things, to me, that's kind of a red flag, right? If someone says, hey, I want to work at Gumroad, but then they don't have any paper trail of anything they've ever done, then I'm like, well, you know, how much do you like what you do? Why is there no evidence that you like what you do? Can I read a blog post about some interesting thought that you've had? Like, I I've just always done that. And so I think ultimately you can go back. I think I started using Twitter in two thousand eight or something like that, right? So you can go back to two thousand eight and be like, when Saw was seventeen or what have you, like, what did he think? Is that consistent?

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Probably not, given that, you know, I was seventeen. But have you, you know, can you see that, you know, that person changing, grow? And I think that's kind of necessary, right? If you think about who are you friends with, it's generally the people who are, you know, there's two things, right? One, it's people you've spent a significant amount of time with. I think it's hard to hack that. But then two, vulnerability, right? It's people who are actually vulnerable, who've actually shared their fears and struggles with you. It's very hard to be friends with someone who's never done that. And so I think there's a paper trail of me being vulnerable for a long period of time. So I'm able Kind of build these relationships, you know, with people probably a lot faster. And you know, and this happens all the time, like even when I was doing the phone calls.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  You know, actual phone calls with people, I would always ask, like, do you have any questions about me, about Gumroad, about how we work? And besides like the logistical things, like everyone was like, look, I already know everything about you. You know, because you've written about it, you know, all of these sorts of things. I'm not applying to this job, you know, because, you know, I already, I've done the work. And so. Yeah, I just find that incredibly freeing and it saves me time, you know, I don't have to have, it's funny. A lot of people think I'm an extrovert because I write on the internet all the time, but it's actually kind of the opposite. Like the more I write on the internet, the less I have to talk to people one, one by one, right? And so I, I think it's a, it actually, yeah, it, it serves both people.

• 44:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So before we let you go, I want you to talk about this book that you recently wrote called The Minimalist Entrepreneur. How Great Founders Do More With Less. And before you came on today, I went and I took a look at both the editorial reviews and also some of the comments on Amazon. I just want to read to people very quickly. So Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, he said, Sahil knows, knows not. He knows what not to do, what not to follow, what, how not to waste and how not to get caught up in the hype. Then you've got Lee Jin, who said, a timely hard won guide for entrepreneurs looking to build sustainable, profitable businesses with real world impact. And then Morgan Housel, who has one of the bestselling books right now, he sold, I think almost a million copies at this point. Said, few people can simplify a complex topic like Sahil.

• 44:52Anthony Pompliano?

  This book is as fun to read as it is informative. And then you've got Alexis Ohanian, who says, in a world where things have become grossly overcomplicated. The minimalist entrepreneur teaches us how to strip away the unnecessary and do more with less. That's like a murderer's row of people on the internet who, who are giving editorial reviews. And then when you read through the various kind of reviews on the, on the actual Amazon page.

• 45:18Anthony Pompliano?

  People are saying, you know, just absolutely hilarious stuff, but also there's just people who just write like practical advice for entrepreneurs. Like just, it's such like a value driven set of, of reviews. Talk to us about, why did you want to write the book? And then kind of what was the process for actually putting this together and what will people learn if they read it?

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. Well, so in 2019, I published kind of an essay on Gumroad and the history, the, you know, the starting of the company, the raising of the money, the failing to raise the money, the firing of everybody, you know, all of a lot of sort of the eight, the first eight years of Gumroad at least, you know, and that essay did super, super well. I think almost a million people ended up reading it. And, you know, one of the big questions I got was kind of like, well, this is kind of like a list of what not to do. Like, well, what should you do? Like, what, you know, what do you recommend we do? And so basically in February 2019, I started writing this book. Turns out books take a long time to write. And so it came out October 2021. And so it was, you know, two and a half years,

• 46:21Speaker 02

  I guess, of work. But really, you know, it was, it was trying to answer all the questions that people have asked me, you know, over Twitter DMs, in person, Q and As after talks, all of the things that have to do with, with starting, scaling, owning, growing, and ultimately exiting a business, you know. And it's really like, honestly, the biggest fear I had is like, is this just too boring? Like, is it just too, it's almost like too value packed? It's too dense? Like, it's, you know, I just, you know, maybe people really, you know, people always complain about fluffy books, but the truth is those books sell really well. Right? And so maybe people want the fluffiness. But yeah, I just wanted to write a book. I wanted to put every single thing that I know about building a business into it. And therefore, like now, anytime someone's like, hey, Sahil, what do you think about

• 47:05Speaker 02

  raising money? How do you, how do you sell to your first customers? How do you think about marketing on Twitter? How do you think about like, you know, which community should you build for? Which idea should you pick? Where do you start with the idea? What's the right MVP? What no-code tools should you use? You know, like, should I move to SF? Should I not? Like, how do I think about hiring and values and culture? Like, all of this stuff, like, I wanted to put in a single place, make it super, super dense. And then, you know, similar to what I was saying before, save people time, right? So if I can give someone this book, they can go read the book, and then they can come back to me with much better questions. I think everyone wins, wins from that. And then the last thing I'll say about the book is, is I wrote it for my mom. Like, I really wanted to write a book. You know, there's kind of like, you know, people say, oh, I wanted to write the book that I I wish I had, right?

• 47:49Speaker 02

  And that's not really for me. I was successful without this book, but there are a lot of people who need help. They like my mom, like they don't know no code. They don't know the creator economy. They don't know notion Figma. You know, they don't know how to run a business like I run a business. And when you hear me talk about Gumroad, my hope is that people think it's like, wait, this is it.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Like, that's all it's a GitHub repo and like deployed on Amazon Web Services and people, you know, you know, you know, spend $200 million a year on it. And then payouts go from strike to our Wells Fargo account. And then I pay people, you know, all the contractors all over the world using buildup. It's like, yeah, it's it. A business is incredibly simple. And, you know, I want people to be able to identify it as business owners, as entrepreneurs, because I think it's incredibly important. You know, if you want financial independence, if you want to get free, if you want to control your time, your hours, where you live, like honestly, I think the best way to do that is to start and own your own business. And I just wanted to write a book that, you know, I could give to my mom and say, hey, look, you can read this book and you can build a business. It might not be a startup. It might be a yoga studio. It might be over Zoom. It might be in person.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  But all of the tools that you need to to start your business and get to your first hundred customers to market, to learn social media, to hire your first few people. You know, maybe even to raise money via crowdfunding. Like, everything should be in this book. At least that's the hope. It's still, you know, it's maybe it's been out for a week now. So hopefully, you know, it's there and and people apply those lessons. And, you know, ultimately, like what I want is that people start and own their own businesses. You know, that's the reason I wrote the book.

• 49:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I appreciate you coming on and everyone go buy the book. We'll we'll give away a couple here in a minute.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Awesome. Thanks so much for having me.

• 49:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Sounds good, buddy. Talk soon.