How Autopilot REVEALS Political Insider Trading | Chris Josephs

Chris Josephs, Co-Founder of Autopilot, dives into the intricacies of political insider trading, the venture-backed journey of Autopilot, and their innovative growth strategies. Chris discusses the evolution from their social investing app, Iris, to launching Autopilot, which allows retail investors to follow top investors' portfolios. We explore high-profile topics including Nancy Pelosi's trading patterns, the history and nuances of insider trading laws, and the potential impact of banning politicians from stock trading. Discover the secret sauce behind Autopilot's viral growth, their creative marketing tactics, and what lies ahead for the company as they partner with creators to further democratize investment opportunities. Whether you're an investor, entrepreneur, or simply curious about the intersection of technology, politics, and finance, this conversation is packed with insights and actionable takeaways. DISCLAIMER: Not Financial Advice. For entertainment purposes only. Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOShea Chris on X: https://x.com/Chrisjjosephs TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 - The Hypocrisy of Politicians Trading Stocks 00:42 - Introducing Chris Josephs of Autopilot & Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker 02:03 - The Evolution of Insider Trading 05:43 - The Stock Act and Its Loopholes 08:58 - The Richard Burr Scandal 11:45 - AOC's Push for a Trading Ban 21:21 - Autopilot's Mission and Growth 36:15 - Viral Growth Marketing Strategies 39:15 - Challenges and Opportunities in FinTech 40:19 - Navigating Media and Investor Relations 45:43 - The Future of Retail Investing 59:34 - VC Fundraising and Business Growth 01:04:26 - Exciting Plans for the Future #podcast #investing #technology #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #siliconvalley

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Just the hypocrisy that $350 million, literally following their trades. Like, if that isn't a sign that things are crazy, I don't know what could be. There's no one more in America that shouldn't be trading stocks than politicians.

• 0:12Molly O'Shea?

  What the potential impact to your business would be if we don't have Nancy Pelosi?

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we would be in trouble. And we're not experts at this. We just think that like-

• 0:22Molly O'Shea?

  You're just really good.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  2.5 million downloads.

• 0:25Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Six figures of active subscribers. Our next stage of this and what we're doing is we are partnering with creators.

• 0:33Molly O'Shea?

  Can't wait for you guys to repurpose all of this content.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  That's, we, I genuinely can.

• 0:42Molly O'Shea?

  Chris Josephs, welcome to Sorcery.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

• 0:46Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you for the hat. I feel so cool right now.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 0:49Molly O'Shea?

  Is this merch on the site?

• 0:51Speaker 00

  No, not yet. You're getting them. These are the sample ones.

• 0:53Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, this is exclusive.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  Exclusive. We got these ones, and then I guess we can ask everyone which one's cooler. But everyone, I think, originally likes that one. That's the one that is the most popular one in the team side.

• 1:04Molly O'Shea?

  I like it. I like it a lot. I'm also a little starstruck right now because I know you're just coming fresh off of Tucker Carlson and Tom Bilyeu. How does the fame treat you?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, making a fool of myself. It's, it's cool because, uh, that was the first one that, um, like, people on, tag us on social media being like, holy shit. You know, you, how'd you get on Tucker? How did you, the Tom Bilyeu one probably isn't as big, but, uh, it's kind of humbling, but I kind of told my team, like, we're not celebrating till Rogan. So it's like, we gotta build momentum. We do Tucker, we do Tom, we do Sorcery. We do who knows what's next. This is just the next step to Rogan.

• 1:41Molly O'Shea?

  You, you know, I know Rogan, right?

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yep. When I saw you put the photo up at the inauguration, I did my research. I'm waiting for you to put the plug.

• 1:50Molly O'Shea?

  All right. I see why you're on the pod then. Okay.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  I'm doing my rounds.

• 1:55Molly O'Shea?

  Well, that's great. We'll get into that a little bit later, but I do want to cover a bunch of things because this is going to be super fun. So we're going to go over the history of insider trading, where the lines blur, retail trends, Nancy Pelosi, for sure, your savvy growth marketing, because you guys have been killing it, and some other kinds of strategies that you guys are going after, your actual VC funding and more.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  What's funny is, this is why I love doing these things, especially this like cool, more relaxing one, not like a Tucker one where you gotta be political. But I think the thing that people don't understand about the autopilot side on the VC is like, we are fully building a venture-backed, like, multi-billion dollar outcome company, and we just had to build it this specific way, because that's how it was working with social media, with how fintech, consumer fintech worked. And it all just aligned very well. We got lucky with a lot of things, but we can go over the strategy and stuff like that. But it is exciting to chat with you on like a venture-backed founder side, as opposed to just purely, you run the Pelosi stock tracker, you know, what, what did you trade two years ago?

• 3:03Molly O'Shea?

  Well, that's how I know you. I know you from Iris.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:07Molly O'Shea?

  The OG days.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  The OG days, yeah. And then that's such a fascinating way that we've been able to kind of take it step by step. Because Iris, at the time, 2021, 2020 was when we essentially started it. It was a social investing app. And it was like, just you could follow your friends' trades. But and then when the stock market goes down, no one cares about your friends' trades. It's like, if I'm following you, I don't care about you losing 20%. I want to follow the good people. And at the time, you know, Nancy, yeah, sorry, but you, Nancy, you know, Nancy, I think will take the crown on that. But she was one of the portfolios that we came up with before we pivoted, and she was on the platform. And then everyone was constantly DMing and talking about us on TikTok and Instagram,

• 3:50Speaker 00

  saying, hey, can I just follow Nancy Pelosi's portfolio? That's what naturally kind of evolved into autopilot. And the Pelosi tracker came with all that. But there's a long kind of history and a long trajectory of how it all started with that. But it did start with like a social investing app and a way to just get notified of Nancy Pelosi's trades, which now turned into, you know, the millions of dollars that is now investing alongside her on the app.

• 4:14Molly O'Shea?

  And the billions of impressions that you're hitting on social channels.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, and what's cool about that, like on the venture side again, is um you can DM anybody with that account. So it's like we we've DM Tulsi Gabbard, we have conversations with Rokana, Rokana has done a ton, he deserves a lot of credit. AOC now is pushing for this, you know, are they insider trading, are they not? That's kind of what's taken over the news recently because of Trump's pausing the tariffs and we haven't seen anything. Well, we can, I can explain to you how all that works, but uh it's fascinating and cool, the doors that can be opened once you're kind of on that scale. And like the other thing too, that I don't think people know from Twitter is um we run an Instagram account with a million followers. It's called the Politician Trade Tracker. And that thing gets if not more uh impressions than Pelosi Tracker on Twitter.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Because Twi- Twitter has evolved into um like it always has been a news cycle, but the one of the downsides of creating content on Twitter is it has a lifespan on it. So when you tweet about it, you're not going to go on the For You page and see a tweet from Nancy Pelosi Tracker six months ago. But on Instagram and TikTok, you can. So we've kind of been able to diversify our organic growth away from just Pelosi Tracker. And that's allowed us to scale this thing faster and get the billions of impressions. Because if we only were on Twitter, it would it would have tapped out, for sure.

• 5:36Molly O'Shea?

  So maybe let's start with the history of insider trading and we can get up to the current state and what's going on with AOC.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  It all started back in 2009, of course, classic. And like what's fascinating, it's crazy to me when I started really diving into this is before 2009, it was the wild, wild west of insider trading. There was no law. They could do whatever they want. And the only reason why the Stock Act started back in 2009, and the Stock Act represents stop trading on congressional knowledge. Literally, the bill says stop insider trading. If that is the name of the bill, could you imagine what was going on before?

• 6:14Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  So that's like in, it is insane when you really think about it. And also because like average everyday Americans can't do it. But the history of it is it started in 2009 because politicians were lining up their portfolios in anticipation of the crash and in anticipation of the government response to the crash. So they were, uh, it gets kind of murky with the details, but they would have meetings with the Fed. And they would, and I think it was Ben Bernanke at the time. And, um, they would talk about the bailouts and it's like, okay, we're going to bail this company. Are we going to do this? It got passed. It didn't get passed. And they were just trading on it and they were allowed to do that because there weren't any laws restricting and requiring them to publicly talk about it. So after that, I think the public outcry started happening and everyone started calling them out.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  What's interesting and a little fun fact on that is, um, there was a couple, everyone supported the Stock Act. They, the politicians voted to pass that and in the Stock Act, what it was. Yeah. And that's, I think where like the, you could start seeing the momentum, but in DC, everything takes so long. The Stock Act though required kind of two, two things, and I think it did, definitely didn't go far enough. But at the time, you know, I don't know, maybe it was good enough. Uh, they, all politicians are required to file their trades, their spouses and their dependents trades up to 45 days. So anything that they trade, they have to file and anything that they're like kid trades, they have to file. The delay, I don't understand. Like, why is there a 45 day delay? I looked into research. I tried to figure it out. I couldn't find out why.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  And that's what a lot of people are saying today. It's like, why do you need a delay?

• 7:47Molly O'Shea?

  Report before or after?

• 7:49Speaker 00

  After. So if Nancy Pelosi makes a trade on January 1st, she technically has up to 45 days to file that trade publicly. So she could buy on January 1st and then she can file that trade publicly on, I don't know, February 15th.

• 8:05Molly O'Shea?

  And it would date back to.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  And it would date back to that. Yeah. So that's how it is right now.

• 8:10Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  So, um, that's how we all find out about the trades and that's unfortunately one of the downsides of, you know, quote unquote, copy trading, autopiloting a politician because of the delay. And it's valid. It's reasonable, but we do have data on like these politicians. They hold for a while. The delay doesn't really affect it too much. Like in 2024, for example, um, our Pelosi tracker that we track her filings, not the actual days of the trade, obviously, and she was up 54%. She outperformed the spy by 30%. Um, there's a lot of data on that, that the, they buy and hold for the long run. So, uh, but it is still annoying about the delay. Um, the other thing that is kind of the fun fact about that was all the politicians supported it,

• 8:53Speaker 00

  except for one or two politicians. One of those politicians was a guy named Richard Burr. So Richard Burr, if you know the history, and I'm a freaking nerd now, but fast forward from then until 2020, COVID, no one was really trading. Remember, there was no Robin Hood at the time. So like, back then, when they passed that Stock Act, it was just essentially just like politicians and parents, don't, don't trade. Kids, you know, they weren't expected to kind of require all these trades because I don't think at the time they were trading that much. The volume was lower. Fast forward to 2020, though, and when COVID happened, and that's when I think the lid kind of was taken off and it ran rampant.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  The story, though, on why that became popular, and then we can get to AOC, is our friend, Richard Burr, the dude that voted against it, he, at the time of 2020, when COVID was going on, he wrote an op-ed to, in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, essentially like when people starting to get worried about COVID, saying, hey, everyone, don't worry, it's fine, we'll be okay, everyone stay calm. While he wrote that op-ed, he is sitting on the head of the Intelligence Committee, and he's getting briefed on the severity of COVID. And he's now saying like, oh, fuck, this is a bigger deal than I thought. I just wrote an op-ed. A week goes by, he personally, and again, this is the politician that voted against the Stock Act, he's one of the few,

• 10:15Speaker 00

  he called up his financial advisor, in his, him and his financial advisor, they liquidated their portfolio, their retirement account, a week after he wrote that op-ed, telling the world to kind of stay calm. Sold off 1.4 million dollars of his entire retirement account, while sitting as the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. So if that's not like, early signs of that probably should be investigated, that probably is insider trading, like, why are you doing that? Well, you just told the whole public that you weren't doing that, and you said as the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, there's something there. Taking a step further, though, he then, two days later, called his brother-in-law.

• 10:52Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  And his brother-in-law then called his financial advisor, and his brother-in-law sold off his entire stocks.

• 10:57Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  A couple of days go by, COVID happens, markets crash, and he saved himself like 30 to 40%. He got investigated by the SEC and the FBI. That's how we know about these texts. But they didn't find anything. They dropped it and then he retires and goes off into the sunset, like fully fine pension and all. But like if that's not insider trading, I don't know what is. That's the frustration that happens with watching these politicians do that. Cause if that was you or I, you know, we'd be fired. We'd probably go to jail. Martha Stewart went to jail for something similar, but on a much lower monetization level. And she also wasn't a freaking politician.

• 11:36Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, government employee.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  A government employee that's supposed to be there supporting us instead is, you know, lining up their pockets. And that going, coming now to what AOC is talking about. I think that's, we're at this inflection point, I think with politician trading, especially with Trump, with what he did with the coins, what he's doing with all the other stuff. I think now is the time that a ban could actually be passed. And with autopilot, we're fully bipartisan. We will support, we will help AOC. She deserves a lot of credit for that. But I am a bit skeptical that something will get through. I think there's a lot of challenges that in more complex, it's much more nuanced than just banning politicians.

• 12:15Molly O'Shea?

  So to set the context, could you just explain what happened in the last couple of weeks?

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:20Molly O'Shea?

  That AOC is reacting to?

• 12:22Speaker 00

  Yep. So we've all been watching the stock market fall since beginning of January. You know, we rode the Trump kind of honeymoon phase. Everything went up. End of January, early February, things started to fall. Trump started pushing his agenda. On February, or excuse me, on April 8th, or I-

• 12:40Molly O'Shea?

  Second.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  April 2nd was the day.

• 12:42Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. April 2nd was the day he came out and did the 10% tariff across the board. He's like, hey, everyone, you guys are all kind of, we're all tariffing everyone. The market hated that. Market sold off. Meanwhile, though, while that was going on, the whole world thinks it's ending. Everyone's kind of freaking out. These politicians don't really necessarily know what to do. Marjorie Taylor Greene started buying stocks. So she is the politician. To her credit, she's one of the few politicians that actually files her day's trades in a reasonable timeframe. So that's how we know that her trades have happened. We don't know about other politicians because of the stupid 45 day delay. But Marjorie Taylor Greene is the only politician doing this and she's now going to get the spotlight shown on her because it's also Marjorie Taylor Greene. But so she started

• 13:26Speaker 00

  buying stocks a couple of days after that, the second, third, fourth. And she was buying, you know, Nike, Nvidia, Apple, she was buying as well.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  A couple of days after that, though, you remember that Trump then comes out and he's like, he's pausing it. You know, we're not doing this, art of the deal, whatever you want to call it. We're pausing the tariffs now and the market rallied the most it's ever rallied.

• 13:49Molly O'Shea?

  Didn't he like tweet, buy now?

• 13:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's where it even gets more complex because he tweeted that at 9:30 in the morning.

• 13:56Molly O'Shea?

  This is not financial advice, but buy now.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  This is not financial advice, but if I were you guys, I would buy. And it gets even crazy, like when you really, it's fascinating because it's like, he's telling everyone to buy. You know, whether that's right or wrong, but and then he then pauses it. If you bought, you would have crushed it. The stock market went up the most, the third most it's ever gone up since World War II. Went up like 10%. And AOC started calling it out, saying like, is Trump doing these things? And then telling his buddies on the side, saying, hey, go buy the stocks. I'm about to tweet this. I don't know the politicians. We don't know yet either. But Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of those politicians that was buying before this. Fast forward to even like literally today, we, we put a tweet up about the Pelosi tracker because MTG again bought the dip.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  And most more notably is she started buying the day after they paused it, the day before and the day after, on the 8th and 9th. She bought Apple, she bought Qualcomm, she bought Nvidia, AMD, ASML. Yesterday, or Saturday over the weekend, Trump comes down and he pauses the tariffs on all semis and essentially Apple products.

• 15:02Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  And the market crushes it again. So AOC calling them out, I don't see this momentum stopping. Like Bernie Sanders was at Coachella.

• 15:10Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  I don't know if you saw him. They're pushing for something.

• 15:12Molly O'Shea?

  That's why I don't have a voice right now, by the way.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. And they, they did a massive rally in LA, I think two days ago, 40,000 people. I don't know why, like, you know, they're, they're, um, I'm not, I don't, I don't know what the Democratic plans are with those two. But I am saying like, that is a message that will resonate with people. Um, and AOC is smart to.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  embody that and I think people like if the Republicans want to kind of top tap into that too they should keep a close eye on this because eighty six percent of Americans want them banned I don't know one person that supports them trading that could be a rallying cry and that could be sort of like the the lightning rod for like AOC to actually do something if she were to want to run for president in twenty twenty eight

• 15:58Molly O'Shea?

  so I guess like between all of that where do the lines blur like where is the blur between this because I know from the financial perspective I've worked at RIAs before we have to submit stocks we want to trade before we trade them like they all have to be through compliance we go through compliance training my friends at banks they can't trade other banks they're like it's very very strict I know friends at like crossover funds they can't even do like they can't even trade stocks so they they're limited to crypto like so like on the financial side yes we're super super restricted and it makes sense but it's so blurry with politician because they're getting insider information as well

• 16:41Speaker 00

  there's like an argument that there's no one more in America that shouldn't be trading stocks than politicians yet they're the ones that are legally allowed to do it meanwhile yeah like to your point someone at an RIA like a journalist in New York Times can't trade in certain stocks like my buddies at work at EY can't trade a certain stocks it's just so hypocritical it's insane and like I think the the the lines get blurred because it's the politicians that are in charge of making the laws about themselves there there's no incentive for them to stop and there's no incentive for them to kind of make this more complicated where this gets interesting and I like this is where

• 17:20Speaker 00

  it gets so hard so the farthest bill that made its way in the senate was one by Josh Hawley and John Ossoff and I think it was like called the Pelosi act or something like that good name but this is where it gets complex and scary so this was back in July of twenty twenty four and it is the farthest again the farthest bill that's ever made it it got voted by the senate I think Oversight Committee to hit the floor In that bill, though, it wanted four things, three or four. One was the politicians had to stop trading within 90 days. Fully get it, that's fine. Two, members and their spouses had to stop trading by 2027 or 2028. Fair, give them time, figure that out.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  But the third part, and where this gets in the VC world, I would be very cognizant and keep a close eye on this, is the third part of that bill, the bill that made it the farthest, would have required all politicians and future politicians to divest from private investments.

• 18:20Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  So if you are in, think about at that time, you got AOC, or excuse me, you got Tim Walz and you got Kamala Harris, career-long politicians for more or less. Tim Walz didn't own any stocks, he didn't have any private investments. Kamala was a career-long politician. On the other side, you got, you know, Trump with all of his businesses, all of that stuff, but JD Vance, ex-VC, ex-founders fund, you know, invested in Anduril, invested in SpaceX. He would have technically, if that bill passes, I don't know what you do. I think he would have to sell out of all those investments.

• 18:54Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  And that gets so complex when you think about, like, the future politicians that we would want.

• 19:00Molly O'Shea?

  I know David Sacks is helping out with the administration and he had to divest. Does that have to do with that? And he's also an investor.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we're backed by Kraft.

• 19:09Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  I've never met with him, I've never talked with him about this. We, our partners are Jeff Floor and Brian Rosenblatt, two great guys. But that's, it is interesting, because he did it. And he seemed to kind of beat people, maybe I should ask him.

• 19:25Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Because he did it before.

• 19:26Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, David.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  Like, David, why did you divest out, but some of these politicians can't? You know, there's examples of politicians specifically as well.

• 19:36Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  To JD Vance's credit, I think he divested out of his individual stocks. He now only owns Bitcoin, S&P, QQQ, Dow, and some gold. So he is very kind of aligned with America. If America wins, his portfolio will win. But he's not in, you know, he's not in meta. He's not like picking individual winners where the conflict of interest can happen. Uh, that's, it is fascinating that, and it does make sense now that I think about it, that David did it, but these politicians haven't. If he was able to do it... Why can't they do it?

• 20:07Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Especially on these bigger things. Maybe it's because he had access to the liquidity. He could find buyers. But that bill, though, still would make you kind of sell out of like, if you've got a small business, you know, if you're a farmer in Iowa, or if you have an HVAC company, you technically would have to sell out of that, too. It's like, how do you find liquidity on that? It's complex. So it's hard and you have, this is my frustration with me kind of studying all this stuff is I want them banned. I want to push for it. But I think that is a world where it's more dangerous than the other one. So like, how do you balance it? I don't know, and we'll have to see. But AOC is pushing for it. We'll see how far it gets.

• 20:46Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, it's super interesting. Another fun fact that I learned, uh, because we had Tarek Mansour of, uh, Calci on, is that commodity derivatives, derivatives, uh, is technically like not illegal. Like it, like insider trading for that is like technically not illegal. If you want to learn more about it, listen to the pod. I don't, you know, he's the expert, not me. Um, but there are so many nuances to this world I wasn't aware of.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I understand why it's complex, too. Because it's still people's money, you know, yada, yada, yada. But I think the broader point that we're trying to get at with autopilot is like, we are trying to bring trust back into the institutions. Like, we are very pro-America. We want America to thrive. We want America to succeed. But you can't do that if you don't trust the politicians. Because distrust in the politicians creates distrust in the institutions. Distrust in the institutions creates distrust in the government. And you follow that, and the next thing you know, society collapses. And I think like, we're already seeing that.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  We think like, our small part of getting the politicians banned would bring trust and transparency back into that. Where at least, you know, if you may not agree with a politician, like you may not like Nancy Pelosi, but your first, you know, criticism isn't, hey, screw you for making millions in Nvidia. You know, it's screw you for having this opinion. But I think that's a better world than all the bad optics and the frustration and the hypocrisy that comes from them just sheerly allowing themselves to do it.

• 22:19Molly O'Shea?

  A couple follow ups from that. Okay, so but their accounts are ripping it. So could you share some of the trends from that? And then I, I want to talk about like what the potential impact to your business would be if we don't have Nancy Pelosi.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we would be in trouble. Um, I wouldn't say we'd be in trouble. I'd say our growth would slow. Cause yeah, like if, if I could snap my fingers and they would go away and the trading would stop. I think our entire team would agree to that. Would it drastically kind of slow down top line growth? Slow down probably some of the best ads that we've ever had. You know, even the Pelosi tracker, what do we do with that? That's two million followers gone. We would have to adapt, but I think like, even if we can chat, we can get into like, we've diversified away from this. We, we've done half a million dollars of creator payouts where we have creators launching portfolios, yada, yada, yada.

• 23:11Molly O'Shea?

  Well, let's get into that.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, fair.

• 23:13Molly O'Shea?

  So how are you diversifying beyond her?

• 23:16Speaker 00

  So the beauty of what we've done kind of with autopilot is we, our kind of spiel, our, our quick pitch is we built the first way to take your stock portfolio and follow someone else's. So instead of you making the decisions on your own and stressing out and being like, what do I buy? What do I sell? You can just find an expert, find someone on the platform and just have them do it for you. Right at the beginning, and we are broker agnostic. And this is kind of the beauty of what we've been able to do. We've been able to diversify from growth, but we've also been able to diversify from revenue streams. Where we now have three different revenue streams pushing towards our eight figure ARR. And I can get into that too. But, uh, so at the core of it, you can take your stock portfolio, whether it's a Robin Hood, a Weebull, Fidelity, Schwab. We, we hopefully are going to have them all.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  And you can connect it to our platform and then just follow someone else. So right now it's my, you know, $20,000 Robin Hood account, following Nancy Pelosi. But at the core of it, that technology is still there. Our mission from the beginning has always been to kind of partly to bring trust and transparency back. But on the product side, it is to find and showcase the best investors in retail. So that the masses can follow them. You know, rich people have access to these strategies that someone like you and I don't have access to. And there should be a world where you democratize that.

• 24:32Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  And I think autopilot can do that. So now our next stage of this and what we're doing is we are partnering with creators. You know, unusual whales is a good body of ours. He's a partner. Quiver Quantitative, he's a partner. But the beauty of that is they can go on and they can start a business with this. So we do a revenue share with them. Where if you want to go in and you want to follow unusual whales, you connect your Robin and you connect your Weebull and then you can allocate some money to follow him. And then you pay the subscription to get the automated trading. You don't pay for financial advice necessarily. You're essentially like paying for the automated trading of it. He gets, he gets a revenue cut of that. And we've been able to now scale this to now where we have nine or 10 pilots is what we call them.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Probably like 30 to 40 waiting to launch. And we've done half a million of creator payouts so far.

• 25:19Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  So now these creators are starting to build a business on our, on top of autopilot as well. They want to promote it. We're living in their links and bios. That's like the next stage of it, of.

• 25:28Molly O'Shea?

  How are they making creator payouts as a percentage of?

• 25:32Speaker 00

  No, so it's just pure percentage of subscription.

• 25:34Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, okay.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  So like if you have, if you charge 30 bucks a month, they get a certain percentage of that. They don't do, we don't do AUM fees. We don't kind of make it complicated. And what's cool is that's how we diversify away and that's how we take the next step. That's why we're venture backed and that's also why um. I'm excited with the next stage of the growth. So like if Pelosi tracker turns off tomorrow, I, I read all the tweets. I do a lot of the videos. I'll just. Start working with them more.

• 26:00Molly O'Shea?

  That's amazing. That's super cool. Because we kind of weaved through, let's go back to Nancy. And, and those kinds of accounts, like what kind of trends are you seeing within their trades and what are they looking at?

• 26:13Speaker 00

  The majority of the politicians that we track, they've all done well because they all kind of typically buy and hold. Nancy Pelosi, for example, since we've been tracking her, we launched it in 2023, beginning of 2023. Since then, she has probably 350 million dollars following her, which is crazy. She's got her own little mini hedge fund.

• 26:31Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's a lot. And and since I think we've been tracking her, she was up like eighty percent kinda after this dip. Her peak was around one hundred twenty percent. And you can go see all this on the app, not financial advice, yada, yada, yada, past performance doesn't, whatever. But last year she was up fifty four percent, and that's even with the delays. So all the people that were following her were kind of being able to ride those coattails up. This year she's not doing as well. The whole market hasn't, but she has been very much mag seven. So she's been big in Nvidia. She's been big in Google and Apple. And then her recent trades at the beginning of the year, the two new ones that caught everyone's eye was a small AI company called Tempest AI.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  I think they were around like four billion when she bought it, four billion market cap. I think now they're at like eight or nine, so she's done well with that. And then the other one was Vistra AI, another AI company. So Pelosi has been buying tech and the majority of her portfolio is tech. I don't even think she owns anything non-tech. The other politicians, we we follow Dan Crenshaw. Dan Crenshaw, he hasn't traded in a while, but he bought back in twenty twenty two. And he timed a lot of these dips perfectly. His portfolio is comprised of Meta, which for what it's worth, he fully supports banning TikTok. So it's beneficial to to that position. He owns Wind Resorts. He owns the Spy.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  He owns FIS, which is, I think, a fintech company. And he is a little bit more diversified. Another one, and he's crushed it too. I think he, since we've been tracking him, is probably up like sixty percent. I haven't checked on him in a while, but the other politicians that we do track, the majority of them do outperform. But this year is going to be an interesting one because of the different market dynamics. We have MTG up there. Dan Rouser, other ones we were thinking of adding, we haven't added any yet, but that's like the trends that we're seeing. They do typically do buy and hold and they typically buy the dip as well.

• 28:36Molly O'Shea?

  Could you share some of the high level metrics of the business? I know this is like a hard pivot, but I'll, I'll get into it. I just, I would love to know what kind of momentum you've brought with all the like really efficient growth marketing.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So when we launched and when we started, we're a team of four co-founders, me, Brian, Scott, Aaron, they're engineers. I'm a, I'm, I'm not even like a marketer. I wasn't a marketer at the time. I was a finance kid, classic finance pro. But what I kind of, we coined the phrase early on was we wanted to call ourselves social growth engineers. And it's like starting to become a thing.

• 29:15Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Because I think we realized if you can own the distribution and you know how to create content that can be distributed, you can crack the code on social media and you could do this in a way that scales. So we launched in 2023, the app autopilot at the time, we only really had the Pelosi tracker. We have the Burry tracker, things like that. And we've been able to, with just a team of three, grow our social media accounts to around like three, three and a half million followers. And this is across all of them. That's what's cool that, I mean, we spend a ton of time and effort on this, but like my personal TikTok has 250K. I have another girl, she works with me, her name is Stash, she's a killer.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  She, her personal TikTok has 150K. On Twitter, we have the Pelosi tracker with 1.1 million followers, the Burry tracker there has 400K. We have a Buffett tracker there and then we, we work with inverse Kramer, things like that. On Instagram, we have another 1 million followers and then we have a small thing on Reddit. So we've been pretty diversified across the board. That has allowed us to get a ton of top line impressions. Everyone kind of knows about the Pelosi tracker. Not everyone knows autopilot's the team behind it though.

• 30:29Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  That was by design because you know, no one wants to follow a branded account. They want to follow like things that they get value from. But we probably bring in.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Like, I would say probably like, just to be conservative, like 70 million impressions a month across all of our stuff. Wow. And that's with a lot of content that we push out, but it's just a team of three. With regards to downloads and kind of how that's translated into the actual app, we've done pretty well with that too, where I think we have, right, 2.5 million downloads. Wow. Six figures of active subscribers. And then on the AUM, because we're a registered investment advisor, this is all public. What's fascinating, what kind of I'm proud of is like, people trust us with their money. And it's like, we have now half a billion dollars of connected, of traded assets. So we're in RIA with half a billion.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  And what's cool is we have the opportunity to go cross wallet, because we have around 6 billion of connected assets. And this is like retirement accounts, this is Roth IRAs, things of that nature, where we don't really have pilots for those people yet. But if I have my Roth IRA and I want to invest in dividend stocks, I have to do this on my own. I don't want to do that. I would rather just connect it to autopilot, pay the 100 bucks a year, and just have a professional dividend investor doing it for me. So I'm confident and I'm excited that we'll be able to build momentum from current assets of half a billion to connected assets, which should hopefully get us to a billion by the end of the year. And the other kind of cool thing as well is like the idea of the revenue. So we do eight figures in revenue.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  We aren't public with how much, but eight figures in revenue, it's growing month over month. We've never really had a down month. And what's cooler again is like, we are working with partners that we want to work with. Where we are like, look, the Pelosi tracker, set it aside, I want to work with unusual wills, I want to work with inverse Kramer, I want to work with like, you know, you could launch a portfolio. You can go on and say, hey, I want to build an account to get my friends invested. My friends want to invest, they don't know where to start, they'll come and they'll follow me. That's, I think, like where we're building the momentum with that. And what's cool as well, and this is what like our team, we were never obsessed with. We haven't done a fundraising announcement, so we're backed by Kraft, they've been helpful.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Nomad Ventures out in LA, I love those guys. Love them. Yeah, I was just chatting with James on the way over. They've been very, very helpful.

• 33:00Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  I mean, they were our seed investors. We met them at Bodega.

• 33:04Molly O'Shea?

  I heard about that. Yes, I heard the story. Wait, can you share more on Nomad? Cause they're a super cool team.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Chris and James, based out of here, they do pre-seed and seed, mainly in marketplaces and consumer.

• 33:16Molly O'Shea?

  Came out of Uber.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Came out of Uber. Yep. And then, so Chris came from Uber. He was one of the early guys. James was Uber and Open Door.

• 33:24Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  And they found us and they, they invested when we were Iris. They did it before the pivot. And I think they were just fascinated and they liked the distribution that we could do.

• 33:33Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 00

  But they've been very, very helpful. Like James works with us on a weekly basis of like, how do we scale the team? You know, how do we, how do we have, how do we graduate even just from like an app that lets you follow Nancy Pelosi to a broader marketplace? Like, what does that mean? How does the onboarding flow work? And he has, him and Chris have a ton of experience from not only scaling teams at Uber, but also doing it in a highly regulated area.

• 33:59Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  So they provide a ton of like, this is like where I would focus. I would not worry about this. I'd worry about that. I couldn't kind of have any more praise than what they've done. They, they've crushed it. And again, I chat with them every day.

• 34:11Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, I heard the story the other week and they overheard you on a Zoom call at Bodega in Santa Monica and like just went up to you after that and just tried to.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I swear to God, that's how it happened. Like, we, cause I'm from Boston. I know nothing about LA. I moved out here in 2021, I think, or 2022, one of those. Yeah, during COVID. But right when COVID started opening up in LA, right when it started opening up. So I didn't want to work in my office, in my apartment. I wanted to work at a coffee shop. So I went and I searched like, where do people go work at a coffee shop? And Bodega was right down the street from me. And I'm like, alright, I'll do that one. And I kid you not, I was on a Zoom call or a phone call talking with, it was either my co-founder or a partner, influencer partner we work with. And I was one of those obnoxious people on the phone, but.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  James from Nomad was right next to me and just tapped me on the shoulder and he's like, "Take my card, this is kinda interesting." And then a couple of weeks later, he wrote us the first check in the momentum to get the seed investment done.

• 35:23Molly O'Shea?

  Who knew Bodega was a blue bottle of LA?

• 35:28Speaker 00

  It really is, yeah. I mean, if I were to go and try and kinda meet investors, that's probably where you go. Cause Injurieson just opened up at the Promenade, March Capital's right there, Clock Tower Ventures is right there, Upfront, they're still there. That was like the hub of Santa Monica.

• 35:46Molly O'Shea?

  I think it might have moved to the proper, but maybe that's my own bias. Because I go there all the time.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was on a pre-seed, I couldn't afford it.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  I was doing my, at Bodega, you can buy the unlimited coffee.

• 36:00Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, yeah, that's important.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  That was important, yeah. And they would open up, so I'd be there early, I would have my little spot in the back. Yeah, I love that place. Twenty dollar bottles of wine on Wednesday.

• 36:11Molly O'Shea?

  Sponsored by a Bodega.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Sponsored by Bodega, yeah.

• 36:15Molly O'Shea?

  So to go back to the business and the growth between the channels, you guys have laid out a really efficient growth marketing strategy for the company. I'm really curious to go into that a little bit further, cause we have founders, we have other investors, we have a really diverse audience, and I'm sure a lot of them would be really curious what your growth hacking techniques are, or anything that you'd be comfortable sharing.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I've done this mistake where I, like, we got competitors now that are doing the whole copying us.

• 36:51Molly O'Shea?

  Don't spill the secret sauce, but you know.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  But I can say like, the thing that people, I think, and we're not experts at this, we just think that like-

• 36:59Molly O'Shea?

  You're just really good.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would, I would just say we get, it's not that we get lucky, we picked the right- We picked the right trends.

• 37:07Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  So like last week, if you remember, um, we saw the Ghibli trend going on and this kind of, this is a brand thing. This isn't a, uh, this didn't drive us growth, but we saw the brand, the Ghibli trend going on. And since we've been kind of deep in it, Olivia Moore from Injuries and Horowitz posted that funny little, she turned the office of the, um, the chandelier. It's like, want to know my perfect steal? I do this. Do you know this scene from the office?

• 37:32Molly O'Shea?

  No.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Ah, if people know, they know. But so there's a scene in the office where Dwight talks about, you want to know my perfect steal? Like I steal the chandelier. I don't do this. I do that. And then I go to like, um, I can't remember the whole thing, but she was like, it's cool because now you can use AI and you can turn these videos into kind of Ghibli style things.

• 37:52Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  And when I saw it, I was like, that's a funny little script. I think this trend is kind of working for this week. Let's recreate this trend, but for politicians. So what we did was we figured out how she did it and then we created that version and we called it the, the perfect trade. So it was like, it was Nancy Pelosi and you could search this. It's on our autopilot page, but it's like Nancy Pelosi being like, want to know my perfect trade? Like I get the information at three 48. I buy it. And it's like, do I buy Apple? No, I buy a.

• 38:22Molly O'Shea?

  I saw this. This was so funny. Yes. Yeah.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  That one, and then we kind of were able to growth hack it. We posted it on, um, Twitter. That got three million impressions there. Everyone was loving it. Posted on Instagram. It gets another million impressions there. Someone else posted on Instagram. That gets another million impressions there. So like at the end of the day, that video that took two hours got us five million of organic views. A lot of brand equity. People like that sort of content. Uh, the lesson that I think like was interesting is, uh, if you, you pick the right trends and you kind of do them the right way, they cannot be good and they can't really be great. They have to be like 10 out of 10, shareable, fun, creative, something that really, really catches your eye where if you do try and hop on that

• 39:08Speaker 00

  trend and it's not to that degree, you'll end up kind of like actually hurting your brand and making it not as cool. Another example is, um, with AI, we have these GPT portfolios. And back in 2022, ChatGPT was the talk of the town. We were like, let's give it 50 grand, have it invest for us and see what happens.

• 39:28Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  We made that account on Twitter, tweeted about it. It got 130,000 followers in a week, something, something crazy. And we literally did give it 50 grand, but the beauty of that was on social media, that's like not even necessarily a branded piece. That's just, what is ChatGPT gonna buy? But it worked well with our product because we can put the portfolio up on autopilot. And the call to action there, the organic way is like, we're giving it 50 grand, but if anyone wants to invest alongside it, you can go to autopilot, you can download, you can check it out. That got us the top 15 in the App Store. And I think now we have 40 million dollars following that GPT portfolio.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  Of, so that is another example of like, we picked the trend right. Uh, and we executed the, the launch of it in the right way too.

• 40:19Molly O'Shea?

  How did this lead you to get on top podcasts like we mentioned earlier?

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of momentum. I think that stuff took a long time. So we have, we, we don't have a PR firm. We don't have a PR team. I think we might do one now, but uh, it's just been me DMing people on Twitter and then them eventually connecting with us. Where the way that the Tucker one worked was we, we made just good quality content on social media. And then eventually someone from the, one of the administration's teams then connected me to Tucker and it was like, Tucker, I think would be interested in having you on. Tucker one, we did, and then we got a couple more intros to a couple more. I've been chatting with Tom Byloo for a while. But a lot of that was just sheer grinding. And like, we get on the news pretty actively too.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  So we have now the relationships and like, if we want to go on Fox News, we could. We've never been invited by CNN or anything like that. It's only Fox News. But that a lot, I think, is momentum and high-quality content. Like, you cannot underestimate high-quality content and how far that can get you.

• 41:29Molly O'Shea?

  What kind of metrics do or KPIs do you shoot for with the content?

• 41:34Speaker 00

  So what's funny is we don't really track too much of it.

• 41:37Molly O'Shea?

  No.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  No. I think what we track is just like, what content can we tell a story around that can at least drive views and drive impressions and drive downloads eventually?

• 41:49Speaker 00

  There's a, you probably see it on Twitter all the time, all these kind of young, kind of, they call them cracked-out engineers, growth hacking TikTok with the faceless videos and yada, yada, yada. And that stuff works. But that doesn't necessarily really work for a financial product where you want to build trust, you want to build a relationship. You know, you're not going to go and put 20 grand in an investment product because you saw a faceless photo on TikTok. You're just not.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  So every view that we do and everything that we try and do, like on the content side, it's one, can it drive downloads? We don't really care too much about making a piece of content just for the sake of making it. We want to have it because we spend a lot of time and effort into building it. We want to make sure that content is actually built to work and drive downloads. And two, we want, don't want, uh, what was the word we were using the other day? Like, we don't want like a wasted or like a valueless impression. Where it's like, okay, cool, someone saw your video, but they don't know that it's autopilot and it doesn't really do anything for you. That's just like a vanity metric. So we don't, we don't really track followers.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  We don't really track impressions. We have a general sense of it because we have to share it with our investors. But we're not every month being like, we got to hit a billion impressions.

• 43:06Molly O'Shea?

  You don't have a content team that's like grinding every day, testing out like five different thumbnails on things.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  No, no, no. Maybe we should, but. We

• 43:17Molly O'Shea?

  You don't have a team in the Philippines?

• 43:18Speaker 00

  No, no, and we get pitched it a lot.

• 43:21Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  We don't. And I think like partly it's compliance.

• 43:25Molly O'Shea?

  Right.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  So you got to be very careful with, you know, registered investment advisor, need the disclosures everywhere. Need to know which, you know, battles to pick. But no, we don't have a, we, it's just me, Stash, Gannon, he's another creator for us. And he, he does a lot of other stuff too. But it's the person behind the camera mostly is just Stash and I.

• 43:45Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, super impressive.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just two of us. And she's better at TikTok than me.

• 43:49Molly O'Shea?

  Can't wait for you guys to repurpose all of this content.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  That's, we, I genuinely can. So that's the other thing too. We have a whole team that we're starting to dive into that. Where we repurposed, um, this is like, these aren't Philippines people and they're not making content. So I wouldn't say that they're like A B testing a million things.

• 44:06Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  But we have a, uh, we're working on a clipping army to some degree. We'll see if it works. Yeah, WAP.

• 44:13Molly O'Shea?

  I am so excited. I want to try it so bad.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  You should. It's built for this. It's not built for like, like, I, we know their team. They're awesome. And I think it's so smart. They did the Drewski thing. They did, um, that other random creator that I didn't know, but has a million, millions of followers. It works for us, content like this. But I think it, for a finance product, it, consumer investing like app finance product. I'm going to see like if it can scale and if it can actually kind of work. Cause again, like, I don't necessarily really care about, um, valueless impressions.

• 44:49Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  Where it's like, I'd rather spend my time and like that costs money. I'd rather spend, make sure the CACs are going to something that can drive revenue or, uh, downloads, not necessarily, you know.

• 45:01Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, that's actually really interesting because financial media and memes, my voice is so cracked, have created. Like that meme stock rage and like all of that kind of trends driven hype driven retail investing and then we you know we also have the tools that we can use it we can use Robin Hood we can use all these different platforms we can use autopilot we can use these different kinds of resources to buy into it and the democratization of finance and retail investing is like a completely different world than what it was like 10 years ago because of social media and these fintech platforms I'm curious like do you have any opinions

• 45:46Molly O'Shea?

  on this you like where do you see that going?

• 45:48Speaker 00

  Yeah that in what's cool for me in my shoes is I think like two things before I answer that is um one since we're bipartisan like everyone agrees 86% of Americans agree they shouldn't be allowed to trade so we see a lot of you know the different sides like if we're posting like this morning we posted about Marjorie Taylor Greene half the comments are like why are you not calling out Pelosi and then you know when we're calling out Pelosi at the comments are like oh well the Republicans do it too so we really do see like how divided and how scary this could be if we don't kind of all understand like the severity of where

• 46:28Speaker 00

  this stuff can go um with regards to the actual platform too on Instagram it's a much different community and a much different source piece of content that works compared to uh Twitter and then TikTok is authentic you can't have green screens you know that stuff won't work all that will work on TikTok is just getting behind the camera um where I think it's going though I think that retail investors and just generally like people uh we're only getting more and more online and I think the scary part about that is your emotions are going to get big I think people for better for worse social media makes you feel important and it's like okay if I am this random person from

• 47:12Speaker 00

  You know Miami and I can post on Twitter and get a thousand likes.

• 47:16Molly O'Shea?

  Miami, what a dig.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. I was thinking about which ones to do. I was gonna say like somewhere else. Miami, I could see this because that's um, I think this happens a lot in crypto world.

• 47:27Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  And that's I think like the point of you got to be careful with like where does social media lead? You lead to a lot of kind of hype. You lead to a lot of emotion driven stuff. You lead to people selling out too early. You lead to people fighting each other. And I think crypto, since it was the wild, wild west, I think it's getting better now.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  We saw kind of what that could mean and where that can go. And I think with social media in general, if you want to run ads as a finance product, you need to have the right disclosures. You got to be approved. You can't do it unless you put your address in these things. And I think that is the right direction because if you allow anyone to go off and just kind of launch their own stuff in the investing world, you're going to run into a lot more scams. And the data here is clear. Senior citizens got scammed at the highest rate in a while, something like 2.5 billion dollars.

• 48:16Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  And I think that's social media. Like how else are they getting it? Maybe a phone call?

• 48:19Molly O'Shea?

  AI.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  AI is a big one too. Yeah. But I get hundreds of DMs on our accounts with people trying to scam and people saying, hey, you scammed. On VC world,

• 48:33Speaker 00

  there's people in, I heard this story, but there's people that are saying that they're selling shares on like Craigslist of these private companies. So you know how like Republic does their fundraising rounds and stuff like that?

• 48:47Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, like SPVs and stuff.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, you got to be careful with, there's people scamming people with that where you think you're buying shares of autopilot from, I don't know, Craigslist or wherever.

• 48:57Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  And you end up, it's just some random dude, you know? That I think is where social media has to be careful. And I don't know where it's going to happen. I don't know what's going to happen with it. But I have a lot more thoughts on like the broader aspect of social media. But what do you see? Because it's like where we both grew up with. Social media, we've seen the ups and downs. I think we're probably more on Twitter. Like, I'm personally more on Twitter than Instagram now.

• 49:23Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  But at the time, when I was 22, I wasn't. I was barely on Twitter.

• 49:27Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  And my younger brothers, though, I have two younger brothers, they're not on either. They're on no social media.

• 49:33Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 49:33Speaker 00

  None, yeah.

• 49:34Molly O'Shea?

  That's crazy. How old are they?

• 49:37Speaker 00

  One is a senior in college, the other one's a senior in high school.

• 49:41Molly O'Shea?

  Why?

• 49:43Speaker 00

  I just don't think they wanted it. I think there might be an inflection point where people are just so sick and tired and annoyed of social media. They know it's emotional, they know it creates divide, division, and it, there's not much good that comes from it. If you're chronically online with it, and I think, you know, to my brother's credit, they didn't see the value of having it. So I don't think they just created one. Especially even like my brother's been to college, he's got his girlfriend, he's got his life. He's a cracked-out engineer, kinda, he loves his stuff. He's gonna do well for himself, kinda thing. He doesn't need social, like, what is social media gonna do for him? You know?

• 50:18Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I think, uh, the biggest things that I watch with it is, I think the advent of social media has just perpetuated faster news cycles. And so whenever we have market turmoil and extreme volatility like we saw in the last couple of weeks, like, usually you're reading a paper, like, well, not usually, but like, back in the day, you would read like the newspaper and you'd see where the stocks are and how things are going and what kind of news is happening. But we're getting news like by the minute, by the second, in real time, and they're just, it's just going faster and faster and faster.

• 51:00Molly O'Shea?

  And so I think a lot of the financial cycles that we'll have are really fast and like, hopefully correct faster.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:07Molly O'Shea?

  But we'll have like, and we're seeing this, like, greater dips, like, greater rises, um, based off of these things and just creates a lot of volatility.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  And you know what's scary about that is, uh, If you are, you and I were retail investors, right? Like, you know, this is not financial advice. I gotta say this for all of our compliance stuff. So you can't kind of go off and just do this because of what I'm saying. But I was working on a tweet. I'm working on a TikTok right now that explains this in broader detail. And I think like autopilot is gonna, it's gonna be a plug for autopilot. But the reality is if retail investors, if you sold out in kind of dips and you missed out on just the 10 best trading days of the year, like if you were just not invested in the stock market for the 10 best trading days of that year, your annualized returns are something like 7% below what they should be. So the average return annualized, I think the, the study I was reading

• 52:00Speaker 00

  was from like 1989 to 2024. The average annualized returns were something like 9.8%. If you missed out on just the 10 best days, your returns are 3.3% annualized. So you're way down. If you missed out on the top 15 trading days of the year, you actually lost money that year. So the stock market could have been up 10% that year. But if you were selling out of emotion, you were trying to time it. You were like, oh God, the world is ending. And then next thing you know, tariff just gets paused and then the market crushes and you miss out on that day, you're missing out on the gains for that year. And that's, I think, like the thing that retail investors, I'm gonna try and educate people on this, but I'm like, I'm not an expert at this. I don't really know.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  But in trading on emotion is risky. And especially with more of these products commoditizing and democratizing access to them. Where it's like, who knows? Maybe five years you'll be able to trade your 401k in individual stocks. Maybe you'll be able to put your 401k in private stocks. You know, Robin Hood with Vlad, they're doing a lot of stuff to bring things on chain. They launched the, with Turek from CalShe, they launched. Prediction markets. Prediction markets. Yeah. That, that's like, are, is people, are people selling out of Apple to buy, you know, Florida is gonna win the national championship? And I think it's good that they're democratizing access to it. What I do worry about is, I don't, I think retail investors,

• 53:25Speaker 00

  we are emotional and we're short-term thinking where, you know, it's just human nature. That's just how we are. Yeah. We have to be careful and we gotta be cognizant of that. And we need to understand the ramifications if you do trade too much on emotion. And with autopilot, I think what solves it is like.

• 53:43Molly O'Shea?

  Set it and forget it.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Forget it. Yeah, it's like, imagine you're following Nancy Pelosi.

• 53:47Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  Like, if you're up 20%, hell yeah.

• 53:50Molly O'Shea?

  Right.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  But if you're down 10%, if you are doing it with Nancy Pelosi, you could sleep at night saying like, "Okay, well, Nancy Pelosi is down 10% too. I think I'll be fine."

• 53:59Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  You know, and like, and she didn't sell, from what we know, but I know that she doesn't, typically doesn't sell these options early, um, she trades options. But a lot of these politicians didn't buy and sell too much into the volatility. And again, if you sold out after Trump announced Liberation Day, you missed out on the 20% gain. Palantir's stock, for example, since that, since he tweeted and the market fell, it's up 40%.

• 54:26Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  In that, in the three-week period. And if you sold out, you'd miss it.

• 54:29Molly O'Shea?

  And that was already on the run.

• 54:30Speaker 00

  And that was already on the run. Yeah, it's already back up to $98. Robinhood's stock went down to 35. And it's just too hard to time it as a retail investor.

• 54:37Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 54:38Speaker 00

  Um, that's one final thing that I would say that I'm thinking a lot about. Like, how do I make sure that our autopilot app isn't creating emotional buying and selling to the degree that the clients lose out on money?

• 54:51Molly O'Shea?

  Right. It sounds like a couple of things I heard from that are buy low, sell high.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Yep, that's the goal.

• 54:59Molly O'Shea?

  And set it and forget it.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Yep. Yeah, buy low, sell high, set it and forget it, and go live your life.

• 55:04Molly O'Shea?

  Go live your life.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  It's like, why are you even worried about Bitcoin falling?

• 55:07Molly O'Shea?

  But if you want to have fun, go to CalShe and trade on, uh, White Lotus, maybe.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  Yep, yeah. And CalShe, Polly Market, I like them both. I use them both.

• 55:17Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 55:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, because CalShe also just launched with Weebull.

• 55:22Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  So like, they're really, they're smart to go the, uh, they're just doing like, the, uh, access.

• 55:28Molly O'Shea?

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  I think what they're doing is good, too. Again, going back to this trust and transparency thing.

• 55:33Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  Like... The world doesn't trust the media anymore. They're essentially rebuilding trust in media. Where it's like, okay, you're telling me that XYZ is gonna happen. Let me go look on Kalshi. And if Kalshi is saying it's not, now you instantly just have like who's right, who's wrong. And my bet is Kalshi is gonna be right more often than not because it's like, that's just the way of the land. That's, that's how predictive markets work. So I think it's awesome that they're pushing for this and they're adding in a layer of trust and transparency into a world where you can debate all you want on social media. You know, you can argue with Trump, you cannot argue with Trump. It's all noise.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Like the prediction markets hopefully can cut through that and actually bring some clarity and trust back into the whole thing.

• 56:24Molly O'Shea?

  So I'm curious, and this kind of goes off of this topic of the other financial fintech companies. But maybe outside of those, within your product itself, like how did you get the intuition? Or the kind of quality that you want to build to become? What are examples of like other companies or products that you use that you really like that inspire your product?

• 56:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Brian, my co-founder, he deserves a ton of credit for this, where it's like, we kept things simple. And I think a lot of that had to do with, you know, for better or for worse, we're comparing ourselves to Apple. Like Apple's copyright, like our team thinks about that forever. Where it's like a thousand songs in your pocket. There's just nothing better than that. Like one line that can describe everything what they do. But the core thesis and principle of what, of what Apple was was simplicity, minimalism. And on the product side, they've done a great job at keeping things simple, keeping things not kind of convoluted. We want to get access and like allow you to start trading in the most convenient way as possible. So like, what does that mean? That means.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  Going through KYC faster, that means like getting less and less buttons, you know, things like that. The faster you can get to the magic moment, you know, I think things like Duolingo helps with that.

• 57:45Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Like I use Duolingo. We don't gamify our finance stuff much, but

• 57:49Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  Then with A B testing, that's a big kind of company pillar on the product side. So I would say it's keeping things simple because of Apple and A B testing and like the fun humor kind of vibes from what Duolingo would do. Those are, I think are probably the two. And also like Robin Hood. Robin Hood, I think they're, they're the poster boys of organic

• 58:14Speaker 00

  simplicity for a financial product, but they're probably getting a little bit complex too, because I think they know. Yeah. Yeah. So and then I think um, Kalsi is another one. And like the one that too that we use in the backend is uh, Brex.

• 58:31Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, you use Brex?

• 58:32Speaker 00

  We use Brex.

• 58:33Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Yep. So it's like we, we get inspiration from the consumer side on like the Robin Hoods, the Wee Bowls, the the Duolingo's, the Apples. But on the, the B to B side, like we use Brex and it's cool to see the simplicity of kind of how they do the different expenses and they can kind of break it down. Because what we're building on our side too is like a pilot portal.

• 58:52Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  Where like if you're a creator like unusual whales, you can't use the app. You need to have your own portal. You know, you can go into the autopilot portal and make your trades and do whatever. A lot of that inspiration I think comes from Brex and their team.

• 59:05Molly O'Shea?

  They're super data oriented, right? So it's like a whole dashboard.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. And they're simple. Like that's, I think like people make these things too complicated.

• 59:14Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  And it's like just, you know, I just want five or six answers, you know, I don't need to have a billion different tabs. I need to have a billion different options. Just find out what you want, find out what I want and Brex does a good job with this. And then like, don't distract me from that, you know, don't make it harder for me to originally do what I want to do with steps. I don't know if this is the right move, but we haven't been very public about like the fundraising and things like that.

• 59:39Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. Do you want to talk about that a little bit more like?

• 59:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:42Molly O'Shea?

  When did you first receive funding? How did you know you wanted to get the next round?

• 59:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:46Molly O'Shea?

  Who did you raise from? How much in total?

• 59:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. And when we started, we never saw like the fundraising as like a set of accomplishments. We saw it more of just like, this is what we need to be able to get to the next step. That's why I don't think we've done a public, um, announcement. Yeah. So, yeah, parade or anything. We haven't been on the tech crunches or anything like that. And we've done three different.

• 1:00:09Molly O'Shea?

  But you will have an exclusive on sorcery the next round.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  That's so that.

• 1:00:13Molly O'Shea?

  Yes.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  If, once we do that, we're coming to you. We're coming to you.

• 1:00:16Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. Cause we haven't done an A yet. So like, we're at eight figures in revenue and we have like growth funds hitting us up, but I, I, we don't need the money. You know, we're in a good spot. Um, we've been pretty capital efficient too. But like to date, I think we've raised around six or seven million.

• 1:00:32Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  Um, we've raised from Kraft. Kraft is like probably our biggest traditional, um, venture fund. Nomad from James and Chris. They're awesome. They've done two rounds with us. Um, next fund out of Florida, a small guy, um, but he put in a good amount. He bet on us when we were at the Irish days. He deserves a lot of credit. And then a pre-seed round back in 2020 with, um, Billy Draper from, um, Path VC. He's been cool.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  Incline Ventures, they, they were the guys behind, um, can't remember, um, tightly. They, they, they like, they're building out like software for churches. I think it's a cool business.

• 1:01:08Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  It's smart.

• 1:01:09Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  It's like one of those non-sexy businesses that needs to be, uh, brought into the 21st century.

• 1:01:14Molly O'Shea?

  Churches know how to make money.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  Churches know how to make money. Yeah. And like what's, I go to my church in Santa Monica and like, they still expect me to carry cash around.

• 1:01:21Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  Like, dude, I don't have cash.

• 1:01:23Molly O'Shea?

  Put it in the basket.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. I got none of that. It's like, just give me a Venmo little button.

• 1:01:28Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, God.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  So they've been great and that, that, I think not raising a lot has helped us get to where we are now. Cause if you give a creative team a massive, um, budget, and again, like, I'm a, I do the creative. So I'm just speaking on that, our behalf, but, uh, if you give a creative team a big budget, they naturally and like instinctively are going to cut corners around creativity to drive growth. It's just natural. And like we, we've had a little bit of this where we've tested out paid marketing. We've tested out performance marketing, never done influencer marketing, but, um,

• 1:02:03Molly O'Shea?

  You are the influencers.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, we rebuilt. Yeah, we built our influencers from the ground up. That's a good way to put it. But are we gonna do an A? Probably. I don't know how much we'll raise. I don't know what we need, but we also need the right partner because it's fintech and it's, you know, whether you like it or not, it still is sort of political. So we're waiting for the, like, we're having conversations with all of them.

• 1:02:25Molly O'Shea?

  Do you run into troubles with the political standpoint?

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  No, no, all of our investors are fully backed it.

• 1:02:32Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  And like, I've even kind of, I've gone back and forth with a couple of them being like, hey, you know, I'm gonna go on Tucker, I'm gonna do, you know, I'm gonna tweet this, I'm gonna tweet that. And they're like, yep, fully support it. Like, they've all been about it. They've always kind of been a little bit like, understand the downside of it. Like with Tucker, be careful because, you know, I think Tucker was great. He was the first person that ever gave us a long-winded conversation. And he was this, like, springboard for the conversations like this.

• 1:03:01Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  But there, there still is downsides to it. Like, when we posted on Instagram, you would get the comments being like, I can't believe you're talking to Tucker. And it's like, relax, you know? But our VC, our investors have been very supportive, 100%.

• 1:03:15Molly O'Shea?

  He does great interviews. I listen to them. And sometimes I tweet about them, like the one with the Casey Means. I was like, you know, don't hate me for tweeting about this, but this is incredible and like really good data, so I'm gonna share.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And like, he'll have people on that you won't agree with. And it's like, look, it's just a podcast. It's not like, it's, it's not the end of the world. And like, we, we fully will go on Trevor Noah, we'll go on The Late Show with Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart had AOC on, like, we'll fully go on all of them. Because, again, like, I will die in the hill that we are non-political. We are very bipartisan. We call out more Republicans probably than Democrats. But we just have the Pelosi tracker name that I think people are like, oh, you're, you're just one of the...

• 1:03:59Molly O'Shea?

  Spicy.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. But it works. And I, I also do think it's creating change. I don't think we, the movement would be here right now if it wasn't for just the hypocrisy that there's $350 million literally following their trades. Like, if that isn't a sign that things are crazy.

• 1:04:17Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  I don't know what could be.

• 1:04:19Molly O'Shea?

  Right.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  So like, being able to publicly talk about that, I think has brought the entire movement forward.

• 1:04:25Molly O'Shea?

  So what are you looking forward to most in this next year? And what are the goals that you're trying to hit?

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  I am excited to take on the next like evolution with autopilot where I think, you know, again, like, I don't think that we're some world-class 10x, you know, 100x marketers. I genuinely do think like on the marketing side, we got lucky with just how polarizing and how well Pelosi did, you know? So I try and stay humble on our team to be like, look, we really haven't built anything massive yet. We still got to get to that, but the next stage of it is where like the money can be made. The actual change can happen and the product side, they will fully understand it. The backend team and the marketing team, we're all on the same wavelength with that. And like the analogy we like to say is like with Pokemon, you started out with Charmander and then you go to Charmeleon and you go to Charizard.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  Like we were Pelosi tracker is Charmander. Pelosi tracker is like autopilot will let you copy Nancy Pelosi. That's Charmander. We got to take on the next like evolution of it, which is partnering with creators, allowing them to build a business, supporting them, you know, our, one of the businesses on our platform makes over like easily over six figures a year. And it's just like, they're putting stuff up. We don't want to be too public with the numbers, but um, these guys are doing well. And like, there's random people on Twitter that you've never heard of that are making 78, 9K a month in revenue. That's I think like where the fun part can really, really start and it's a challenge though.

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  It's not, it's not for the faint of, no, that's probably the wrong way to say it. It's not, it's hard to give up the success and kind of turn the page on what's worked for you to a brand new slate of like this very well could not work.

• 1:06:15Molly O'Shea?

  Right.

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  You know, the markets could fall 40%. That probably is not good for us, but that's not good for everybody. It's like, so what do we do? How do we survive? Do we have to do a series A? Do we want to hold dilution? Do we want to take a strategic investor? Do we want to allow people to launch more and more portfolios? That's all going to be found out in the next year and I just, I get excited by it because it's the challenge of like, we'll see like, we got to put our big boy pants on and like, like rip the Band-Aid and see what happens.

• 1:06:43Molly O'Shea?

  Right. That's super exciting. Chris, thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:06:48Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you for the amazing hat.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:06:51Molly O'Shea?

  So excited.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  One of one.

• 1:06:55Molly O'Shea?

  I'm gonna wear it everywhere.

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, do it.

• 1:06:57Molly O'Shea?

  All right, well, thanks for coming on. This was a pleasure and I'm so excited for you to share it all over the internet.

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  Yep, yep. Next thing is Rogan.

• 1:07:06Molly O'Shea?

  Rogan, he's coming for you.

• 1:07:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, we'll see.