#458: Rameez Tase on Subscription Business Models

Rameez Tase is co-founder & CEO of ANTENNA Analytics, a new media measurement company using an advanced data approach to provide analytics for subscription businesses. Previously, he was VP of Audience Growth & Analytics at Axios and Mic, where he led performance marketing, customer retention, content insights, and data analytics teams. In this conversation, we discuss modern media companies, the subscription business model, what is working for the world class subscription businesses, and why data is so important for anyone looking to grow their product and subscribers. ======================= Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. ======================= Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains. ======================= LVL is a new crypto investing platform that I'm an investor in. They allow anyone to trade an unlimited number of times per month for free. They have no trading fees and no spreads in the spot market. If you buy or sell more than $500 in Bitcoin on any exchange, you're spending too much on trading fees. Use LVL to save money and trade as many times you want. https://lvl.co/pomp =======================

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Ramiz Tais is co-founder and CEO of Antenna Analytics, a new media measurement company using an advanced data approach to provide analytics for subscription businesses. Previously, he was VP of Audience Growth and Analytics at Axios and Mike, where he led performance marketing, customer retention, content insights, and data analytics teams. In this conversation, we discuss modern media companies, the subscription business model, what is working for the world-class subscription businesses, and why data is so important for anyone looking to grow their product and their subscribers. I really enjoyed

• 0:42Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:31Speaker 01

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

• 3:56Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Rameez here. Thank you so much for doing this, sir.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Thank you, Pomp. And you're calling from Miami, the trendiest place to be in technology nowadays.

• 4:09Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Let's jump right into your background, kind of help everyone understand where did you grow up and what did you do before you started the company?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a proud immigrant. I grew up in India, or I was born in India, but I grew up mostly in New Jersey and we just did the stereotypical thing and moved back from the city. So I'm embracing my roots on the other side of it. I spent the last better part of this decade in digital media, particularly thinking about growth and analytics. Before that, I had a brief stint in finance and I'll tell you what, my first day on the job, I knew it would be a limited stint, but I put five hard years in in between anyways. And so, look, I think, when I think about the last seven, eight

• 5:01Speaker 02

  years that I've focused on digital media, I think there's one really key theme, one thing that has just been a through line for the entire time. And that's this idea that the metrics that we were choosing to optimize our businesses for, they just weren't the right ones. And it grew from this kind of intuition, this inkling, to something that was just one of the strongest points of conviction I had in my entire personality. I spent a lot of time pounding the table that the idea of scale for scale's sake was wrong in media. And, you know, I think we've kind of seen how that's turning out. And look, the idea is you can't win on scale because you're always competing with Facebook,

• 5:45Speaker 02

  who's going to have a lot more scale than any one media company is going to build. And in that world, you have to win on loyalty, on retention, on customer lifetime. And those are different metrics that most media companies had no experience, right? And if you think about the typical media company, it was a wholesaler, it was a B2B company that sold directly to telcos or to whoever. This new world, it's a direct to consumer operation that needs to fight for those customers every single day. And until we pick those metrics to optimize our businesses around, I think media is going to be in a tough place for years to come.

• 6:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so let's break down kind of this two really antithetical worlds, right? One is let's go as broad as possible. Let's get as big of an audience as we possibly can. And then the other is maybe we want some scale, but really what we're focused on is kind of making sure there's no holes in the bucket, right? We want to really work on retention and loyalty and customer lifetime value. Let's start first with the first bucket. Who does that well? And then what are the downsides to the like, let's go after broad scale type business model?

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Look, I think the people that do that well do not consider themselves media companies. I think YouTube, Facebook, Google, they all do that extremely well.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  And the reason they're able to do that extremely well is they can source content without necessarily paying for it from every corner of the world. And so they can serve every constituency quite well without the economics turning upside down. I think when you think about the other version, which is picking a lane and growing meaningfully to a big scale within that lane, there's tons of examples out there. There's individual creators, your YouTube creator, that really serve one audience, whether it's Marcus Brownlee or others on YouTube. There's big media companies like the New York Times and others that are focusing that strategy. And what we're seeing in the streaming world as well is kind of resembling that.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  But look, I think what makes that possible is fundamentally, the internet is a global community. And so when you say, hey, we're going to target this niche, well, this niche is a whole lot more people in terms of the addressable market than it was even 10 years ago, and certainly more. And so each niche has a massive, massive audience. And by the way, whether you have 100 people in your audience and you charge them a dollar each, or you have one person in your audience and you charge them $100, you're making the same amount of money. That dollar amount that each person's willing to pay has kind of been historically very underestimated for the right product.

• 8:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Elaborate on that a little bit, right? When you say that it's been underestimated, I guess, what's kind of the historical view on readers' willingness to pay? And then, kind of, where do you think people have been misguided? Like, what maybe is the actual truth that you're discovering?

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, look, our data shows that people have multiple subscriptions for each individual subscriber, and that's even more when you think about it at the household level. And that number has continued to grow for the last three years unencumbered. So people do have more of an appetite for this than I think we initially thought. And, you know, this idea of subscription fatigue, it hasn't come true yet. What we know will happen, and what happens in almost every mature commerce industry, is people manage their budget, they have a set amount, and if they get this thing from the grocery store, they put this other thing back on the shelf. And I don't think we're there yet. That's not what the data shows.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  And even once we get there, there's so much opportunity for multiple subscriptions within that wallet, because during football season, you might have your one portfolio of three subscriptions, but then in the spring or summer, during kind of hit movie season, you might have another portfolio. And so even if you only have room for three subscriptions at one time, you might have room for 12 over the course of the year. And so there's actually tons of room for many more media brands to exist for kind of each use case or person or psychographic, and we're not there yet.

• 10:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's start a little bit about the company that you're building today. What was the impetus for the idea? And what does the product look like?

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, look, I told you that myself and actually my co-founder Jonathan, we'd spent a lot of time pounding the table about these metrics and reorienting the businesses that we were at to focus on customer funnels, retention, lifetime value. Well, we thought, wouldn't it be great if we could help more than one company at once? And really, hence, Antenna was born. So what does Antenna do? It's a measurement analytics company for subscription media businesses. And it's built on this premise that in a world where distribution is fixed, people don't cancel their cable subscriptions after they watch football on NFL on Sunday.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  You just need to think about viewership. It's easy. In a world where people do cancel CBS All Access, for example, the day after they watch a bunch of NFL games, you can't just think about viewership because you don't have a subscriber in the first place who's watching. And so we're basically bringing all of those metrics we've spent a lot of time thinking about and sharing them transparently across the entire industry. These companies have a ton of data on their own customers. But what's the churn rate when you don't know if it's good or bad? Right? What's attainable without any sort of benchmarking or competitive intel? And by the way, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, they're not exactly prone to share information like that. It's really hard to know whether you're doing well or not.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  And by the way, Netflix can have all the information about its own customer as possible. When it's operating in a crowded marketplace of other alternatives, chances are someone doesn't cancel Netflix because of something Netflix did. It's because of something over there that someone else is doing. And so that context really, really matters. And that's essentially what Antenna exists to provide.

• 11:55Anthony Pompliano?

  So this entire trend towards subscription media, obviously, we see everyone from The New York Times executing this with millions of subscribers down to a lot of kind of substacks trying to get to 100 fans, 1,000 fans. What's driving this trend or this focus on subscription? Is it literally just out of necessity?

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Well, I think there's a couple of things. I think once the cat is out of the bag, once Netflix and Spotify exist and they show people that they can get only what they want, it's hard to put that genie in the bottle. I'm mixing metaphors there. And I want to be clear. There are tremendous benefits to bundled media. The bundle is not fundamentally bad and it will likely exist again at some point. But the specific place we were at with the cable bundle and the media bundle more broadly prior to Netflix was too much content that not enough people cared for. And there was a variety of reasons that drove that. And so there was this incredible opportunity for unbundling.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  And look, people have a variety of interests and there have been subscription properties that have formed with each of those interests and people are more or less loving it at the moment. The other part of it is this kind of price times volume equation I laid out earlier. If you're only going to go after a certain subset of the market, you want to drive a much higher average revenue per subscriber or user. And one of the best ways to do that is user-generated revenue because the rates there are just much higher than advertising, which is the obvious alternative. I think those two things coming together have really driven the boom in subscriptions.

• 13:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk about what the best in the world, the world-class media companies are doing. When you think about retention, churn, average lifetime value, what are just benchmarks or milestones that you think of, hey, this puts somebody in that world-class bucket? Obviously, I understand there's not that many that accomplish this, but is there 90% churn after 12 months or an average lifetime value of $200 plus? What's the framework that you use to think through what's world-class and what's not?

• 14:12Speaker 02

  I always like putting it in this kind of rule of thumb. If you have an 8% average monthly churn rate, roughly all of your users churn out each year. It's pretty easy when you say that and then you ask, do you think you could run a successful business based on that type of user? People are like, yeah, you probably can't. That's probably not a good number. And to compare that to Netflix, for example, which I think people widely agree is one of the best subscription media businesses ever built, their monthly number is closer to 3%. And so, but there's a lot that are not 3%, there's a lot that are closer to 8%.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  And so, I just thinking about, thinking about that rule of thumb of, if you had your user last for less than a year and then they were gone, and that happened for every single user in your user base, do you think you could build this business? I think that's such an easy rule of thumb, and it's essentially 8 point something percent that that's the number.

• 15:14Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, when you think through the reasons for high churn, right? Let's call 8%, it gets you to that high churn. Is this something that the content's bad? Is it that it's mispriced? Like, what do you see as some of the common mistakes that media operators are making that leads to that high churn?

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's, let's put it in three to four different categories. The first, you mentioned is pricing, right? That's a definite category and we see, and it differs over time for different services, but pricing increases do have an impact on churn rate. With some services, it's a one-time impact because they do have a ton of loyal users. With others, it's kind of a never-ending impact where people continue to churn because they're, they're just not as loyal.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  The second is obviously, what's the programming on there?

• 16:04Speaker 02

  And this is really important for, especially streamers, but in a world where you're maximizing viewership and what you want is the Super Bowl or Game of Thrones, because if you have one of those marquee shows, you're going to really, really make your, make or break your year.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  The way you program, the way you commission content is dramatically different than when you're trying to give someone who signed up yesterday some reason not to cancel every day for the next year or more. It's a dramatically different programming model, and certainly Hollywood has not kind of fully grogged that, that a programming model, but I think people will. And I think what you'll see there is a shift to deeper catalogs. Different kind of jobs to be done of content, whether one piece is to get you to sign up and the rest is to get you to stay. So I think that's another big reason. And then a third one is brand, right? Who are you for?

• 17:02Speaker 02

  This is another thing where the old way of doing it is almost antithetical, as you said earlier, to the new way of doing it. Old way, drive viewership, attract as many eyeballs as possible. People don't get more eyeballs, so you have two per person. So at a certain point, you need more people, right? Well, the flip side of that is find a niche and get them to pay you more and more and more. They have more than two eyeballs in terms of dollars, right? They can pay you 20 times, they can pay you an exponential amount more. So if you just hyper-serve that one niche in terms of your branding and you say, "This is who we are for," you can do a lot better than ever before. But it is, again, a contrasting philosophy to where a lot of these folks started, and it's gonna be a transition.

• 17:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there a world where you get coexistence? Like, you have kind of, let's go after the mass audience, let's use CPM or CAC type of pricing for that really wide-reaching, kind of lowest denominator type audience, but we're also gonna supplement it with subscription-type products? Or do you feel like people have to commit one way or the other? Like, is there kind of multiple models? Or do you feel the best in the world commit one way or the other?

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Top, I think there's some really smart Harvard Business School professors that are thinking through whether vertical integration as a strategy, which is an incredible strategy in boardrooms, is possible in execution. And so this idea of focus, can a telco company be a media company? Can a theme park company be a media company? All of those things.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  It is an important question to ask. Certainly, it's harder in execution than in strategy. Is it impossible in execution? I don't know. I do know if someone is able to execute it well, it's very valuable. And let's just take it for granted that it is possible right now. Well, in that strategy, you do have tiers. So these two things can coexist. You do have a top of the funnel where it is more broad-based. It is more fleeting. The consumption is more passive. And you might be known to everyone in the world or certainly a large swath of people. Below that, some percentage of that big audience, they might want to go deeper. They might be the hyper fans that want to meet the personalities, the creators. They want to go to the theme parks. They want swag.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  And those two things can coexist. And I would say, you know, in addition to it's hard because incentives aren't always aligned. And the place where brands that want to be successful right now should focus most of their time on is those building those deep relationships. Because let's face it, we all kind of know how to build big scale businesses. That playbook has been written a thousand times over. Building real direct-to-consumer relationships, that's a new skill. That requires a lot more thinking. We're not mature in that way at all. And so there's a lot more work to be done there. But they can coexist, I think. It's hard.

• 20:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And in that world, is this when you talk about subscription media, right? The let's go wide. I think you did a great job highlighting that's YouTube, that's Netflix, that's or I'm sorry, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, all of those. But in subscription, we've really only seen kind of two models. One is a hard paywall where I'm going to ram you into the paywall and there's written content or there is video content, right? And so you see on the written side, obviously, the New York Times has done a great job of this. Business Insider, there's a bunch of these businesses that have really started to kind of figure out how to grow that subscriber base. On the video side, you've seen things like MasterClass, you've seen Netflix.

• 20:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What we haven't heard a lot about is subscription podcasts or audio, for example. I feel like people have pontificated a little bit like, oh, that should be a thing because there's written content, there's video, like, why not audio? But we haven't seen anything really, really work yet. Is that just the market hasn't matured yet? Or is there something else that's kind of holding that back from development?

• 21:14Speaker 02

  I don't know if you'd call it original sin in the podcast. And by the way, just taking a step back, the way we define consumer entertainment, I think there's two things that really differentiate us from the nihilists of the world and what others do. The first I've really highlighted, it's this focus on purchase behavior and not viewership. The second is how we define consumer entertainment. It's not just big horizontal media. It's gaming, it's audio, it's user-generated content, it's edutainment or infotainment, as MasterClass might think of them, it's health and wellness. And so if you're a consumer, you are making trade-offs, not just between HBO Max and Netflix, but between HBO Max, Netflix, and MasterClass, and maybe Peloton.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  So that's the second edge in which we think uniquely. To go back to your original question on podcasts, I don't know if you'd call this original sin or not, but one of the original sins of the podcast industry was that these incredibly talented creators, who often went through big media brands, used advertising as their primary method of funding their podcasts. And I think where that goes is a platform. I think Spotify is really making a push here, captures a bulk of the value as they build tools and automation into the system. And so the logical end for podcasting right now is an ecosystem where

• 22:40Speaker 02

  there's unbelievably talented creators, a plethora of them. There's a discovery and monetization layer, it might be Spotify, and that discovery and monetization layer captures a bulk of the value because any individual creator struggles to stand out or have leverage there. I think the biggest creators will likely then circumvent that or use that as a marketing tool. And I know, I'm sure you think about this all the time. I know Sam Harris thinks about this, and I know others do. But for someone who has the level of engagement and brand and depth of relationship, Spotify in this example, it doesn't just become your only monetization layer.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  It becomes your marketing funnel and it might be audio products, but it might be non-audio products and there's a whole set of vertical monetization you can create there. But that's not going to be available to everyone. And I think for someone to just say, hey, I'm going to do a podcast and by the way, it's going to be paid is going to be really tough because you're basically competing with a ton of free stuff out there and not in a differentiated way. But to contrast that with something like Sam Harris's meditation app, which is an audio-driven experience, there's going to be a huge market for things like that, in my opinion. So I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I'm sure you've thought about it quite a bit as well.

• 24:05Anthony Pompliano?

  No, look, I think that makes a ton of sense. To me, really, it just comes down to are you optimizing for only economic benefit or are you optimizing for other things as well? And I think that this kind of idea of having multiple products for a brand or an individual really drives a lot of that as well because there is a trade-off. If you want to optimize for revenue, yes, you should go subscription only and you should go get people behind that paywall over a long period of time, but that does kill a lot of the virality, that kills a lot of the growth and things like that. So I think maybe Sam's probably one of the people who's figured out kind of this medium ground where some of the episode is out in front of the paywall and then it hits you with a hard paywall. If you don't listen to the rest, you gotta go pay. So I think that there will be more innovation there, but it is a very interesting thing

• 24:50Anthony Pompliano?

  because I think there's people like Luminary and others who've kind of taken stabs at it, but no one seems to have really nailed it. I know Andrew Wilkinson and a bunch of people working on Supercast, they're trying and that platform's pretty interesting. So we'll see what happens. I want to talk a little bit about your guys' platform. Tell us, if I end up coming in and I use the product, like how does the product actually work and what are the insights that I can glean from it that maybe I wouldn't be able to get out of Google Analytics or some other analytics service?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. So it is focused on purchase behavior and subscription metrics. And so if you are a streamer and you want to benchmark any of your key metrics against the market, signups, trial conversion, churn rate, retention, et cetera, you would come to us and you'd be able to do that and you'd be able to track that over time.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Beyond that, you might have amazing first-party data and you might know your own churn rate, I hope you do, but what you don't necessarily know is how is my churn rate impacted by other market events? A big promotion at one of my competitors, a big programming release, a new launch of a service? What we can do, because we can go much deeper, is say, what's the Netflix churn rate for users who also signed up to Disney Plus in the month that it launched versus the churn rate that did not? And so Netflix would then know, oh wow, users who sign up to Disney Plus are X percent more likely to switch. And so that competitive intel.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  And then lastly, and again, it's because of the depth of the data, understanding how to make, it's not the silver bullet, anyone that tells you they have data that is run fast away, but decisions like pricing, content valuation, promotions and offer strategy, distribution, understanding, for example, what's the difference in churn rates between the app stores, the channels, environments, true direct-to-consumer billing, and where should I focus most of my marketing and product team's time based on that? What's the customer lifetime value profile of each? That helps you make those distribution and product decisions in a way that hasn't been available in the market today. Because look, none of the platforms are really apt to share much data.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  If you go talk to Apple and Amazon, they don't share a whole lot with their partners.

• 27:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. And how are you guys collecting this data? I think that's one of the things people are always fascinated by. Like you have so much data and it's so robust. How exactly are you capturing it?

• 27:17Speaker 02

  I'm glad you asked. I think it's a really unique data strategy because it allows us to provide day zero value. We're not asking you to give us your data in order to provide something. I think that sort of, you know, going in a different direction, I think that sort of kind of long SaaS integration process always kills software startups, early days. We're partnering with a number of really popular consumer apps. Those apps might help you manage your budget or clean up your inbox. And those apps are generally free. Consumers opt in very explicitly to share certain data, transaction data, email receipt data, and kind of other psychographic data with the apps and their

• 28:01Speaker 02

  partners. And so what we're getting, it's anonymous, but it's persistent over time. User 123 signed up to Netflix two years ago. They canceled Netflix 30 days ago, and they immediately signed up to Peacock. That's how we're putting the metrics together. And what I love about it is, at the end of the day, those consumers that are sharing the data, they're actually getting a value because these companies that provide them the entertainment they love day in and day out are making smarter decisions because of the data they're providing, which I love that it's kind of a virtuous cycle at the end of the day.

• 28:34Anthony Pompliano?

  You guys have built this amazing product, but you've raised capital, you've put a lot of really smart people around the table. Talk a little bit about the fundraising strategy to date, who the investors are, and kind of the logic behind partnering with those investors over others.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we raised a little bit over $4 million, and it was led by a fund called Rain Ventures. They're the VC fund of a really big media merchant bank called the Rain Group, which a lot of people know. And a ton of great angels supported as well, including a bunch of media and technology founders, executives. We did that a few weeks ago, actually. And it was, look, fundraising is not success, but it certainly allows you to hire and operate to get there. There's a couple of reasons why we really thought now was the right time to fundraise.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  And I think it'll sound familiar to people who have built successful startups before. We're early in our journey, but you can feel this moment when you have momentum and product market fit. And I'll put it in maybe four phases. The first is I don't know if I can curse in this podcast, but fuck it. Let's try some shit. Right? That's the that's the pre-seed phase, maybe. The second is, hey, this problem we have identified is real, is valuable, and people really care. Whether or not we have the right solution, I couldn't tell you. The third is, hey, our product is starting to push some of the right buttons for this huge problem we've identified.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  And the fourth is, whoa, it's working, scale, scale, scale, build process. I would say we're very early on in the third one. The problem we've identified definitely exists. The urgency is there. We've heard it countless times, hundreds of times.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  And some of the things we're doing might not be it, but it's in the neighborhood. We know that this focus on purchase behavior is what people are interested in. We know that this data is not easily available other places. We know people are trying to make pricing, distribution decisions, and they feel naked in terms of the data that they have. And so because we feel like we're at that kind of beginning of the third cycle, we thought, look, we need to raise some money right now to accelerate building our own product so we can recognize this incredible urgent problem that we've identified. And that's kind of the rationale for why we did it. Rain stands for themselves in terms of why we chose to partner with them.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  And so I won't talk too much about them, but only a couple of weeks in, and they have blown me away in terms of their sophistication and how leaned in they are.

• 31:19Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Talk to me about how you guys make money. A lot of people hear this, they'll say, hey, the product's amazing. You've got great partners. How do you guys plan to make money?

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Our customers subscribe to the data and essentially it's syndicated research, which is a bunch of reports essentially, and raw data as well as some analyst hours. And the idea and how market measurement has worked in a number of paradigms and industries before us is we provide this data that's differentiated and we stamp it with our kind of seal of approval. So the methodology is very well understood and trusted. And our customers build IP around it so they think about the right questions to ask of the data. And they ask those questions over and over. And look, their competitor might not be as crafty or smart. And that's kind of the value that the data brings. But even when everyone has it,

• 32:13Speaker 02

  there's more value on top of that because there's some groups that are really smart in how they use the data. And so that's kind of how we make money and why it's valuable long term.

• 32:24Anthony Pompliano?

  A subscription business model for somebody who analyzes a subscription model.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Exactly. Very meta.

• 32:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Very meta. Absolutely shocking.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  And by the way, by the way, on that note, I think a lot of people like the idea of a subscription business model because hey, recurring revenue is cool. That's a great outcome, but I think people should start to analyze that problem a little bit more from first principles. For us, the reason a subscription made sense is that the market changes every day, every week. I mean, just the streaming market alone. You have HBO Max putting all of their movies direct to S5, Warner Media putting all their movies direct to HBO Max. And you have Disney releasing a dozen Pixar and Marvel movies direct to their platform. You have Paramount Plus and Discovery Plus launching in just a few weeks.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Every day, every week, every month, there is a new story. And so if we were just to do one time engagements, our customers would miss a lot of how that changes. And in a world that's this dynamic, you don't want to, you don't want to be left out on that.

• 33:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's so fascinating. Before I let you go, I always ask everyone the same two questions. You'll get to ask me one to wrap us up here. The first question is, what is the most important book that you've ever read? And I'm going to change it. What is just the most important subscription business that you've either paid or content you've consumed from?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Awesome. That's a good question. I have to say Stratechery, which is Ben Thompson's, I would call it blog, but it's really much, much more than a blog.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  I'm sure you've gotten that answer before. Shritekari for me was the foundation of how I understand the world today. When it comes to media and technology, which is by the way, what I spend more time thinking about than any other one thing in my life. And it really was, it's stemming from this idea that in a world where everyone is your audience and reaching everyone in the world is extremely cheap with marketing platforms like Facebook or Google. Getting a huge audience is not valuable because anyone can do it. And so if anyone can do it, how do you build value? The way you build value is to create deep lasting relationships with users such that

• 34:44Speaker 02

  they stay retained and they continue to pay you money such that their customer lifetime value is bigger. So it really ties back to what I'm doing right now with antenna. And so I have to credit Ben there for that.

• 34:58Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a fantastic answer. Aliens, are you a believer or a non believer?

• 35:04Speaker 02

  I'm sure you've read Tim Urban, who runs Way But Wise Fermi Paradox. I just don't know how you could read that and not believe in aliens. And then when you look at the complexity of the world today and you look at how insufficient human IQ or the way we approach it is, it just, there has to be more, right?

• 35:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, I'm a believer. Everyone knows that I believe. I don't know if Ben to earth, I don't know if we're going to meet them. I don't know if they're little green men, but I definitely think there's intelligent life somewhere in the universe is just too big. But you know, the more grand you go into some of the conspiracy theories, maybe I'm not there, but that's okay. You could ask me one question to finish up. What do you got for me?

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Tom, do you want a Bitcoin question or a non Bitcoin question? Or should I ask both?

• 35:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Go ahead, fire away with both.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Awesome. On the Bitcoin question, look, the internet was created with the idea that there is no scarcity, there's zero marginal costs for distribution. Yet you guys are all obsessing with this digitally scarce property. I don't get it. Tell me why those two things can simultaneously exist.

• 36:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, I think that the whole key to this is, basically, it comes down to provability, right? So the idea was always the internet. Take a music file, for example. If I said to you, hey, you know, or I had a music file and you wanted it, you should send that new Kanye song. I hit press send. And the way that the internet works is basically they would copy the file, send it to you. You didn't know if you had the original or the kind of copy, and neither did I. Didn't matter. I could listen to the song, you could listen to the song, everyone was happy. When you now want those digital files to represent assets, whether they're stocks, bonds, currencies, or commodities, you need provability, you need authenticity, you need to be able to prove scarcity, right? That's what makes the financial assets work. And so you could even argue that there's scarcity in the existing

• 36:59Anthony Pompliano?

  financial system, right? In terms of everything is an electronic Q-cиф, it's just in a centralized database. So it's really no different than using electronic Q-cips. The difference here is there's not a centralized database, there's a decentralized one. And so I think that, you know, it's kind of one of these weird things, like something isn't a thing until it becomes a thing. And that's like a perfect example. So, you know, it's, it's unique, but, but it's working so far. And so I tend not to try to overthink it and just say, hey, it became a thing, and I don't think it's going to stop. And I don't want to short that trend.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Awesome. I love that answer. Okay, my non Bitcoin question, which I think is the most important one and a great place to close. And I'm sure you did too, but I think we both grew up in a world where leadership was defined by alpha males ruling by, by force.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  You actually get to a position of leadership and you realize that you're a servant to your team and decision making is so decentralized that you need all of them to feel like owners and leaders. It takes a tremendous amount of EQ and it's something I think you're uniquely equipped with. But tell me, what are the, what are the secrets or what's one secret that you use to get people to open up and be so free of any sort of walls or guards when they talk to you?

• 38:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think there's two things. So we specifically talk about like people that I work with. One of the, you know, big rules and kind of lessons I learned in a lot of these military leadership schools was always the idea that the leader eats last. And it's such a simple concept, right? But it's basically like your job is to take care of everyone else and you eat last. And so literally when I was deployed in Iraq, like we would go to the chow hall to eat and you would see sergeants or officers wait and they would literally count all of their guys going up to go eat. You know, these are coming off infantry missions, dudes are starving and all stuff. But if everyone else eats first, then I'll eat. And it comes from a world of like, hey, there might not be enough food left type situation, right? But it's still this idea that

• 39:00Anthony Pompliano?

  like, I am the least important person here because you are as, as the person that's being led, doing the activity, right? And so you are much more important. The second thing that I'll kind of highlight is, and I forget who it is, it might be Daniel Eck, I can't remember, but rather than be a pyramid, recently in Polina's The Profile, it talks about inverting the pyramid. So a lot of people think like, I'm at the top of the pyramid, I'm the most important person. But if you actually invert it and think about, I'm the bottom of an upside down pyramid, now all of a sudden, I am here to basically serve everyone else above me. And so that's like a really unique kind of visual framework. And the last thing in terms of getting people to open up is, I just

• 39:42Anthony Pompliano?

  ask them what they care about, specifically when I work with them, right? And I say to them, like, what is your goal? Right? I just went through this with a couple of guys that I work with. And I specifically said, what's your financial goal for 2021? Right? Where do you want to be in three to five years? What is your career goal? Is that, you know, as a stepping stone in your career? Or what you're doing today, what's the path to getting there? And I'm surprised that many people just don't ask that. And so I've got some guys who they want to make a ton of money. Like that is their goal and they've got specific numbers and like, let's go help them try to hit those numbers. I've got other people who want to develop skills or learn new things or whatever. And so across all the businesses that I have, like I just try to understand like, who is this person? What are they trying to accomplish? And if I can empower them to accomplish that goal, then ultimately like they're going to be happy.

• 40:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And I'm going to feel good because I've got a bunch of people who have been successful in accomplishing what they want that I work with. And so it's just a win win.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  That's, that's a really incredible answer. So we can leave the audience with two things. One, ask people what you, what they care about when you talk to them. And two, leaders eat last.

• 40:47Anthony Pompliano?

  That is, that is definitely true. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find more about antenna?

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, my Twitter is twitter.com/ramiztase, R A M E E Z T A S E. And antenna.live is our website.

• 41:07Anthony Pompliano?

  You, your Twitter feed is full of insights around media and subscription businesses. So highly, highly recommend. And folks can go check out the product, but listen, thank you so much for doing this. We'll see you again in the future.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Awesome, Pomp. Happy holidays.