Episode 24: Anthony Pompliano - CEO of Professional Capital Management

0:00This week, I'm honored to sit down with none other than Anthony Pompliano, my youngest guest to date, entrepreneur, investor, and one of the most influential voices in digital assets in next-generation finance. Widely known simply as Pomp, he's built a powerful platform at the intersection of technology, investing, and media that reaches millions. After serving in the U.S. Army, Anthony worked at Facebook alongside Mark Zuckerberg, followed by a stint at Snapchat, before making his way into venture capital and crypto. He co-founded Morgan Creek Digital and has backed dozens of early-stage companies and become one of Bitcoin's most vocal and widely followed champions.

0:38Despite being early in his career, Anthony's accomplishments are already significant, and his perspective on the future of tech, markets, and media is as sharp as it is forward-looking. In this conversation, we explore his journey from the military to Silicon Valley, his approach to asymmetrical bets, the future of decentralized finance, and how he's built trust and reach in an increasingly crowded digital world. I enjoyed this conversation and I hope you guys do too. If you're a fan of the podcast, I would greatly appreciate it if you could subscribe to the YouTube channel and give it a five-star rating on Spotify.

1:10If you know anyone who might find this interesting, please share it. I think there's a lot of valuable insights in these episodes that could benefit a lot of people. Great to have you on, Anthony. You're my youngest guest yet. I appreciate you taking the time. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. So I'd like to start where I always do, kind of your upbringing and your foundation. Tell me a little bit about your upbringing, but also you and your two brothers are all very successful. How do you think the environment your parents kind of shaped in your household and your upbringing created an entrepreneurial spirit in you three?

1:41Yeah, look, I think that our parents were the perfect combination of disciplinarians, but also knew when to let us be boys. And, you know, I grew up in a family. There's five boys in the family. Three of us are pretty public in terms of social media and stuff. but we got two brothers who hide in the shadows. And we grew up in a house that basically encouraged competition. We competed at every single thing we did. Who could eat their food the fastest, who could race up the stairs the fastest, who could play basketball the best. Whatever the thing was, we competed at it. Probably really frustrated by parents a lot, but it was a great environment to grow up in because you're constantly – we're all just making each other better.

2:18When you got four best friends that are there with you every single day, it's pretty compelling. You later played college football and spent time in the U.S. military. You did a tour in Iraq, if I'm correct. How do you think those experiences kind of shaped your perspective going into the business world? Well, I think that there's some core similarities, right? There's obviously this idea of teamwork, there's idea of leadership, and there's this idea of there's feedback. If you don't perform, there's varying degrees of punishment or loss. Obviously, the military and college football, you know, one's life and death, the other one's not.

2:55But I do think that there's some core concepts that kind of traverse those different parts of my life. And, you know, again, it goes back to that they're all different forms of competition. And so the thing that I really like is when you have competition, you need teamwork, you need leadership, you need the ability to experience loss so you can learn and improve and continue to kind of push forward. And so I think that really those were just manifestations of how I grew up. It was just kind of, you know, taking it to the extreme. Before we get a little bit deeper, what I'd love for you to do is kind of give my listeners a bit of insight into your career.

3:29So if you'd like to kind of summarize your or give just a brief overview of your career from your time playing college football all the way up to now in around two to three minutes. Just go ahead. You have the floor. Just give us some insight. Yeah, look, I played football. I was in the Army. I deployed to Iraq in 2008, 2009. I came back, I graduated from college and from there built and sold a number of software startups. I worked at Facebook for two years on the growth team there. And then I started investing full time. During that time, I've invested in over 300 private companies and had the fortunate ability on top of that to also build a number of businesses.

4:06everything from, you know, one of the largest independent financial media companies in the world to also a number of other companies that we've incubated across everything from real estate analytics to software. And, you know, again, it's just kind of competing in the professional space. I like to think that investing is kind of the competitive sport for, you know, thinkers. And I think that building companies is, you know, a great form of competition as well in terms of can you actually solve the problem for the user and can you make the various metrics that you care about grow. I want to touch a little bit on your time at Facebook, because you worked alongside Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg with building their own pages on the platforms in Instagram and Facebook.

4:46Working alongside them, they're two of the most influential people in tech today and have been for the past couple of decades. What lessons did you take away from your time there, both at Facebook, but also just being around those two incredible leaders? Yeah, well, worked alongside is very generous of you. I was a little peon that had the opportunity to just be in the room with them. And I was excited about, you know, maybe I felt like some of their aura or whatever would rub off on me. But I did work alongside a team of two other people, sort of three of us. And really the focus was, how do we help them grow their online following?

5:19And, you know, at the time, I really didn't understand at first, like, why are we doing this? But then quickly, this whole idea of like going direct, being able to talk to your user base, talk to, you know, your constituents is obviously very important, something I've benefited from after I left. And so the things that you realize in working with these people is they're great leaders. But also, you know, there was this one meeting that I'll never forget with Mark Zuckerberg. And in the meeting, I don't even remember what we were talking about. I just remember understanding that we were having a very high level conversation.

5:49There was a screenshot in one of the slots. And he called out a very nuanced design component of the screenshot and basically was like, why is it like that? That's not how it's supposed to be. I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, wait a minute, this guy is like a multi-billionaire, runs Facebook. You know, he's thinking of a, not a bet the company type decision, but definitely a pretty big impactful thing. And yet he's able to drill down into the explicit details of literally pixels and then go back, you know, within seconds back to the high level decision. And so I think that type of range of, you know, being really focused on the high level stuff of being able to drill into the details is a great example of what it takes to run those businesses.

6:25And obviously, Zuck has done a fantastic job of building a business that I think is the envy of the world. And kind of alongside Facebook being the envy of the world, in the conversations I've had, I've noticed that culture is just extremely, extremely important. I spoke to Roger Altman recently, founder of Evercore, and he said what sets Evercore apart is really just their culture, having an excellent culture. Because you notice that Lehman Brothers, that the culture was kind of broken. My question to you about culture is you've experienced life in the military, big tech, now is an investor in crypto and in private companies.

6:57And you recently started a SPAC, which we'll talk about a little later. But what cultural similarities or differences have you noticed across those environments? Competition. The competitors want to be where they can compete. And it's no different, I think, in the NBA than it is in JV basketball, than it is in Facebook, or it is on Wall Street. You have people who are highly ambitious, they're very intelligent, they work very hard, and they're trying to figure something out. They're trying to beat the competitor. They're trying to beat the peer, right? And that is a thing that has worked throughout human histories.

7:30Whenever you have competition, it usually ends up creating a better product, ends up creating a better business, and ends up creating a better innovation. And so I think that, you know, that's the story of my life, and it's why I enjoy doing what I do. But I think that culture also shows up in, take Facebook, for example, the way that they would manifest that is they basically would put posters on the wall and they would talk about these things and, you know, move fast and break things. Think about how strong your culture has to be and move fast and break things for it literally to have permeated outside the walls of that company and now be something that every single person in the world who hears that phrase associates it with that company.

8:05Like that is such a strong culture, right? It's such a product market fit for a cultural message with a certain point in time and a certain group of people. And so I think that's really the thing that sets a lot of these companies apart is the cultures aren't the same, but the structure, that the importance of the culture, the way that they actually will hire people who are cultural fits, the way they encourage the culture, the way that they, you know, kind of operate on a day-to-day basis and live those cultural values, that is similar in every single one of these businesses, regardless of what the individual kind of cultural, you know, ethos are, regardless of the business.

8:38And I think especially keeping the culture really top of mind, especially while you're scaling up to a Facebook started off, It's tiny. It's a startup. And then it's now grown to, I don't know how many employees it has, but it's a humongous company. But keeping that culture top of mind when scaling up, I think, also is super important. And scale can sometimes also be the enemy of culture, is what I've noticed. But you're a big champion of Bitcoin. I'll talk a little bit about Bitcoin. I have a very unique audience in the sense that I have a lot of young people, high schoolers, college students that listen to my podcast and that want to go into the world of investing and finance and stuff like that.

9:11But I also have a lot of very large investors, billionaires, activist investors, people like that who tune in and listen to it just because I have an interesting array of guests that many people have not been able to get. So if you had two minutes or three minutes to pitch Bitcoin to a room of both high schoolers, college students, and kind of institutional investors, really big investors right now, how would you kind of pitch it? Well, the beauty is that all of those people have the same problem, right? Which is that we're never going to stop spending money from the government. So if government spending is out of control, then that means that the national debt is going to continue to go up.

9:44The only way to deal with the national debt is we've got to debase the currency. And so historically for decades, the way that you could get financial security in America was you could save your way to that financial freedom. Think of if you were to ask your grandparents or your great-grandparents for financial advice. They say spend less than you make, and you can live a life that most people would love to live. But now that's no longer true because the debasement of that currency is not the reported 2 % inflation. Instead, if you look at things like the money supply growth, it's closer to 8%.

10:19And so somewhere above 2 % is the actual debasement rate called 5 % to 8%. And so if your cash is being essentially evaporated at 5 % to 8%, then you need to find a solution. Now, there's a lot of solutions out there, right? You can go and you can buy stocks. You can go and you can buy real estate. You can go and you can buy gold. There's a lot of things you can do. but Bitcoin in particular was purpose-built for this problem. It's a store of value that brings all of the timeless principles of a store of value to the modern age. And so you don't need to pick an individual stock. You don't need to go and try to understand what its earnings are.

10:56You don't need to try to understand when should you buy the stock and when should you sell the stock. On the real estate, you don't need to go and get a mortgage. You don't need to go and actually look through Zillow. You don't need to go and try to find a tenant to rent it out. You don't need to make repairs to the roof. When it looks at things like gold, you don't have to try to figure out where am I going to store this big heavy thing of gold. You don't have to try to figure out how can I spend it. Bitcoin is taking all the best attributes of these other assets and it puts it into a digital asset that is decentralized, meaning that nobody else owns it, but it's also liquid and it's secure and it's available 24-7.

11:29And it can be sent to anyone in the world within seconds completely for free. And so I look at it less about Bitcoin as some magic bullet, and I look at it much more as there's a problem in the world that is shared by everyone. Whether you're 10 years old, 21 years old, or you're a billionaire, every single person has the same problem, which is if you put your wealth in cash, the government is going to inflate it away. And if that's the case, then what do you need to do? You need to find a store of value. And the store of value that the entire younger generation has chosen as their preferred store of value is Bitcoin.

12:02And so from a demographic standpoint, if young people are going to store their value in there, then naturally as time passes, that asset is going to become bigger and bigger over time. Now, of course, people will say, well, real estate's been around for as long as I've lived. Real estate's been around for centuries or gold's been around for thousands of years. What I explain to them, though, is if you're under the age of 40, 50 years old, you don't know a life that isn't have fiat currency at the center of it. So the difference between if you're, let's say, 15 years old, the difference between fiat since 1971 or Bitcoin since 2009 is exactly the same time period.

12:41You don't know a difference. Both of them been around your entire life. And so the difference between 50 years and 15 years is not that big compared to maybe a gold that's been around for thousands of years. And I think that's ultimately Bitcoin's big value proposition is it's the simple store of value, which I look at as a digital savings account. In your regular world, you have a savings account, you have a checking account, you have a brokerage account. In this digital world, I think you're going to have a digital savings account, which is Bitcoin. You're going to have a digital checking account, which are stable coins.

13:09And then you're going to have a brokerage account. You're going to go and you're going to buy stocks or you're going to go buy different assets that you want to speculate on them going up in price and creating more assets for you to save in. No different than the world that we live in today. It's just the form factor changes. And I think Bitcoin will be a big winner in that world. So taking a step back from looking at it kind of purely logically as a means of transaction and what you just explained, what kind of core ideology do you think underpins Bitcoin's value if you have to take a step back?

13:38What kind of ideology going into the future do you think underpins its value? Well, the beauty of Bitcoin is that it's one of these assets that's a tool. And so when you have a tool, it's different things to different people. It's kind of like a shovel. You may need a shovel because you want to dig a hole into your backyard because you want to put it in a pool. Somebody else may need a shovel because they want to dig a hole because they're burying a loved one. Somebody else may need a shovel because it's a ceremonial thing because they're breaking ground on a brand new dream of theirs to build a high-rise building.

14:07There's all these kind of different use cases for the tool. Now, the tool is a shovel. Bitcoin, it's a store of value. So it has the same purpose. But the reason why you may use it is because you think it's censorship resistant. You're really worried about that. I may use it because I'm worried that somebody may seize my assets. And so I have seizureship resistance. There's other people who may use it because they say, you know, it's really cheap for me to send from one country to another country. I want to send money back home to my family. So although it's the same thing in terms of its actual application, it can be used in so many different ways that it's something different to different people.

14:40Now, if that's true for use case, then ideology is the same. The beauty of Bitcoin is that Republicans and Democrats both like it. The beauty is that young people and old people, that any ethnicity, they all like it. It doesn't matter what language they speak or how much money they have or where they grew up, right? Every single one of those different cohorts of human population, somebody there likes Bitcoin. And so it goes back to this idea of a tool is apolitical. It is not anything worried about geography. It doesn't care about wealth status. It doesn't care about education level. It's simply a tool to be used.

15:14And so those ideologies, how can you find somebody who's a Christian, who's a Muslim, who is Jewish, who is this, who is that, right? You put them on. They all use the same tool. And so whether it's religion or kind of more secular type of ideologies, every single person in one of those groups uses Bitcoin. And that's the beauty of it is that it can be important to you, but it can also serve everyone else as well. And it's not a zero-sum game. yeah i i haven't heard that insight before and i think it's it's really valuable it's it's to each person it means a different thing and because it has benefits and it's it's a very new thing and because it has a lot of benefits to each person it can um have a different benefit before we move on to kind of some more insights um i want to ask you you have two warren buffett busts if i'm correct the back um on your shelf what does warren buffett mean to you and why do you have those busts Yeah, one is Buffett and the other is Munger.

16:11It's kind of hard to see because of the shadow, but the other one's Munger. These were sent to me by Andrew Wilkinson, a friend of mine who actually built a company who created these. And, you know, somebody sends you such a thoughtful gift, you better put them somewhere nice. So he's getting a good bang for his buck in terms of where they sit. Look, you know, it's kind of funny that I take Buffett as an example. I look at Buffett every day when I walk here into my office and I look at him and he tells me two different things. He is the paradox of life, in my opinion. On one hand, he is the greatest investor that has probably ever lived in our generation.

16:47He has been able to teach people so much about how to live their life, how to be patient, how to be thoughtful, how to do all this stuff, right? And I think that his track record objectively is very difficult to critique. On the other hand, his personal life, he's got a lot of things that I don't agree with. and he's acted in a way that necessarily wouldn't be the way that I would want to act. And so that's the paradox of life, is that somebody can be at the top of their game in one area, but they could be not at the top of their game in the other area of life. And so it doesn't matter how much money you have, how successful you are, how many accolades you get, you always have room for improvement.

17:24And so I think that people are like, well, isn't Buffett, he doesn't like Bitcoin, right? And I say, well, that's also part of the opportunity, right? Munger, he didn't like Bitcoin. That's part of the opportunity, right? I think that these guys have a ton of timeless investing advice. And I think the challenge for young people in particular, but all investors, is how do you take that timeless investing advice, which is timeless for a reason, and apply it to whatever you do? There are lessons from Munger and Buffett that you can apply to sports, your relationships, to reading, to whatever hobby you have.

17:58And so if you can do that, then you should do it. But also understand that even them, even the like intellectual heroes that people have, they still have parts of their life that they're probably either not proud of, or they would want to improve. And so I think that those guys are, are great examples. There would be many others. It just so happens that Andrew didn't make a bus of, you know, maybe athletes or somebody else. He made them with these two guys. And, and it's, you know, kind of a humbling reminder that, you know, no matter how much you're killing it in any one thing, there's always more room for improvement.

18:30I think a kind of Buffett-esque point I've taken from you before this podcast, I obviously read and watch a lot of things. And you always say investing can kind of, I guess, paraphrasing, investing can kind of boil down, success in investing can boil down to being different, but then being right. And that's kind of a Buffett-esque. I just want to mention that's kind of a Buffett-esque or insight that I've taken from you that I've found valuable. But on this podcast, over the 23, this is the 24th conversation I've had so far. I've noticed each guest tends to have a skill or kind of superpower that truly sets them apart.

19:02And you've mentioned two superpowers that you think have kind of powered you, put you ahead and kind of empowered you through your career. Can you kind of describe those superpowers and how do you think they've shaped your career? Yeah, well, I think that really the superpower that I've somehow backed into is that I live at the intersection of three different things. And I think it's Naval Ravikant. He's got this great saying where he's like, you know, do one thing, really well. And if you're not the best in the world at it, add a second skill to it. And then maybe you're like the best. So if you're the like, you know, I don't know, best, best basket weaver who does it on one foot.

19:37Well, that's a pretty small pool of people. So the more things you add, right, that the less competitive it becomes. So having three, it gives you a sense that I'm not probably pretty good at any one of them, but adding all three of them up, maybe I can be unique. And really, it's just can you operate businesses? Can you allocate capital? and can you create content, right? And if you can do those three things, I think that that is a very advantageous position to be in in the business and finance world moving forward. And so, you know, I'm not perfect at it and I'm constantly trying to get better at it, but doing those three things together seems to be the area that I've carved out.

20:11And so it's less about anyone's skill being, you know, world-class. It's more so the combination of them coming together means that there's very few people that are competing with me in that category. you've often said that people who are complacent get get disrupted and as people move through your career such as yourself when you build up success you have more and more to lose each time you take a risk how are you kind of fighting complacency and how do you plan to keep evolving and adapting speaking of buffett i don't know if you know this on my desk here i have uh i saw in a documentary that buffett has a box and it's his two hard box i think right somebody made this for me says too hard, too small.

20:52Right. And I look at that every day because that's how you don't get complacent is it's just as hard to do big things as it is small things. And so if it's too small or it's too hard, then go find the things that are big and easy. And obviously easy is always relative, but I think that it's a daily reminder. I stare at that all day long, right? And at this point, it's just something that subconsciously is there. But I don't want to spend my time working on small things. And I don't want to spend my time working on things that are so difficult that it's not going to be worth the squeeze. And so instead, just like, don't be stupid, and go do big things.

21:33And you'll always be improving that way. You mentioned you work at an intersection. And that's how and that's how you've seen you've you've succeeded because you kind of mesh those three things together and are the best at those kind of three things. But when you're operating in all of those three environments, whether it be crypto media and any of those things, how do you separate truth from noise? Because especially in things like cryptocurrency, there's just a lot of noise out there. How do you separate them? I think, first of all, you get confidence if you've done the work, right? There's a lot of people who say, oh, I went, I looked at cryptocurrencies, I bought this thing and it went down.

22:07So great. Well, how much time do you spend thinking about it before you bought it? right and uh they're like oh i didn't really spend that much time so okay well if you bought a stock how much time would you spend right before you bought it well i got a whole process right okay well you know if you'd spend that much time on a stock but not on a cryptocurrency of course you lost money um so i just think that uh people like to ascribe uh kind of oh something you know doesn't make sense or it's not going to work because it didn't work for them um but you know look i i uh don't invest in things i don't understand um and i think that other people should uh should hopefully follow a similar approach.

22:41And so when you look at things like cryptocurrency, yes, there's a lot of noise. But the people who can sift through the noise are the people who paid attention, they've put the work in, they've went and they've studied, they talk to people, they understand the nuances of the industry, right? And so the same is true in other industries, right? You know, there's plenty of industries. If I showed up today, and I talked to the main players, they would tell me some amazing things. And I'd be like, this is crazy. Why doesn't everybody do this? You can make so much money, right? And then you go talk to like an industry insight.