What Eric Learned At An Investor's Conference

0:00All right. So we are going to talk about what I learned at an investors conference that I just came back from this week. So just some context, it's the month of, well, this month at least, Neil and I have been traveling quite a bit. And so we wanted to share some learnings from Neil's travels and my travels. This will be the first of multiple episodes, even though it's not even planned out here yet. So overview of this conference. This conference is called Capital Camp. And about 300 to 400 capital allocators, so you can call these investors or business owners, whatever you want to call them. They descend on this little town called Columbia, Missouri.

0:37which is where Mizzou is, which is one of the colleges. And basically, we meet up and we talk about investing. And so I wanted to share some experiences. And how much did everyone pay for a ticket or what was the rough price? Well, the rough price is$12.5K. It's quite a bit of money for everyone to pay for a ticket. So what did you end up learning from the – first off, why did you end up going to the event? Just out of curiosity, right? Because you spend most of your time as an operator of the ad agency. I was just curious on what was that for you. So, you know, interestingly enough, this conference, so I'll answer your first part.

1:17So the first part is I went to this conference a year ago and I've heard great things about it. I follow a lot of investors on Twitter. I listen to a lot of investor podcasts. This event is hosted by two prominent investors. One is known as, his name is Brent Beshore. So he has a company called Permanent Equity, and they're known as – they are a holding company, and they just buy companies for the long term. That's why they're called Permanent Equity. And then the other one is Patrick O'Shaughnessy. He's the son of a prominent guy on Twitter as well called Jim O'Shaughnessy. And he has an entire investor media company called Colossus.

1:51And interestingly enough, they did a deal. So, Nia, I don't know if you know this. I think I told you about this, but they did a – they sell podcast ads for equity on their podcast. and they got a chunk of equity from this company that does like, I don't know, probably over a hundred million a year right now and a good chunk of EBITDA. So all this to say is that I think that there's a lot to learn from investors because in business, if you're an owner, you're responsible for capital allocation. And so I think there's a lot of frameworks. There's a lot of mental models to follow. And I just go there to learn.

2:22So when I went last year, the narrative I had was that I had actually single grain was a purchase. At the end of the day, even though it was a turnaround, it was a purchase. And then I'd purchased two other agencies, and I'd done a handful of angel investing too. And so even though Neil and I, we talk a lot about marketing on this podcast and business, at the end of the day, I look at both of us as capital allocators. So we don't really talk too much about our other investments. And I know what Neil has. Neil knows what I have and what we believe in. And so I think at the end of the day, there's a lot to learn from these people because of how they think.

2:56Dude, I totally agree with you. I didn't attend the event. I didn't attend the previous one either. So it sounds like you've been to two of them so far. But funny enough, I got an email on Tiny Capital's annual meeting. I don't know if it was a board meeting, not board meeting, but annual shareholder meeting or something like that. I'm not saying I'm a shareholder more, so I just got an email saying that, hey, come here to attend. Sadly, I don't think I'll be able to make it due to time. But it's a similar model, right? If you look at a lot of the players out there, there's different types of entrepreneurs.

3:28And some people are visionaries like Elon Musk, where they're going to end up creating something new and revolutionize the whole space, or Sam Altman, what he's doing with AI. And then there's some people who like to innovate, but maybe not on those scales. And there's a lot of other different tiers of entrepreneurs. But to cut to the chase, I, and I think Eric may be somewhat similar. He may be, he's probably more innovative than I am. but I'm a simple operator in which I don't try to create something new and sexy that's going to save the world. I just look for big TAMs and see how I can penetrate it and go and make my cash from it.

4:07Interestingly enough, Neil, I don't know if you remember this, but we both took a personality test a couple of years ago, the Ray Dalio and the Adam Grant one. And it basically shows that Neil and I are, we're very opposite, but also very similar in many ways. So when it comes to being someone that's deliberate or someone that's very detail-oriented, that's Neil, right? But when it comes down to being conceptual or being creative, I'm maxed out on both of those. But the thing that brings us together is we're both maxed out on practicality. And so Neil was basically spot on there. So I wanted to share a couple other experiences here, and then we can work towards wrapping.

4:41But what I'll also say is that there is this phrase that I heard this time where you have creator capitalists. And what a creator capitalist actually means is those that have actually built an audience and they're using that audience. They're leveraging the audience to get good deal flow and they're investing in other companies. And there's a guy, his name is Kevin, and he has a company called Epic Gardening. And it's like a gardening, like a bunch of media properties around gardening, and he does really well for himself, right? And so Eric Jorgensen, he wrote the Almanac of Naval Ravikant. He actually spoke at one of the leveling up masterminds.

5:15And so you have a lot of people like that that are there to learn, but they're also really good in their own right. And actually, in the same vein, so one of our mutual friends, he also is like, as an investor, he's like, you know, I'm looking at now, how do I get distribution? Because that's what I want. And so you have the investors trying to learn how to build an audience and you have the audience people trying to learn how to be investors. And it's kind of the symbiotic thing. The other thing I'll say too is that at the end of the day, I wrote this Twitter thread kind of recapping things, but it doesn't matter how good the food is, the speakers are, how good the venue is, the location, the weather.

5:49It's really just about the people at the end of the day. And so every single person I met does something impressive. And I don't think I've met – I don't think I had any situation where I was like, oh, this conversation is like – this person is not humble or I don't feel like this person is intelligent. Everyone is really smart. everyone's really humble and then everyone just wants to help each other and so for example our mutual friend he gave me his term sheets actually he sent me his term sheets this morning on how he does these deals and we both talked about how creative this guy is and i was like oh my god this term sheet's amazing i'll share it with you afterwards and like i'm like this is great you you get to learn from the people that have been there done that and you get to shortcut a lot of things because at the end of the day once you build a relationship with someone it goes a lot more than one simple transaction.

6:36Were most people there private equity fund guys or hedge fund guys or family office? So there's a theme. There's always a theme with how the macroeconomic environment is going. And we talked about this on the phone, but last year there were a lot of hedge funds. There's a lot of private equity people. This year, and you can say holdcoes are private equity as well. There's a lot more holdco people. So I'll share a story here. What do you mean by holdcoes? It's because typically most funds have a life cycle. Are these just companies that don't have to sell or anything and it's just you know correct so some individuals and they just keep buying businesses and they never have to sell them so like a permanent equity for example you can call that a holding company it is private equity in the sense that they're buying other businesses but they're buying them to hold them and there isn't a life cycle where it's like oh we need to flip these in the next like decade or so it's not like a vc fund either where you have that that five to seven year timeline does that make sense yeah so they got money from lps that just let them hold on to it for as long as they need to.

7:31Correct. Yep. And so one of the guys I met at the event, I'm not going to name names here, but he basically, he spent$150 ,000 out of pocket and he bought a VC backed company that had raised 30,$40 million. Let's just put it that way. And so you have a lot of these people that are trying to buy distressed assets. The theme for this year is like people are kind of waiting and they're waiting in the shadows to kind of start to pounce. And you have people talking about, oh, you should really get to know the lenders because Because the lenders, like one guy buys e-commerce companies, he knows all the lenders out there.

8:03And he's basically going to the lenders and saying, hey, who's available and who looks good here? And then he can basically buy out the debt, right? And then he'll have these e-commerce companies for pennies on the dollar. And that's how he's been doing deals. So everyone has their own way of doing things. And then it starts to help you think about, oh, maybe you can adjust how you do things too. So that's that. Cool. And final thing I'll say is this. Um, the event wasn't more so it wasn't really about going to watch talking heads. And so really it's very content light. It's very, there's a lot of networking, right?

8:38So I'm going to share my screen real quick for those of you that can see on our, on our YouTube. So it's pulling up, it's pulling up. Neil, can you see this yet? No, not yet. Okay. I'm going to try it one more time and then I'm going to give up. But basically what I'm trying to show here is I'm going to do this. Well, anyway, on one picture over here, you can see there's like a tennis court. There's tennis court. There's pickleball. There's a contingent of YPO people here as well. So I always like to talk about the different peer groups. This gal over here, Jess, she flew in her plane. So you have badasses in the group.

9:15She literally flew her own plane in to the conference, right? And so that's really cool. And everyone just, again, super nice. And there's different activities. You can go tasting. You can go cooking or whatever. and you're just trying to get people. You're just trying to know people at the end of the day. So all that to say, it's, you know, if you do have the money to shell out for things like this, great. But if not, I'm at least sharing some of this with you. And the way I've modeled my leveling up mastermind is actually after this, after. So we took a big risk in Miami, the last event that we did to focus more on the people and focus more on the people getting to connect with each other instead of having big name speakers.

9:52And that's, that's the difference there so anyway that is it for today if you want to check out the event leveling up.com founders if you want to learn more about it next event is in beverly hills august 7 to the 9th and don't forget to rate review subscribe it helps us grow and we will see you later