Pomp Shares 3 Non-Obvious Business Ideas with Massive TAMs

23:49I've been there. People would be like, oh, he has a podcast. And I used to be cringe. It was like somebody stabbed me in the stomach and twisted it when they would introduce me that way. Right. And I'm like, you are disrespecting all this other work that I did to say that I have a podcast. Like, yes, I have a podcast, but also like I wear shoes. Are you going to introduce me as like, oh, Pop wear shoes. And so I remember kind of going back and I think about it. Dude, it's like calling milk cat food. You know what I mean? Sam drinks cat food. Yeah. It's like, that's not totally fair. So what you eventually realize is like, it's just marketing, right?

24:30At the end of the day, like it really is just marketing. And whether it's Twitter, whether it's podcasts, whatever, the people who tend to be good at it, don't think of it and like sit down and like create a marketing calendar. Like, I don't know, they're like taking a poop and they pull out their phone, they start tweeting like random things and like they go viral, right? At the end of the day, it's just marketing. And so in some weird way, maybe we all shouldn't like be ashamed or cringe when people say that stuff. Like if you're better known for how good you are at marketing, Like maybe that's actually telling you something.

24:57Right. And so I think we all have that as almost like something that eats at us or it's like an insecurity. But whatever. Who cares? Like if they could do it, they'd do it themselves. Yeah. And to clarify, Sam, I never said fraud. Fraud means one thing. I said I feel like a little bitch when I do courses. And there's a big difference. Fraud means you're misrepresenting yourself. A little bitch means you're representing yourself as a little bitch. and you have to ask yourself, is that accurate or is that not accurate? And yeah, that's how I felt sometimes. I felt like a little bitch for doing courses.

25:32I was like, should I be doing something else with my time? This is, I like to teach, but maybe that's like, you know, not the best use of time. Sorry, I paraphrased that incorrectly. I was trying to, I actually think I made you sound better, but you know, whatever. I'd be honest, I'd rather be honest. Okay, Pomp, you brought some ideas for us. you know that this is the idea podcast. You brought some ideas. Let's rattle them off. So start with number one. What ideas and trends or opportunities do you see right now in the market? Yeah, so this first one is one that we're actually doing. So I've thought a lot about it.

26:08Housing affordability is the worst it's been in this century. We continue to see people are worried like, hey, I want to buy a house. Should I rent? Should I buy? What are interest rates going to do? All these different things. But there's no dominant voice in terms of news, commentary and data. And so we started a company called Resi Club. The idea really in the beginning is just go educate people about what is happening. And so I'm not an expert on residential real estate. I don't know that many other experts on residential real estate. So we were able to partner up with a gentleman named Lance Lampert.

26:39Lance was the real estate editor at Fortune magazine. So he's like, quote, unquote, legit. Right. He's got 75 ,000 followers on Twitter. A lot of people in the industry all follow him. And we basically just said to him, like, look, man, we want to go build the dominant platform in residential real estate coverage. Why don't we do it together? We know how to scale things. We know how to grow this stuff and monetize. You know the content. You are the expert. And so let's partner up. And so we've gone ahead. We got started. It's about two months old. And, you know, I love these types of businesses because they kind of look stupid almost in the beginning.

27:08They're like, oh, you guys just like created a newsletter. Well, yeah, that's exactly what we did. And then it turns into like a media site. And then it turns into a data product. And then like, I don't know, 10 years from now, are we going to have the information where we can go and see like, you know, general contractors in different markets actually build affordable housing? Like maybe. And so you start with this small little thing that you can build profitably and you don't have to raise money or kind of do anything where there's these, you know, huge expectations. But as you grow the business, you can increase your ambition over time.

27:37And so I think a lot of people start with like massive ambition, like let's go to Mars. And sure, there are some companies where that definitely makes sense. But for businesses like this, it's just like, hey, there's a problem in around housing affordability. A lot of people aren't talking about it. We should have more people talking about it. And then we'll figure out how big it can get and how ambitious we can be over time. But we kind of earned the right to go do that. And so that's what we're doing. How much did you fund it with? Way less than people would think. We were profitable within the first month.

28:05And so we actually wouldn't have even need to put money into the bank account. But I think we put$100 ,000 to get started and never touched it because basically, you know, within the first week we were profitable. And the market for this is, is it brokers, real estate agents that want to pay for this? Or are you looking at investors or is it the average person who might be, you know, on Zillow looking for a home? Yeah. So the beauty of residential real estate is it's the largest asset class in the world, but none of us who are like, oh, we're so smart. We're like business people. We're finance people.

28:32We have podcasts. We never think about residential real estate as like the largest asset class in the world. We're like, oh, stocks or crypto or bonds or whatever. And so what you end up getting is it's a very niche thing in that it's residential real estate, but it's a very big thing in that it's the largest asset class in the world. And so what that involves is home builders. It involves real estate agents. It involves people who want to buy or sell homes. It involves people who are doing mortgages like lenders, et cetera. So there's a huge kind of ecosystem of folks who all need to be aware of what's happening in this industry.

29:03And so it's one of these great businesses where it's like small and specific, but also large and broad at the same time. And I think you're doing it wise. So I'm looking at your paywall and you're saying that like basically you get access to a regional housing tracker data, like some type of data set. I think that's smart. Who, was it just Lance? Because it looks like Lance is doing all of the writing. Is he also somehow aggregating all of this data as well? So Lance is, think of him as like the editor-in-chief. Like this guy is lights out, right? And so as soon as he was like interested, I was like, oh, what do we need to do?

29:41How do we like run through brick walls to like get to work with you? So it was very much like go find partners that you like look up to and want to learn from, et cetera. And he does all of the content today. Eventually there will be an entire team. But I think one of the big lessons that I've learned over the last five or six years of kind of like playing on the internet and building these businesses is you just don't need that much. And yes, we have an advantage. I've got a big audience, right? Lance has been doing this for a long time and really understands how to create content and kind of write articles and interview people, et cetera.

30:08But at the end of the day, we've now created multiple businesses like this where we start with like two or three people and you can run for six or 12 months and get them profitable with serious cashflow. And then you start to hire a team, salespeople, other editorial folks, et cetera. Can I give you a critique? Yeah. I think this is awesome. I love The Real Deal, which is a real estate blog. your premium plan is$150 a year. That is so stupid, man. Why aren't you charging way more? It's so hard to do stuff on$150 a year. Yeah, we eventually will. Like for sure, we'll increase the price. But if you think about a lot of times, like even, I'll give you another example.

30:51So Baria Times is a kind of daily news for tech business and finance and started as an email. And when you're building these businesses, you basically have a choice. You can like have a high CPM and be okay with not selling out 100 % of the ads sometimes, or you can have a lower CPM and just sell out the ads. I tend to always go for like, let's sell out all of the ad inventory and build the muscle of being able to do it. And you can always raise prices later. Same thing here with the subscription for Resi Club is starting at 150 bucks. It's like, if you're interested in this and we're actually creating something valuable, there is zero friction for you paying 150 bucks a year.

31:27Over time, we will increase the price, but that's much better. and gives us a better signal, then let's say we came out with like$1 ,000 a year and people are like, man, this is valuable, but it's not worth$1 ,000. At least now we know, okay, we have something that people want. It's helpful to them. They're not churning. And now we got to go and do price discovery over the next 12 months or so. And we'll figure out what that price point is. But I'd rather start with a lower price, make sure we've got the right product and then raise prices later. I like this idea a lot. I think it's a really good idea.

31:54This is like a 50 to$100 million win bootstrapped. I think it's going to be great. you know, maybe more, but like, I think that's a very realistic outcome from this, but I got to ask you, you know, it's interesting to see ideas when you're at the end of the idea maze, meaning like you figure out like, oh, this is the opportunity we should go with. You're a guy who's got a thousand different opportunities, thousand different ideas of what you could go do. Can you walk me through the idea maze? How did you land at this? And like, what were the kind of like other paths that you considered? And, you know, like, for example, this is residential.

32:26Why not commercial? Should it even be real estate or should it be finance? Because actually you have a good foothold finance. And I'm sure we haven't talked about this, but I am sure that there was a little bit of a walk down an idea maze looking for, oh, wait, what is the real opportunity here? And then it all starts to come together. You get the right operator, you figure out the right idea, the right brand, then you go for it. 100%. So this one's actually a great one to talk about this because we actually, I would call it like a false start. We had partnered with somebody else who they were not in residential real estate.

32:55The way that they cut the market was by geography. And so they were very focused on South Florida. And so it was like, okay, we think that there's a massive business to build that content first that eventually leads to kind of data products that is in the real estate market. And when we got started, we didn't know a lot of people, right? And so I went around, I talked to a couple of people, I found someone, I said, hey, they do really good work. It was a person I really enjoyed kind of working with and talking to on a day-to-day basis. And so we got started, but it was very much like small geography, all about South Florida.

33:25And then the idea was like, we'll go to like Tampa and then we'll go to like Orlando and then we'll go to Atlanta and then we'll like just go through these geographies. And it didn't work for a whole bunch of different reasons. Probably some of it was our fault. Some of it was the other person was, you know, very focused on like what they wanted to do in terms of the content that they had already been creating. And, and so we kind of just were like, hey, this isn't that this like explosive thing. The market isn't like pulling this into existence. And so like rather than bang our heads against the wall for the next 10 years together, like you had a great thing going before we came along and try to convince you to do this with us.

33:58Like, why don't you just keep doing that thing? I don't want to like, you know, hinder your success and your growth. And then we'll like go back to the drawing board. And so that's the second attempt was with this Resi Club. And so you're right that like one, there's an idea maze, but also So I think a lot of people don't realize how often there's false starts to these businesses. Nikita Bear, who is, I think, friends of all of ours, he's talked about this a bunch with consumer social apps. He's like, product market fit is not a single metric. Like, you just know, right? It's like everything's exploding and you obviously have product market fit.

34:30But in both of the apps, TBH and Gas, that he launched and eventually sold to Facebook and then to Discord, I think he's publicly described many times he would launch it. It wouldn't hit. They would go back, like make a couple of changes, like launch it again. And sometimes he would launch like five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 times. And then eventually there was the right combination of all these things that work. And so there's two ways to do entrepreneurship. One is like, I'm going to bend the world to my will. And like, here's the thing that's going to work regardless of what the market tells me.

34:58I'm going to make it happen. And then there's like this iterative approach. And a lot of these things that I work on are much more iterative. And so you just have to be really good at like, go 100 % in, run the test as perfectly as possible. but be willing to cut bait and try a different combination of the inputs if for some reason it's not exploding in the way that you want it to sean you got to tell the nikita story which one just just the the this last one this last thing that he did yeah he was he was telling us as he was building the app and launching it over and over again and renaming it like what was happening one time they renamed it to one thing and then like took off in the gay market he's like all he did was change the name of the app and it appealed to only gay people and then he changed the app name and it went back and it changed how the app was going.

35:45I think he says something that he's like, the most important thing for a consumer startup is develop a machine that will allow you to launch tests like real high fidelity tests of your product. That is actually your most important product at the beginning, which I kind of agree with but also kind of disagree with. I think that's a really good way to do the apps he's trying to do, which are like, it doesn't work if it doesn't have a K factor over one, right? Like if it's not viral, his apps literally like don't work. And then this app was like, I don't really care about retention, long-term anything.

36:19Like it was like, I'm going to get you in. It's going to spam, invite your friends. And then there's a paywall and I need like 2 % of people to buy the in-app purchase. And if under 2 % of people do it, this doesn't really like make a lot of money, but if I can get 2 % or more, this thing will make a few million dollars of profit in the next 90 days. And, you know, so that worked really well for that. But if you go look at how some of the great, like, consumer products are built, they didn't do any of that shit. Like, Pinterest, it's not like Pinterest was sitting around being like, okay, I need to create a system where I can launch systematically in high schools over and over again until I get this correct, right?

36:52And, you know, Facebook and Snapchat, like, they did eventually figure out a way to, like, roll out and grow. That they did, but they didn't have this, like, thousand shots on goal with different variations trying to get the virality to be just right. I think what Nikita's doing is awesome because it's such a different game than when anybody else really was playing. However, his advice is basically how to build a virus, not how to create the next social network. And I think people think of him as the genius consumer social network guy. And it's like, no, he's basically built viruses that goes on teens' phones.

37:27And that he's very, very good at. It's like, what are you optimizing for? Right. You know, if you want to build the next great social network, like, yeah, K factor matters in the beginning. But actually what matters more is like, what is the 30, 60, 90 day retention? If you want to just like go viral and be on every single 14 year old's phone in America, then the only thing that matters is K factor. Right. And what do you think both of his apps within, I don't know, 100 days of getting acquired or 200 days of getting acquired, you know, shut down and run off to zero. Right. Because they didn't have retention.

37:59But the one thing I would give him a ton of credit for, which I think was really impressive, was A, he went back to the well. What most people don't do is they do a space, they become super knowledgeable about it, and they get so jaded and have so much scar tissue that even though they are the best equipped person in the world to go back and build in that space again, they are so turned off, they go become a beginner at something else, which I think is a fine life choice to make from a variety of life, but not optimal from playing the game of entrepreneurship. The second thing is he was in the world of, I'm going to build a hit social app.

38:31And the way that a hit social app works is like, get a hundred million plus users and then start to make money on ads and like raise venture capital, do all this. When he went back the second time, he like broke down the fourth wall of Silicon Valley. It was like, what if I don't fund this? And what if I just like charge a little bit of money? And like, what if I just make a few million dollars of profit like every month? And like, I don't know how long it'll last, but I think I can make like whatever, you know like five million bucks in the summer that sounds pretty awesome let me try to do that and nobody nobody in consumer so like the mobile gaming guys were like yeah of course like get a bunch of downloads and then charge like you know a small amount and see if you can make you know your key metric is arpu but like the the mobile gaming guys don't build social apps the social apps guys don't build mobile games those guys don't build enterprise sales like people very rarely are able to like rethink the rules of their game and he rethought the rules of the consumer social game and was like, I'm going to build a consumer social app, but it's going to have the monetization of a mobile game.

39:34And I think in basically like a six month span, it made like seven or$8 million in gross revenue with like, you know, and it was very profitable for him in that period of time that he sold the thing. You know, that is a very impressive way to like, most people can't do that. Most people can't rewrite the rules of their industry, of their game. There's two things that you made me think of. The first is there's a whole group of these people who are like trying to rewrite the rules or think about this differently. One of my favorite examples, and I don't want to share who it is because I don't know if they're okay with it, but they created like a ability to make photos in your Instagram story blurry.

40:11And basically you would have to pay on Apple pay to like unblur the photo. So obviously like all the only fan girls would put it on their Instagram story and it'd be like just blurry enough where people are like, oh, that looks like something I might really like looking at. and then they'd pay like$2,$5,$10, like whatever it was set at. And so you're like bootstrapping off of these massive audiences these people already have, but it's like a little feature and they don't raise money for it. It's just like basically, how much money can we generate as quickly as possible? And I mean, they make a lot of money, right?

40:41And so it works. So it is possible. Speaking of folks who go back to the well, do you guys know who Brad Jacobs is? Yeah, he created like$6 billion companies now or something like that. He's the guy. He's the goat. So I've been trying to get him on the pod. I've been trying. I can't. He's got a book coming out. He'll definitely come on. He's got a book coming out. So he's 100 % going on. I can't get in touch with him. We'll talk later. But he's 100 % going on everyone's podcast because he's got a book coming out, which is like the best time to get these guys. But so about four or five years ago, somebody like almost like a back alley drug deal was like, check out Brad Jacobs.

41:16And I was like, never heard of him. Like, who's that? Got on Wikipedia and literally for a week and a half, like didn't sleep. was just like all over scouring the internet, trying to figure out like what obscure podcast did this guy do? Because he just did it over and over and over again. And what he essentially does is he just does roll-ups. Like Wayne Huizenga is another guy who's like famous for doing this. And what Brad did is just figure out a business model, figure out a funding mechanism, start winning, and then go around and tell everyone like, hey, I'm going to do the same playbook and I'm going to win again.

41:49And then people gave him money. So explain what he did. So one of the things that they did was in the waste industry, which also I think Wayne Huizinga had a big one as well. In the waste industry, basically they would go and where he started was he didn't go to major markets. He didn't even go to like what he calls like secondary markets. He basically went to like podunk towns and was like, I'm going to buy the landfill. And then once he bought the landfill, he was like, OK, there's like seven companies that all pick up trash in the surrounding area and they bring to this landfill. And he was just like, let's start like snipering off each one of them.

42:17He'd buy the first one. They'd buy the second one, the third one. And eventually he'd own all seven of the companies plus the landfill. And so he just did this across the country and he would roll it all up. That one was like, I think early 90s, it was called United Waste Systems. And so he took that company public and it ended up being like a multi-billion dollar outcome. He's done that same thing like six or seven times now. And so you're just like, okay, building a billion dollar company is cool. Building two, you're like, damn, like you've got the golden touch. If you do more than five, there's like one of you.

42:50I think he's done it with... So he did the Waste Management thing. Then he did United Rentals, which was like renting heavy dump trucks and porta-potties and bobcats and things like that. Then he did it with XO Logistics, I think, which is currently public... XPO, which is currently a publicly traded company. And I think he did it two or three other times. I mean, he's done it many, many times. I think his book is called How to Make a Billion Dollars or something like that. Like it's a pretty, it's a pretty baller title. He's like, I'm not coming on my first million. You look quite literally beneath me.

43:26You want to know something funny about, about how he describes himself? He's like, you know, I'm a career CEO, serial entrepreneur. Like he has very much like what you would expect from a guy who's built multiple billion dollar companies. But if you Google his name, you know on LinkedIn, how there is like a, like a preview of the website on LinkedIn, it says Brad Jacobs is an influencer because I think he has like the influencer like categorization on LinkedIn and they just like autofill it. But it's like the classic, imagine telling Brad Jacobs like, ah, you're not really like a multi-billion dollar entrepreneur.

43:57You're just an influencer. He'd like blow a gasket. Yeah, that's so true. That's what it says. His first top link on Google, Brad Jacobs is an influencer, period. Got him. Like stop disrespecting that man. The reason he's cool is like, okay, so he lives in Grunge, Connecticut. He wears like a suit and tie most of the time. He looks like a suit. And I'm sure he's very professional and a wonderful CEO. But if you actually listen to some of the things he says, he's way more entrepreneurial than his picture looks. You know what I mean? He's got that artist vibe a little bit. The guy is special. He's very fascinating.

44:35But before his book came out or is coming out, he's been really under the radar for how successful he is. He's a really fascinating person. Yeah. One of my favorite activities is if you're ever reading an article, like Bloomberg does this a lot and actually the Financial Times, they'll like randomly talk about these like really wealthy people and I'll just immediately, you know, copy, paste, Google, like, hey, who is this person? And recently I did it. And let me see if I can find this guy's name real quick because it was like one of these things where as soon as you go down the rabbit hole, you're like, wow, this is like a whole different game.

45:12What is this dude's name? Oh, here you go. Benny Steinmetz. so they call him an Israeli tycoon but he like got in a bunch of trouble and there was like fraud and I think he maybe even got arrested, etc. But like he's in the commodities game and you're like, I've never heard of Benny Steinmetz. He sounds like he's built some massive companies but also in the commodities game like sometimes there's gold in the mine and other times there's a promise of gold in the mine you know, type thing. And so you're just like how many of these people are out there that are not on the internet or not well-known in the internet circle.

45:48And sure, you can go look at the Forbes 400. You can go look at all these lists that people put together. There's way more people that are completely unknown than I think known. And so it does kind of remind you, you only got to be right once or twice. And you can achieve immense amount of wealth or success by doing just the basic things. Go buy assets that end up being valuable. If you Google this guy, he looks like one of these guys that can like find a pressure point on your neck that makes you like collapse. He looks very legitimately like a killer. And I researched him as well. He was in the IDF.

46:25So like he's a trained military guy. And if you Google him, he looks scary. He looks like he'll put to sleep.

46:34Hey, quick message here, because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works? No friction? Well, I've used mercury for years now. And let me tell you, it just works. and that's why I use it for not one, not two, but eight of my companies. From credit cards to invoices, I have everything in one place. There's no janky dashboard. I'm never told, please visit a local bank branch. None of that tomfoolery. And a few months ago, I landed a big client. And the first thing I did, I sent them a clean branded invoice. Boom, deal closed, cash in the door. That's the kind of banking experience I want.

47:03And that's why I use Mercury. So if you're running a startup and you want banking that feels like it's built in this century, well, go to mercury.com and get started in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bank and services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC. What other ideas are interesting to you at the moment? So I'll give you a couple categories. There's one that I, the best thing I have for it is like persistent patrol companies. So if you think about one of the big problems that cities, states, and the national government's going to have is like they have to get more money.

47:35They're broke, right? And if you're broke, you either like cut your costs as much as possible or you go make more money. They're not going to cut costs. They got to make more money. One of the best examples is in New York City, the congestion tax. That's one of the few taxes that I'm on board with. You're on board. Okay. All right. Let me explain what it is first and then we can debate. The way it works is like, I don't know, nine to five, Monday through Friday. If you drive from like outside of lower Manhattan into lower Manhattan, they charge you like 20 bucks. Like it's a pretty large tax every single day.

48:07So it only is charged one time. But you can imagine all the cars that are driving from above 59th Street, below 59th Street, between 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, and they're getting hit with this$20 tax. It's a way for the city to raise more money, get more income. It's called a congestion tax. It's the first one in the United States. But this has been happening in Europe and other places for quite a while. So it's not a new concept. It's just new to America. They're also considering charging people like$1 ,000 a month or something really high in order to own a car in the city. There's all kinds of ideas because it all comes back to this thing.

48:39They need more money, right? They're broke. And over the last couple of years in cities like New York, people who were paying a lot in taxes, they left. Like there's the infamous story of David Tepper. He was in New Jersey and he was responsible for 3 % of the state's budget and the taxes he personally paid. And he moved to Florida. And there's all these articles that were like, the state of New Jersey is going to go broke because David Tepper is moving. And so I think it was for like some sort of a family medical situation. He moved for a couple of years. when he moved back, the way the story goes is that he called up the state treasurer and was like, yo, you got 120 million coming to you next year, like put it into your budget.

49:16I'm back, baby. So like wealthy people. Yeah. And it's New Jersey. It's not like it's like North Dakota, right? It's like the state of New Jersey was dependent on this guy for material percentage of their state budget. So wealthy people have been moving. So my idea is like, well, how are they going to get more revenue? Right now, a lot of revenue is derived from like parking tickets or like stupid things where they have humans walking around trying to like catch people doing things they're not supposed to be doing. So I think there's going to be an entire rise of businesses that just use computer vision to do the same thing.

49:47Like anything that can be automated will be automated rather than have humans with their lazy eyes walking around, just have computers that constantly monitor it. So parking tickets is an easy one. Fire marshals, like how many times have you gone to an event and it's like, you know, fire marshals, so 220 people can be here. I think there's a thousand people in this room right now. So like they can just automate. Okay. You hit with a$500 fine every single time at this event venue, et cetera. Elevators. Like you can just go through this and see over and over again that computer vision will just become like the persistent eye.

50:19It's scary. Like I don't like the idea of this, but I do think someone's going to build this technology and it's not going to be the government. And so we're likely to see a huge rise of these businesses that used what is pretty like standard technology at this point to just like count the number of humans walking into a building and stay on top of it so that the government can generate more revenue. Well, there's also like in L.A., don't they have the mansion tax, right? Like it's like, oh, if you sell a home for more than five million dollars, there's just like, here's a new tax. And they're like, what are these people?

50:48New York has it to live in small homes. Like they'll never do it. They'll never downsize. Like we got them. We can charge literally anything we want and they're still going to pay it. I kind of agree with you that getting this revenue stream is going to be important. Obviously, I hate the idea of the persistent patrol computers basically fining you for taking every misstep, but I think the root thing you're talking about, how do you help governments make more money, is going to be a business opportunity because you're right. They do need it. There's a competition right now between taxes and tipping.

51:24Like when you go to the coffee shop, there's literally going to be a competition between is on the bill, if it's itemized, does the government get more money out of the bill or does the tipping? Because we've become this like tipping society where somebody like pours a coffee and they're like, that'll be 15 % on top of the bill. And so if the government continues to increase sales tax, like very much, these bills are going to get inflated because it's just, everyone's got more hands in the cookie jar. So Sean, New York has a mansions tax. Do you want to know what the threshold is in order to pay it?

51:55No, what is it? All right. So keep in mind, I think the average sale of a New York home is like$800 ,000. The mansion tax starts at a million dollars. So basically... You have a second bedroom? Mansion. Yeah. So their mansion tax, I think it's close to 4%. It ranges, I think, but I think it goes up to 4%. So basically, if you purchase a two-bedroom apartment in New York City, you basically have to say, all right, here's an additional$40 ,000 just for buying or is it for selling? I don't remember which one. But someone pays roughly$20 ,000,$30 ,000,$40 ,000 for a two-bedroom apartment. So they have it as well in New York City.

52:35It's pretty wild. I mean, that's like a$5 ,000 mortgage payment, right? If you're like, hey, I don't want to pay$7 ,000,$8 ,000 for a two-bedroom. I'm going to buy and I'm going to have to pay$4 ,500 or$5 ,000 with 8 % interest rates on my mortgage, like a million bucks. Like, yeah, you're getting hit with the mansion tax. It's pretty wild. But yeah, New York has that. New York gets you in so many different ways. It's a very challenging place to live because of that. You live in New York, right? I do live in New York. Like, what will it take for you to move, basically? Nothing. Like, at this point, I'm not going to move.

53:07I moved. And I think that I've come to the realization that I'm willing to pay for the experience. Like, yes, the taxes are higher, but I feel like the money that I give on those higher taxes is very much in exchange for the density of New York City, the experience, like all of that. And so to some degree, it's like the biggest expense I pay every year, but it's because of the quality of life or a specific type of quality of life that I want. And so I just come to terms with it and like stroke the check every year. And compared to other cities, New York does a half decent job of like making it feel like you're getting what you paid for.

53:45You know, you've got good parks, subway system, whatever. But damn, it's still challenging, particularly. I mean, you were in Florida for a while. I'm in Texas at the moment when I'm thinking about going to New York. I'm like, golly, this changes the math a lot. The math changes at a significant amount. Yeah, just close your eyes and don't look.

54:05all right i got well i got one more idea before we go which is uh ai agents i don't know uh i sent you guys the link but this kid i don't know this guy uh jacob greenfield we love this we love him i don't know him either but he posts amazing stuff he immediately is awesome in my book because he posted this yesterday and i was thinking like what we could talk about today um and he basically used these ai agents which like that's all i know about them is they're called ai agents uh but they go and do these jobs. And so he was like, all right, I'm going to go have an AI agent that finds opportunities.

54:35And I'm going to score the opportunities based on how much money could I make and how difficult would it be to execute? And he basically populated this whole list. And then he's like, but ha ha, I'm going to create a second AI agent that then goes and looks at all of the opportunities that are high earning potential, low difficulty. And I'm going to have them create a plan on how I could actually execute to do that thing. And then he's probably going to create like a third AI agent and be like, and then I'm going to have them carry out the plans from AI agent number two. But it's just like, again, yes, you have to be technical to be able to figure some of this stuff out or work with technical people.

55:09But the world is changing at a very rapid pace. And what we're seeing is everyone was worried about like the blue collar worker was going to get automated away. Like, damn, it sounds like Jacob is automating away my first million. Now all of a sudden, no one has listened to the podcast. They're just going to get an Excel sheet with like, how do I get rich without doing a lot of work and go do those opportunities, right? So it's cool to see, but I do think that there's a lot of things that people are going to figure out here of just like how to find better opportunities without having to spend thousands of hours doing the research.

55:41This is awesome. This tweet is awesome. I'm looking at it now. This is very good. They are awesome, but also like like, okay, I like I think it's like one of these things where like the demo shows you what's possible, but the demo is not usable. I feel like the same way about VR right now. Every time I buy the new VR, I buy the new VR every time it comes out. And then I put it on and I'm like, holy shit, this is amazing. I can't wait to show five other people this. And then I'm going to put it on the shelf and not touch it for a year. But soon, this will be... It'll solve all the pain points. You used to have to be tethered to a computer.

56:17Now you don't. It used to be where it was really hot and sweaty in there. Now it's not. You used to not be able to see the room when you're there. Now you can see through. You can see the room. They're improving it one step at a time. For example, the things on this list are clean energy solutions for shipping, innovating fuel alternatives. Okay, yeah. Sure. A moneymaker. Battery that lasts forever. I got you. Pop, why isn't real estate blog on here? Not enough money and way too difficult. where's real estate blog it didn't make the top 30 so i think the idea of this is really cool but uh you know in practice like if somebody sat down was like great i'm gonna do that thing i'm gonna go use that that thing to make it happen i don't think any of it's like usable at this point i will give you one example that i think is usable so um i think somebody could do this right now i think uh you know somebody who wants to play a different game could go play this game upwork has like, I don't know, three or four billion dollars of GMV every year of people basically paying for tasks that get done.

57:23And I'm pretty sure a huge number of Upwork tasks and Fiverr tasks are automatable right now. Or maybe they're not 100 % automated, but you could take that same person, use AI, use technology in order to be like 10x your output, 5X your output. So you get just better leverage, operational leverage. I think if somebody combined private equity and AI, you could go roll up and buy the top profiles on Upwork and Fiverr. So you basically buy the search juice that these guys have so that they're going to get the top logo design. They're going to go get the top jobs because you're the number one rank because you were there since 2013 on Fiverr or whatever.

58:07And I think you could go buy all of those and then you could put them all under one roof and be like, that's wild we're going to use ai to fulfill a huge number of these um and you could make a lot of money because those little properties on top of fiverr on top of upwork those are valuable rental properties essentially they go get income every month but now you have a way to get more margin out of that rental i think already you could buy them at a good price because nobody else is really buying those but on top of that you could probably get some more operational leverage out of this was the whole idea that like thrasio and other amazon aggregators had was they were going to like go buy up a bunch of Amazon stores.

58:42And I know somebody who financed a lot of them. And his thesis was like, if you're the first search result for a very popular product, that is like real estate. And so it's like location, location, location, like you are the first search result. And so you'll constantly get traffic. Obviously, there's platform risk if there's some sort of algorithm change or whatever, but they were able to kind of model out that risk. The hard part is like you're dealing in physical goods on Amazon. And what you're talking about is like you're basically just dealing with software. And so there is 100 % somebody, some obscure place in the world who is like the best Fiverr logo designer right now.

59:17And they are just like a mid journey, like power user, right? And so it's like, okay, I used to be able to design X number of logos per month. Now I can do 100X that. And oh, you want to give me feedback? No problem. I'll just change the prompt to make it exactly what you want. and I can do it in, you know, one 100th of the time. Yeah, like that sounds awesome to that person. And frankly, like that's how the world should work. Like you should pay the same for the results. You're buying the result, not the amount of work. And like that person, after having figured out how to do it, is going to be financially rewarded.

59:52Like we want that financial or economic system to be exactly how business works. Do you, of all these companies that you're working on, how much time are you allocating to each one? How many businesses do you have now? I don't know how many, but let's just call like around 10.

1:00:11I think of it kind of like a two by two matrix to some degree. There are some businesses that are young and need lots of time. And then there are a lot of companies that are older and don't need as much time. The only thing that changes between those two things is like fires, right? So it's like, if you look at my day, it is mostly distributed to the companies that are just getting off the ground. we're trying to figure out how to build momentum. We're trying to get to profitability. We're trying to like figure out the first couple of hires. We're trying to like make sure we've got the product correct, like all those types of things.

1:00:42And then maybe 20%, 15 % of my day is like, oh, we just lost a big customer or there's some like fire to put out with one of the companies that's already pretty mature. But after the first, I don't know, six months, like the company works or it doesn't. And if it works, then actually I'm probably doing the company a disservice if I'm like still meddling in the day-to-day like decision making and leadership of the business. We have somebody who runs the company, like they should be the ones to sink or swim. And I think they appreciate the autonomy to just go do it themselves without having me like micromanage them over their shoulder.

1:01:15The only thing that I do do is every week I get a weekly update. And frankly, like I read them, I give a little bit of feedback here and there, but it's more so for the people who run the company because it forces them just to write down, what do we get done this week? And no one, including myself, ever wants to send an update. It's like, we got nothing done. So that's really the only thing that's persistent week in, week out, regardless of the age of the business. How are you balancing the two things of A, buy versus build? So I think Sean and Andrew Wilkinson, they're toying around the idea of buying parts of companies or wholly owning companies that they buy, as well as focus of, well, these one or two things could have outsides returns.

1:01:55I should only do those. Yeah. So buying versus build is really interesting. I've gone back and forth over the years. We've bought a couple of businesses, not a lot, but a few. And then we've obviously built a number of them. And there's a sector right now that I'm looking at. It's in the media space. It's a very specific type of audience. I think that it's kind of a unique thing. I'm not usually big on ideas or valuable. This to me is just like, we understand something about an audience that most other people haven't yet discovered. And so we think that it could be interesting to go after. There's two players in the market that are well-known in that industry.

1:02:29Again, it's a niche, but also like very big. And both players, you'd probably have to pay like over$100 million to buy them in kind of total cost. And you probably can't buy a minority stake. And so it's like, at this point, given our track record, I probably could go try to figure out, you know, a bunch of these like big institutional investors who want to buy media businesses and like go put it together. It's a lot of work. You have to convince someone to sell it to you. You have to get the terms right, integration. Like there's a lot of challenges. but then I'm like dude I think for a hundred grand we could create a competitor and like it's not gonna be worth a hundred million dollars you know within the first two or three years but like could we like take a big dent into their businesses probably so when it's that skewed I obviously tend to lean towards building versus buying I think where it's harder is like hey the business is worth like ten million dollars or five million dollars and you're like that's like two years of progress versus not spending the money up front and like maybe you get there.

1:03:28That's where I probably lean much more towards like buying versus building. It's just like it's a lower risk and the deal's easier to get done than trying to go and buy these huge things that, frankly, there's only so many people in the world that are actually good at doing. And what about the focus thing? I mean, I only do one thing. I remember your face. It's seared in my brain last time you asked me this. And I was like, no, I don't do a lot of things. I do one thing. We provide capital and distribution to businesses. I think that's inspiring. I think that Sean and I fall on different sides.

1:03:59I actually think, Sean, I'm slowly buying into other viewpoints. Oh, shit. I'm trying to go over to where you're at. I'm trying to focus more. Sam has... No, no. Hold on a second. This is a lie. Sam, you have multiple businesses. You're not just doing one thing. Although you think of, I don't know, Airbnb short-term rental, right like you built that out like that's a project that you were working on right at the same time you were getting hampton off the ground right like there's all these things where sometimes it's not like okay i'm gonna raise money and go build this big business it could just be like projects but you're you're constantly doing multiple things i call them hobbies so i i have a 40 hour a week thing which is actually so i'm disproving my my own point it's actually podcasting and Hampton.

1:04:44So that doesn't exactly make my point, but that's like my nine to five. And then like I've got like weekend projects is how I consider it. So meet Sam Parr. He's a podcaster with weekend hobbies. Podcast influencer, content man. Producer, content producer. I think we've done a really good job of rebranding that. Creator just sounds weak for some reason. There's a bunch of people changing their ex-bios right now. they're like just deleting creator and putting producer yeah it's just for some reason it's a weak that's a weak that's a weak uh uh word i don't know what it is but we do need to rebrand that well just it bulks you in with everybody else that's the problem like uh it's like oh no i'm i'm not like them no no that guy's just unemployed uh there's a difference you know uh i'm a different thing i need to have a new name i met a guy who uh he was one of the early hires at palantir and uh He essentially like, I don't know, he didn't tell me this, but like, I think he was like basically the COO, right?

1:05:44Or whatever in the early days. And he was like, yeah, one of the cool things about the culture is like, you kind of like jointly with your boss made up your title. And so his was like risk identifier and destroyer.

1:05:59Right? And it's just like, man, names do matter. Like, what does that guy do? I want to go work at the company where like, that could be my title. And it's very clear inside the organization. what the president does at different companies may be different but the guy whose title is like risk identifier and destroyer is 100 focused on risk and so uh same thing like content creator like maybe it's the wrong name and just change the name and then all of a sudden everyone's really excited about it chamath has a good story about this he says when he was at facebook they were trying to hire like you know some phd level um you know math and stats guy and they were like cool like you can come be a data analyst he's like i don't want to be a data analyst i'm gonna go get my PhD instead.

1:06:35He's like, I don't know, did I say data analyst? Data scientist, where you have a new field called data science. And you're one of the first to be a data scientist on Earth. And he's like, yeah, I invented the tag data science. And then now it's like, you know, a whole like prestigious job title in Silicon Valley is data science. Is that story true? That's a hard story to believe. You think that's true? Yeah, I believe it. I don't know. I have no reason not to believe it. I did. I love those guys so much on the All In podcast, but I was laughing that people were giving them shit about using Scaramucci as a measuring stick.

1:07:09You guys see this? Yeah. No, what's that? Scaramucci was the White House communications director for 11 days, I think. I mean, the infamous photo, he's got the sunglasses on with the finger guns, probably one of the greatest stints in the White House of all time. And so people always tweet at Scaramucci. Emmett Shearer was the CEO of OpenAI for 48 hours. They're like, hey, how many Scaramucci's did he last and scare me she would like calculate it like you know point two or whatever um and so the all-in guys they had been saying it for a while and they were like yeah we invented that they were like on twitter like give us credit if you're going to use it and uh and then the internet loves to hate on those guys if you're not in like the tech industry so they were like waiting for them to say something and of course they all started pulling up like articles and whatever and i'm like man this is like peak internet right is like somebody wants credit for a term that no one's really clear where it came from.

1:08:04And then a bunch of people who don't like that person wants to critique them and yell and scream and go do a bunch of work to disprove them. I was like, we are all wasting our time. We should just get off the internet and go do productive things. It's kind of like when I say MFM, we get credit for making Andrew Huberman and Brian Johnson famous. The longevity guy. According to us. Yeah. You're welcome, world. I actually think that Kim Kardashian's famous because of you guys. Didn't want to be tweeted about her early on. Yeah. It's like, you ever heard of Rob Dierdick? You're welcome. I was the first one to watch her work, I think.

1:08:38Yeah, it was great. Pomp, thanks for doing this, man. We love hanging out with you. Absolutely. I appreciate you guys very much. Can I plug one thing before I leave? Yeah, yeah. We have a job board. It's called dreamstartupjob.com. It used to be called Pomp Crypto Jobs. It was just crypto. We've now expanded it to be crypto and everything else. We've helped three people a day on average for now over two years, get a new job. And so there's 10 ,000 open roles on there. If you want to get a job at your dream startup, you should go to dreamstartupjob.com and check it out. All right, appreciate it.

1:09:10It looks good. I remember what it used to be. I think this is a smart move. Well, we'll figure it out. I appreciate you, fellas. Good to see you, man. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. on the road, let's travel, never looking back.

1:09:36Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love. I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. And you know, as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the nineties, you're operating like you're in the nineties. And trust me, I've been there clunky portals, random holds on your money,$50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switched to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

1:10:06If you're already using Mercury, respect. If you're still using one of the old big banks, I got questions for you. So go visit Mercury.com and give it a test drive. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column 8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC.