The Man Who Owns 1% Of ALL Bitcoin

23:41When you go into these like blue collar kind of industrial manufacturing businesses, like sometimes these people have been building the company, like the line driving business, They've been building for 20 years. This is like their life. And when we were having the negotiations with them, like we were starting out with like, what's the point of the board of directors, right? Like there's an education that goes into it. And so it makes getting deals done very, very hard because of that friction that exists. And so it's almost easier to do deals with people who have done lots of deals than it is to do deals with somebody who's done their first deal.

24:11Like this is the big one. And so we're still trying to figure out how to solve that problem, but it's just something that we've noticed that doesn't get talked a lot about online. What were the numbers of this company? I don't want to say because they're super great guys, but these businesses, they're bigger than you think. I've looked at a bunch of these businesses. So there's like line striping. Another one is like traffic cones and barricades. And so if you think of that business, like every construction site, you have to have these things there from a safety standpoint, it's legally mandated.

24:40And it's like the greatest real estate business in the world. They can buy a hip height, four foot wide barricade. They buy those for$400 and then they rent them out for$5 to$8 a day. And once you're on site, you're not allowed to leave the site. The equipment can't leave until the job's done. So LaGuardia, that was under construction for 10 years. So somebody was just renting them cones, getting paid$5,$6,$7 a day for 10 years. And so those businesses are really interesting. What ends up happening is my buddy, Brian B. Shores, got this quote. He says, small businesses don't stay small on purpose.

25:15So a lot of times what happens is they'll dominate a local area, but they have very hard time scaling. And so you can expect revenue is mid-seven figures. Usually, they can get to about a million, a million and a half dollars in EBITDA. And then the owners are taking quite a bit of compensation for themselves. If you're taking$500 ,000 and you live in a rural area or not a major metro, you're rich. And so it's a pretty good job to have, especially with the freedom it comes with and do that for a decade. You got paid$5 million and probably living pretty good. There's also a generational thing. So my father is a small business owner.

25:53My father-in-law is a small business owner. My father owns a produce brokerage, meaning buys fruit from a farmer and sells it to Walmart. My father-in-law owns a moving company. and I've asked them questions like, do you have managers? How does that work? And they're like, what do you mean? I only have 18 employees. There aren't really meetings. I don't do one-on-ones. Or they'll be like, well, how do you... Do you just do everything? Yeah, everything goes up through me. Or it's like, well, how do you hire? It's like, well, usually just one of the people who work there might have a buddy who hopefully could do okay.

26:29You know what I mean? The mindset is when you come from, I think, a different generation, and also you come from poverty, and it's blue collar. You're like, dude, I make 800 grand a year. I'm rich. What do you mean? Why would I do anything else? Do you know what I mean? I also think that there's this element of ambition can kill companies if you're in the wrong business. And so we all get excited because Elon's like, we're going to Mars. I'm going to put a chip in someone's brain. We're like, that's awesome. But I have one friend. He's got a retail store. He's got three locations in the United States.

27:00One of them is in New York. And I was talking to him recently and he's like, yeah, all of our profit comes from the New York store. Like, actually I might be better off if I shut down the other two stores. Right. And so it's like, when you're in business, everyone wants you to expand, get bigger, like do all these things. And he started down that path, but he realized like, wait a second, like maybe actually the value of this business is that like, I know one market really well. I picked a great location, like it's a great business. And if I become ambitious, I will suck all the profits out of this business and try to reinvest it and end up just like blowing up.

27:30And so again, if you're running a tech company, like you have to be ambitious. The whole point is the power law. But if you're running some of these other businesses, like, yeah, maybe you don't want to make more than$800 ,000 because in order to do that, you've got to double the team size, your profit margin goes down, your stress level explodes, and like the odds of success don't actually line up with how much money you could make. And so I do think a lot about like, there's like an ambition product and market fit where it only pays to be ambitious in the right market with the right product.

27:59Dude, my father, when he travels, my parents now, once they got older, they go to Florida for six weeks every winter. He travels, I swear to God, with a file cabinet, a phone that you could plug into the wall, and a fax machine. And he's like, well, I have to have my work equipment. I can't work without this stuff. And I'll get texts from him. and I'm like, dude, are you trying to post on Facebook right now? Like I, I, this is a Facebook post, isn't it? He's like, isn't that what I just did? Like, and so like the idea of like evolving to some of these tools, it's like, dude, I'm like, I don't give a shit about growing this.

28:34I'm just going to like bail and it's going to die. Like there is no, there is no exit. What are you talking about? The exits when I die. I also think that small businesses, like if people don't understand what goes into running these small businesses, like you just are like, oh, of course the business just runs it's somewhere like a tech company but small businesses make up 50 of jobs in america and the country is literally built off the backs of these small businesses right in terms of gdp growth and all this stuff and we all probably know stories you know similar to this where like they're going around with their equipment um i know somebody who's an extended family member uh he has a business where uh it's like a chemical business and he like mixes things in order to create the product and he won't fly anywhere he will only drive because when he can drive he can put all of the materials in his car and then he'll like show up so like when i was living in florida he showed up and he's like can i just like take over the garage and i walked in there and i was like this looks like a like a science lab like he's like a meth lab yeah and then he like makes the product and he goes to the post office every day and like drops the product off so they can ship it like all this stuff and you're just like man this is incredible what goes into building these companies compared to like the tech world we're just like oh like somebody wrote some code and just operates 24-7, 365.

29:45Money keeps coming into my account because Stripe's awesome. It's just a whole different way to play the game of business. There's a great quote in Venture Capital of you can't put rocket fuel into a car. Rocket fuel's great, but if you put it into a car, the car explodes. Your ambition thing is like that. Ambition placed into the wrong vehicle will often just result in pain, not growth. I had heard another interesting thing. to a guy who's probably one of the most successful VCs in the last, I don't know, 20 years. He was talking about AI and he went and he met with a guy who was like a mega billionaire, private equity type of dude.

30:25And he goes to this guy this guy's like 80 years old or something. And he goes to him, he says, hey, I'm here I want to get your advice, your wisdom on what I should be investing in. I feel like the whole world is changing. AI is super exciting. I want to be in the game. I want to be investing in the right AI projects, but I'm not sure like opening. I could kill any project at any given moment. If they just release any feature, the valuations are a little bit crazy. What should I do? And the, the 80 year old PE guy goes, I think you should buy railroads. And he goes, and he goes, well, when, you know, Buffett has this great quote, which is that change is the enemy of the investor in, in, in their style of, of compounding.

31:03Right. Because you, if you want something that's durable, that's going to compound over 20 years. You don't want to be in an industry of rapid change where the leader one year could be gone in year three. It's great on the way up, but it's terrible on the way down. And so he was like, it sounds like everything is changing so much. He's like, my approach is go find things that are not going to change. They probably have less people interested in them right now. They're probably undervalued. And what I like about your line striping business, Pomp, is that it's a mix of both. So it's like a AI proof type of business, because it's painted lines on roads.

31:37But it's also going to benefit from all the advances in AI, like one of the big advances is self driving cars. And so you would be the beneficiary without the competition versus if you said, I'm going to create a better LiDAR system or a simulation system for self driving cars. Okay, cool. But you're competing against the smartest people on earth in the most competitive field ever, where technology is going to make everything obsolete every three years. And that's just a very hard way to win. Somebody's going to win for sure, but it's a very hard way to win versus what you're talking about with the line striping business.

32:09If somebody's listening to this and they have a line striping business, I know how to grow this nationally. Please get in touch with me. I will help you. Like 100%. No, no, no. Don't sell to that suit. Dude, come to me and Sam. You're relatable. You're relatable guys. I got a cool baseball hat. Sam's got his denim collection over there. You don't want Pomp the suit. This guy's on TV. He's too busy for you. Sean, have you ever been inside a Home Depot your entire life? Yeah, dude. I go in there all the time for advice. I'm like, I'm looking for some men. Can some boys come fix some things at my house?

32:44Here's the case of my car. Go. One of the other, maybe an extension of this is not only what's going to change, what's not going to change, but can you bring fresh ideas to old industries? so uh there's this new podcast that i've been listening to that's fantastic it's called rain makers uh and it's this guy out in la basically he's like trying to find investors that no one's ever heard of before and so he went and found them like and i think it's not like no one's heard of but just like the new generation hasn't heard of and so one of the guys that he profiled was uh philip anshuetz who uh he owned a bunch of real estate he did a bunch of like oil and gas bought railroads and there's like a tie-through of this guy's career where he basically tried to find like value no one understood so he would buy up railroad companies not for the railroads but he'd buy because there was oil underneath the ground right or he bought up like a bunch of local sports teams because he figured out a playbook of how he could get the stadiums for free right and he'd have a bunch of real estate but the one i loved was um he bought regal cinema the movie theater chain when all of the movie theaters were crashing and everyone was like oh this is a horrible business like you can't make money on tickets and food and what he realized and his like aha moment was for 20 minutes before the movie starts you have a captured audience they're just sitting there looking at the screen and so he started to sell ads and he made the movie theater an ad business and then all of a sudden he completely changed the unit economics and uh was able to like save regal cinema became this huge thing sold it etc and so like one okay like that's awesome but also like part of being a ballplayer and like understanding this i listened to that podcast episode and we had a conference coming up and i was like oh my god i have the same thing as the movie theater.

34:15All these people are going to be sitting there. And so they went to advertisers like, does anyone have a TV commercial that they've already made? Pay us. And we will just like play the commercial in the middle of the conference. And we did it. And so you like start to realize that not only are you taking new ideas to these old industries, but then once you like see it, you can bring this across all sorts of different applications. And I really think like that is the beauty of what you guys do on My First Million, but also like these podcasts and Twitter, et cetera, is it's just like find the ideas and then like capture them and apply them into your situation.

34:50And this has been going on for a long time, but now all these ideas are just much more readily available. Dude, this guy, Philip Antoos, have you, do you know who this is, Sean? No, I've never heard of him. Dude, he's savage. He's super low key. But yeah, it started real estate and oil. But then now he owns AEG. Do you know what that is? The entertainment thing? Yes, the entertainment thing. It's basically, I think it's the second largest ticketing service provider behind Live Nation. AEG owns music events like Coachella. So this old guy, he owns Coachella. He also, you know, AEG, you buy tickets through there.

35:27He owns all types of sports magazines. He owns a couple of sports teams. He owns entertainment parks. He's like prolific. This guy's super prolific. And you guys want to know something else about him, Pop? You probably didn't realize this. I was reading I read a lot of history I bought this book about the American West this fucking guy's the author he wrote the he wrote the book on like America expanding into the West this guy's super prolific this guy feel I'm how do you say his name Philip Philip on choice AEG is literally on choice entertainment group right is the AEG he's super legit he's amazing this guy's amazing I've been fascinated by him but he's a pretty low key.

36:10I don't think you could find a biography on him. He's very under the radar. This guy's super fascinating. That's cool. Okay. I like it. I'm sold. He wrote the book was a great twist, by the way. That is not what I thought you were going to say at all. Very fascinating guy. Can we talk about Pomp's List? We have this segment. Sean, we have to do a redo on this segment. It started out with years ago when my wife wanted to go work somewhere. I was like, where's the company where you can own the stock and it could like 10x potentially, but it's like a really safe place to work where it's got 500-ish employees.

36:47You can get good maternity leave. Well, it's cool. I think it's worth saying. How old were you guys at this time, roughly? This was, I was 27, so she must have been 24. So she's 24 years old. Most people, when they think about a job, they're just like, I want a job. What kind of job? A good job, right? Like, what do you want? You don't even know what you, you don't even really know what you're looking for. whereas, Sam, you went all capital allocator on, or you're like, look, this is not a job. This is an investment. You're trading your time for restricted stock units. We're going to pick the best RSU package that's out there.

37:20And you're going to think about this as one concentrated bet where you're going to basically get, I don't know, let's say a lot of these companies would give you maybe 40, 50K a year of stock in addition to, let's just reuse round numbers, like, I don't know, 150K a year of salary. And so you're going to get over a four-year period. you're going to get$200 ,000 of stock. And what you were saying was like, how do you become a millionaire? How do you take that$200 ,000 of stock over that four years? How do you become a millionaire without having a great idea, without becoming an entrepreneur, without becoming a great investor, without doing anything?

37:53No capital, no expertise. You're going to join as employee number, I don't know, not even in the top 100, right? 1 ,500. 1 ,500, right? At a company that we all know about, we can touch and feel the product, so we're not betting on thin air here. And that fascinated me. You told me about this. And then we created a whole thing around it called Sarah's List, around her name, which was what are the 10 companies or so that we think fit this criteria today? And we did this and then we did like a round of it and they all turned out to be, or we hit like seven out of 10 that would have hit the criteria that we had touched on.

38:25Pomp, we asked you to do your version of this, Pomp's List. Do you have any, we just told you about the prompt. We didn't hear anything you had to say. What are the companies today that you think fit this criteria? You could go be, I don't know, employee 500 or employee 1000, get 200K of stock and might become a millionaire just off of the company continuing to grow and chug along these sort of later stage public or private companies. So I broke it up into three different buckets. The first two are like 10X reputation. So I don't think there's 10X left in the stock necessarily, but I do think that if you go and join now, they're still like kind of seen as cool and new and fast growing.

39:01And so your reputation and kind of your resume with 10X, those two are like pretty simple. OpenAI and Anduril, I think are both at this point where if you go and you join, like you may be able to make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and like there's probably some upside, but OpenAI at like$85 billion, basically you have to build a trillion dollar company to get 10 to 12X. And so I think that is like, you can make a really nice salary. You can probably get some upside, maybe, you know, two to five X is like a kind of base case, But really why you would join one of those companies is because the reputation and kind of resume 10x is kind of the value that you're getting there.

39:39Andrel was on our original list, my friend. We've won up to you on that one. I don't even think OpenEye really existed the first time. You probably existed as like a research lab at the time we did that episode and it was not on our radar. We missed on that one. Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, these companies, that's how they should mature, right? They should be like 10x economic opportunities and then 10x reputation. It never works the other way. Like there's no company that there's a 10x reputation opportunity first, and then there's a 10x economic opportunity. Like the economics have to be captured to some degree and people be like, oh, that company is successful.

40:15And then that's where the reputation kind of follows. So let me ask you, you worked at Facebook and Snap to, you know, blue chip logo type of things, but also at one, you know, at different times have been incredible, you know, financial things too. when you joined those, did you think about them from a logo collector first mentality or a stock collector first mentality? In your calculus, I'm sure both were beneficial, but which one was more beneficial in your case? Yeah. I mean, Facebook is probably the best example. I built and sold this company. It was kind of like in social media analytics.

40:46We used a bunch of the APIs. I'd gotten to know some people at Facebook. When we sold the company, I made enough money to make more money than my friends who had jobs, but not enough to retire or anything like that. and the guys at Facebook like what are you going to do now and like for whatever reason I never even thought that like Facebook has like you know a building with like hundreds of employees or like any of this like it was just kind of like this thing I use and I talked to a guy over email and um so like why don't you come out here and like interview for a job and I was like cool what job like product manager I had no clue what a product manager was so on the way there on my Kindle I bought the art of product management which is a book about product management I read I went into the interview and I just regurgitated everything I remembered from the book.

41:26The king of king of bullshit. But I was just like, I mean, like, that's kind of what a product manager does, right? It's like they kind of just like get enough information and then just like say some buzzwords, right? And like get the product out the door. And so like definitely huge imposter syndrome when I started working there. And I remember the last interview actually was with Sam Lesson, who now is like, you know, very well known, etc. et cetera. And Sam got on and I didn't know what to expect because they were kind of like, Hey, this is like the boss guy, right? So like, you know, be on your A game.

41:57And he got on and he was like, let's talk about beacons. And I was like, what? And like the Facebook beacons had just come out, like kind of like RFID stuff. And he just wanted to brainstorm. And I was like, oh, this place is different, right? Like that's not like a normal interview. And so the reason I took the job was not the money. Like it was a good salary, but it wasn't anything crazy. This was at the beginning of 2014. The stock was probably like 50 bucks. Oh, you got a 10Xer then? Well, I sold it and bought Bitcoin way better. Were you about to say the reason you joined was kind of the people and the culture was different?

42:29Because the first two companies I built, I couldn't get them to grow past a certain point. And so I pretty much came to this like fork in the road. I was like, I can go to business school and like pay to try to get this education where I can just go join the people who seem to be like the best in the world at growing things, which was the Facebook growth folks. And they'll pay me. and like that literally was the evaluation and so i went to facebook and they blew away my expectations like sure you get some you know resume uh benefit and all that kind of stuff uh but what i found in my career is kind of like college like no one actually cares where you went to college after like maybe the first like three to five years of your business career working at a place like facebook unless you're one of the first maybe like two to five hundred employees it kind of just is like all right you're like kind of legit you know you worked at a place that has some sort of high bar.

43:11But now there's 80 ,000 people that worked at Facebook as of the end of last year. So it's kind of like 80 ,000 people got in, right? Does it have the same kind of cachet as it did a decade ago? Unclued. Dude, Sam, did I ever tell you when I interviewed at Facebook? No, I did not know that. So when we were going through the acquisition process, we were going to sell to Facebook, not Twitch. They had the higher offer, the better offer, and they flew us out to Seattle, I guess, is where we went. And they were like, oh, as a formality, your whole team has to go through this kind of like leveling thing.

43:47So you interview, you're all in, but you have to get leveled. And you got to do it too. And I was like, okay, great. I'm excited. I've always wanted to know what this process is like. But then a part of me was like, shit, I better not blow this one, right? Like the emperor has no clothes. Let me make sure I don't blow this whole deal here by going in wrong. So I do the interview process. During the interview, I was kind of like you pumped. I was just making up like, I was literally just making things up every single question they asked. I had no idea what the answer should be. And this is completely out in the blue.

44:19Because I had done the interview process with the other people who were looking at buying us. And in theirs, it was like, tell me about a time where you showed resilience. And I was like, oh, whatever. This girl rejected me in seventh grade, but I didn't give up. Eighth grade, I got her. Whatever. It was like some stupid character type of tell me a story. Tell me about a time you disagreed with somebody. but you've found resolution. Facebook was different. They go, okay, let's pretend that you just released a feature and you come in the next day and the chart of the usage looks like this. And he showed this curve where it's like, it was like normal and then it drops off a cliff.

44:56And he's like, but it's not around the feature you released, but this is this adjacent feature. Here's what the usage looks like. Walk me through like, all right, how would you approach that? What would you do next? And I was like, and I'm so dumb, But I was like, well, I'd go I'd go ask the guy who works on that. I'd be like, hey, do you know what's going on with this feature? And they're like, OK, I like that. And then what would you do? I was like, well, then I'd see what he says. And then based on what he says, that leads to my next question. If he doesn't know, then I would do this. What a stupid interview.

45:28No, it was it was honestly it was a great interview. It was the best interview I'd ever done. All of the questions were like this, where there were real, real scenarios where they got you to basically it wasn't a riddle. like some abstract riddle about like how many toilet seats are there in Bay Area and it wasn't canned pre-prepped like character questions where you just cherry pick one example that makes you look good versus the reality. I was like oh this is a problem solving job and they're trying to see how I problem solve. And there were all different variations of try to solve this problem but it's like a real problem not like a very arbitrary problem that like doesn't even it's not even relevant to what's going on.

46:04What level did you get now what was it last last last pod i don't mean to keep my own horn but beep beep the guy told me that it was the highest it was the it was of all m &a that they had done it was the highest like feedback rated they'd ever got now when he said that i knew i had been pretty much bullshitting the whole time during the interview so i was like i respected them even more i'm like these guys just want to win the deal like that's clearly what they want they don't actually care about my interview they know that they didn't just flatter me and that this is going to totally work as it is working right now.

46:36I could feel myself blushing. I was like, wow, these guys are really smart. They threw out the actual interview results and they just told me what I wanted to hear to get me to pick them because they already had decided before the interview that they wanted to buy our company. Anyways, the last thing I was going to say, there were so many people that were at Facebook that you've never heard of because there's people you know of at Facebook. There's Zuck, there's Cheryl, then there's like the Chamath level, then there's even like Sam Lesson. The guys I had interviewed with us. I guarantee you guys have never heard of them.

47:03Do you know this guy Vijay Raji? Do you know this guy Vivek? You've probably never heard of these guys, right? They were so impressive. These guys were so impressive and not just impressive in the interview. Then their track record was impressive. I was like, so what are you working on here at Facebook? I've never heard of you guys. They're like, well, we built the games, like the HTML games inside of messaging. And I was like, okay, how'd that go? Did some people use that? They're like, well, honestly it kind of failed in this way, but there was this one part of it that was actually pretty successful.

47:29And it brings in like whatever, it brings in 500 million a year now. And they're like, that was kind of like an okay hit. But our big hit was working on this. And he's like, yeah, this guy Vivek, he's like, you know how Office went from like Microsoft Office went from something you buy a disk and you download and you type in the key, you pay$30 once to like this thing in the cloud Office 365 that you pay every month for? He goes, yeah, he created that. Like he was at Microsoft. He created it at his desk. Nobody kind of believed that that's the direction they should go. He did it anyways on his own nights and weekends.

47:59And then kind of like powered that through and got that approved. Now that's like the way that Microsoft works. And I was like, you guys are the no names at Facebook. Holy shit. The level of talent at this place is insane. Dude, it is insane. I remember taking tours there. My wife worked at Facebook and I would just walk around the campus and I would just see some of the conversations and hear some of the conversations. And I was just starting to hustle, which is just a daily newsletter. And I was pumped that I had 100 ,000 people a day reading it. And I just remember walking around and I'm like, I'm a piece of shit.

48:30I'm nothing. Like, I am nobody. Give me one of these Facebook vests. I want one of these. I'm in. Did you see the vending machine where they have like MacBook chargers that you could just like push A3 and just a giant like brick charger will drop out for you? I'm like, dude, I just bought four computers on Craigslist for$800 a piece. And that was a big deal for me. And like, I'm out here and you guys have a vending machine with mouse and Dr. Dre headphones in it. Like, what the fuck? Sign me up. I'm in. The thing that Sean was talking about with the interview. So there's three different tracks in the interviews when I was there.

49:00And I didn't believe I was a good interviewer. Like I didn't know how to pick talent basically. And so one of the things that you can do is you can like volunteer to do the interviews more often. As a product manager, like they don't have like, oh, that's the person who does all the hiring. But the current product managers hire the prospective new product managers. And so like the current team kind of like does the interviews. Right. And so of these three tracks, the one that Sean talked about was the favorite one that I liked to do because it was like the most practical. And so the example I used to give is like, you launch something, 50 % of your traffic is down.

49:32You come in Monday morning. What do you do? I probably did over 100 interviews in like an 18-month period. And so you hear all these answers. And there's only one time ever somebody said something to me. And I immediately was like, higher, like strong higher. He goes, I would immediately alert the entire team. We have a problem. Like everyone else would jump to solve the problem. but it was so obvious. Like this guy's worked on teams before he understands like what happens in these scenarios, like communication is key. Like everything that was wrapped in this, like one single sentence. And I remember just being like, man, you can tell the greats from like the pretty goods in, you know, a 30 minute conversation, just walking through a practical example because all of the lessons learned show up.

50:11And so I do think that's one of the strongest things that Facebook does in terms of like talent filtering. What, what are the other companies that you like? All right. So there's a bunch of companies that I'm going to put in the middle bucket, which are the 10X potentials. Eight Sleep, I think, is a huge business. Really? I think they're huge. You think it's 10X, though? I think it's huge, but not a business. No, no, no. Yeah, I think Eight Sleep. So look, I'm very good friends with a lot of folks there. I think that they are probably one of the best operators, team of operators. They do a lot of revenue.

50:47they have only like 80 or 85 employees uh i believe that they've publicly said that the company's been profitable and they're selling a hardware product plus all of the software and some of the things that they're building now are just like really cool and i think a lot about like 10x economic opportunity uh is not just like hey can we make more money but you also have a really really strong mission and so their whole idea of like for eight hours a day no one tends to a human can they compress that can they make it healthier can they you know do things like body scans etc like all these kind of cool things um i think that's a huge opportunity for someone the second is varda uh the whole idea of like let's go to space is not new but let's go to space to help us back here on earth is huge and so varda does is they've created a space manufacturing facilities they launched them up into space they're right now manufacturing drugs in zero gravity and then they're bringing it back to earth and so i think that that's a pretty big one explain that i forgot what's the reason to do the manufacturing in space it's a little unclear as like what all of the reasons are going to be so far but two quick ones are like there are some drugs that uh it's either very difficult or not possible to uh currently manufacture you know with gravity so like zero gravity is a huge component of it and then the second thing is if they're able to do this correctly it actually may be cheaper to do some of this in space than it is on earth.

52:08And so it's like their big macro bet is just like use space for the benefit of earth rather than everyone else who wants to go to space to like conquer Mars or the moon or whatever else. But dude, how does that make sense? How could it be cheaper to do in something in space? You have to get to space in a rocket and you have to have labor in space. How could it possibly be cheaper? There's no labor. So that's the thing is they've built this like automated manufacturing like box basically. And so you don't need any labor. And then now, like the other thing you have to remember is like rocket launches are super cheap compared to what they historically were.

52:42And then it's not like SpaceX is like getting a rocket just for Varda, right? They're like bringing tons of things up there all at once. And so now you have like shared cost of an already, you know, 10X or more cheaper rocket. And so the math ends up working in a really interesting way. We got to get that guy. What's his name? Delian. We got to get him on the pod to explain this. I'm going to be like, and I'm not going to let him do no hand wavy shit. I'm going to be like, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, the box manufacturers in space and it's cheaper than renting a place in Lexington. Like, all right, walk me through that line by line.

53:14There's no way. Right. Like, this is crazy. You guys bring him on and we'll see what he says. He's obviously right. Like he's not wrong. I just don't get it. And I want somebody to explain it to me because there's got to be other people out there that are like, how does this work exactly? All right, everyone. Quick break because I've got a thrill of the shill. I've got something to shill. So here's the deal. About eight weeks ago, I released this new podcast called Money Wise where we break down different people's financials, meaning we look at what their income is. We look at how much money they spend and they break down their portfolio.

53:44And then we'll dive deep on a certain topic that's a little psychological. What do you spend on that makes you happy? Things like that. Well, I said I was only going to make more episodes. A few people begged me to make more because they're really hard to make. And you did. So I made more. So we have a season of seven episodes. The first one's released today. Right now it's live. And this first episode is with a guy who spends roughly$250 ,000 a month. And we broke down exactly what he spends his money on, his net worth, his portfolio, everything. It's pretty surprising that people give out this information.

54:13And so I'm really proud of this podcast. So you can check it out. The first episode is live now. Look up Money Wise. You can find it on YouTube. But right now it's not video. It's only audio, but the audio is on YouTube and then Spotify, iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts. Check it out and then tweet at me, The Sam Parr. Let me know what you guys think because I'll make more after these next seven. But again, only if you love them. And I need to know if you actually do. So it's called Money Wise. It's a podcast by Hampton, my company, joinhampton.com. And let me know what you guys think. The Sam Parr is my Twitter.

54:44All right, back to the pod. well guys when it comes to banking the only time i feel truly happy is when i'm using mercury and that's today's sponsor for the show that is the banking product i use for not one not two but actually eight of my businesses i have eight mercury accounts i just went and counted i use it for every one of my companies it's an absolute no-brainer over 200 000 other fast-growing ambitious companies use mercury it's one place you can go where not only you can of course have your money there, but you can send invoices, you can pay bills, you can create reimbursements for your team, pretty much all of your financial needs can be housed under Mercury.

55:19And the product is beautiful to use. And the reason why is because it's a product that was not made by finance people. It was made by a founder, Ahmad, he's been on this podcast before. And he used tons of products as a startup founder. And this is the one that he wished he had. And I actually reached out to them to become a sponsor for this show, because I'm such a big fan of it. So if you need a banking product for your startup, use Mercury. You will not regret it. It's amazing. For more information, check out mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.

55:49So the third one, I'm shy to share this one because Sam's head's going to explode, but a figure AI definitely I think is one. So for those that don't understand what they're doing, human labor is becoming a huge problem where there's just not enough people to do all the jobs. People get sick. They're tired. They only work so many hours, all that kind of stuff. And so this rise of like robotics, but not just like Boston dynamic, like dog robots, actual what they call humanoid robots. So these are like human looking things that walk around a warehouse. They can pick things up. They can pack things.

56:22They can kind of do all the things a human could do. And one of the best things I texted Sean, this like one of the best ways to evaluate a company is what enemies they pick. And so here, the guy, Brett, who runs Figure AI, he basically picked Elon Musk as his competitor. And so you got to be a little crazy. You got to be a little ambitious. You got to raise a lot of money. This guy's raised, I think, over a billion dollars now to go after this opportunity. But the other thing that's really interesting is as an investor, historically, people paid attention to demographics, how old a population was, how fast it was growing, all that.

56:57Now you're going to have to actually pay attention to robotics. And Balaji Srinivasan has talked a lot about this, where if you don't have enough people in society, you're going to have to replace them with robots. And so measuring how many robots are coming off the production line, maybe a better sense of where you should be investing versus the human demographics. But I think that's a big one. Once they raised their first round at$300 million, I went and toured their factory or whatever. And I went back, I go, Sarah, let's move there you're gonna get a job there we gotta and she's like uh i don't know anything about robotics i'm like i already bought the books you got some reading tonight uh we're gonna get you to work honey it's gonna be okay we're gonna get you caught up it's like i'm the tiger mom don't worry we're enrolled you in kumon you'll be ready in three weeks yeah the coffee's brewing it's gonna be a late night so uh come on chop chop let's get to work the um i've got three more for you is uh traba i don't know if you guys have heard of uh of this company it's one of the fastest company uh growing companies in founders funds portfolio what they figured out is uh similar to like uber uh where you press a button a car shows up uh all of these light industrial manufacturing facilities they need tons of labor so kind of the other side of the problem that figure's going after so that what they do is they go to these like temp work providers.

58:17But the problem is that the temp work providers, you'll be like, hey, I need 50 people tomorrow. And they'll be like, cool, we'll send you 30. That's all they have. And then of the 30 that they're supposed to send you, like 20 of them show up and five of them are like hungover from the night before. Right? So it's just like, it's a horrible experience. It's super expensive, all this stuff. And this is the company where like the investors brag about like on their about page. They're like, we're a 996 company. Savages. I met the founders and they were like, we have an Olympians work ethic. And I was like, I'm in.

58:46Like, we're just going to outwork everyone. You know the truth about this company. So I should have invested in this company. I had a chance to invest in the city. I was like, and then before I even heard the pitch, I said, I'm in. Because I heard something very similar to what you just said, Pomp. Not the Olympians work ethic. The spelling bee champions work ethic. The guy who started the company went to Duke and I know his brother. And they both, the brothers were like, on the ESPN spelling bee, like, you know, One of them won it. And then the guy who started a trial, but he's the guy who fainted mid word.

59:17Do you remember that clip of the guy who starts spelling the word? He passes out, stands up and finishes the word. It's the most incredible clip. I did not know that. ESPN history. Forget LeBron. Forget Michael Jordan. This kid starting to spell a word, passes out, gets up, says nothing about passing out and just finishes spelling the word flawlessly was absolutely incredible. He's the founder of Trava. when I heard that I'm like I'm in just send me tell me where to wire the detail wire the money and then unfortunately got too smart I asked my partner who knows a lot about staffing he's like well it could be hard for all these reasons and I was like I guess you know more than I do I'm just basing this off the spelling bee performance turns out I should have just trusted my gut turns out he's done alright I met his brother at a party and he had won the script spelling bee I've seen him on ESPN I see him at a party I recognize this kid from ESPN I'm like you I've seen you before I was like you're the spelling kid he's like yeah how did you know that was years ago and I go dude this is annoying drunk Sean dude dude everybody wait dude spell my name and he goes I don't know your name I go it's Sean and he goes I don't know S-H-A-W-N I go no I beat him I beat him as if I spelled something as if him spelling my name S-H-A-A-N meant anything and that was the only time I ever interacted with this guy.

1:00:39The next day I was mortified. I was like, dude, what an absolute douche I was last night. And I've been hoping to meet this guy again so I can apologize for this 15 years ago. I'm like, bro, sorry I made you spell my name at that point. Now we know why he didn't send you the wire details. No, no, that was his brother. That was his brother, two different guys. His brother became like a very successful poker player and then did a bunch of interesting things that way. I think Spelling Bee is like one of those hotbeds of like, if you can get obsessed about this, like intellectual pursuit, you know, means two things.

1:01:10Your parents are incredibly overbearing and you're incredibly smart. And so, you know, that usually will lead to success. A hundred percent. Next one is a placer.ai. So I've invested in most of these companies. The only one, OpenAI, Android and Figure AI, I wish that I had. But Placer, they basically, it's this Israeli guy. And he was like, hey, I'm going to use like cell phones to create better mobile analytics. Not like what you're doing on the phone, but like where you are. So originally his like pitch was like, hey, I'm going to like be able to tell people when you drive into the parking lot and like what aisles you walk through in the store.

1:01:43And we're going to sell all this analytics, like really, really granular kind of location data. They just publicly announced that they're doing a hundred million dollars in annual revenue. And so when you look at that again, like it's for real estate, right? That's where they've seen a lot of people buy. But like, I think also like some hedge funds and a couple of other folks by the data as well, you know, a hundred million dollars is pretty much de-risked it. And this is like, if you want to have a career in like B2B, you know, software or analytics, like obviously you're not going to go to like an Android, right?

1:02:11That's kind of like off brand, off industry. But I think placers are like still got probably a 10X potential upside. What's their valuation in their latest round? I think the latest public one is like a billion dollars. So kind of like 10 times revenue. So it's not hard to see a business that, you know, already doing$100 million in annual revenue growing pretty quickly. You know, so it's got some upside to it. This is probably my favorite one of yours so far. Do you got any other ones? You had one more maybe? I've got two more that are kind of related. So everyone's all excited about like the deep tech stuff.

1:02:42I invested in this company called Rainmaker. And so Rainmaker makes it rain. They're flying precision drones into clouds and they're dropping chemicals in the clouds to make it rain. And so like, that's kind of crazy. That is probably the riskiest one. Wow. Pretty cool URL. And then kind of simultaneous to that, if you look at like what's like the cyber security version of all these deep tech companies, there's this guy, Joshua Steinman, who left, I think he was on the National Security Council in the Trump administration. And he like realized, wait a minute, like there's no companies that protect all of our public infrastructure.

1:03:20So the example he gave me was, imagine what happens if someone can hack the water treatment plants and change the pH levels of the water and have massive carnage or really, really screw with a local area by simply hacking this one facility that's public infrastructure and doing something nefarious. And so he's creating a company called Galvanic. Again, it's super small, probably on the higher end of the risk spectrum, but just a really cool mission of if you're able to protect public infrastructure, there's like unlimited demand for this type of service. And you can see how these businesses could get quite big given, you know, all the concerns with our adversaries and people kind of getting better at cyber warfare, et cetera.

1:04:02Dude, I love that idea. That's a great idea. That's great. And what was that called? Galvanick, G-A-L-V-A-N-I-C-K. wow that one and this make rain thing are are pretty wild yeah the rainmaker one like people have been doing it's called cloud seeding people have been doing that for a while uh and they're specifically doing it in like china and the middle east and stuff but uh there's a world where like not only can they make it rain but also if you can change the weather pattern like you may be able to like prevent uh hurricanes from hitting land and you know doing stuff like that now of course you get into this weird world that like the second someone's like hey i can like change the weather people are like right no like yeah you're trying to play god whatever um but but i think that uh where they're starting in terms of like going to farmers and being like hey you know get what is basically precipitation in this in the clouds just to fall you know it's a worthwhile mission and and the founder's awesome he's got a mullet he works out he has a squat rack in the office and he's just like we are going to be successful.

1:05:06So, you know, let's see what happens. Dude, maybe I should do that for all my portfolio companies. Just gift them a squat rack. Just increase returns in my portfolio 20%. I mean, there is definitely got to be some sort of study that like one, people who just are in better shape, like you have more energy, you think clear, you know, all that kind of stuff. Dude, we got to ask you about two things. This Solana bet you did. Explain this. This was a, this was baller. Sam, do you know about this? No. What happened? So I had a bunch of Ethereum back from when I was mining it. And it was just kind of like sitting there.

1:05:42It had gone up a lot. And towards the end of last year, I was sitting there and I was just like, why am I holding this? Like deciding to hold an asset is an active decision every day. So I'm basically like saying I should go long Ethereum every day that I don't sell this. And I'd been scared about triggering taxes and like all like the normal lies you tell yourself as to like, why not to make a decision and i just said to myself like okay if i am gonna sell this and not buy more bitcoin what else would i buy and so i like went through a bunch of the cryptocurrencies and i was just like i think solana is going to go up a lot it's gonna go up a lot more than bitcoin i think it's gonna go up a lot more than ethereum uh in this specific bull market because a smaller market cap there's a lot of energy and excitement around it and and all that and so um over the years i've learned how to kind of like put positions on which i think is also like a very under discussed thing.

1:06:33I didn't sell everything and then just buy this asset. Instead, what I did is I bought a little bit of Solana at$48. It started to go up a little bit more. And usually when that happens, people are like, oh, cool. I was right. Instead, I doubled the bet at 55. The position is going in your favor. And so I doubled down because the market's telling me I'm right. It kept going up. I then sold 100 % of the Ethereum and I bought Solana at$73, I think it was. And so it gave me like a blended price around like 65 bucks. And so Solana just went on a tear, which$120. And I was like, oh, wow, that was awesome.

1:07:11Like, hopefully it keeps going. And that was it. I was like done. But then the price started to fall. And as it fell, it fell from like 120 to 110 to 100. And I woke up one day and it was at$80. and over the years I've just learned like nothing's changed with the thesis I got no more Ethereum to sell to like you know convert over so like I'm going into the bank account and I just went and got more cash and bought it at 80 which happened to be about a 30 % drawdown which historically in crypto has been like a pretty good spot and then it's ripped all the way up to like 190 ish and so it's been a great trade but also it is uh I'm only able to do it because I've been doing this long enough and learn how to put the positions on, how to think about when the position goes in your favor to add, not sell and take profits.

1:07:57But you also have to know what you own. And I don't think I'll own Solana five or 10 years from now. It's very much like for the next year, I'm very bullish on this. And then we'll see what happens. Whereas Bitcoin, I'll hold forever and don't think that I'll ever sell it. First of all, I mean, kind of very good trade. So first of all, very, very well done. Not easy to do what you just described. The psychology around what you just described is, I think, more important than the why. But I do want to ask you, you said the word thesis on Solana. So I have a buddy who has an insane amount of Solana.

1:08:30He owns like$40 or$50 million of Solana. And I think this guy's nuts for doing it. He's a very smart guy in general. But I asked him, I'm like, why do you own this absurd amount of Solana? This is like, what do you know that I don't know? please tell me so I can go buy it if you have some like incredible thesis and he's like I just I think it's gonna go up that number go up thesis and he's like well I think it's gonna be a bull market and a bull market it's usually these kind of like second third third fourth fifth coins that like get the highest run up um I see a lot of energy in the ecosystem people like these like all of a sudden it starts to sound a lot like I don't know like uh you know we're talking like horoscope type language for me.

1:09:14And so I'm like, and I've been telling him, I'm like, dude, please just sell this thing. And he's like, oh, I just feel like the energy. I feel like I see it a lot on Twitter. It's like, oh my God, dude, are you sure that this is the reason to have 40 or$50 million of Solana? That is an absurd amount of this thing. Yeah. On one hand, it sounds crazy. You're like, oh, it's like the energy, whatever. On the other hand, like in this person's defense, what I would say is when I first started investing, somebody told me like, follow the developers. like that's like a great investing strategy and so there is like a lot of development activity that's shifting the other thing is there is a pretty like well thought out investment strategy of like i want to buy the things that everyone's going to buy tomorrow today rather like i like if everyone else is going to build a thesis around something then i want to buy it uh before they do like be contrarian that becomes consensus and i love the george soros quote he's like when i see a bubble i rush in right like the whole point is that bubbles kind of like go bigger and further than you think that they can.

1:10:10And so let's just say that like Solana is a bubble. Selling an asset at the beginning of a bull market is usually in crypto like a pretty bad strategy. But also as assets get bigger, the returns go down. And so I don't think it's crazy to say like, oh, there's a lot of activity around this. There's a really strong narrative or meme. There's tons of coins and things that are being launched on this. And Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana probably all go up. But if you had to pick one of the three that goes up the most, well, it's probably the smaller market cap asset that likely will outperform. And so I don't think it's like the craziest theory.

1:10:46The question is, what is your thesis on when to sell? And that's what people in crypto, including myself over the years, like we have messed that up over and over and over again because timing markets is nearly impossible. And when an asset goes up hundreds of percent, you're like, well, of course it's going to double from here. And then next thing you know, it's down 50%. You're like, shit. So what are you thinking with the Solana one? What are you going to do? My theory in crypto now is selling is less to do with price levels. Like in the public markets, people will hold a stock and they're like, okay, if this ever gets overvalued, I'm selling, I'm trimming the position.

1:11:20In crypto, it's much more cyclical. And so I actually think that selling is more about where are we in the cycle, like time, than it is like value, right? Because it's hard to like, what is the value versus price? And is this overpriced or underpriced? Like it's very difficult to do for these assets. So I think about it a lot more as like, is it the end of this coming year? Is it, you know, the beginning of next year? Is it the summer of 2025? Like there's some timeframe that I'll come up with and I'm like, I don't care what the valuations are. Like I'm just selling because it seems like the right time in the cycle more so than I have a price target for any one of these assets.

1:11:56What was the second thing you were going to ask him about, Sean? Andrew Tate. Pomp interviewed Andrew Tate before he was Tate. You were on Tate before Tate. What's the guy like? You met him in person, right? I did meet him in person. He did an interview together in Miami. Why'd you interview him at that time? Was he kind of big? Is that kind of interesting person? Or what was the context? I don't really think that he had... Maybe he said a couple of crazy things online. Like crazy in the sense that people were like, oh, whatever, reacting to it. But he's a four-time world champion kickboxer. We had DMed a couple of times.

1:12:33I actually thought that he was just like an interesting person from the perspective of like, he had a lot of commentary about things that people either weren't willing to say or like made me think. And didn't mean I agreed with everything. It's just like when you when you find those people, you kind of like, hey, tell me all your worldviews. And then I'll sift through the bullshit and figure out like what I agree with and what I don't. And so I interviewed him and he definitely said some like things that I was like, oh, I can't release this interview. Like, you know, this is kind of like a little a little spicy.

1:13:01see and so what was interesting is i was like hey i don't know if we're gonna like actually ever release this thing like let's just kind of put it on ice and we'll go from there and then a year later like society had changed culture had changed and he started to like become much bigger he went on a couple podcasts he said a lot of the exact same things and people didn't have a problem with it so like it's interesting like he was saying the same thing for like a year or two years but actually culture became like a little bit more acceptable of some of the commentary and including things around like, you know, the vaccine and like that type of stuff.

1:13:35And like, I think people just had more information to kind of evaluate these situations. And so I was like, all right, it's still a little spicy, but like, let's release it. And one of the like final points to deciding whether we were going to release it or not was I didn't really care so much about the like really hardcore perspectives as much as like, who are you as a person? Like, how do you make money? Like kind of like the business and the person behind these thoughts. What was his business at the time? Hustler University, like his course? He had a bunch of them. They're like online businesses.

1:14:06He described them. Actually, it was the first time that ever a podcast episode I had done was cited in articles where people were writing hit pieces or critiquing him. And then they were referencing things on the podcast. So I'd get a Google alert notification. Like, oh, you've been mentioned in The New Yorker or whatever. And I'm like, oh, it must be awesome. Obviously, I'm a cool guy. And then you go, you're like, oh, I'm in an article where they're like, you know, talking about misogyny and like all these things like, oh, OK. And so at the end of that interview, he asked me, he's like, what's the one thing you disagree with me today?

1:14:42And what I say to him in the interview is I said to him, I said, every single thing that you're saying has like this like kernel of truth. But then you like extract it and have this like bombastic rapper that basically is going to go viral online. and he kind of like cracks a little bit and breaks character. And he's just like, ah, you're a smart man. He like shakes my hand. And I think like that was the biggest takeaway was people don't become viral and successful without being highly intelligent. And he very well understood the human psychology and the way the internet worked. And so he had a message.

1:15:15He wanted to get that message out to people. He was able to communicate in a very effective way. And so people might not agree with everything he said, but if you look at his tactics, they have pretty much become standard in a lot of people's marketing today. And so people kind of saw this guy be successful on the internet, get a message out. And now you have a bunch of companies and individuals that are trying to replicate it. And maybe it's not the same message, but that structure was pioneering. And so you've got to be able to evaluate people and say, hey, I understand you for who you are. I agree with some things you say.

1:15:50I disagree with other things you say. And then can I learn something from you? And to me, the learning was he really, really understood marketing and communicating on the internet in a way that I don't think a lot of people did before they kind of saw what he did. Yeah. And he kind of paid the paid the fucking price for it, too. Well, in hindsight, like that's the second lesson is like, don't become the main character. Right. Or if you are, you better be ready to pay that price. Yeah. And it's just, you know, I ask myself a lot. Look, I have a number of very successful friends who nobody's ever heard of before.

1:16:23Right. And I'm sometimes like, man, that's an amazing life. Like you, like you figured it out, you figured out how to be super successful. And also no one knows who you are. Um, there's a lot of other people who like, they enjoy talking to folks, right. You know, uh, Patrick, but David, I saw a clip of him recently and he was talking about the fact when he sold his insurance company, he was like, I wanted to do something for the rest of my life that I enjoyed and talking to people and learning from them was like the thing. And so he went and he did all this media stuff and whatever. And so I think you just kind of like know who you are as a person.

1:16:52Like, what are you trying to accomplish professionally? What is your comfort level with like privacy and like personal, you know, kind of notoriety? And it's different for everybody. And so, yeah, if you want to become the main character, then definitely you got to be ready for, you know, everything that comes with that good or bad. Well, dude, you're dressed as the main character today. You came on here. You're looking good. Best Dressed Award for 2024 is in your hands. Somebody has to come take that belt out of your hands for My First Million. Thanks for coming on, dude. It's always fun to talk to you.

1:17:21Thanks for having me. All right, 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 no days off. On the road, less travel, never looking back.

1:17:38Hey, 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 as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the 90s, you're operating like you're in the 90s. 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.

1:18:08If 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.