My First Million - Part 2: Pomp On His Businesses, Young Rock Star Employees, And The Internet Entrepreneur Hero

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

Episode 434 Part 2: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) are joined by entrepreneur and Bitcoin investor Anthony Pompliano (@APompliano) to explain his businesses, how he gets rock stars on his side, and what internet entrepreneurs that stand out right now. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. SHAAN'S NEW DAILY NEWSLETTER --> shaanpuri.com ----- Links: * Mark Jenney * Daniel Gross * Pomp Crypto Jobs * The Crypto Academy * Pomp Investments * @pompglobal (Instagram) * @pompofficial (TikTok) * The Pomp Podcast * Anthony Pompliano * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ Show Notes: (02:35) - How Pomp makes money (30:05) - How to get young rockstars on your side (50:20) - Who's the one internet entrepreneur you think has figured it out? ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

But what I've over time started to realize also is like, and it goes back to kind of why we want to start some of these companies. Investing in other people's companies is great. And obviously the power law takes over. And when that occurs, it's an amazing. And angel investing can be really profitable. But actually, you're much more likely to be able to take, you know, $50, $100,000, start a business and get to like a million dollars in revenue and throw off $500 to $700,000

in profit year after year after year. And do it with like a very high degree of, uh, of probability of success. And so in some way, like, what's better than angel investing in other people's ideas? It may actually be just like angel investing in your own ideas or your own companies. And so that's really where I've been focused is like, yes, I will still on occasion invest in other companies, but now I want to start these businesses. And I look at it as what is the competitive advantage?

We have capital, but we also have distribution. And so if you have capital and distribution, you basically just need like a decent idea and you need an absolute killer operator. And if you can find those two things, combine it with the capital and distribution, you got a good chance and being able to make some money. All right, we got an episode here with Pomp, Anthony Pompiliano, who you may know as the Bitcoin guy.

He's huge all over YouTube, Twitter, everywhere else. He came on. We're actually going to do this as a two-part episode because at the beginning, it was all business. We were business in the front. We were talking about this crazy million-dollar bology bet where he's betting that Bitcoin is going to a million. million dollars in the next 90 days. We talk about that. Why Bology thinks it, what we think about

the bet. And Pomp does a, you know, I don't know, econ 101 where he explains what's going on with the banking system from his perspective. That was good. But here's the thing, though, in that episode, the whole episode is about something that's going to happen inside the next 90 days. So if you're going to like, it is a little fearful listening to it. And so actually listen to the whole thing and do it now because we're talking about something that's happening in 90 days. And then go ahead. The second episode was way more fun. And it was pretty wild.

Go ahead. We talked about his business empire, you know, what he's building and why he's building it that way, why he gave back all the money from his fund and shut that down, why he's... It's huge. Turned off all his advertisers, millions of dollars of advertised, what he's doing instead. So we talked about that. And then we talked about... Then it went off the wall.

And the pod got a little crazy, but in a great way. I think people are going to... You're going to love Part 2. He broke down, like, all of his businesses and how they work. It's very impressive. It was pretty wild. And it was, he's, he's impressive. He's significantly more impressive than a lot of people think, I think, because there's way more behind the scenes.

Pretty funny stories, which pop is usually, he's pretty buttoned up on his, on his main channel, because he's talking finance. He's talking serious, but he tells him pretty funny stories. So the second, part two is the more fun episode. Part one is the more serious episode. I think you'll like them both. And we have to remind you guys that our episodes, we work really, really hard. And unlike every other type of podcast out there. Our stuff's not free, but you don't pay with money.

All you have to do is go to our YouTube page. We call this the gentleman's agreement. What is it? The ladies' understanding. The ladies' understanding. You go to our YouTube page, and the reason it's called that is because it's an understanding. It's an agreement. We can't be there behind your screen to check this.

Otherwise, we would. But everyone's doing it. So just go ahead and do it and click subscribe on YouTube. And then just go ahead and do that on Spotify and iTunes because the more you do that, the more our volume goes up. And we get more downloads and we can do, keep, doing this type of stuff, Popp ain't going to come on to episodes like this if we don't have a big listenership. Same with all the other guests. All right, enjoy. Can we talk about, instead of value

ruining, we talk about value creation? Because pomp owns like four companies, I think, that I wanted to ask him about. And my fighter flight mode is like too much right now that I need like, I need like a rags or riches story. I need something interesting. I need, I need, I need pop to tell me how he makes the paper now because I need to calm down. I need to meditate. by pomp telling me how he makes income. Is that all right, Sean? Yeah, but what's your question? How do you want to frame it?

Well, so Pomp, he has, from what I understand, you have four or five different companies and you have this office in Miami and you have like, it feels like you have, at first I was going to call it a mini empire, but it doesn't sound so many actually. It sounds like you are. Medium empire.

Yeah, maybe big empire. I don't know. Can you explain what are like the things that you got going on? Yeah. So, you know, from my career, uh, if you really think about there's kind of three stages to some degree at first, it was like, hey, how do I build companies? And I basically had enough success where it was like, okay, maybe I'm not like horrible at this, but I definitely don't know how to like build companies to scale, et cetera. Uh, that led to Facebook where like that was kind of my equivalent of like an MBA, right? I literally was with all these super talented people, uh, in 2014, 2015. Um, I, um,

I was put on a number of different projects where I got exposed to Mark Zuckerberg and a bunch of the leadership of the company. And I just learned a lot. It was like the best learning experience possible. And shortly thereafter, I started investing. And when I started investing, it was kind of like I didn't have an idea to start a company. So like, oh, let's try this investing thing. And I really enjoyed doing it.

Ended up building two different asset management firms. And like, it's fun. But like the product is kind of money. And you get to work on a bunch of different ideas. But I think that I keep coming back to an idea of like venture capital is such a slugging percentage game, that what you end up doing is you end up actually playing an access game almost more than you do playing a business game. And what I mean by that is outside of the maybe the big five or six venture capital funds, once a company gets de-risk, it is all access, right? It is literally, who do you know, how do you get into a deal?

how do you actually get an allocation, whatever. And like, that's fun. But that to me is more of like a kind of a status type thing of like, oh, what do these people think of me? Will they invite me into the deal? And like that maybe is like an underbelly of the venture capital industry. And so simultaneous to building those asset management firms, I started creating content on the internet.

And in hindsight, like it was optimized initially for learning. Then it kind of switched like, oh, there's a lot of deal flow that comes from this. And so I like took it a little bit more seriously. And then there was this like final transition to like, oh, these are like businesses. right? And I think the big aha that I had was historically you built a company by building the product and then going and looking for customers. Now you can find the customers and then build the product. And so that's essentially what we've done is we've built this very, very large audience. You know, the podcast is 25 million downloads last year. YouTube's half a million subscribers. One day I think you guys are going to pass me. So keep going. The email is big. Twitter's big, et cetera. Is your podcast? Are you bigger than us right now? Are you trying to flex? on us or are we already bigger? I think you're still bigger. How many downloads? Ranges from 100,000 to 150,000 per episode.

And if that's, uh, so the, the RSS feed, the actual pod is in the 100,000-ish range, sometimes more, sometimes less. And then the YouTube videos, 20 to 50,000. So that's what we say 100 to 150,000 downloads per episode. So you guys will do more than me on individual episodes, but I have like this crazy power law. Like we just put up an interview on YouTube. It's got, you know, 100,000 views in the first 12 hours, right? So it's like very much concentrated on like the long tail, which is like also interesting, right? Like would you rather have the consistent 50 to 100,000 YouTube and podcast

or would you rather have the breakout like million, you know, views plus every month or so? Yeah, so maybe you'll catch up to us one day. I don't know. So the general idea has just been like, how do you build those businesses? And really it's like once you know who the audience is, you can go and build products.

I very much look at it as a game and it goes back to the whole idea like I don't have hobbies, right? Like this is what I do in my free time and I really enjoy doing it. And so we've built a number of different businesses. Some of them have been bigger than others. But really it's like if you have distribution, then you can build companies in the 21st century. And we see, you know, really, really big creators doing this. I tend to think of anyone can do it. And then I guess what are the businesses?

So there's the media company itself. Then we have a with two ask. And you have, you have, so yeah, let's just listen. So number one, media company that has advertising. Is that a substantial size business? It used to have advertising. It was a very substantial business. It probably was one of the best monetized podcasts in the world based on the audience to revenue.

It was a big podcast. And so both on the revenue side and also the downloads, I turned all the ads off. And I think there was really two things that fed into it. One was when you have an advertiser, usually you just go and you find companies that you like their product. You then say, hey, I use this product. You guys should check it out. And that's like fine.

If you're doing like a bar of soap or you're doing like liquid death or, you know, like whatever the normal product is. The problem in finance is like people put their money into a product that you then share. And so you're essentially like renting your reputation to someone else, right? And you have no control over the business. You don't know what they're doing. And then it's not like, oh, I bought this. you know, chair they got recommended.

I bought this sweatshirt that Sean and Sam said was really cool. I don't like it. Like, I had idiots, right? But like, I'm not that worried about it. When somebody puts their money into a product, then all of a sudden, it's a whole different game. And so I just didn't want to be in that world anymore, especially when a lot of them were crypto companies and crypto companies kept blowing up, et cetera.

But the second thing that I realized from a business opportunity standpoint is when I got rid of all of the advertising, I knew that we would take a massive hit. We have a team, we've got an office, like all this stuff. And so I had to commit to personally covering everything. So like once I made the decision, I've been losing money every month. But I'm doing it because the bigger opportunity is to actually own the products and services that you put through the distribution. So think of it like you guys will get paid as a podcast host for an ad. They might pay you $1 to read the ad.

But they're making $3 to $5 on the back end as their return on advertising. Now, if you can cut out the middleman and you can just own the product or service, that's a way better deal. deal. The reason why most people don't do it is because they don't have the skill set or the interest in actually building the product or the service. And so I basically just was like, look, we kind of like figured out how to do advertising based content. I want a hard challenge. I want to do something that is going to be by most people's account stupid to give up all this revenue and go try this. And like it's one intellectually stimulating, but two is if we figure it out, it'll be a way bigger business and it'll be a much more sustainable, resilient thing over the long run.

it's just you got to be able to weather the kind of bumpy transition in between ad base to, you know, owning the products and services yourself. So we have fund. We have media company, which sometimes does, sometimes doesn't actually make revenue. Then we have- Hold on, hold on. The fund, didn't you give all the money back? Aren't you no longer in the fund? So there's two different asset management firms.

One was a joint venture with a Morgan Creek capital, a hedge fund. We invested all the capital and, you know, investing in companies like Coinbase. and we bought some Bitcoin, those types of things. And you get a cut if it ever does well. Correct. And then I had a second asset management firm. I was one of the first people to do a rolling fund

on the Angel list, which I found was an incredible product for somebody who has a small team and kind of wants to punch above their weight. And so I think we grew it into like maybe the third biggest rolling fund on the platform at the time, made a bunch of investments.

And then I just got to the point where I started to do the math. And I was like, what do I enjoy investing in? I enjoy investing it. I enjoy investing in like the pre-seed seed. I actually don't like doing like series B, series C stuff again because it's more of like this like status and access game. I enjoy meeting someone who's like,

I have an idea and like talking to them and trying to figure out like, is this a viable idea? What are the first steps? And so if you actually look at the math, if you can afford to personally invest in those deals, a lot of times it's actually better economically to personally invest than it is to invest out of the fund because of the way that the carry works and kind of the management fees, etc.

And so it was like if I invest personally rather than do the fund and also now I don't have to spend time on LPs, on the updates, like do all the things that go into managing a fund. I get time back plus I could make more money. Like I'll always pick that. And so I gave back all of the uninvested capital out of that fund and then now just do all of my investing personally. And do you do big checks or is it like the normal like 15 to $30,000 angel check? No, I'll do bigger than that. but what I've over time started to realize also is like, and it goes back to kind of why we want to start some of these companies. Investing in other people's companies is great. And obviously the power

law takes over and when that occurs, it's an amazing and angel investing can be really profitable. But actually, you're much more likely to be able to take, you know, $50, $100,000, start a business and get to like a million dollars in revenue and throw off $500 to $700,000 in profit year after year after year and do it with like a very high degree of, of probability of success. And so in some way, like, what's better than angel investing in other people's ideas? It may actually be just like angel investing in your own ideas or your own companies. And so that's really where I've been focused is like, yes, I will still on occasion

invest in other companies, but now I want to start these businesses. And I look at it as what is the competitive advantage? We have capital, but we also have distribution. And so if you have capital and distribution, you basically just need like a decent idea and you need an absolute killer operator. And if you can find those two things, combine it with the capital and distribution, you got a good chance and being able to make some money.

And so you have, and by the way, what's your biggest angel investment? Or what will end up be so far the most successful one you think? Some of the big, I mean, Bitcoin obviously is probably the one that will end up making the most money, both in terms of the amount of money I invested,

but also kind of just the aggregate dollar value it'll be worth. I tend to be in Sean's camp, like the dollars aren't going to matter. is going to be the Bitcoin. I think that some that people will find interesting. I don't know the exact math on all of them. And one of the things is when it's your own money,

you probably pay less attention than when it's a fund, right? Because you're kind of just like, oh, I invested. That money's gone. Hopefully I get some back later. But I invested in Varda, Delian, and a bunch of those guys. They're doing kind of space manufacturing. I find that really fascinating. A friend and I, we invested in something called Everly Well,

based out of Austin, actually. they do like at-home diagnostic testing. I invested in Howard Lorman's new company, Rome. They're kind of building like a workspace for remote teams, kind of a Zoom and Slack type killer that seems to be doing very, very well, and a whole host of other ones. So, all right. And then you got the fun and investing, you got that thing, media company.

You also have Crypto Academy. You have crypto jobs, which parlayed now into like a proper recruiting service. Yeah. Those three? So you can basically think of the inflection points business, a business called inflection points. You can think of that almost as like it's become a holding company for all these different products and services in a specific vertical. So I'm fascinated with Mark Leonard. I don't know if you guys know Constellation Software.

He basically buys these like vertically vertical specific software companies. Well, what happens if you don't have a holding company that ends up buying across the different verticals? What if you just have a holding company within a specific vertical? And so that's basically what we've built. we have a job marketplace that companies can go list their open roles they pay for it we then use the distribution to drive traffic people can go get a job we also have and that's uh that's pop cryptojobs dot com right that's that's that's correct okay and that's like a pretty basic business it's just a job board think of a job board right that's how we got started was just a job board got it we launched it

it got to like 50 000 in monthly revenue pretty much in like the first like four weeks uh and it was like okay we have a business here right we can go and we can try to scale this thing um we then bought a recruiting company, kind of traditional headhunters, proof of talent is the name of that business. And so you can do like self-serve. You can go and list the jobs and people will come to you or you can go and you can work with the recruiters. They just take a percentage of the first year fee. Then we started doing corporate training. So there was a very large company that came to us and was like, hey, can you train our people? And so we got into that business, ended up growing that to seven figures in revenue. And then we just started a research business. The research business,

think of it as like buy side research. So, uh, you pay a subscription fee, um, and they deliver research, uh, kind of a couple times a week, uh, called reflex. Can you say what that's, can you say what that was called? So that one's like, that one's like a perfect example, right? So, uh, reflexivity research is within that holding company, but I think is a perfect example of like what I want to do now over and over and over again. Uh, so if you have an idea, please reach out to myself, uh, Sam or Sean. But, um, Will Clemente is a, uh, a young guy in the Bitcoin crypto world, uh, has done. really great analysis. I've worked with him for about a year. I know that he's hardworking.

How did you find that guy? He was like in college, right? When you found him? That guy was great. He was working at Target, literally? He was literally working at Target. He was literally working at Target. He was literally working at Target. He was literally working at Target. I don't remember every single detail, but he had like, I don't know, a couple thousand, maybe a thousand followers on Twitter. He was going into the bathroom at Target and like tweeting like Bitcoin charts and stuff. And so I met him because of the stuff he was tweeting. And then was like, in the bathroom? No, online. And I started being like, hey, you know, like, what do you do? And he's like, I'm literally like, I'm literally like in the bathroom at Target tweeting on my lunch break, right, or whatever.

I was like, all right, like, that's pretty cool. And so we just started to, you know, kind of interact online, then I started to bring him on the podcast, and just like, I got to know him and it was like, okay, like, this kid is smart. He's young, so he doesn't have a ton of experience, but like, his compounding rate of learning was like off the charts. He would like read a book in two or three days and then like send me, hey, here's all the things I learned from the book. And then he'd like read another one and do it again. And it was just like, all right, the trajectory of this is not linear. This is very much like compounding or exponential. Like this is a young person I want to spend time with. Why is a guy who's this smart at this into learning working at Target

in the first place? Like was he just not interested in school? Like, was he just not interested in school, but only interesting blockchain? Why does this happen? He was in college. This was like his job while he was in college was like, you just go to like the local businesses, right? He got a job at Target. So he ended up dropping out of college and kind of like bet on himself. He got a job. Eventually we're like, hey, maybe we should like start a company together. And so we figured out kind of the structure of the business. We put some money into the business. And we in the first six months got to, you know, 100K of ARR. And I think that we will be at maybe three or 400k of ARR after the first, you know, call it nine months. And then I think that maybe we can get somewhere around

a million dollars in the first year. And so it's like, if you can do that. And this product, by the way, this product, I'm looking at the site. So I used to own this thing called Trends, Trends.com. And we got that to be a good business. But you guys are doing very similar, but you're making not, I made mistake of being broad. You're doing just crypto. It's $2,500 a year. And what is it? Just a weekly newsletter? No, you get like anywhere between four to six different research reports per week. And then there's a weekly what we call like an analyst call. So we've got a bunch of these young people who are like crypto native kids, right? I'll use kids because they're like under the age of 25, most of them. And they're super, super smart. They're like in all the Discord channels and they really understand

like what is happening in the community. And then you take someone like me who can help them wrap that into something that can be consumed by large family offices, hedge funds, you know, large asset managers, individual investors, et cetera. And so not only do you get the research reports, but you also get that weekly call where you get to get on and just ask them questions. And they're, and they're, they're writing the report. Jason here from J.B. Morgan. Just quick question for, uh, come squat 69. Uh, you, you mentioned that you were, you're, I mean, literally, I would love to hear you expand on that. And also, whoever's vaping, can you please, uh, mute the microphone?

They just call everyone, bra, like, so, bra. Uh, yeah, it's good. We literally have like public company CEOs who are subscribers and they get on the call and they're like trying to like, you know, learn and all this stuff. And when you have these businesses, I think that there's like pros and cons to these like internet native businesses that are started, especially with young people who want to work, who kind of have this desire to kind of push forward. The good thing is like they're young. They're like too naive to know all the things that would stop someone else from doing it. They have a lot of time on their hands. And like, frankly, they're willing to make mistakes, right? they don't get embarrassed because they did something.

You're just like, hey, don't do that. And they're like, okay, like, thanks. And they just go and do something else. The downside to it is like, at one point, we literally had to have like a little bit of an internal session. I'm like, hey, here's how you write. You know, like, like, grammar. And like, here's how to like use punctuation and spacing and like all these

types of things. And so you go into these businesses understanding that like it's all about momentum. And then you have to look for the rate of or the compounding rate of learning. And if you can set it up correctly, these businesses can grow to be pretty substantial, they can be profitable. And also the thing I enjoy the most is like, if I could go back and be 22 again, like, I don't want to go get a fucking job, right? I want to like kind of bet on myself and use this internet thing and try to make money and make more money than I could make at a regular job. And so in many of our different businesses, we have people who have made enormous amounts of

money compared to what they could make if they went and got a normal job doing the exact same skill. But it all comes down to incentives. And so in every business, what I try to do is I try to create upside where we take a portion of revenue or profit, depending on the business, we put it into a pool, and then we try to split that among the team. And so if you have a profitable business and you're able to incentivize people and you're like, hey, when you win, I win and when I win, you win, people will do incredible quality and velocity of work because ultimately the capitalistic incentive takes over and they just simply want to make money and they want to do good work to make that money. And so it ends up aligning interest and these business,

can absolutely explode. But why do five things instead of just one thing that could maybe like just grow a little bit faster or have more of your focus? I am doing one thing. So I think this is like a different way of looking at it. I'm providing capital and distribution. That's the only thing I do. Right.

When I start the research business will and the people he is hired, they're doing the research. They're doing kind of all the different things. I'm really, really good at putting together the deals and the capital and then pushing a high quality product through my distribution. and hopefully that'll grow to not just be my distribution, be other people's distribution. But I couldn't run the recruiting business. I couldn't run the research business.

I couldn't run a lot of these different businesses. I have to kind of stay within that circle of competence. And it's just like, provide capital, have a huge megaphone. And I guess maybe pick correctly, right? Pick the people that you're going to do it with correctly. And then just like get out of the way and let them be great at what they do. And if you have the stars aligned, like they can become pretty big businesses. Sean and I are kind of in like a similar spot as you.

And the thing I keep asking myself is like, yeah, this is awesome. You know, and Sean and I each separately are doing very similar to things as you. But I think to myself, but when are people going to stop listening to me? When am I not going to be cool anymore? Do you get that fear of like your clout won't matter? Well, I think that I've now been on the internet long enough where like I've gone through peaks and valleys. Like 2021, I could have literally tweeted. sup and it was going mega viral during like the Bitcoin bull market right like literally I could just

breathe on the internet everything went viral but like that's not me and you have to be grounded enough to understand like that's Bitcoin bull market you know a product that's not because I'm some genius now when that stuff crashes you know I have this saying of like if you get the praise on the way up you got to eat the shit on the chin on the way down and so like you you've eaten a lot of shit because you're you're so charismatic and you make all these bold claims I mean, you get a lot of crap. Yeah, but like if you view that from the perspective, like, these people are attacking me, like, you'll be super depressed and you'll, like, run away and be quiet.

And a lot of people do that. When the Bitcoin, you know, bear markets come or other asset markets come, like, there are people who just disappear, right? Instead, I look at those opportunities as kind of a defiant way to say, like, it does not matter what happens. I'm not leaving. And so, you know, in this last one, when FTX blew up and all this stuff happened, I went on national television and was grilled.

by a reporter for 20 minutes and in a completely unscripted thing and he like he wasn't friendly but to me like that's where my skill set shines is like I will debate anyone at any time on topics that I think I understand and it's even better if it's on live TV

because guess what we did? I went on television. I did it. I got off Twitter was like on fire. People were like that was the greatest segment of all time. These two guys just went at it and I emailed them and I said,

send me the video. I took the video and immediately uploaded it to YouTube the full thing, and I said, title, Pomp destroys TV host on Bitcoin. And published it. Right? And so like, why go on television? It's to get the clips,

to get the content to then post on your own stuff, right? So I think that the hate you have to also realize, like, oh, like that's the president of my marketing team. That guy, there's a guy yesterday, true story, who created an entire thread of hate. He had videos. He had tweets. He literally filmed.

himself unfollowing me, right? Like he filmed his phone, screen record, unfollowing me. And I almost DMed him and said, thank you. Right. But I was just like, dude, do you not understand how the internet works? The more you attack people, the bigger the audience gets. And I don't want to be attacked. Like, I'm not seeking controversy. I'm not seeking to be attacked. But what ends up happening is if you have that view of that lens, the haters are actually on your team. They just haven't realized it yet. And so like, let them do their thing. Let them keep hating. And naturally the audience gets bigger and bigger over time. What distribution channel is going to be the most effective to you?

And the one that you're, when you talk about this distribution, and if you only had one of them, let's say Twitter, email list, podcast, YouTube, which one would you say this is the most powerful and this is the one I'm focused on growing? So the one that I wouldn't give up is the email. But I don't necessarily think that's the one I'm most focused on growing. I think that audio is a really interesting medium where you're basically whispering in someone's ear for like an hour. Like it's super intimate and people really come to trust you and things like that. And so I think there's probably someone out there like just doing reps at the gym and just

grunting right now and listening to us right now. We get that a lot. So you're wearing people's ears as their bench pressing. I mean somebody's bicep curling right now, but also someone's like literally at the bottom and their deep squat and they're like, damn, these guys, they're calling me out right now. But like you're basically just you're in people's ears or in email. you have direct communication and also you can write like if you understand what your best quality is some people is writing some people it is video some people it's just audio and talking i know people who have podcast who script out every single word of the episode i don't think you guys do that right and like if you guys did do that one it would take you guys forever but also too like it wouldn't be as entertaining it wouldn't be

as fun and so it's kind of trying to figure out like what is the match between like the participant and the medium. So like if you guys were sending an email and like you two wrote it, you didn't hire anyone, like sorry, but it probably sucks, right? It would just be like, eh, there's no magic here

because actually what makes this so magic is that like there's the serendipity and the like iterative nature that you guys have back and forth. And so I just think that as people start to get onto the internet and try to build these audiences, you got to really question like where is my advantage and where do I actually have something

that can cut through the noise? because now there's so much noise if you don't cut through then you might as well not get started. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Call, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago I totally missed. HubSpot, grow better. I'm exhausted. I'm just exhausted. I hate when you end the episodes that way. I just like, that's how I feel.

Like, imagine, imagine watching a TV show. And they're put it on a show to try to have a good time. And at the end, they're like, fuck, man. I just feel like I just got like, if he's down, I'm down. I'm not down. You're a, you're a, people will follow your lead. If you had a good time, we'll have a good time. You got to have some, as we say, showmanship.

A showman wouldn't be tired. at the end of his episode. Dude, I'm not down. I'm amped. And it's like, I got to go with like, it's like, it's like I just got done working out. I got to go like rest for a minute and then get up and like implement all this stuff. I feel like I need to go and like I, I'm, maybe I'm into crypto now. I don't know.

Like he's just Malcolm Gladwell my ass. Like I just got got, you know? Like I just feel good about like what I heard. And you're just, you're full of energy. Do you nap? No. Are you a napper? No.

You don't nap? No. Hell no. Why would you nap? You don't nap? You'd have to do? Oh, dude. I'm team nap over here. Naping. Yeah, I think a 30 minute nap every day. Do you guys both take naps for real? Yeah. I nap every other day. I'm trying to shoot every day. Once I get to every day, I know I made it. How many hours do you guys sleep at night? Seven. Normal? Same. Oh, man. I don't think I could nap during the day, but I also drink coffee in the morning, so like, that might screw it up, too. I got to tell you guys a hilarious story. Uh, before.

we go. So, so Pomp was talking about his like analyst team is like, you know, the high quality analyst team that's all like, you know, two years out of, out of undergrad. And we at Milk Road, we basically had a super lean team. It was me, Ben, but I wasn't active day to day really. I was, you know, just kind of guiding. Ben was running it. And then there was a, our lead writer, Diego, who's awesome. And then we hired one guy. We were like, maybe we should do social media. And so we put out a thing being like, hey, I don't know how to use. TikTok, but if you do, come work for us. And so this guy, Billy

uploaded this incredible video. It's on the internet. You can go look on Twitter. Basically, he uploaded this video for him, just chugging milk shirtless and just like doing, it was just like a ridiculous video. He would find somebody like, hey, can you hold his phone? I'm trying to get a job.

And then he would chug the milk and they'd be like, a job, what is this? And so anyways, we hired Billy. We tried to do the TikTok thing. Didn't fully work out, but it was okay. But Billy's a great guy. He ended up helping write the newsletter. So two,

hilarious things just happened. First, they did a Milk Road team offsite, like something we never did because my whole ethos building the milk road was like, I'm not trying to be a CEO anymore. I'm not trying to like stand up in front of the company with a t-shirt with our name on and tell everybody how great everything is. Like I just don't want to even have to do all that stuff. But the new guys who bought it, they want to do the company building. So they invited everybody out. And I asked Ben, I go, how was the offsite? He goes, he had one one insight from the whole thing. He goes, Billy showed up in a wife beater, but not as a joke. He just, he just, That's just what he wore to the event. And no one said anything. And I was like, no one said anything. I go, wow, that's incredible. I can't imagine not saying anything. And then let's fast forward three weeks. Billy, they offered Billy a raise and he quit instead.

And I was like, it's a bend goes, Billy, you got a raise and you quit? Like, this guy's a conundrum. Man, what's going on? He goes, he goes, he goes, you quit. Like, what's the plan? He just provides a bed in a text. He goes, do I look like a guy with a plan? And that became the most badass thing I've heard all week.

Do I look like a guy that's a plan? But Sean, I tend to think that we over index a lot on like, people want to always hang out with their heroes, right? They want to hang out with the older people. They want to hang out with the people who have done the thing that they are trying to do. And there's a lot of value you can get from that. But I do think that we drastically under index on like, go find the young energetic person who you're like,

you are literally an idiot. But damn, are you going to be an. awesome idiot who's going to run through 20 walls and eventually find something on the other side. And what it does is it like, it forces you to up your game. Have you ever talked to like a 21 year old and you're like, okay, so, uh, let's get this done by Wednesday. And they're like, okay. And then they send it back to you like two hours later.

And you're like, damn, why do we wait until Wednesday? Like this kid is actually correct. We should just get it done now. And so I do think that the internet companies or these native companies, that's one of the big advantages they have. Like, you know, you guys had Nick Huber, you've had Andrew Wilkins. Like a bunch of people who were doing this, when you find the right person who can just like get shit done, you are unstoppable with the internet now. And I think that that is something that more and more people are going to wake up to. And like, it wouldn't surprise me if we like bankrupt

Main Street businesses because they all move online as people just realize like, why am I going to have like a physical store that people have to walk into when I can just do this online thing? And it is a big concern for these local communities. But at the same time, I'm like there's way more economic opportunity online for for people who want to do that. One of the other guys we tried to hire at Milk Road. He was a young guy, 21 years old. He was working at Main Street at the time. And I love this guy's tweets.

I thought he was interesting. And he would tweet out these like little random websites he was making on the weekend that were like just super simple, like kind of like it's either going to go viral or this is the dumbest thing ever. There's no in between. There was no like kind of core product service. It made no sense. Nothing. It did make any sense. And I was like, do I love this guy.

I told Ben, I was like, hey, we should hire this guy. He's like, what's he going to do? I go, I don't know. We should just have him do what he's doing now, but without his full-time job. Like, what if we just gave him more time to do the stupid shit he's doing on the weekends, Monday through Friday instead? And so I talked to him. He'll figure it out.

I talked to him and I was like, hey, you know, do that. I think this milk road thing's going to work. It was super early. We were like, I know, four weeks into it or something. And I was like, I think this thing's going to work. You should join. He's like, same thing. What am I going to do?

I go, just do, do weird, you know, Rohan stuff that you do. Go, just go ahead and do that. And he's like, all right, cool. Let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me get you up. He's like, when do you want to start? Like tomorrow? And I was like, no, no, no, like I got like, I'm traveling. I'm going to be back on Wednesday.

Let's talk on Wednesday, which is like four or five days away. Fatal mistake. Classic 34-year-old mistake thinking that, that the world's not going to change in four days. This guy's entire, he, in those four days, he ends up launching an NFT project. that goes super viral, ends up making so much money. He goes and becomes this anonymous account, Frank D-Godds. And he created the D-Gods project. I can talk about it now because he's like out publicly.

But for a while, I was like, what the fuck is this? And so I kept trying to hit him up, be like, what happened? I didn't know he was the guy behind D-Gods. And so I was like, dude, what? You ghosting me? Like, we had such a good idea. He's like, hey, man, like three weeks later, he just resurfaced. He's like, sorry, bro.

Like, it was like no time had passed between our conversations. It's like, oh, yeah, about that. I don't know, man. Now I'm doing this other stuff. I got to do this. And I was like, tell me about it. So he screen shares and he shows me how he's growing it. And one thing I'll ever forget, that was like the classic, like, this is, this guy's

an idiot. This makes no sense. But I, I'm down and I want to be in this car. And so he shows me the site. And I go, how do you stop people from just selling it like, you know, right away? Like, what are you getting? Because nothing holds value unless the. the people who buy it hold.

Which is why for Bitcoin, the genius meme is the, the hold old meme, right? Because it became culturally the normal thing to do to just hold the thing. And he goes, oh, yeah, I had the same thought. So I created something called the paper hands bitch tax. I go, what? Basically, if you sell at a loss, if you sell for less than the mint price, not only do you get just like, you know, you take the loss on the principle,

but we also apply a 25% tax because you had paper hands and we applied the bitch tax. to you for selling on the dip. And I was like, he's like, people loved it. And I was like, what the fuck? And it totally, it totally worked. It became like, again, he created a meme and it was a monetized meme in his case. And I just thought it was awesome. So yeah, I'm totally down to hang out with these guys.

Sean, while all this was happening, I just looked at my DMs. So I have like another perspective on the exact same situation, which was one of the hacks that people have figured out is if they post something on their Instagram story, like a lot of times people with bigger audiences will just like share it. But in the DMs, it looks like they like messaged you. So now there's like they posted something, then you posted something. And so he did that. And he posted something I reposted it.

And then he followed up with, he's going to kill me for reading this out loud. He goes, if you have any ideas for some more fun tools for us to make that you think would be helpful, would love to chat, man. And he said it like we were like, boys, right? He was kind of like saying it like, of course, like you're going to engage. So I didn't respond. Maybe I didn't see it or whatever. And so I guess I went to L.A.

for the Super Bowl. And then he follows it up with, yo, we got to kick it while you're out here. Like again, like we're like boys. And I'm like, who is this like 20 something year old kid? Right. And so then he just keeps messaging me until finally in July. He just starts DMing me things. And he just keeps saying, yo.

And so I met him in person in my. Miami. And I was like, who are you basically? And he's like, oh, I'm into Bitcoin or whatever, but like, I have this secret to tell you. And he told me about the NFD thing. And I was like, what is going on? And he was showing up the conferences with like, uh, handkerchiefs over his face. Right. And like, I saw that guy. And I was just like, do you understand how you cannot have like any degree of success or, uh, reputation or anything to be willing to like go to the lengths of success that he went to. And I think that's why, like, young people are so empowering to be around. It's just like, that kid was willing to do a bunch of stuff. No matter how cool we think the three

of us are, we would never do 50%, 60% of the things that he did because we're like, ah, I can't do do the paper hand bitch tax because then everyone's like, pop, fuck you, you know, like yelling and screaming or whatever. And this kid's just like, dude, dude, this would be hilarious. Watch this. Do you do to do. implement and it works. And so, I don't know. It's just like, how do we find more of those. If you're like a young kid who has a idea of like, well, Abraham bitch tax, please DM us. I'll tell you, I'll tell you where I, where I messed up. So I had met, I think, I think I told stories in the pot about like four people like this. I basically had four people that I kind of like either did hire or were

trying to hire as like a really junior kind of like intern, mentor type type situation that have all gone on to become like multimillionaires done super interesting things. And I was like, how do I have more of this young energy in my life? Because these people are awesome. They're flawed for sure they do a lot of dumb shit but the things they do do are all it's always interesting it's never boring right it's like you know it's reality tv in a way to me so i'm like all right i want to be i don't want to just get older and as you become more successful you start hanging out with older and older people than you become old and so i'm like no no i'm trying to fight that so i did this dumb thing which was i tried to recruit i tried to like put out the call for people like

this i was like hey if you're young you're smart uh you know like joint like i just want to hang with you. I'll invest in your stuff or I don't know, I'll mentor you. I'll do something. I put out a type form. And I got all these smart people applying, but they were all the wrong people because I had done it in a way that was like, it was like the high achiever path. It was like, here's an admission form and they're like, ah, a test. I know how to win the, I know how to apply for things and get picked and be like. And so they just said all the right sounding things, which was, here's my background, here's my pedigree, they're well-spoken. And I recruited like 20 of the wrong people. And I just had to like abandon ship. I was like, okay, I need to find a way to

get like the shitheads. Yeah, they're the wrong type of nerd. Exactly. Like, I don't want high achiever nerd that's used to ticking all the boxes and getting good scores on all the standardized tests and, you know, getting picked for the like the thing that their parents wanted them to do or school wants them to do. It's like, you need the person who's gone off the path, you know, will in the bathroom at Target, you know, who's doing out, like, reckless Bitcoin stats and shit like that. Like, you need, you need somebody who's a little bit off the path because they're the ones who do more interesting things. And so, I don't know, I haven't figured out how to recruit that except for, like, referral, basically.

I'm like, who do you hang out with? It's Marciaun Lynch, like, his famous quote of, like, I'm about that action boss. About that action boss. Yeah. And, like, there's a young person I know. I won't use his name or what he built, but people may be able to figure it out. He,

I think he, like, moved to Miami or something, uh, or like, was visiting Miami maybe, uh, and I saw him on Twitter.

He was like tweeting some interesting things. I just DM'd, I was like, what's your deal, right? And, uh, similar to Sam's like,

let's fuck. I was just like, you know, like, what's your deal? And no, I, I,

I usually say, what, what's your story? Tell me your story. Uh, Sean, the let's fuck is for friends. When I was in Austin,

we were texting. like, should we do dinner? And I responded with let's fuck. And he was like, God damn it. But so this kid, he like comes to the office. And I don't know, he's probably like early 20s. And he's literally like, yeah. So me and my friend, we like built this app. It's been downloaded 75 million times. It's like making like millions of dollars. And I was like, what are you doing? Like he's like, yeah, I'm going to like figure out a new thing to do. And I was like, well, what about the thing that's working? He's like, oh, it's like on autopilot. Like I'm going to like figure out this new thing. And I was just like, man, you are so cool. I hope that you are so successful. We need like

100,000 of you in the world because he literally could care less about the money and like all that stuff. He just was like, how do we build cool shit? And so I was like, man, imagine if one of us had built an app that it's 75 million downloads. We'd be talking about it nonstop. Like that'd be our main purpose. I'd retire. Ben, update my LinkedIn. End endorsed my skill. Dude, I have the craziest version of the story. I know we're way over, but I got to tell the story. It's too good.

So that guy, Rohan, I'm like, how do I meet more people like him? So my strategy was, let me just hang out with him. And I told him, bring a friend. So he drives from L.A. down to San Diego to where we're hanging out at this house. And he brings a friend. Of course, the friend is, you know, the 24-year-old version of the Doseki's guy. He's the most interesting man in the world. So this guy comes in and I'm like, all right, what's your friend?

deal guy who like, you know, has curly hair and maybe still has pimples. Like, you know, you must be the best. And he, of course, was the best. So he's like, yeah, my name's Luca. And I'm like, what's your story? And he goes, so I went in reverse order because he brought in these guns, like these, uh, Nerf type guns, like gel blasters. I don't have you seen this, but like the gun called the gel blaster. It's basically like, um, they're everywhere. Yeah, it's everywhere now. I didn't realize. It's like a $50 million a year business. So he basically was like, oh, right now I'm working on this like DTC product, this like, you know, thing. Oh, yeah, we just, we're in Walmarts nationwide or, you know, I don't know, some shit like that.

We're basically it's like, if you're 13 years old, this is your like number one thing you want for Christmas. It's like this, it's kind of like less painful than a paintball gun, but like cooler than a Nerf gun where it's just a foam thing. It's like this little pellet that's like a gel pellet. And it shoots like a machine gun. So already you brought two over. The party became way more fun. People are shooting each other. It's great.

So I'm like, all right, you're doing this. that's crazy. He's like, yeah, you know, I was trying to do this, but then we got ripped off. We got sued by this one thing, blah, blah, blah. I was like, all right, what did you do before this? He goes, oh, yeah, I'm into crypto. That's why I know, you know, why I know you guys, you know, I bought Pudgy Pinguins. So he did like a hostile takeover slash buyout of Pudgy Penguins, this NFT project, which again, it's not what you're, you know, you don't usually think I'm going to go spend millions of of dollars to buy Pudgy Penguins, NFT, IP.

But he decided that that was a good use of time. I said, how'd you get millions of dollars? And he goes, well, before that, I, um, I started this online e-commerce brand where I was selling gold chains, you know, like rappers, gold chains and grills and shit like that. And I go, what? He's like, yeah, I just like, I just realized that you could just buy these like kind of crazy, blinged out rapper gold chains and like, uh, and I sold them. And then I sold my company to this company shop GLD, which, uh, which was like 300, 400 million a

year. I was like, 300 or 400 million. I've seen these people like sponsor. you know, like kind of like, you know, random Instagram influencer and stuff. Like, wow, this is all crazy. I go, how'd you get started doing that? And I got one level deeper. He goes, well, I had to like, you know, for family reasons, you know, me and my mom

were like homeless for a couple years. And I had to like, oh my God. He's like, I just quit school in high school. And I had to go make money. So I went down the street and I started knocking on doors trying to get a job. I got rejected everywhere. The last door I knocked on was a startup called Ring. And the guy, Jamie was there as a tiny office.

And he's like, who are you? What do you need? He's like, I need a job badly, like to help pay you like for family stuff. I'll do anything. And he's like, okay, well, I got like, I got to box up all these orders. Can you just help me with that? And so he like started boxing up the orders. He was like the first employee at ring.

And then it was like with Jamie for a few years before going off and doing his own thing. And I was like. And now he's your son. So this was all before like 25. He was like 24, 25 when I met this guy. You know, a couple months ago. And I'm like, you have lived three lifetimes in a career epic. and just really interesting things.

I can't wait to see what this guy's going to do next. But that to me is the future, right? It's like all these young people who have that skill set. It's not for everyone. Like some people just want to go be the accountant or go be, you know, kind of a mid-level manager and that's their career aspiration. That's fine. But for the people who want to do this, like that guy literally knows more about business

and like IP and, you know, physical store distribution and like all these things. Then most people coming out of MBA schools, right? Like, good for that kid. 100%. 100%. And I was like, hey, I'm trying to think about influencers. And I just, I literally felt like someone being like, uh, like, uh, like it's like if some, it's like when my grandfather comes to me. Yeah, they're going to start calling you gray bush. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's like, it's like, it's like, I've helped my grandfather like set up FaceTime, you know, just so he could see his grandkids. And it's like, uh, and it's like, uh, I don't know, just push the green button. Like that's all that's as far as you're going to get here. Like that's how I felt by the end of talking to this guy about how to like how to do online marketing through. like influences on Instagram. Like by the end of it, he was like, you know what?

Just like send me the link, dude. I'll take care of for you. You're not going to be able to do this stuff. Dude, that's crazy. These are some good stories. I'm back. The energy's back, baby. Can we just go forever?

Like, just do like a 10 hour rip. This would be like 30% of Pomp's morning show. He would still be sitting there with his brothers. Dude, we can talk about two hours of air time to fill. You want to know the craziest part about the morning show is the the greatest thing I ever did and the worst thing I ever did, because it took so much time to your point. But man, there is no better thing than just hanging out. Like, imagine if we, every single day, just live stream for two hours about whatever the fuck was going on. You had never had more

fun than doing stuff like that. The problem is, you start to just say what's actually on your mind and like, get a real dumb later. One time I was on, one time I was on your show and I like totally ruined it for your sponsor. Do you remember that? No, what did you do? I think you had SOFI on as like a sponsor. Yeah. And I, I, like something wasn't going well with him. And I was like,

so far, more like so fucked. And then I saw your face, I saw your face freak out and I go, oh, wait, so far marketing people. If you're listening to this, this is me, Sam, I'm saying this. Not pomp. So don't, don't yell at him. You guys suck or something. were incredible and it was like they had the stadium and the whole thing but like you know how it is right

there's probably people who have said things about sponsors or like maybe a company you're an investor in or whatever and you're always like and i wish you hadn't said that but like here we go and that was definitely one of those moments where i was just like well there's a lot worse things that sam could have said so like i guess on the grand scale of like what is possible that was like not great but still you know we'll just keep moving here well i made sure i remember i i i remember i i Well, I talk to him. Sorry, go ahead. You've got the Donald Trump thing where it's like, if you're crazy from the beginning,

if you just say wild shit all the time, there's no penalty. It's only like, pop, you, you're a little too smart and like responsible. If you slip up even a little, people are going to get on you. But like, if you're just wild all the time, there is no penalty. You somehow get out of jail free. And I think I've been trying to steal that from Sam now of how to just keep it, keep it loose and somehow like, Sam does it to guess. they'll come on and be like, you know,

you're really good looking for like an ugly tech guy. Like they're already, their head's spinning. Or he'll just be like, you're like, you're not rich, but you got a little bit of money. And they're just like, what does she say to me? Sean, you'll appreciate this whenever people. Megum. No, whenever people are like, hey,

I want to start a podcast and I'm like kind of talking through with them for a few minutes in terms of like what to do. I use Sam as an example. So I'm like, well, you can have like, you know, a show where you just talk yourself. You can have like an interview show. And then like within those different categories, like, you know, you can have a really serious, intelligent podcast where you ask really smart questions.

Or you can be like really blunt. Like, you know, Sam Parr, like, he'll just have guests come on and just be like, how much money is your bank account? I always think of like, man, 50% of people are like, I'm good. I'm not going to answer. And then 50% like literally tell you the answer. And I'm like, what a genius way to get great content. Ted, it's just like ask the questions that no one will answer.

And then he'll follow up with something that's like, but and the reason I ask is because, because I want to know. It's like there was more justification, but there's just none. Because I'm always curious, like, you know, I've been following you for years and I just, I was always curious like, what is it? Well, in that book, influence, they say, they say if you, if you give someone a reason for why you're doing something, the more likely to do it. And so I got in the habit of saying, like, yeah, and I'm asking that,

Because I'm curious. Right. It doesn't matter what comes after because. Because it's just the magic word. All right. Can I ask you guys one question before we break here? Yeah. Can each of you point, who's the one person that's like on the internet?

So not like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or whatever. Who's like the one internet entrepreneur that you're like, man, that person seems to have figured it out. And like, I can't wait to see what they continue to do over the next 20, 30 years. And like extra points if it's somebody that no one really knows. my obvious one is Huber, but Nick Hubert, but let me think about, let me think about, I don't think that would have been obvious. Well, everyone knows them. I also think that if I had a bet money on like one operator, I think it would be Austin Reef

at Morning Brew. Like, I've gotten to know him really well. And he's one of the few people where I'm like, I'm like afraid of him. Like if I hears that, I'm going to compete with them, I would be like, shit, it's on. So he, I would say those two. But let me try to think of someone who's a little bit more anonymous. What about you, Sean? Let me ask a different question, Poppe, before I answer,

what would be the type of answer that would be interesting to you here? It's just somebody who like, either nobody knows or somebody who's been like successful doing something that isn't like, oh, I set up a newsletter and now I have a bunch of like ad revenue. Like the pellet gun, you know, is like fascinating, right? You're just like, man, who even knew that was a market? So like somebody who's out kind of out of the mainstream. All right, here's one.

We have this. We both have a friend. but I'm going to hurry up and say it so Sean doesn't. There's a guy named Mark Jenny who started this company called RV Share, and he sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars. Now he owns like $50 million worth of Airbnbs. And we'll like message them. Like, hey, do you want to come on the pod?

He's like, oh, I can't. For the next three months, I'm traveling the world with my kids and their homeschooling teacher. Talk later. And I think he's kind of one of the guys who I look at who's kind of one life. And the last one is the guy who started WP. forms, what's it called, Sean? It's called Saeed. He started this company that owns maybe a hundred million dollars years,

a hundred million dollar a year business where he owns all these WordPress forms or WordPress plugins. And he says he works five days a week. So one day a week, one day a month, or one week a month, he takes a meetings with all of his CEOs. And besides that, he's giving away a lot of his money. And he's like 30 years old, married with kids, super low key. That's a great answer.

Sean. I'll give you a couple of names that come to mind. So I think, so Amjad from Replit, I think he's sitting on a monster business that is kind of hidden in plain sight. Like, people know about it, but it's not yet considered to be big just because they haven't come out with a really flashy headline of being worth X billions of dollars. Like I think when they raised their last round, it was almost like strategically shy of a billion number. It was like 800 and something million instead of a billion. I'm sure they could have negotiated it up, but I actually really liked that he didn't.

And it's one of these things that's just like, I think it's a, I think it's just going to be a really important company. And I think it's going to be different than, I think it's going to be different than the previous winners looked like. Because, you know, like what happens is, you know, Amazon takes off. Then you think the next big thing is going to be e-commerce.

But no, it's actually Google. Then Google takes off that you think the next thing's going to be search and information. No, it's actually Facebook. It starts off as like a, college social network thing. Then you think Facebook's the big thing and then actually turned up to be Uber. It was like, you know, Uber and Airbnb, it was like real world shit that you can use your phone as a magic button to do. So it's kind of like the next interesting thing is not going to look like what the last interesting things look like. And I think that what Replit is, which is this like

coding environment for oftentimes beginners, teenagers, I think is like a stealth really, really big deal. But it's kind of boring. So I wouldn't say like, I wouldn't say he's the one I'm looking at. because I kind of know what he's going to do for the next 10 years. I almost don't have to look. It's like, I could just check in in 10 years and be like, yep, the hockey stick kept going. And like, you know, obviously that had big implications. I'm an investor in Replit. And I think that you're spot on of like it's way bigger than people realize.

But also, uh, the most important thing is like they capture new coders. And then they try to keep them in that environment. And so like if they get you early on, it's like kind of like going to like to like The source. Yeah, it's just like that's your lifetime infrastructure. It's a fascinating business. I'm an idiot and should have invested so much more money because I completely agree. It's going to be a massive, massive company.

So who are your other ones, Sean? The other ones. So I would have said a couple years ago Sam Altman, but now I think that's obvious. So I'm going to say somebody who I think is on par with Sam Altman, but doesn't have the same shine and doesn't have the clear like open AI type of like interesting bet, which is Daniel Gross. So Daniel Gross is one of the most interesting and impressive people. that I've met. I think that he fits your category because he's still young enough.

He's ambitious, super, super ambitious like Sam Altman, but he's free. He's not, like, currently committed to, like, one company for, like, a really long time or, like, in the middle, or, you know, hasn't, like, picked one path that he has to stay in. And so I just can't imagine that in the next 10 years, Daniel Gross doesn't do something that is, like, just epic. And I think it could be in some field that you don't, that maybe he's, you know, that maybe he's he's not even working in today. It could be like longevity or some biohacking thing.

So I think that you need people who are willing to go into these other spaces that pull off some impressive shit. I think bio and like sort of this longevity space is really interesting. And there's going to be some tech entrepreneur that's like forget like, forget the newsletter, podcast, Twitter, forget software with VCs, forget investing. I'm going to go and do something else with my time. And I like people who just choose to play. their own game and ideally a game that not everybody else is playing. I think Daniel Gross is going to be that guy.

That's a great one. And he is kind of like hidden in plain sight, but I think that Sam was at the same time. Like he came on our podcast really early on, like at the Hustles Office. I don't even know how we got him on. We just, I don't even know who knows it.

Maybe me or you, Sam, I don't remember. But he just walked in. I don't think he had any idea what we were doing. I'm pretty sure we like shared a microphone. Like we did the thing where you're like, I think we were on our iPhone. I'm going to pass it to you.

We were definitely down one mic. It was like, because we only had ever done two people, uh, episodes. It was this tiny room and we're sitting at this, like, uh, AirPods, little table like, you, you know, like, it looks like lunchable should be on top of the table. Like, it was that baby of a table. And our show is not for everybody. It's not like, you could sit down most people, like, cool, let's brainstorm. Like, what's an interesting startup idea you have? What are some spaces you think are cool?

Why do you think this is going to work? And this guy was able to riff for like two hours on everything from like running to why somebody should create a new Apple competitor. with creating a new laptop to his investing strategy, why it's different, like how he's going to beat YC, all these different topics. And he just went for like two hours effortlessly. And I thought, okay, that's impressive. That's, you know, the type of person I like to follow and be around. But is, is that like a signal you actually should surround yourself with one, young people, but two is like the most interesting people you can find. Like, I hate going to dinner. Sam and I were talking about this when we went to dinner. Like, I hate going to like the classic

business dinner where I was like oh what do you do what's going on at work whatever like I love the person who shows up to dinner and they have some wild thing that makes everyone disagree and argue and and like uh debate what's going to happen and this and that and whatever and then you find like the person who has that usually has like a whole bag of them right like they literally are like oh okay we're done talking about this one like here's my next you know ace out of my back pocket and those people somehow always figure out how to be successful like very rarely do you find the most interesting man, kind of like the kid with the gun, right,

that ends up not figuring it out. They may fail a hundred times, but eventually they do it. And is that just like they think differently, and that is kind of the prerequisite to actually finding true success. Yeah, independent-mindedness. Like, Jack Smith was the other guy

I was going to say because he's like this. I don't know, Pop, do you know Jack? No, who's that? He's, uh, Jacksonville. He started Vungal, which was like a big ad network, um, but he's a kind of young British guy who is, He sold that company for $900 million when he was 20 years old. And so he, but like, if you talk to him, he'll never mention it because it's not because he's

being humble, like he is humble, but it's because it's just not interesting to him. I don't know even though if it was interesting. He left like a few years before it sold because he's like, cool, I'm going to do whatever. And anytime you talk to Jack, he's up to a new, as Sam would call it, a new caper. And it's like, it's not like usually for profit. Like sometimes it's for profit. But it's more like, dude, Jack, you don't care about this money. He's like, but I'm trying to beat this game.

And so like one time you'll talk to him and it'll be like, he spent the last two months in his garage trying to build the perfect computer chair. It's like the like the thing is zero gravity like floating on your back chair. And he tried every product. He's tinkering with it until he gets it right. And then next time you talk to him, he's like really into the world of collectibles. And he's like got this arbitrage going where he's buying and selling baseball cards. And you're like, Jack, do you even know about baseball?

He's like, couldn't tell you the first thing about baseball. but I could tell you that this card right here is undervalued and my team in the Philippines is like flipping them right now for profit. Then the next time he made, he made like a list where he put in a spreadsheet all the companies that you can buy a pair of clothing from and you could return it within 365 days. He's like, I want to see if I can like live for free

for a year off this clothing and return it or you know, just like weird schemes. He just loves like. Or like he had a baby and then he didn't name the baby. They just called it baby for the first. year until the baby could pick its own name by crawling to like one of the names as like this guy's not going to do anything in the like just standard version and he's not doing any of these like he's not talking about them we are the ones who talk about them maybe he doesn't even want to maybe we should

take that out but like he doesn't do it for the effect like he just does it because he just got curious about that path or wanted it like just thought that makes more sense to him than the other way and then he'll do it and he's not like what you don't want is the guy who's at the the dinner to immediately say the crazy thing because they're like trying to seem a little bit out there and like they're trying to build their brand like that's the worst you want the person who's almost aloof to the fact that it sounds bad shit crazy and you're like dude do you realize what you're saying and they're like what what's wrong with that well by the way the baby thing was like the i i made fun of i go jack for once in your life be normal and then um like i i you know like the time

passed and i was like that's actually a great idea because he said he goes why would i name my kid before I even know them. I should like see like what type of name fits. And I was like, oh yeah, you're actually right. It is weird that like we don't get to know them. And so anyway, he does things all the times where at first glance, I'm like, this is the stupidest thing ever. Just be normal for once. And then he'll, like, I actually think he's right a lot of times. But I think that there's like somebody who has that proclivity of like always doing things in a different way. One, it isn't necessarily different to them,

but two is that those individuals are the ones who actually end up figuring out like what is the best chair. Or they're the one who like, they'll convince a whole friend group to like not name their kids for a year. Or you know what I mean? Like there's almost this like lack of importance

we put on the courage to be different. So like even in friend groups, like do you ever notice like everyone thinks something And then once one person says something else, then a bunch of people like flip. And they're almost like just like, kind of like, oh, where's the magnet? Right.

Like, oh, this viewpoint is popular. Like they just kind of mosey on over here. And then like, oh, this other person said this. They moseon over there. And so I do think that we need those people in a society, but also like, man, what a boring friend group it would be to have. Where like everyone just gets together on Friday night.

And I'm like, what did you do this week? I don't know. Went to work. Right. Right. Like, what are you doing this weekend? Like, I don't know. gonna like just watch the games like it it just would not be fun and so i think that a lot of people

who listen to this podcast but also just like are quote unquote on the internet they're escaping what could be like their local life of that and they're trying to find other interesting people they're trying to find other ideas and it's like exhilarating for them and so like this jack guy sounds amazing but like how do you find a hundred of them well it's usually you don't need a hundred and then you just realize that they're going to do this forever like there's this one russian guy who started this social network back in the day called Kub. I don't know if you ever saw it, but like,

Kube was TikTok before TikTok. It was amazing. It was only in Russia, Ukraine. I only found out about it because I randomly met up with this group from Ukraine that was touring Silicon Valley. And I was like, hey, come to our office. I'll give you a talk. And at the end, I asked them,

I was like, what's the hot shit in Ukraine that I should be knowing about? I don't even know why I asked this question. It turned out to be a great question, but I didn't really expect them to have a good answer, but they were like, this thing called Kube, blowing up. And this was like two years before TikTok. And so anyways, he built that thing. It didn't end up going huge, I think, because of other reasons, like with Russia and the way they control things. But I'm like, this guy's going to always do interesting things. So last week,

I checked it. I was, what's that guy Anton doing? Of course, he's doing the craziest shit. So he now is doing, he's like, I'm trying to change the way people eat fruit. I was like, what? He's like, You ever seen someone eat a mango, cut a mango? It's disgusting. I go, what? He goes, the way Americans eat mangoes is terrible. A mango is, he's like, it just goes on this way. He's like, mangos are beautiful.

They're the most delicious thing. And he has basically, he did this, he has some process that cuts, like, the juiciest part of a mango into a perfect little ball. And so you look at it, you're like, that looks delicious. And basically his mission is to make fruit more fun and delicious to eat by just cutting it better. And you cut it better and you package it that way. you store it in a certain way.

He's like, I'm going to reinvent the way people eat fruit. And I'm like, of course you are. Of course, guy who created TikTok two years before TikTok is now going to change the way I eat like mango. But like, you know, sure enough, like he's going to just keep doing interesting things. He can't not. That's an investment thesis. Weird shit that makes money. That's amazing.

Pomp, you were messaging me before this and you're like, it's only an hour, right? And I was like, yeah, give or take. And give or take an hour. This is now our longest episode ever, I think. Hopefully you didn't miss any meetings. We're going to break this up into two episodes, I think. I think we have to. Two episodes?

I think, because the first thing was awesome and the second thing was awesome. I don't want people to miss the second half. The second half was maybe better than the first half. Well, you guys are too kind. I listen every week. I always enjoy listening to you guys give each other shit and then having the guess before. Who's funnier? Well, see, the whole thing about humor is that you guys have your moments.

But I just enjoy what I enjoy when the, when the guests come on. And then you both, you can just feel it. Like one time I heard Joe Rogan and Naval on the podcast. And I said to my wife, I was like, man, Joe Rogan is super smart. But like this is like a Ferrari and a Corolla. You know, like literally like he was like hitting his A game, right? And even Joe was just kind of like, hmm, tell me more. He just had nothing to really go.

And sometimes I can feel you guys are like, man, you guys are just absolutely killing it. And then a guest comes on, you're like, hmm, tell me more. And you just let them ride. So I appreciate all the work you guys are doing. And you give me something to listen to every morning. Sam, the funnier guy is the one who didn't have to ask who's funnier.

Just so you know. General rule. It's better than you ask me who's uglier, which I'm sure is the next question. I don't know, man. I get texts. I get at least one text a month saying I'm a hilarious. Have you guys done the analysis of who talks more?

It's got to be. be made. I'm sure somebody in the audience probably could do it. And then you can argue. It's him. Yeah. Some things we don't even need data science. We don't need Will Clemente at Target to know this one.

I don't talk and interrupt more. Dude, pop, this is great. What were you saying? You were saying that everybody should subscribe to our channel or they're going to lose all their money or something like that. What was the agreement? If you don't fulfill the gentleman's agreement, like what's going on? Come on.

The gentleman's agreement and the lady's understanding. The ladies's understanding. Exactly. What you guys should start telling people is like, help me help you, you know, is just just subscribe. Yeah, get the video in the feed. Now that Susan, CEO of YouTube has stepped down, Neil has stepped in. He's bringing back all the distribution.

He's going to send you guys to the moon. So don't worry. I wish I could be on a first name basis with these people. I mean, it's like, what are you like a, what are you? You're like a called Dave Matthews band Dave too. Well, the beauty is you just call them by your first. name and then they similar to rohan dming me you just think that your boys and so i'm hoping that maybe they'll uh turn our volume up a little bit on youtube if he hears this sus it suz no can i tell you guys

is actually a really funny story very quickly uh oh what is um what is the guy who uh he used to walk around with uh the clock what is that guy's name of the big flavor flave flave so uh i'm pretty sure yeah i'm like almost 99.9% sure was him I was working at Facebook. Joe Montana came to, like, do, like, this veterans event. And so they need, like, an escort, kind of like a, almost like a babysitter for any guest who comes on campus. So another guy was going to take Joe Montana. And they were like, hey, you are going to go with Flav of Flav.

And I was like, oh, that sounds cool. Like, okay, so I'm, like, walking around with him. Kind of, like, nervous to talk to him because he's, you know, like, a celebrity, but also like, is he cool? Is he not? Whatever? Do the event. And at the end, he goes, yo, before I leave, where's that Instagram dude at? And I was like, what?

And he was like, what? and he was like the Instagram dude and I was like uh and he was like the Instagram guy where is he I know he works here and I was like do you mean like the founders and he was like yeah the tall one I met him I know him and I was like oh boy and so he was like I was like Kevin and he was like yeah that one so I'm like I genuinely I generally know where the Instagram team said so like walk through the whole campus right we get there and I'm like please don't be at your desk please don't be at your desk don't be at your desk, right? Never talked to the guy before.

And then, sure enough, he's like there. He's, like, taller than everybody. You can see him the second you walk in the door. And I got Flav-O-Flave with me. And I walk over and I go, excuse me, Kevin, uh, uh, flavor Flaves, because he knows you. Mr. Flavs.

He would like to say hi. And Kevin turns out and he's like, oh, man, what's up? Like, whatever. And he's like, super nice to him. And Flav-a-Flave just goes, what's up? Yo, you need to turn my volume up on Instagram.

And I'm like, I'm definitely being fired. Like, holy shit. This is so bad. And Kevin was like a consummate professional. He's like, let me go like introduce to our partnerships team. Like whatever. And I remember like on my way out,

I was like, hey man, sorry about that. Like did you know him? He was like, I think we met like one time like five years ago at a party. But like, sure. And so I always just think about like, yeah,

if you ever get to talk to the leaders of any of these products, like that's the question that you got to ask. Got to shoot your shot. It's like, yo, turn my volume up. That's so good. That's my new phrase. that and do I look like a guy with a plan that those are just

those are just epic all right fellas appreciate it