The Pomp Podcast - #1302 Leif Abraham | Bitcoin Is Taking Over Stock Trading Apps!
Episode Date: January 30, 2024Leif Abraham is the Co-Founder & CEO of Public.com. They are creating technology that makes building a multi-asset portfolio fast, secure, and frictionless. In this conversation, we talk about the... shift in investing trends, bitcoin ETF, technology vs financial advisors, giving revenue back to users, and operating the business. ======================= Trust and Will has simplified the process of creating and managing your will or trust online. They leverage a data-driven, design-first approach and amazing customer support to help you protect your legacy from the comfort of your home starting at just $159. Sign up today for 10% off using https://trustandwill.com/pomp ======================= Introducing Espresso - the world’s most interactive portable display. They have a portable screen that is incredibly light, comes with a nice stand, and the user interface is very easy. Anyone who listens to this podcast can go to us.espres.so/pomp. They have a brand new offer waiting for you. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/
Transcript
Discussion (0)
What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening
to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world
and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the
world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch
episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to
help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's
episode. Today's episode is with Leif Abraham. He's the co-founder and CEO of Public.com.
Public.com has millions of users. And so we start the conversation talking about the shift
in investing trends from five years ago to today. Who are these people? What are they buying? How
are they buying these assets? What are the amounts they're putting in? And are they using financial
advisors? We then start talking about the Bitcoin ETF. Why Public.com is now a multi-asset platform
that allows you to buy everything from Bitcoin to bonds, royalties, options, and public equities.
And then Life finishes up explaining to us how he actually operates a business of this size and
scale, how they've grown so quickly, why they raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and where
he sees the future of the fintech industry. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you
all do as well. Here is my conversation with Life Abraham. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments.
All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect
the opinions of Pomp Investments.
You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement
to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression
of his personal opinion.
This podcast is for informational purposes only.
Today's episode is brought to you by Trust and Will.
I've gone through a number of different changes in my life over the last few years.
I got married, I had a kid, and I had to start thinking about how could I ensure that my wife
and my child would be okay if anything ever happened to me. That's where trust, wills,
and estate planning come into play. Now, most people, what they do is they get introduced to
a friend, an uncle, or someone in their local community. It tends to be someone who's really
expensive, a lawyer, an accountant, or somebody who does estate planning, and they just simply
are using a one-size-fits-all template and just telling you, pay me thousands of dollars and I'll
use the same thing for you as the guy down the street. But that's not what Trust and Will does.
They have a trusted online estate planning product that starts as low as $159, which allows you to
now protect your legacy from the comfort of your own home. Get to leverage their excellent customer
support available via phone, email, or chat. They have thousands of five-star reviews and a rating
of excellent on Trustpilot. It takes most people 20 to 30 minutes to complete their estate plan
with Trust and Will. And not only that, but if you go to trustandwill.com slash Pomp, you'll get 10%
off. Plus you'll get free shipping of all your estate planning documents. So go to trustandwill.com
slash Pomp and make sure you get an estate plan in place. Whether it's for you or one of your
loved ones, having a trust and or a will can literally be the difference between someone
being taken care of and someone not. Go check them out today at trustandwill.com slash Pomp.
Today's episode is brought to you by Espresso, the maker of the world's thinnest portable display.
Now, listen up. If you're like me, you feel like you are at a command center when you sit down at
your desk. I got a gazillion tabs open and different windows for different activities.
There's my web browser, my text messages, I've Slack open, and I got a notes app. I normally
work on a desktop and it can be very, very productive, but everything falls apart the
second I leave my desk. If I'm traveling, if I go to a coffee shop to do some work,
or just want to work from the kitchen table.
My laptop doesn't have enough screen space.
I lose my command center
and my productivity falls off a cliff.
It's a major problem.
But this is where Espresso comes in.
They have a portable screen that is so beautiful
that you think Steve Jobs came back
from the dead to create it.
The thing is incredibly light.
It comes with a nice stand
and the user interface is so easy
that I figured it out.
How to do it in less than three minutes.
If you listen to this podcast,
you know that's not an easy feat.
So the Espresso team and I
we became friends. I got to know them because I really liked the product. And those screens,
they now want to offer them to any fan of the podcast. So we struck a little deal. Here's how
it works. Anyone who listens to this podcast can go to us.espres.so. Or if that's too confusing,
just go click the link in the description. If you go to Espresso's website, they've got a brand new
offer there sitting for you. You get a little discount and you'll get a beautiful screen.
Trust me, I use mine every day.
You'll love the Espresso screen
and I think it'll make you more productive.
Go check them out today
by clicking on the link in the description.
All right, guys, bang, bang.
I thought a great place to start this conversation
would be around the changes in investing trends, right?
Public.com is a very large business today.
You've got a huge user base.
The way they act today is very different
than maybe investors were acting five years ago.
What are some of those trends that you're seeing
that have really allowed you to build such a big business?
Yeah, I think what you've seen in the last, call it, five years is that real estate investors have
really gone through a lot of different market cycles. And because people are really learning
by doing, they have a lot of learning experiences that usually take maybe a decade or a few decades
to really go through, right? But if we really look back, we launched in September of 2019,
to be precise. And at that point in time, you had, you know, two something percent interest rates,
you know markets were doing its thing and then literally you know what is it you know five
months later you had the cover drop and the circuit breaker hits in the stock market multiple
times within the day something that hasn't happened in call it 100 years or so right and
um and so uh that obviously was like one massive kind of learning moment and obviously that drove
you know a lot of retail into the market they saw it as like an opportunity to kind of you know
by the bottom, which a lot of them did, as we've seen in our numbers.
And then obviously throughout COVID, stock market was the only arena that was open.
Sports were off.
People wanted to have some teams to be rallying behind.
Those became stocks and companies.
That drove a lot of volume, of course, and just people being loaded home and stuff.
And then suddenly, you have interest rate changes happening.
And each of these cycles has, I think, asset classes attached to them.
and if you look throughout kovitz you had your covert stocks right you had you know your you
know travel speculation you had work from home theme you know healthcare things like that then
suddenly you know in 2022 um you know you went into a uh you went into a um into a market where
you know people were suddenly looking at you know crypto rallies and things like that
on 21 i mean sorry um then 2022 you know things were kind of like rejiggering people were flying
back to things that felt more value again and that all happened within like three years you know
interest rates started to rise again and suddenly things like bonds became interesting right like
u.s treasuries like the six months t-bull was the number one investment on the app last year for us
like the number one asset you know which is something that was unheard of because bonds
for pretty much you know like non-existent for a decade plus and so i think seeing all this
happening in such a compressed time frame it was quite unprecedented and so people that entered the
markets before like 2019 and then went through all that learning period have really changed the
behavior literally on an annual basis and that's what we've seen like we've seen people that
started out in like a cheaper you know coin and now put you know serious money into u.s treasuries
which is like two extreme ends of the spectrum right so now what do you think is driving that
change right it's very fascinating if somebody could buy kind of the the meme coin and then they
can go buy u.s treasuries did they get smarter did they learn you know kind of more knowledge about
the legacy financial world did they understand what they were doing when they were buying the
meme coin it was just like you know loose monetary policy and meme coins go up or what was really
happening i think again people learn by doing and i think people um learned uh you know by seeing
what's happening as they're as they are involved often say that investing is a forcing function
for financial literacy where if you have skin in the game you will care as you care you will
automatically be more attentive and educate yourself and read the news more properly and
things like that and so i think people being invested i think is just generally a very good
thing for society as a whole because people are just get more involved in things they might have
not been involved in otherwise because they have skin in the game and um and i think what happened
within crypto specifically was crypto was the first asset class that was born retail so the
first people that got rich on crypto were regular people it was not the big hedge fund managers or
anything was regular people and that is a story that is obviously something that is a pretty
attractive story to people and so and then the other end you have to think a lot of a lot like
a lot of crypto had was just a lot of community that was built around it because of that
and so you know people are look like people want to be part of something the same reason why
you support a sports team and go to the game and hang out with the friends to have something to
talk about i think that same happens in communities around anything else and you know that anything
else can also be a cryptocurrency for example and i think that's what you're seeing with also
especially these like community driven coins like you know shiba and dodge and whatnot where people
know pretty well that there's you know no underlying function or that really then the
thing itself you know kind of like a piece of art let's be honest you know and um and so from that
point on i think you know people like that brought people into the markets and then as they entered
the markets that's when they started to educate themselves around you know how does yield really
work you know what are the market structures you know when something goes up why does it go up you
know um et cetera et cetera and then that brings them into other asset classes like stocks and then
that brings them into other classic classes like you know bonds and treasuries suddenly and so on
but i think the question is like what pulls them into the market in the first place and what is
it's an initiating kind of driver. And I think what you've seen in specifically 2020 and 2021
was that crypto was for many people, the initiating driver, there was the entry
into the markets as a whole, not just the crypto markets.
So how do you think about something like the Bitcoin ETF, which some people would argue is
going to pull interest away from the actual cryptocurrencies themselves. And now people
can just go buy this stock that gives you exposure to Bitcoin. And maybe it's the industry itself is
maturing a little bit and kind of becoming more sophisticated as well. But do you expect capital
flows to change or no the people who would use public uh or kind of some of these other
brokerages like they are very much they want to own the coins they want to have direct exposure
and the bitcoin etf is more for like wall street investors yeah and this is exactly what we're
seeing like what we've seen so far is that yes the bitcoin etfs are up there in terms of some
of the most popular etfs you know as like so far at least and but we still see more flows
into the into bitcoin directly into the actual bitcoin cryptocurrency and it's interesting i
don't know if i can like describe exactly the thinking there maybe it's just also people
getting kind of into it and maybe they just want to add to positions that are already there things
like that because there's an obvious price difference between going directly into the
cryptocurrency versus you know uh investing into the etf um i guess you know let's be honest etf
is much cheaper um but uh what we've seen so far is really a different behavior though generally
thinking i think the etf is very good for the industry and to your point i think it is a sign
of maturity it's a sign of that you know crypto as an asset class can mature you know and so on
and you know when i talked about this the other day i kind of you know got a few comments of like
oh you know something like the government regulating crypto like that kind of goes against
that i personally think you know there's a few things i think there's a difference between
crypto the asset class and you know blockchain the colors like you know a ledger as a function
for potentially being used as a financial system in some regards and those two are just very
separate things and you know once the technology we can use for many things we might want to build
but the other one you know like the coin itself can be an asset class by itself and the etf just
kind of carves out that function of it and puts it into more markets and makes it more accessible to
more you know people and brokers and all that kind of stuff and so for that aspect right i would say
it's very very good that there's also something that is that has a little bit of oversight that
is more regulated because i personally think that you know like the the financial markets
have matured over you know 100 plus years in the world and you know humans a lot of learnings and
you know it can be easily like i think it's too simple to just be very binary and be like
regulation is good or bad depends on what the regulation is and there's a lot of things that
you know i think are baked into the financial markets that are quite good to also protect
investors and so on and um having that layer around part of the crypto ecosystem i think
is a very good thing for the crypto ecosystem itself as well what's fascinating in talking
with you is already in just a few minutes we have talked about etfs we've talked about meme coins
We talked about treasuries. We talked about value investing. We talked about Bitcoin,
et cetera. You all have this bird's eye view. And now it seems like the product that you've
built has become this multi-asset platform where people can do everything from options to crypto,
to traditional stock investing, to bonds, et cetera. Talk a little bit about maybe the
philosophy of what is the product ultimately that you're trying to build and how do you measure
success? Yeah. And so how we think about internally is from our business goal perspective,
we want to be people's primary account and then for the user i think that means is that
we very much believe that if you can manage all your assets in one place you will end up
likely making better investing decisions because you can move money around different asset classes
and different investing strategies uh within the same place and that holistic view that you can
have yourself over your assets and your money um will you know will just make it easier for you to
have a better understanding of it and potentially make smarter decisions for yourself.
That falls into things like that. We've done a lot of work to build,
we call internally, the holding system. It's basically like the tech layer that
sits on top of everything. There's a real-time ledger, basically, which enables real-time money
movements between all these asset classes. That means I can sell a UST bill right now
and move that money directly into a cryptocurrency a few seconds later.
And that type of technology, so to say, the ability to move money around between different
asset classes and that kind of speed and so on, and just having that kind of direct overview of
everything, I think can be just very powerful for people before your management, if I could put a
word in, but just like how they manage their money in general. When you see kind of this management
idea. Legacy investors, the wealth transfer that's supposedly coming that everyone keeps
talking about for the last decade, they're financial advisors. I give it to someone else
and I kind of like forget about it to a degree. Maybe I meet with them twice a year, but that
person, they've got it. They're going to figure it out. They're going to go allocate 60-40 global
portfolio and really kind of go with the academic theory. Are the people who are using public
talking to a financial advisor? Is that kind of getting kicked out of the industry or are you
a workaround? How do you look at the technology versus maybe the human side or the advisor side
of a business like this? Yeah, I think the spectrum was historically always thought about
just as either it's active or passive. And passive often meaning it's being managed.
In theory, if you have your money in an ETF, it's managed within that fund, right? So there's a big
part of it that's already... The way we think about it is that it's not that binary, it's way
nuance and that spectrum is much wider. And so internally, we can talk about things like there's
guided investing, there's automated investing before something is even managed. And in that
world, I think folks are not either or. You want to have the ability to do a speculative options
trade one day, potentially even just because you think it's fun or whatever. And at the same time,
you want to have money in the Nasdaq ETF and just let it sit and compound over decades.
I think that duality exists for most people, really.
The other side of it, I think, is also, I think a lot of people, and that's what we're seeing,
obviously, because we're also an active platform as a default, but is that people do want to have
some control over it themselves and that doesn't mean that part of the portfolio might not like uh
could be managed you know back to even an etf technically is managed in some regards
um but it just means that you know people like the sense of that they have control and
um i think this this notion of you completely give it to someone to manage and just like don't look
at it and move away i think it's going to go away more and more especially also because what we've
seen specifically throughout the last few years is that financial education through social media and
whatnot has so damn accelerated. We launched T-Builds on the app in Q1 last year. When we
launched it, we jumped on with reporters to talk about it. We had really deep financial markets
reporters so we had to explain how does the table work again you know like because it was so you
know these are like professionals in the space and just because it was so you know just like
irrelevant for such a long time you know within the public community you suddenly like it took a
week and you had people talking about building uh uh building letters before for their bonds
you know basically you know meaning you know you build like a bond letter so you you know kind of
of get cash flow through a certain period of time asking which maturity and like different
maturity links and stuff like that and like that you know it went from like people borderline have
not already thought about or heard about or understood how these things work to people
talking deep strategies within like a week and i think that type of like rapid education in these
like bite-sized formats is just what exists today which didn't really exist 20 years ago and so that
generation didn't go through that and i think that just makes people also much more comfortable
comfortable and confident that yeah they could potentially run part of that portfolio themselves
you guys recently launched options and one of the interesting parts is that you're going to
get 50 of the options revenue back to the user obviously this gets into payment for order flow
a lot of different platforms kind of how they think about their relationship to the user versus
maybe other constituents that they work with why are you giving 50 of your revenue back to
the user like how exactly does that work yeah so you might remember that um in 2021 we actually
stopped participating in payment for auto flow on the equities trading side like on the regular stock
uh uh training and we did that for a few reasons number one um you know uh it's it leads to better
price execution for the user it just creates you know just like more transparency for people to
know that like if you execute a trade in public you know a party will do its best to make sure
it actually was at the best price and another piece of it is that payment for all of code
generally you know it incentivizes a company like us for that you know we want people suddenly to
trade a lot et cetera et cetera and it kind of creates this like misaligned incentives between
the brokerage and the customer and you know that impacts things of how you think about product
development and what features you do and you know things like life cycle marketing in the app and
all that kind of stuff and you know and so like just thinking of that like your your business
model impacts your incentives which impacts how you design things and um when we launched options
which was one of the most requested features we had kind of ever right um the thing was we looked
at again those market structures and we were like okay in the market structures in options you
actually cannot get rid of the market maker as long as you don't necessarily become one yourself
which is obviously quite a process to do that but you cannot get rid of them right and so payment
for auto flow because market makers are so baked into that market structure you can't really get
rid of it now we were like so what is a more transparent way to align our incentives with
the ones of our users and kind of continue that thinking throughout also in the like you know
also in the in the in the options markets and that was the sense of like okay what if we actually
give part of the payment for the revenue that you make on options trading and give it back to the
user because it creates this transparency for them to really understand exactly how much money do we
make on each trade that you're making because you're making the same amount you know exactly
how much we're making so it creates some transparency therefore understanding like
and having clarity of like what our incentives are as a business in that moment you know and
in options trading we make money on that and so therefore it's like yeah someone who trades more
we will make more money on that but it's better for the user to understand and know that you know
and have clarity there and transparency than not and um and then generally speaking you know that
just adds a little bit transparency, just like the market structures as a whole, right?
The stuff is super complex. I literally just, you know, scratched the surface here that we
could talk about the whole podcast about those market structures there. But it is, you know,
something that has been fairly introspective that is important, I think, you know, for people to
understand. So they understand incentives, so they understand, you know, how things work. And also,
if these things change in the future, that they know what that means for, you know, their assets
for the future as well. When you think about building the business, it's a big business today,
right i don't know how many employees revenue like whatever numbers you could share that just
kind of give people a sense of like how big this business is and then maybe we can get into like
the actual company building operational stuff that you've done to get here yeah so we're three
million users um and again we launched um a little over four years ago so there's now a 50n market
officially and um and obviously you know how you can think about it is what you've seen throughout
20 and 21 was um a lot of user growth a lot of people went into the markets but also the behavior
was i would say in most cases a little more speculative and what you've seen throughout the
last you know two years now roughly right or soon to be two years um is that that behavior has
changed to be call it you know less speculative more fundamentals driven etc etc which also means
people are actually moving way higher dollar amounts into the markets and so like we've seen
for example our like first deposit of people that sign up and deposit for the first time into the
app that 20x throughout the last call it 18 20 months um and there you see that just like the
the behavior has drastically changed you know of those people and so on and that's how you can
you can kind of think about them so you know in these markets you see maybe less people creating
new accounts but the people are coming in are way more uh um you know kind of like serious about
you know their investing uh assets as they get started now as you've built the business um
four years millions of users you've had to hire very quickly uh you've probably moved offices
multiple times like there's all these things that go into hyper growth how did you keep the culture
an area where people wanted to come work here the people who were working there didn't want to leave
yeah um first i think tenure is a wrong thing to look at to be quite honest because um um you know
we have the board we have jessica neil who was the chief tenor beside netflix and you know i
personally love the the netflix um you know employee handbook for example and just like
this whole notion of a company as a sports team not a family and you know if you take the sports
terminology right the best players stay and so really fine that you potentially have players
on the team who you know will do a phenomenal job and will really fit into what the company is
for a year or two or three and then they might not and that is completely okay and so i think
10 years generally the wrong thing to look at because it's not necessarily a sign of success
right there may be certain people that shouldn't work with you what we rather look at is the ratio
between voluntary and involuntary churn of your employees so how many people that you want to be
in your team actually leaving your team versus how much are you in control of who's at the team aka
the people that you let go and generally speaking i think you know that if you are more in control
of who's on the team aka the ratio of people that you let go is actually higher than the people who
are quitting themselves that i think means you have you know generally speaking a more healthy
culture because culture is really just how you work in order to make the company successful
you know and um you know and that's you know it was like ping-pong tables and parties and whatnot
um and so you know and so i think that's that's how we like rather like just like rather look at
that right um yeah so sports in the family how do you go about evaluating talent both as they're
coming in to work at the business and then also whether they are one of the top performers or you
may need to part with them and go find someone else for the role yeah and i think um our view
on that developed over time like we had this moment where we raised a ton of money in 2021
we hired a bunch of people um team grew really damn quickly and um we reached this time where
we were like okay now that's like you know bring the experienced manager and who comes from a
little bit of a bigger tech firm etc etc and then suddenly what turned out you had also people on
the team who are maybe you know rather have one-on-ones with people than you know actually
be deep in the work and what we've really i think learned for ourselves which kind of became a little
principle at public now for management is like at public every manager is also an ic and you must
have a love and an obsession for the craft and that falls into you know microphone ionic is
really deep in figma files with you know the direct ic designers right like literally yesterday
i was really deep in like you know copy docs of some life cycle emails that we're sending out
and like stuff like that and i think you know everyone needs to be really deep in the work and
has must have this like love and obsession of the craft because i think that's really what everything
kind of comes back down to and i think there's too many of these like management mindsets of like
which leads to people wanting to build armies and whatnot where they think their worth and
the value to the company increases with you know the more budget they oversee the more people they
oversee and whatnot versus the actual value they drive for the company and hiring should be a last
result not the first option it should not be a strategic move for like we want to do this let's
hire someone to do that right hiring should be the last result of like we cannot figure out different
ways to do this therefore we now need to hire and um you know and so on so like i think that's
really the sense of that the biggest thing we care about is people that are completely willing to get
their hands dirty and you know think that is like and that's what they get the joy out of right and
so on and i think that culture just needs like that needs to be there at all times and i would
say we we had a small moment where we lost that to be honest um and i think throughout the last 12 to
18 months we've been trying to aggressively you know make sure that that's truly what every single
person he is how do you think about fundraising you've fundraised in really good times and you've
also i'm sure evaluated doing it in bad times as well uh how has that changed and maybe what are
some of the lessons that you've learned there always raise more money than you think you need
because you don't know what's going to happen um that's for sure like when we raised like the last
time we raised was in 2021 was february 2021 so we're still running on that money today
and at that point in time we raised 220 million dollars which was nuts just let's be honest
effing bonkers right we were 40 people 45 people when we did that you know and also at the time
with very little revenue like we were in the middle of GameStop there was no momentum behind
us right but we were 18 or less than like 15 months in market like super young product super
small team. And we raised a ton of money on that. And at the time, I remember the first
term sheet was for $100 million. And then we just talked them up. And we were like,
should we make it $200? Because it seems like we can. And to be honest, it was one of the best,
best decisions we've done. Because our future would have looked very different if you would
have raised half of that. And in that moment, that money was just ridiculous. $100 was just
ridiculous so 200 was just stupid you know and um but it was one of the best decisions to be honest
because we're still running on that money today and it was you know uh like we could have predicted
the future of how the market's going to contract and whatnot i think generally speaking what's
happening right now is very healthy i think what happens in the zero interest rates you know
environments is that you know yannick and i had this term where we talked about of like the uh
the, uh, like the, uh, so someone who, you know, in a Zerp environment becomes,
becomes an entrepreneur because it's easy. And that is all washed out, which also means you
just have more talent density, you know? And I think in these markets, people get focused again
on like, what are we doing here? We're here to try to build a really healthy, good business that
ends up making money. That is the number one purpose of the business. Um, not all the other
distracting things around it and I think you know in those Zerp markets I think we also all like as
an industry as a whole and everyone got very distracted to suddenly care about a bunch of
things that maybe we shouldn't have cared about as much and you know that affects company cultures
and in fact you know how you think about money that affects how people build teams and whatnot
and you know I honestly you know I entered the workforce in like before 08 right and I moved to
us in 2008 and then suddenly you know i was you know the uh person in the job where around me
everyone got fired and then you had 10 years plus where a bunch of people entered the job market
they did not have that experience and so i think having this moment right now is very very healthy
for people's perceptions of what's the purpose of the business truly you know what the economics
actually should look like etc etc and um you know that obviously means that valuations contract
impact in the moment in time but they will expand the world at some point again you know maybe not
as crazy as 2021 multiples but you know prices go up prices go down and you know we raised a
lot of money in 2021 at a very healthy evaluation at a time you know and we'll raise money again at
some point likely and when we do we'll see what the variations at that point and that is totally
okay right if anyone in the stock market knows everything goes up and down and it's better to
on that then you know yeah you know try to get too crazy yeah you said that the business would
be very different today if you had raised half or less than what you did raise what would be
different like what where do you think the business would be i think it's two things right
i think um um first off um there's obviously company strategy would have been slightly
different in terms of how you deploy the capital because if you have less you deploy likely also
little less um so that's i think one thing um at least in the in the like in the you know call it
like the like 2021 years now though on the other end it would have me it would have still meant we
would have likely needed to raise money by now that would have been my assumption and you know
that meant we would have needed to raise money likely exactly at the time where valuations would
be crazy compressed and also, and then in that moment, I think you still have a business that
runs the way it was running in 2021, early 2022, and how startups and venture capital
will operate at the time, aka, likely less efficient than people operate right now.
And it's definitely true for us. We're now running way more efficient than we've done in those years.
and um and then you would have raised need to raise money at a time where you know everyone's
minds already adjusted to the new market conditions but you didn't actually have time for
your business to adjust perfectly to that yet or to at least show the track record that you have
you know and then you have to raise time and money at the time where the valuations contract so that
combination i think is deadly right the combination of looking at how you run your business
still being in the old world the new world having adjusted and valuations contracted i think that
kills companies and so very very lucky that we were in that position how do you think about uh
regulation obviously you are in a highly regulated uh industry um there seems to be a lot of maybe
gray area questions concerns at the things that are like the furthest out crypto uh maybe even
royalties like these areas that are not really the mainstream financial assets uh have a lot more
regulatory questions than obviously a public stock on you know the new york stock exchange
so how do you think about you know navigating that while also trying to innovate
generally speaking i think there's a lot of regulation that's still behind but if you think
of you know things that you know that you have to be accredited and how to become to and how you can
become accredited in order to invest in for example private companies you know things like
that i think that is still outdated that needs to change to be quite honest um on the other hand you
had some innovation right so you know it's now five years ago reggae plus was introduced which
is basically the ability to turn any type of asset into a sec registered tradable security
and that has been used to you know turn things like a piece of art or you know royalties and
make that an investable asset class so you can buy and sell shares right so we acquired a company a
few years ago called otis um which basically used record class to do that and integrate that into
the app where you know now in public you know there is even you can put you know you can buy
a share in a bank see or you can buy a share in the shrek music royalties so anyone who watches
you know a shrek movie you suddenly actually make cash flow on that right and actually the yield on
that when we ipo that was higher than most the most you know bonds out there and stuff and it's
completely uncorrelated to the financial markets because it's you know based on content consumption
you know not uh the financial markets and so and then the ability to add that to your portfolio
et cetera et cetera and so like reggae plus for example thing was a good innovation that actually
came out of the regulatory environment to enable these types of things it's so you know expensive
to to do it et cetera et cetera like as a company but generally i think we we have some innovation
that's good as well the bitcoin btf is another one right good that that happened um but i think
there's still a lot that needs to happen generally speaking like our name is obviously public and so
we often think about this way of like it's on us to constitute like like it's an us to define what
constitutes a public market and you know things like making music royalties actually tradable
and accessible to anyone to participate in that asset class you know um uh is obviously you know
kind of cool and a good innovation i would say and i think you will see much more of that just
this like securitization of everything happen,
but it will take still likely a decade plus
for that to trickle into more asset classes,
more into all asset classes.
My last question for you is,
it is your job to understand where you've been,
where you are today,
but also where this entire industry is going.
What are maybe one or two things
that you think are going to happen in the future
that either people aren't thinking enough about,
or maybe things that everyone believes will happen
and you're like, ah, I'm not so convinced
that that's actually going to be where the world goes?
First, I think interest rates are going to stay higher,
longer than people expect right now.
That's my little macro take here.
Yeah, I mean, Jenny speaking, again,
like number one, it's the securitization of everything.
I think you're going to see more liquid markets
around private securities happen at some point.
I know Cata just had to now close it down.
I think that was actually bad for the industry
that you know they were kind of forced to do that you know despite the maybe questionable tactics
that potentially were unveiled there but nevertheless i think it was actually bad for
you know the private markets that kata suddenly closed down their efforts to try to build you
know like an exchange for private securities i think that was kind of a stupid outcome for
everyone to be honest um but i think that you know uh those are i think some of the you know more um
you know exciting things the other one sorry to be that but like ai i think is going to have a
massive impact right like we launched alpha on the app it's like a research assistant which we
basically you know which is just like basically like like an lm that we've um trained with
earnings call data and analyst reports and you know just like historical fundamental data etc
etc and so now you can just swipe down on any stock and ask for any question about the stock
and it's phenomenal how well that thing works and i think the next step there is obviously for those
tools to be personalized for our portfolios it doesn't necessarily mean that an ai will
like trade for you um or you know if that's good or bad but um but just the sense of that
you know what's like the impact that ai can have on just like portfolio management
and giving you insights quickly around your portfolio i think is going to be
awesome, awesome, awesome to see.
Where can we send people to find you
online, or if they want to check out
Public, get an account, where can we send them?
Yeah, go to public.com
and sign up, and
obviously you can find me on Twitter
at live, L-E-I-F, Thunder.
There's a whole other story to that
handle, we can talk about that next time.
All right, sounds good.
We'll definitely do this again in the future.
Cool, awesome. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for watching!
