The Pomp Podcast - #566 Chris Zarou on Building An Engaged Fan Base

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

Chris Zarou is an entrepreneur and investor. He is the mastermind behind the legendary rise of artist Logic, along with a host of other incredibly talented individuals.  In this conversation, we discuss the creator world, how to build an audience, intersection of entertainment and tech, fans vs listeners, music distribution, talent in startups, playing not to lose, and bitcoin.  ======================= Did you know nearly 338 million dollars worth of NFTs were sent last year? And in 2021 that number is growing faster than ever. Looking to make your first NFT? Check out NEAR’s fast, scalable, low-cost, open-source platform. Learn why NEAR is the infrastructure for innovation at near.org: https://near.org/?utm_campaign=pomp  ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  ======================= With 10M+ users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell 100+ cryptocurrencies. The Crypto.com Visa Card gives you up to 8% back instantly, and 100% back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, Crypto.com lets you earn up to 8.5% p.a. on BTC, and 14% p.a. on stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App with code "pomp". Download the App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/pomppodcast2021 =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Chris Zaru is an entrepreneur and investor. He's the mastermind behind the legendary rise of ArtistLogic, along with a host of other incredibly talented individuals. In this conversation, we discuss the creator world, how to build an audience, intersection of entertainment in tech, fans versus listeners, music distribution, talent in startups, playing not to lose, and of course, Bitcoin. I really enjoyed this conversation with Chris, and I hope you enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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Also, Crypto.com lets you earn very high rates of interest on Bitcoin and stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com app with code POP. Again, download the Crypto.com app, use code POP, and you get $25 for free. Download the app today by clicking on the link in the description, Crypto.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Chris. I hope you enjoy this one. 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. all right guys bang bang i've got chris here with me thanks for doing this man of course man thanks for having me all right you've got one of the craziest stories that i know uh and there's a lot of similarities i think between what you started doing and what you're doing now and investing um but on the surface most people wouldn't understand that uh let's just start from like the very beginning you are how old before you start a talent management business

20 20 years old and at 20 you're trying to figure out like what you want to do or you always knew you wanted to go in the talent managers no i really had no idea stumbled into it i was on the path to become an athlete tried to become a professional athlete i was division one soccer player learned really quickly that wasn't going to work out after my sophomore season kind of cold turkey dropped it and was like okay what's next right you go through that soul searching for me it was like, okay, what am I passionate about outside of this sport? It was music was the answer for me. And okay, how do I get involved with music? Landed on talent management. I would go to Barnes and Noble, kind of just read music business books to learn about it. I landed on

talent management because I was like, okay, there's no barrier to entry here. If I can find talent and break that talent, that's my foot in the door. So literally just stumbled into it. All right. And so when you start understanding that, was there things you learned by reading like the talent management books or the like business books that you were like okay here's like the two or three things i gotta do this or was it literally just like just find the right person it was more for me it was more about finding the right person and looking back now if i had tried to educate myself on that current music business back in 2010 2011 i think i would have been brainwashed right i think a piece of my success was not having the experience so i got to

i understood the internet and i understood okay where audience was where attention was and i knew how to put my artists in front of them that was kind of how we broke through and it was also a really unique time in the music business the recorded piece of music was kind of dying these labels were having a really rough time because that was the era where everybody was pirating music right and it allowed me and it really because i understood the inerrits where i lived that's how i found talent there was this these music blogs right it was this we call it the blog era is a huge uh piece of the music business people my age i kind of came up with it is this like dat piff and like a bunch of those sites that's a great example but it was more like

college kids curated blogs right okay where they identify talent find talent and post the talent and you would just go to discover up and coming talent that's where i found my artist and i had a relationship with these kids that's how i marketed them it was it was that simple and executives didn't understand it experienced managers didn't understand it yeah and so when you say they didn't understand it they didn't know it existed they didn't know it existed i was getting calls in the early days of managing logic from executives that i had started building relationship with and i'd have a video and it'd have 500 000 views after 48 hours like yo how are you doing this they were dumbfounded and what were you doing i was using those websites it was just

relationships right it was that because people were checking those websites and then again word of mouth kicked in this was the internet wasn't as noisy then and i think that was a really special time so if you discovered logic right you'd want to go deeper you went through his entire discography right you told your friends about it it's also the aux cord era where everybody was sharing music whether you're at a pre-game you're driving your car and i just noticed word of mouth that spread so quickly talk me through when you first found logic is that the first artist that you found or is that just the first major artist that the second artist ever worked with there's rapper out of philly prior to that but it was the first success i ever had came across him on the

internet um really didn't have much music out it was like an acapella video of him rapping on the university of maryland campus he lived in maryland at the time and i kind of cold reached out to him on Facebook. And I was like, hey. There's a Facebook message slide right in the DMs. Like, what's up, man? He didn't even have an artist page. I had to find like his personal Facebook.

That's how early it was. Reached out to him and was like, hey, you know, I think you're talented. I'd love to manage you. And logic's a funny guy. Did he know what that was? He did, but he called me and he was like, you don't have any experience.

And I was like, I know that, give me a shot. Like, just trust me. That's kind of the agreement that we had. I was like, don't worry about paperwork. Just give me a shot. And it, you know, fortunately worked out. So you see him, uh, was there anything that you were like, like this guy's a star in the making?

Was it lyrics? Was it just like kind of like stage presence, if you will? Or was it just literally intuition? Like, I don't know. I can't explain it, but like this guy's real. It was more intuition from, I think me being such a fan of hip hop. I was like, okay, this kid is a student of the game, right? This kid has worked at his craft.

That that's what stood out to me. You could tell that by watching right away. Yeah. Right. And then obviously got to know him more and more and hear more music. I'm like, okay, that was very true. um so that kind of was what drew me to him and once you guys decide like all right let's work together this is 2011 2011 okay so in 2011 uh social media is not huge right like very very

different world as you've already described what do you do because you basically take a kid that you find in maryland who nobody knows and it becomes logic right and for all intents and purposes that's like a zero to one type event uh that doesn't happen overnight like what are the steps kind of from an execution standpoint you guys did to take logic's talent and actually make it this household name sure it knowing what i understood and i think like i said a couple minutes ago i understood the internet and i understood where attention was right and had the relationship with all these blogs and again at the time you couldn't even really get behind the scene analytics so i would just again it was all intuition i was okay i would reverse engineer

other artists breaking okay okay youtube seems to be uh playing a big role in this artist's career so i would sit logic down like hey we need to shoot a music video for almost every song on this project right because that that's really how we're going to market you and we'd roll it out slowly as kind of singles but there'd be five or six off a mixtape because youtube was that was really the only music streaming platform if you think about it right this is pre-spotify pre-apple music so it's a way for kids to easily share music when you post on your facebook at the time it would clean embedded in in facebook so you could watch it across your news feed twitter did the same thing at the time so we shot a video for every single single that we handpicked um and it was

low budget like i we would i would bargain with directors there's one director we work with his name was gravity i was like hey i'll let you put your logo at the beginning of the video because we don't have a budget to pay you and that was the trade-off um and so that was equal because that person's betting my work plus Logic's talent is going to be a viral video, right? And we started getting, you know, some great views at the time. So it was worth it to him at the point. And we ended up growing and building with that kid for a couple of years.

So it was just figuring it out and think, you know, again, intuition where I thought talent was going to be, putting Logic there. And then word of mouth just did its thing and started to take off. Okay, so word of mouth kind of did its thing, right? We've talked quite a bit about how you kind of methodically built a really really rabid fan base and uh for those that aren't familiar with logic's fan base there's like i don't know uh the drakes and the jay-z's and like these massive massive names and yes they have some subset that care a lot but on a percentage basis majority of their audience

is more of a passive kind of listener sure right it's hey i like jay-z's music but if jay-z comes to town i'm not literally gonna not go to my brother's birthday party to go right logic actually has a very high percentage of his audience that literally will do anything that he is doing or into or whatever because it's almost like a a measurement of engagement right it's not passive it's much more kind of uh intentional so one of the things you told me before is you guys would go on these city by city tours and it sounds like it would start out really really small and then you basically would just like okay next time we come like increase it like walk through like why did you go on the city tours and like how did you actually execute that yeah the quick answer

was a way to monetize his audience because at the time we were giving away free music so we weren't making any money off of it and i think back to your prior question it didn't happen overnight it was what we focused on him i talked about it every day we'd say small wins so that's what kind of got me up in the morning i was like okay let's get a small win today right because i started to see it day by day, it was compounding. And I'm like, okay, this is kind of really happening, right? So you wouldn't have this major viral moment, but every single day I'd refresh the video and have more views. I'd look at the streams, it'd be more streams. I'd look at social followers, it'd be more. And then I realized it started compounding at a higher

growth rate as time went on. And then I was like, okay, I think it was all intuition based. We didn't have data. Like I said, the way you get like Spotify has a backend that is just fucking incredible. It gives you so much information, where the listeners are coming from, the age of that listener so you know your entire audience demographic right you know where they are where they're consuming your music we had no clue so it was an intuition thing where i'm like i remember calling him i'm like i think we could probably tour right and again learning as we went throwing a tour together i think we did 35 cities on that first run um rented a minivan and nissan altima and jammed them and toured the country man what does that mean when you go on a tour like

like do you go to a park do you go to like a bar like we were doing we were doing probably 250 to 350 cap rooms so very small rooms right we had no tour history and it was all of us working with promoters and we had an agent that we work at the time nobody would give us guarantees so the way touring business works is you'll get a flat guarantee you do really well you'll get back in right because logic had no tour history nobody wanted to give us guarantee so that like a guarantee would be like hey come here and play we'll pay you you know ten thousand dollars to play and then oh by the way if you hit some metric then we'll cut you another check for 10k so you can make up to twenty thousand dollars for playing tonight but ten is up front guaranteed the other

ten is you gotta you gotta pull in the audience exactly that so we embarked on this tour again no guarantee so like it didn't work out we lost we lost literally everything so to backtrack a little bit the way we had the startup capital so we bootstrapped the business my management company never raised money we had to sign a record deal in order to fund that first tour right so we literally risked like i was like hey logic i'll put my advance and he put me and him split the money we went on tour and it just worked out and it was figuring it out as we went i had never toured before obviously and and you know even the accounting was just like i look back at it i'm embarrassed now but i'm the cash story the cash story is so good so again being a door deal you'd

settle the end of the night in cash depending how the tour did and we crushed we ended up all right so hold on it was just so people understand a door deal basically means no guarantee people are coming in you'll get 85 90 of every ticket sold okay so when people show up they're literally paying cash they're getting a ticket they're walking inside but that cash that they just paid is ultimately supposed to end up in your pocket 80 85 90 whatever but it's sitting in cash which you know depending on who's at the door depending on what the the uh venue is gets kind of sketchy if all of a sudden cash starts disappearing or whatever so my accounting system at the time right before we went on the tour i had manila envelopes i'm like all right 35 cities denver colorado i'd

write on huge right and i'd have it in a backpack and i was like the end of the night i'm gonna settle and i'm gonna literally it was like a ledger and i would write everything so if somebody needed 20 for weed minus 20 for weed right and we finished the entire tour when i say i look back i'm embarrassed it was in that one backpack right we'd be in a green room i'd put it down in the corner and we'd all leave the room it's 65 70 000 and it's just cash yeah and literally all of the expenses of logic's tour is written on manila envelopes just in a backpack together everything and then post tour right we're at my house i was working with harrison remler who you know now um who's the ceo of my company at the time was an intern he ended up tour managing for me on that

tour i left i did the first 10 shows kind of showed him the ropes so we're literally my parents basement at the time where we built the business out of and we're trying to then input everything into like an excel spreadsheet and have it neat because we had to bring the cash into the bank yeah yeah and they want to know where the hell did you guys get this cash you're pulling out of a backpack so so we literally we're sitting there we're taking out the cash we're putting the cash on top of the envelopes right i was working in full time so it was all it was all laid out on the floor so you'd have denver and it'd be cash on top of it you have new york city cash on top of it i was going to work so i was in college working full time and managing logic at

the time and i was like all right hire to finish up here you got it i'll jump out i leave i come back okay he tried to clean up took all the envelopes ripped them up threw them out i get back there's just 35 piles of cash so we had no idea so we had no idea no idea what we should do just put it on the bank and just said hey we're gonna i'll take my commission you get the rest that was it yeah dude like it wasn't glamorous back then yeah and a lot of people think like oh it's entertainment it's music business no i mean it was like really hard work like just grit and and like the tour you're jammed body to body in the back like i rode that minivan like this yep and when we got back to new york so we ended the tour in new york and we did everything like

it wasn't by the book i the the rentals were in my name so i rented them from long island and rentals uh the cars the minivan and the ultimo yep toured the country went to california and came back and i was doing the paperwork and it's like you can't leave new york state we literally drove across the country and came back i was like well i'm gonna return them in new york so who's gonna know meanwhile they're taking photos of our license plate every easy pass and every it was uh yeah so when you do that how much of the success of this first tour is because you guys didn't do what everyone else did versus no if we had done what everyone else did we would have been way more successful no i think it wasn't the tour if we had done what everyone else

had done i don't think we would have got logic's career off the ground okay it was it was doing things our way that was kind of a little bit different and that's why i was getting calls from executives going yo how are you doing this how are you building this audience it was just solely living on the internet like a lot of times i say logic is kind of a child of the internet we built his entire career on the internet by giving away free product which again record executives and labels looked at me like we were nuts it's like the one thing that you can monetize you're giving away for free and i would get frustrated because i'm like you don't understand i'm building an engaged audience they're creating emotional connection with this artist they're not going

anywhere when it's time to monetize we'll monetize right how important is it uh building an audience on the internet's one thing right you can go you can tweet post on youtube whatever uh versus actually going and seeing your 200 fans in milwaukee wisconsin right and being able to either have them see you and and kind of be there in person or even signing things or taking photos with them or like doing that type of in person right like like is that actually a really key ingredient here versus just oh yeah we were on the internet we're good at the internet but like we could have done it without that in person that's a great question i think back then it was so important we were kind of in the dark on exactly whose audience was because we didn't have the data

that you can get now right we didn't know kind of the age demo we didn't know you know so that first tour was everything for me i would go and generally be a balconeer i would just stare at these fans and i go okay this is who his audience is now let me try and go where they're going to be or where i think they're going to be and continue to market him so that's kind of how we developed everything from the beginning but now you can build anything on the internet and you have that information right so you shouldn't be surprised when you do sell a show out to see who's there but back then it was like i had to learn who was going to be there yeah when you think about um the idea of like okay i now understand who the actual demographic is right

i'm assuming that it was like hey who's your demographic i don't know young yeah right like or college or whatever it was uh but once you start to understand all right this is actually who these people are what do you do to like go figure out what else they like or go and put him somewhere else right because he doesn't have enough star power at this time it sounds like to like walk in and do deals and do all this kind of crazy stuff it's still a lot of like guerrilla marketing but it's not just around music it's really kind of building this like cultural uh kind of trend around an individual very much so i think you had to try and really understand who that audience was who else they listened to what they consumed um you know even lifestyle brands

we did a deal early on with Fila right which was kind of an old you know sports brand that was trying to you know have a resurgence and it made a lot of sense for Logic's brand at the time he's not a high-end street fashion dude right it wouldn't have made sense back then to do a deal with Supreme right um it was funny as we started to see it these kids also kind of live vicariously through him so in one of the tours when we did that deal I started seeing kids show up in Fila gear every day right so it was kind of cool and i realized okay this is more than just kind of a fan base this is kind of like it's a lifestyle type thing for him but yeah i think understanding who your audience is the most important thing you can do and then tripling and doubling down on over

delivering to that audience and a lot of people can say they did that we live that i think logic you know as an artist probably has some of the best examples of doing that his sophomore album it was literally that how can we continue to double down how can we continue and from the earliest days right uh again and where i keep saying future trends and predicting and putting him there he was he lived on ustream right and this is a decade ago now you talk about twitch right and we just did a twitch deal a decade later we were live streaming to with to his fans 10 years ago he'd sit on twitter go on ustream and engage with these kids it'd be 35 kids there right but like that's what people don't understand right just real quickly uh when we talk about

streaming or building an audience he's not turning on one of these platforms like oh there's 10 000 people here right you're talking about 35 fucking people on the other end of it and it's day in day out day in day out every day he knew the early fans by their names they still come to shows now and i used to say to him at the time i'm like that kid is going to buy music buy merch buy tickets a decade from now and we've seen it play out right so he lived on your stream taught he would engage with 35 kids right so identifying you know those trends and doing it but also then saying okay as he started to get bigger where that wasn't really possible anymore it was too big how can we continue to double down then use social media as kind of a microphone

megaphone so his sophomore album it was kind of him and I brainstorming how we could do that and I kind of came up with the idea I was like what if we just kind of bust you he lived in LA at the time needed to be in New York for press and media when his album came out two weeks later I was like, what if we did a 14-day bus tour where across the country, we literally stopped at fans' houses, right? We ran a contest, stopped at fans' houses, knocked on their door, and you went inside and played them the album one-on-one, right? You had that experience before it came out, right?

And we captured that content and we put that content out. That's exactly what we did. And I've never seen an artist do something like that. How long was the album? That album was probably an hour and 20 minutes. So literally, I'm going to go into somebody's house that I've never met before, but as a fan of me, I'm going to play the album. them i'm going to interact with them i'll spend an hour and a half two hours whatever with them

and then i'm going to go to the next one that was one person one person he showed up again and again knocked on the door and again and again we did it for two weeks straight and ended up in new york when the album came out but it was such a cool moment because then we document it and logic would kind of post on social media what that interaction was hey this is jacob from san antonio texas right jacob's 17 years old he's this and would tell a little bit story they had an interaction but that fan got a moment they're gonna remember professor alive logic sat there not only played the album one-on-one gave him a little bit behind the scenes hey this is my inspiration for the song so i was going through in my life when i made this song and then kind of learning from that

experience and taking for me and doing it again but trying to perfect it even better with other clients it's like my second client john bellion who i'm still working with to this day we did the same exact thing a year later right really but stepped it up a notch so he was playing live in the living room we did an entire acoustic show for that person and their family in their living room so it's like really meaning it when we say doubling down and over delivering to your audience yeah and so when you start to think about this uh like let's go back to logic for a second i think everyone thinks of him initially as a musician right as a as a rapper whatever you want to say but a performer there's a lot of different facets to his life there's that aspect there's chess

right you start getting into the various personalities or kind of pseudonyms if you will right or kind of brands around him talk about just uh it's one thing to say okay you as a performer i'm going to take you i'm going to take you city to city we're going to use the internet we're going to build an audience and if we have audience and fans then we can figure out how to build a business around you as a performer but you guys built an entire franchise right and there's multiple ways to look at this like where did that come from is that you saying hey we should go build a whole franchise is that just naturally kind of okay here's the next kind of step we take like how does that come together it was a learning experience as we kind of went

i think his early days of logic if you look at a lot of that first album was 2014 it was called under pressure even if you look he was on the double excel freshman cover which is you know for an up-and-coming artist it's the biggest thing you can get it's it's basically predicting it's a who's next list right and you go and you do that big photo shoot for the cover and if you look at what logic's wearing he's got you know a big jacket on three four gold chains and it so wasn't who he is right now we all know who logic is he's not that guy we had a stylist for the shoot we thought we needed to fit in the box of the pop when logic really lived on the outside of it and once i realized that i just started nudging him to be more and more of himself

the more human and himself he became those personas started getting bigger and bigger and bigger and we were able to kind of build these different brands around him because they were all part of him right i think because he's a versatile artist bobby tarantino one of his personas is like a little bit more fun right i think young sinatra's boom bap hip-hop which originally is what drew me when i reached out to him um and then we also built merchandise brands around those personas and we're able to really expand you brought up him playing chess he had an era where he kind of perfected a Rubik's Cube. So he's going to do press

and he's going to freestyle at this radio station. I'm like, yo, just bring your Rubik's Cube. He started freestyling and doing it with his eyes closed. You know, his sophomore album, we did a panel at Comic-Con because like we started realizing some of his audience, it was kind of this nerd culture thing. It's like, let's lean into it, right?

And looking back now, I think he kind of grew what hip hop was and what's acceptable in hip hop because he didn't fit in that box. And if we had continuously tried to put him in that box, I think we would have failed miserably. so I think the biggest thing was identifying that learning from and saying listen let's triple down on who you are how important is it to have the right person to do this with oh it's so important

right because if you're not authentic and genuine that's the biggest thing about logic he's just such a genuine guy um I think it would be impossible because I think audience can see through that and a fan base can see right through that and I think they realize how genuine he was like this dude's doing Rubik's Cube because he loves it this dude is playing chess on Twitch now versus grandmasters because he loves it you know now what you've done is you've basically built a talent management business right and uh not once you've done many times with multiple artists uh but you started to do more investing sure and i think when we first started talking uh at first it's like okay anyone who's successful at anything like they want to have some investments but the

more that we've gotten to know each other it feels like there's a really really strong connection between talent management and startup investing? Because ultimately what you're doing is you're picking talent, right? So talk a little bit just about like, how do you see those similarities? And like, is it literally the same way I pick logic out of a crowd,

I can go pick the next startup founder that I think will have like a higher probability of success? Or is that not really a great comparison? I wouldn't say picking a startup founder out of a crowd, but I think when you work with successful people, right? Like identifying logic and then doing it several times over and building a talent management company, you're like, okay, well, maybe I have a unique ability to identify talent, right? And then the second aspect of that,

it's not only identifying talent, it's having a unique worldview and knowing where the world is going to be and putting that artist there. Because that's how we did everything. When you're bootstrapping a company and you don't have hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in marketing costs, you just had to outsmart everyone and put that artist where the world was going to be, right? They'd be a first mover. Anytime a social media application came out, Logic was the first mover. He built a massive audience in the early days of Snapchat, right? So it's using those two things. And as I grew over the course of the decade, I started realizing about three years ago that there's a lot of comparisons as it was organic, right? People

would start introducing me to, you know, startups and founders and having the ability to say, okay, this person kind of has those, you know, qualities of what some of the artists that I invested in have and then also you know as they're pitching me listening to that and going well well i know where the world is moving i'm gonna bet on this so it's kind of both those things when it was kind of one of those moments like wow there is really a lot of similarities between these two things once you find talent from a music standpoint you do a lot of work in terms of what i'll call kind of behind the scenes um really kind of helping them plot what are the intentional steps we're going to take to get the ultimate goal right how does that play into then helping

you know, a startup founder or a company, right? Because it's very similar. A lot of investors, you have to help from a strategic standpoint. You're not there every day doing stuff, but just like, how do you see the experience you have from music porting over? Yeah, I think I can help in where I think

I understand the world the best. And that's kind of living in the entertainment and tech space for a decade, building an audience, right? And I think any startup at a certain point needs to get users. So it's over a decade of experience. And also I grew a business, right?

bootstrap the business and um i think it's it's trying to add value in in the world that i know right if something as i really can't add value and i tend not to invest in it um because i don't see the point i was like i can't add you value one of the areas of investing i think that people are super interested in today is this like creator economy right um we've talked previously about this idea of like what's the difference between logic the musician versus somebody who's a twitch streamer versus somebody who's on TikTok versus somebody who's got an email newsletter versus a podcast versus somebody who gets a Netflix deal. They're all creating content. They're all trying to build fans, right? They're trying to have engagement, like all this stuff. So how do you

look at the evolution over the last 10 years or so since you started to today of like what a creator is and kind of all the tools and analytics and stuff that are available to them? Yeah, I think most creators have always been there, but I don't think there was a distribution channels for them to kind of build an audience right and now what you're seeing is kind of this middle class emerge right and one of the themes i've been obsessed with the past couple years is niche right because story about it was actually the day i was always i always knew logic was a niche artist right and we didn't care about having the big pop culture moment ultimately that came right but it was like let's just triple down on this audience that you have he he sold out the

garden right and that was a big deal i'm a new york guy and like any other morning i'm on my run i lived in the east village at the time i was in the east river run and i was running through the city and i had a thought i was like 99.9 percent of people right now have no idea logic's playing msg tonight right and i was like so that is the pinnacle as an entertainer selling out that arena right but i realized like the eight million people in the city there's only 15 000 people in that room tonight that's a niche business right so it started getting me to think more and more about niche and then as kind of the internet evolved tech evolved like what you're seeing now is the middle class economy just boom i use an example as an analogy like betty sue in north dakota

who bakes cookies on youtube with her daughter and right and other moms with their daughters watch them and they use the same recipes she can actually have a real business like doing that now and can live off YouTube ad revenue and maybe sell recipes. So I think if you have a, but again, the one thing that I try to remind people, you have to be talented. You can't just turn on a microphone and start a podcast.

You have to be, there's gotta be some talent there. You have to be adding value to an audience or else I don't think it'll work. Yeah, and so when you're doing that, that is, again, like more from the creator seat. What about the tools, right? How has that stuff changed? whereas you know now if you had the tools you have today back in 2011 my guess is you guys would

be even bigger right you were already super successful but like it would be even bigger because it's just leverage on the ideas that you have sure there's so many more ways now because of tools that you can monetize and also build an audience you just said like whether it's an email paid email newsletter whether it's a podcast right when we started out a decade ago there was very few ways you can do that um and now what i say to artists like unfortunately you can't just make music anymore i think music is just it's an extension of your brand you have to build your brand right um and again it's easier for some people based off their personalities than it is with others like i think logic that became natural right pandemic happens and we're sitting there go

how do we generate revenue right we're gonna lose x number of dollars in touring income i knew the twitch executives we started having conversations organically it turned into a twitch deal right and that was groundbreaking for twitch at the time they'd never done a deal with an artist before um and because of who logic is he can interact with his audience that way he's playing chess on there he'll he'll go and make beats for an hour and kids love that right it's i've been going to the studio with him for 10 years i don't find it that interesting anymore kids love that right that's perspective they don't normally get so i think now there's just so many ways that if you're not but again my again a piece of advice do what's natural to you right if you're not a good writer

don't do a paid newsletter right if you're if you're better speaking and on camera do youtube vlogs and we were doing all this stuff 10 years ago from that first tour i mentioned a decade ago we have vlogs all on youtube you go back and watch that entire tour right like it's stuff we were doing it 10 years ago so and when you were doing it were you measuring any of this like in terms of like analytics or success or like like why keep doing it right it's one thing to say oh this should be a good idea what gives you the confidence to keep doing it because it was growing so we saw it and it was like small w right okay this vlog this week did better than last week's vlog that's positive let's do it again and it was like i said the small wins adding up on a daily basis

again when you're first starting out to this day it's no different you have to see growth and just let that keep you going give the motivation to continue doing what you're doing if you go back what are the tools today that you're like this was a game changer for artists whether they're musicians or otherwise is it just streaming for example like hey whether it's twitch uh streaming video streaming music on the spotify's apple musix is it something else like what are those inflection points now kind of looking back that you're like man maybe people didn't understand it at the time but this really changed the game social media social media it's why you can take a kid from Maryland and me building out of my parents' basement.

We're both 20 years old and, you know, completely get it off the ground to where every single record company is calling us, asking us how we were doing what we're doing, starting and, you know, selling a national tour. He sold out three and a half national tours in Europe twice before he even put out his debut album. Everybody was, they're like, how did you do this? It was social media that was completely game-changing for for us is there a corollary in like the startup world uh to mixtapes like mixtapes almost feel like a half r&d half uh customer acquisition and then like half uh practice to some degree right like really well said yeah i agree i think i guess that was three halves so you can't really get a whole but go ahead no but it was it was

a way for us to see what his audience liked right those mixtapes we had 22 23 songs there were big mixtapes and we got to see what performed better um what his audience engaged with and i think as he developed he was also like it's a talent right that's him in the gym working on his free throw but he's doing it publicly i think learning in public is is something that i advise a lot of people to do um that's what that to me that's what mixtapes is learning in public right you're trying things you're figuring it out he was perfecting you know his skill um and by the time he was ready for his debut album i think it was because of all of the the mixtapes and music we could put out. Yeah. When you start to think through investing, are there certain things

you're looking for? Or is it just, I'm looking for the founder? More often than not, for me, it's the founder. They have that, again, it's intuition-based, right? And this is learning a lot how I've grown. So as an investor, especially over the course of the past three years, right, I had took a bunch of early bets in my life, right? You know, I bet my life on Logic and john my first two clients and had just a massive level of conviction in their talent and then as i kind of had some success i started taking smaller bets and this is the investing space not necessarily all in the startup world betting in the public markets and i was like okay i was right a lot right but my upside wasn't tremendous because i was taking these small bets

right and it was something and we talked about this right before that chamath polyhapitea had talked about slugging percentage versus batting average right i had a really high batting average but a lower slugging percentage because i wasn't taking these high conviction bets playing not to lose correct i was playing not to lose instead of to win and i i was funny because i was thinking on it recently i was like why did i do that right in my early days i took these massive outsized bets right and had these massive outsized wins but once i had some level of success i was more timid and wasn't willing to do that. It was, I don't know, it's something about kind of human nature. I think I fell into that. So I have to remind myself the next time you feel that level

of conviction, bet on that founder, bet on that startup, bet on that. Right. So that's something I constantly remind myself. Yeah. And when that happens in startups, there's one check size, right? That you can write. Sure. But two is it feels like you can be really, really helpful outside of just the check because you've got a very different kind of Rolodex, right? You've very different experiences than kind of cookie cutter venture capitalists who, hey, you know, they're great people. They work hard. They're doing what they're good at. But a lot of them have the same skill sets. A lot of them have the same networks. And so you bring something differentiated to the table. And that's really where you can leverage that on these big bets.

Sure. So again, it's super important to me to add value. I speak to the founders that I invest in. I try to speak to them every two weeks, if not more. And again, it's how much the founder wants to speak to you and how much you're looking for advice um but yeah it's back to your previous question if it's the founder that same intuition i got in some of my early clients if i have that same feeling i'll take a big bet yeah when you start thinking about uh how the startup ecosystem is changing uh crypto is one piece of that there's also just traditional technology early stage private markets and then there's like everything else and i'll put everything else in like this legacy bucket so there's real estate there's public markets all this stuff it feels like

you're much much more focused on like early stage venture and crypto more so than the other stuff correct all right so walk me through like where does that come from and like how do you think about okay i've got all these opportunities that i could invest in across all these different asset classes like why those two for me and this is going to sound like a you know funny answer but the the asymmetrical upside right i could take my money and i could stick in s&p 500 it banks fund and make 6% a year for the rest of my life, right? I enjoy kind of betting on my gut and betting on my worldview because there's no better feeling in the world to me than that. And the closest example I have it is how you and I started building a relationship was kind of the Bitcoin

bet, right? And it was kind of the beginning of COVID. I'm watching public equities are now at all-time high. Bond yields are at an all-time low. Where can I put capital to work? And me understanding, again, my world, I'm like, okay, there's going to be an outcome from the Fed printing this much money. What I think that's going to be is that's going to create inflation. Where can I put my money as an inflation hedge? And then I started going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. And I went to school consuming all of your content and just literally from reading the white paper to just going deep um and then the final step for me was reaching into my network getting introduced to people like yourself getting introduced to fred ursum co-founder of coinbase

getting you guys on the phone meeting with you for a beer in new york and going hey here's my thesis do you think i'm right and once i heard yes enough i was like okay i'm gonna push all my chips in right and that's that level of conviction um and then kind of seeing the run that bitcoin has had since it's a great feeling right i use kind of investing in business i'm a competitor right back to my original from the beginning athlete a soccer player so it's a way for me to kind of get that competition out a little bit is competition what drives you like like what would you rather would you rather win and say like yes i bet on this and i was right or would you rather actually make money on something you're wrong on that's a tough question i like this but i think about this

all the time like what is the right answer there at at this stage i'm just competing with myself right um i would did you ask me if i want if i would i feel better betting on something being right and winning betting on something being wrong and winning what would i feel better definitely being right i think um have i won off something that i was unsure of but took that bet sure um but yeah i think i'm competing with myself when i was younger i would like you know i think it's part of what drove me i want to compete with other managers and executives um is there a lot of shit talking that goes on and uh no but i think behind the scenes you kind of like no we're gonna you know wait till we see that guy what he's doing we see that woman what she's doing like

okay and that was the young that was the younger entrepreneur in me and i realized you know a little a little bit later that it's not a zero-sum game and when i once i kind of that that switch had flipped for me i started winning much more what are one or two ideas that you have now that you're like, if I'm a founder, if I'm an artist, I want to build an audience given all the tools, given the world we live in today, whatever, what are one or two things where you're like, man, I would go spend a lot more time on a or B, but most people don't think about those things, right? Like, like it's almost like a, a counterintuitive thing to go spend your time on, but that you think that there's a lot of payoff there. I think the best way I could answer

that is understanding where your audience is. It may not be the biggest platform in the world. Like so many artists want to run to tiktok right that is the thing right now and it's been like that for a couple years but it's like maybe your music isn't right for tiktok maybe you yourself as a brand as an artist isn't right for tiktok why not spend a lot of your time on discord i think that's your audience is you should spend time on discord right what does that mean like spend time on discord is that like start your own uh kind of discord uh yeah based around your interest maybe right and then be be the the subject matter expert in that and then also then pull people into your music right again music is just now an extension of an artist brand right

like maybe logic is the chess guy and his music is just a you know extension of his brand right obviously he was a bigger musician first but i'm you can reverse engineer that and say well no i can be the this guy in this space and then kind of just and again the bad example of it is a lot these tiktok kids putting out music it's not what i mean um like it has to be is it not good no comment it has to be authentic and genuine to to who you are but there's just so many ways that like and what i'm realizing now right is people want to go deep not the same way they used to go deep back when i was starting out a decade ago because the internet wasn't as noisy right so what i challenge myself and i challenge my team where can we put our talent to where people are

gonna want to go deeper tiktok you just scroll next next next next next it's so hard for you to stop click on that artist profile go a little deeper then go to their spotify page now 10 years ago that's all you really did and i really that's where i say word of mouth right it's something that i focus on a lot because people don't talk about it because you can't it's a metric you can't measure but i'm like where can i put talent to where word of mouth is going to kick in right where it's not as noisy it's not as cluttered um and i think you have to start looking you know in different places so even micro communities right that's something that we focus on on instagram on tiktok on twitter right marketing to those micro communities because we think this artist specific

audience lives in that community so it's just reverse engineering stuff how do you know it's working outside the analytics are there little things that you look for in the way that um a customer talks about a product or talks about a musician uh something they do like like what are the little things that you look for right so let's say you're evaluating a startup uh to invest in the product's already out in the market it's got a consumer facing element to it are there things you're looking for in that customer base where you're like oh when i see this like that tells me there's really that like product market fit people really need this or really really want it it's a great great question and i didn't realize this until the past 18 months right okay during

covid was selling tickets that was always a metric for us to know what we were doing was really working and when we lost that i was like fuck we've i relied on that a lot i didn't realize that it's such a commitment to buy a ticket to see an artist live that people don't realize right you're maybe getting a babysitter that night maybe you're taking off work the next day maybe you're getting a ride there you got to work out your public transportation right how like did you buy tickets three months in advance did you buy it right before to see if the tickets dropped it's the ultimate commitment that a fan can make is seeing a live show so that is the number one thing that kept us going that we knew was working every time we put out an album you

put up a tour tour crushes we did a good job move on right losing that for 18 months was really what made me realize wow i didn't realize how much that metric of ticket sales was important and it feels like that is uh very similar for a startup like you're actually selling the product like are there sales right just like are people willing to take their although you can say that appreciating fiat currency right you can actually trade that for this good or service you're willing to give up your hard-earned money uh for this and that's the ultimate sign that like yes i want this correct and again it's also the similarity between like you want to look at logic's career in a startup giving away free music was us it was pre-revenue right we weren't making any money

so everyone wants to talk about that in the venture world oh they're pre-revenue so were we right i was living in my parents basement giving out album after album for free because i knew we were building this audience that we'd monetize later so that's where like there's so many similarities between the space of venture investing and and talent management were you guys uh burning cds we were not at the point that's a little bit later it's like when apple you bought a macbook they didn't have cd drives in them so yeah got it so you guys would basically be giving them out all digitally uh like what you brought up dad piff i was gonna say it remind me what dad piff was i remember i used to go in there for like i don't know like lil wayne would drop a mixtape

marketplace that's what it was and that's what we did um you pay 50 bucks uploaded a mixtape and they had a chart you didn't know your chart and that was it obviously we had to market the music and it was all those things where the audience was and putting the music but the artist paid and then it was free for everybody else 50 bucks i mean 50 bucks is nothing right but with music it's just a massive market opportunity and people are willing to pay and you have to believe in what you're building because you're giving away all your product for free you had to believe in it and say, well, no, this is going to pay off, right? We're monetizing the time is right.

And that's what his first album was. That's what the first tour was. And it compounded from there. How do you think about Bitcoin, the community versus like a Logic fan base, right? Like to me, Bitcoin is probably one of, if not the most rabid engaged large audiences on the internet, right?

Logic's audience is pretty similar, right? You've done this for multiple artists now, right? What, is that a sign of anything? is that like hey look like people can look at all the prices and the fundamentals and everything but like the community is like a much bigger sign than people realize or how do you think about that yeah you know people want to this may be a weird comparison people want to talk about bitcoin failing bitcoin going to zero right i think you and i know that's never going to happen just based off of the rabid people who who are believers it won't go to zero because i'll buy them all at a

dollar exactly exactly and then you have the same thing of like so much of like being a fan of someone you get into barbershop debates and that's so much of what hip-hop was and i think logic's audience will defend him to the death right it's a lot of that same belief and what that tells me is he's gonna have a career for life we're 10 years in now right that audience is gonna be there they're passionate they're engaged and and that's what that tells me it gives you a little bit of confidence and security i think yeah and bitcoin has that you know times a thousand just given the larger audience and stuff yeah and also i think that there's this weird sense of uh they feel like uh in music they're protecting the artist sure here they're protecting the network right

and the network actually can't uh quote unquote fuck up right like logic could go out and get a dui right or an artist could go out and do something stupid and next thing you know everyone's like ah you know i don't know conor mcgregor's probably the best example actually loved by so many does a couple of dumb things now some people like i don't know how i feel does a couple more dumb things people may just be like all right fine like we're done with that guy right correct a network that is just a computer system that has no ability to do anything other than what it's created to do you don't have to worry about that right like there's this um almost clinical nature to it and so there's no humanity there uh which i've never really thought about but like

that's an interesting way to look at like why people will be so loyal for so long correct like you and i were joking off camera but like elon could tweet whatever he wants to tweet i shrug my shoulders at it it's fine he's testing it by the way he wants to he wants to tweet whatever he wants to tweet he's gonna do it and i keep shrugging my shoulders it's fine i mean he hit us with a was it tesla has uh diamond hands i mean like the guy uh he understands the internet pretty damn well right he's genius right but um is it genius or is it evil genius or are those two things the same i think he's having fun i think the guy's a genius and what he's done for society and is doing um is incredible but i don't know if i had that megaphone if i would

manipulate and move markets so that's fair uh in crypto all bitcoin or do you look at other stuff defy all that how do you think about only invest in bitcoin just bitcoin and uh is it a thing where bitcoin is um the core of a portfolio because you're looking at more from like a wealth preservation standpoint or like how do you think about the actual portfolio construction it was a whole it was a whole bunch of things that led up to my conviction in bitcoin um covid played a massive role in what the fed did and what happened and then i realized like everything is just going to live on the internet eventually everything is going to be digitized so if you don't think a store of value is going to be digitized you're out of your mind right like i'm not buying gold

i don't want to buy gold but have you ever bought gold i've never bought gold yeah neither have i but i want to be able to put some money where it's going to be an inflation hedge and be protected and my belief is that that's bitcoin yeah um now that you are into bitcoin uh other people in your life have sort of come into bitcoin yeah um friends family uh logic etc what are those conversations like right like come because you have a very unique position in that uh you aren't necessarily uh full-time like my day job is in finance uh or in venture capital or whatever but i think when people talk to you like oh this guy really knows what he's talking about right he did the work he's gone to school as you say um and then you're talking to people who their full-time

jobs without investing either in most cases so is that a thing where like oh they just trust you and they're like okay hey you know what are you doing i'll kind of mirror that or do you find yourself like really doing more education on kind of a granular level uh with kind of people outside of the finance world yeah i would never tell anyone to blindly trust me so i try to do some education but again it's surface level because some of it's really complex especially if you don't really understand the financial world or how markets work um so yeah logic was knowledgeable on it we have another buddy of ours um that's been around for years who was early in the space by no means am i trying to say i'm super early i think timing worked out um so yeah i try to

educate and a lot of it yeah it is especially with clients is trust me that's worked for me and you know i don't say that often so um yeah all right last thing i gotta ask you and then we'll in rapid fire the charizard card or whatever what what what is going on here were you involved in this at all he called me and told me he was doing it charizard he spent a quarter million dollars on okay and it's just a regular pokemon card he called me i remember it was i don't know it's 5 30 p.m whatever he's like yo i'm just letting you know he's like you're not gonna talk me out of it i'm buying a charizard card for 250 000 i was like all right cool i was like rocket because again when when he starts out the phone call i'm like yeah the decision's already been made i was

I was like, call Josh, Josh's account. I was like, call Josh. And listen, what's funny is he's going to win off that. It worked, right? He knows that world and his intuition is phenomenal. He knows that space. He knows that world. And he's invested much more.

He hasn't been as public about in the collectible trading. So you've been able to help a bunch of other people understand Bitcoin and stuff like that. Did he convince you to go buy some Pokemon cards? He has not yet. He has not yet. Has he tried? I'm a little bit more stubborn. Has he tried?

He has tried, yeah. and you're just not into it not having it well what is i'm very bullish on the space i've made so i've made a bunch of angel investments in the space i did i did whatnot i think i introduced you to grant i did alt um alongside alexis ohanian who's kind enough to let me in with him um those those are two perfect examples so i have more infrastructure than hey let me go try to figure out what cards super bullish on the space instead of me investing in actual cards myself yeah i tend to think that that's a i'm with you uh i've got a lot of friends who are very big into it and they're like you know not so much pokemon but more like the sports cars like you

know psa9 but what i did i had a little i don't even know the difference right so like how could i possibly out compete you if you you know all this stuff you're an expert and i can't figure it out for me to be willing to learn i have to have some level of passion so when i went to school i say i went to school on bitcoin i'm kind of a nerd with that kind of stuff and it was super interesting to me i don't have that with with collectibles i don't really have that so i wouldn't have took the time to learn what cards to buy yeah so makes sense uh three questions to wrap up and you get to ask me one uh your most important book you've ever read never eat alone by keith ferrazzi okay it completely changed my mind on why networking

it's all about networking okay i had i was a young kid and i thought business was a zero-sum game that book taught me otherwise it changed my life what is just the like high level premise of the book give and expect nothing in return got it okay and so never eat alone means like if you're gonna eat make sure everyone else eats around you correct got it uh no one's ever suggested that before that's a great one um second question eight sleep uh what is your sleep schedule and for those that don't know eight sleep is basically a thermoregulated bed um i sleep on it it's fucking freezing cold uh but i sleep like a baby do you sleep a lot not a lot has that changed through the pandemic as i've gotten older i prioritize my sleep speaking of i just bought

nate sleep oh two weeks in it's great i'm two weeks in it's great um i prioritize it now did not for for the early days and i don't advise it i didn't sleep a lot um i don't sleep a lot now i'm trying to get better all right so wait two weeks in this this is my two questions uh did you or did you not get woken up by the uh vibration on the bed i did the first morning right it was great i leave it on oh you oh you use it i use it oh i had to shut it off it scares the shit out of me i leave it like i wake up and i'm like whatever all right so you like it's it's the thermal regulation the cooling for me yeah i'm a hot sleeper game changer yep absolute game changer second thing is uh do you are you like fanatical about hey you know a certain time every night i

go to sleep or are you more so i go to sleep when i'm tired but i just want to make sure i get you know eight hours or whatever now i'm trying to put a time to it okay because i can get distracted um so midnight i try to get into bed at midnight um get up at 7 30 it's not bad right and and uh if your body just gets into it and used to it then like you're golden yeah and again what got me more into trying to pay more attention to is the the not traveling as often traveling throws me out of whack and i spent a decade traveling so yeah i i hear you uh third question aliens believer or non-believer big believer why i think the universe is too big for us to be here by ourselves that's simple do you think that they're close enough where we'll ever come in contact or

just like oh yeah they're probably out there but we'll just never talk to them i think eventually oh you do eventually during our lifetime no oh all right but just like during humanity's lifetime 100 yeah uh big question then it's just like do we find them or do they find us they find us you think so yeah is it like independence day where they're like flying down and i don't know i haven't i haven't thought that deep into it what do you think in our lifetime we don't come in contact um but i don't know there's a lot of ufo garbage that's flying around and uh maybe some of it's real who knows i also have to remind people that uh ufos and aliens are not the same thing good point right like like we just immediately

when you hear ufo you're like oh aliens i just watched this clip from 60 minutes about two uh air force pilots who swear they saw a ufo really yeah yeah but like see here's my so like i've seen a couple of these i haven't seen this specific one so i want to be careful that i'm not talking about them specifically but like a ufo is an unidentified flying object so they're like i swear that i saw a ufo and you're like okay did you see a alien spaceship or did you just see something in the sky that you don't know what it was they were literally sent out to go find out what it was because their radar was picking it up oh interesting yeah so like hey we see something out there we don't know what it is you guys fly out there they flew out and now they're like yo

yeah it was not it was really interesting it was a five minute segment it was really interesting all right i'm gonna have to watch it i'll send it to you um you could ask me one question to finish up where does bitcoin end the year uh and the year is hard how about i pick what's the highest it hits this year okay i should just say 100k because then i'll uh i'll stick with my thing um so i definitely think it hits 100 if you told me sometime next year that bitcoin hit 250 000 this year uh it wouldn't surprise me okay i don't know if i've got enough confidence where i'm like it's gonna do this right with 100k since 2019 i've been like this is like this is going to to happen um and that's

just based off havings and kind of all that anything over that i think it's literally just like how frothy is it at the time and how quickly do we go from let's call it like 100k to whatever right and so is that number 125 000 or 500 000 like such like a big range in there and so i don't know just pick the middle like i brought somewhere around like 250 okay so we'll see where where can we send people to find you on the internet twitter chris zeru um yeah that's where i am is that the easiest place easiest place founders too that's it awesome all right well listen thank you for doing this thank you i appreciate it uh since i've gotten to know you i think the uh the two things that by far have like blown me away it's like one the level of

effort and uh work that goes into just like building a fan base that's actually engaged and like people are like yo i fucking love like whatever this thing is and then two uh there's not very many people who like start in that world and like hey i'm gonna go learn this other world right there's a lot of people who start out here they have success in the music world or whatever and then they're like oh yeah well like i'm successful like of course i just you tell me what to do i think you start out and you said look i don't know that much right and over the last couple years you've like really built yourself up in terms of like now you could go and you could sit down and talk to anybody and be like, oh, this guy

knows what he's doing. So kudos to you. Appreciate that. I appreciate everyone listening and we will do this again in the future. Thank you.