The Pomp Podcast - #768 Building a 9 Figure Empire With Zero Public Funding w/ Val Katayev

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

Val Katayev is a serial entrepreneur with over $100M in profits and exits. He's successfully lead 4 different start-ups to hyper-growth that center around digital media. He has also recently made significant investments in real estate. In this conversation, we discuss building and selling companies, structuring a holding company, how he hires individuals to run each company, his unique work/sleep schedule, and why he's getting heavily invested in real estate. Val is someone you may not know, but will learn to appreciate it. He is someone who has built a spectacular life without any public funding or notoriety. ======================= Mode, UK Fintech app, allows you to buy, earn and grow Bitcoin, all in one app. Not only is it an easy and safe way to buy and hold Bitcoin, with Mode you can shop and receive up to 10% Bitcoin Cashback for FREE from its growing list of online partner brands. Available on the App Store and Google Play. Download Mode at modeapp.com and enjoy 0% trading fees on all buys and sells until Dec 31, 2021. Only available in the UK. ======================= Cryptocurrency is the future, so don’t get left in the past, bet with MyBookie and you can get in the game now! To get you kickstarted with crypto, use my promo code (POMP) to double your first crypto deposit at MyBookie. The best part is, MyBookie accepts well-known crypto currencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum so you can bet and withdraw with Crypto. The NFL Playoffs are around the corner and this week the Buffalo Bills and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will face off in a potential Super Bowl preview. Both teams sit 1 win away from earning the top spot in their respective conference, but in this high stakes game, bet the Buc’s Moneyline. Don’t miss out, double your first deposit up to $1000 by using promo code [POMP]. Head to MyBookie today, place your bets, and watch the sparks fly with UFC269. Bet anything, anytime, anywhere…with MyBookie.  Visit http://mybookie.website/joinwithPOMP ======================= Do you want a new job in the bitcoin and crypto industry? You should go apply for hundreds of open roles at http://www.pompcryptojobs.com or sign up for our training program at http://www.pompscryptocourse.com

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. Val Kadiev is a serial entrepreneur with $100 plus million in profits and exits. He has founded and led four successful startups to hyper growth that centered around digital media across various aspects of the industry. He also recently has started to get heavily into real estate as well. This conversation was fascinating. Val talks about building and selling companies. He talks about structuring a holding company and how he hires individuals to run each company. And then we talked about why he's heavily investing in real estate as well.

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go to pompcryptojobs.com today and you will find the best open roles that you have to offer. All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys 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. Val, what's going on, man? What up, Pomp?

How are you? I'm good, man. I'm excited to be on the show. I even shaved for you. I'm excited for you to be here because i feel like you got a crazy story that not a lot of people know so hopefully we can change that let's first start with uh you've basically built how many companies at this point into hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue uh in total without taking any venture capital just basically you self-funded all these companies how many companies have you built

uh in total these companies probably uh man i mean companies i built i lost count right now i control um five i've sold a few before that um every business has been funded by me no no outside investors you know you're a boss you know you're a boss when somebody asks you how many businesses you built and you said well i control five i have controlling stakes i should say i don't i have partners i have co-founders i have amazing managers ceos who like manage all these businesses yep i i try to stay out of uh i try to be just a ceo of one you know that i focus on because i just have to build something all right try to take off three years but like that wasn't for me what what is the structure that you use to all this do you have like a holding company and a

bunch of smaller companies underneath it that are kind of like subsidiaries like walk me through how you structure this yeah i have a holding company that holds all those um other companies you know i found it um you know i also have like a service company that kind of manages i try not to like do a lot of transactions inside the holding company just to keep things nice and clean so um yeah it's it's uh it kind of all flows through from one and it comes into all those other guys you know i i come in when it's like there's a stressful environment or like you know like when covid hit i'll get involved in pretty much every one of my companies try to get them um you know if i have to finance them or do whatever i gotta do to you know pull the pull the strings and okay make sure

that nothing falls apart all right so now walk me through this i got a lot of questions because actually uh we may have more similarities than you realize but uh with this holding company when you come up with a subsidiary you come up with the idea somebody else comes up with the idea sometimes either one like like walk me through how you create one of these subsidiaries like uh does somebody pitch you or are you going and finding someone saying i want to start this business come help me pretty much every one of them was uh an idea that came from me or me and my co-founder that we you know agreed on and kind of to move forward there was one situation um i was pretty deep into fintech um like marketplace lending i'm sure you're familiar with that um

you know i i i uh i found somebody i was actually looking to put up put in some of my own money and i found somebody like the guy just started his fund and like five million under management and i'm like i'll put a bunch of money in but i want a stake in the company i'll buy a stake um you know, and, uh, so that's, that's a, that's a perfect example of a fund that went from five to like several hundred million dollars and within like three years that, um, I'm, I'm, um, I'm a partner in, but I wasn't a founder. Uh, that's primarily in capital management, you know, so we like manage a bunch of different, uh, funds in there. Very boring funds. It's not like the fun excited shit you do, uh, with crypto. All right. I got a whole bunch of questions.

I went back to your Twitter account. It's like the best thing ever. I love your Twitter account because you tweet about just high signal things. You don't shit posts like me and my brothers or fool around on the internet. It's all high quality stuff. So the first thing I want to talk about is when I first came across you was this real estate thread. And you basically said, you know, look, I'm taking inspiration from this other person. And so I'm going to share your experience in real estate. And so you've got poised property group, which I think is the name of the real estate entity and it launched four years ago. And then you're like, oh yeah, by the way, we've acquired and developed six properties worth nearly a hundred million dollars,

which is a lot of work to do in four years. So walk us through kind of, how do you think about real estate and why did you start a company four years ago in this space? Yeah. So I was super under invested, under allocated towards real estate all these years, right? I've been pretty successful, but I have not had nothing real estate. I did one deal. it was like a minority deal and the the two main guys got into a huge lawsuit in new york city i'm like i'm never doing another minority deal in real estate ever again right so um i have a friend that i've known for 20 years he's been in construction with his family i'm like dude let's um let's let's let's let's why don't you level up why don't we be developers right i'll i'll bring in the financing

i'll help you out with that i'll bring my balance sheet to the table um you do the rest right like i don't i'll be honest you don't have time for anything else but i'll help you out wherever i can and uh he's like all right cool let's do it and uh i trust this guy with like you know pretty much everything which is very important real estate you know it's very easy to get kind of screwed over in that in that space um contracts are not no contracts you know the last thing you want to do is you know deal with with legal issues um with a partner in real estate so anyway so um Yeah, that's how it started. So we made the first acquisition, which I tweeted about in a thread,

which is pretty cool. We broke a record in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which is a pretty hot area next to Williamsburg that a lot of people are moving into nowadays. All the kind of hipsters, like VCs, tech guys, everybody who feels like Manhattan maybe is not that cool anymore are moving to those areas. And, yeah, we bought a piece of land.

We knocked down the house. We put up a couple of luxury townhouses and sold one for $4.25 million. And I kept the second one because I just think these things are going to be worth $5, $6, $7 million in the coming years. Just the replacement cost alone,

you know, with all the inflation, you know, just the materials and the labor are just so much more now than they were when we started that project. So like, you know, the guy who bought the first house actually got a bargain. You got a great deal.

Yeah. All right. So walk me through. We're going to pull up the photos of this first project in Greenpoint here in a second, but in terms of how a deal like this comes together, I want people to actually get value out of understanding real estate

from a perspective of kind of what you guys are doing. You bought the land, you basically clear it out, and then you go to build this. How long does that take? How much cost goes into this thing? And then how do you actually decide what you want to hold versus what you want to go ahead and sell? This project was a little different

because it was my first project. I did not want to take like bank financing. i didn't want to bring out bring in outside investors i wanted to like straighten everything out get the process down figure all those kinks out first before i go to anybody else including a bank right uh so this one was very easy i financed the thing with uh with my partner we bought the piece of land um and then and then uh you know the way we structured it is uh you know it's an llc that holds that piece of land that project everything done in that specific project LLC. And, you know, we kind of, we didn't really, we built to sell, but, you know, you kind of have

to watch the market and see what the market is telling you. So we kind of decided to keep the second unit after we built everything. But yeah, like we built to sell, you know, you definitely have to project and estimate what your costs are going to be, you know, to buy the land and then the construction like you know as you know they're hard costs and soft costs uh as the terminology goes hard costs being like what it actually takes to build the bricks and mortar and all that stuff and then the soft costs that a lot of people don't realize how many costs there are in things like uh well if you had a bank you pay interest or if uh you know like all the legal fees all the you know you gotta account for all the licensing fees like that house had like four different neighbors

with five different neighbors, we have, we even have to like make licensing deals with the neighbors just to get access to a bit of their property in order to be able to build our project properly. So you gotta like, you know, you gotta project all those little nuances, which add up really quickly. Got it. And then you had a tweet back in October that you said, uh, one of the free lunches in real estate investing, if you know how to use it wisely, you're specifically talking about the 1031 exchange. And so walk through maybe a little bit as to how you think of that? Cause I think real estate investing provides obviously very specific tax advantages that other asset classes don't. Uh, and that's one of the reasons why people really like to invest

in real estate. How do you think about the 1031 exchange? Is that something that you guys are like, yeah, we definitely want to leverage that. Or is it more opportunistic if you find the right deals and kind of they line up, then you would use it. 1031 is definitely part of our strategy, strategy, wherever we could use it. It's a, you know, there are a lot of like moving parts, how to figure out how to make that work. Like an area like New York City, you have no idea how many people, you might know, I'm in Miami as well,

how many people are so asset rich because of 1031, right? They sit on all these properties, they accumulated all their lives, but they've never really like cash out for that reason. What 1031 allows you to do, maybe not obvious to many people, but it's kind of like what you do in a stock market, right?

If you buy a stock, like I love SPY, s&p 500 index i buy that i've been buying that for over a decade i just buy and hold i never sell right and it's essentially same thing if you never sell it you never pay taxes the difference with real estate is uh you want to kind of move up and uh and and buy something something else so what it allows you to do is say okay i want to sell a property that has a lot of profit in it right but you could roll that profit into the next project and the government allows you to roll that profit into the next project until you sell that other project. You might not sell that next project, or when you sell that project, you might have another bigger one that you 1031

and roll into. So a lot of people have been kind of rolling and rolling their profits for, man, probably decades in some cases that, so they never really paid. They just keep accumulating this wealth and accumulating assets that have this huge baseline profit, but they never pay taxes on it yeah it's pretty incredible when you can basically just continuously roll it forward deal after deal after deal after deal and you take what is maybe a smaller property or smaller investment and you end up compounding it without having kind of the interruption of compounding via taxes that you would get if you were you know switching in and out of stocks or pretty much any other asset so it's definitely yeah it's like it's like the government is the investor in your

deals because you know you're not paying taxes all these years so it's free money yeah i i completely agree all right you got another uh set of tweets where you said if you're young skip the money managers their fees are not tax deductible so it costs you a lot more than you think buy spy index on a dip never sell borrow against it when you need the cash and you basically go on to talk about some places where people can do that and then you also explicitly uh kind of clarify and when i say money managers i'm not talking about funds fund fees are fully expensed to the funds we're talking money managers that manage your money and take a fee generally half a percent to two percent depending on your portfolio so we uh we love to kind of give financial advisors and

stuff a hard time on here we obviously always say look there are some great financial advisors you should maybe go talk to the people who are really really good uh but the average one probably isn't as good as as people need and so talk a little bit about this idea of the money managers and their fees and like why do you specifically call out that it's not tax deductible yeah it was Part of the Trump's tax plan wasn't Trump's. I'm sure that was kind of pushed on by the more by the Democratic Democratic Party and then the right. So when the 2018 tax act came out, what it did is they made man, obviously, like I'm not a tax advisor or anything. Neither am I, of course. Yeah.

Yeah. But the new law is that you cannot write off management fees. So if you're with Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs or with any of these guys who take a fee to manage your wealth, it all of a sudden became non-deductible. So essentially, because the tax bracket I'm in and you're probably in, right, like that means my fee just doubled because I can no longer write it off. So like, it was a point of this, I was already kind of managing the money in my, um, Goldman account on my own in a way they didn't really like it. And, uh, and, uh, you know, uh, so I just kind of, at that point that was, I mean, I didn't have some, you know, these people have some of the, a lot of these, uh, places have like some of the most, the smartest people working there, but you know, it's like at

some point the numbers just don't make sense to pay. Did you, so, uh, did you pull your capital from wherever, whichever bank you were when you called talk to me about that phone call is that like an email you send like give me my damn money back is that a phone call you go to lunch and kind of wine and dye them then tell them like how does that work listen i had a great relationship with them and um and uh so i kind of told them it's like listen i just it just doesn't make any sense anymore you know i've been kind of um you know um managing yourself managing but i've been kind of directing them what to do with my money even in my Goldman account. And, um, so like, listen, this is just the,

this is just the nail on the coffin, right? Like it doesn't make sense anymore. And, uh, so it was good. It was good conversation. I stay, I still stay in touch with those money managers. Um, they're pretty cool. You know, they, um, so I was, it was a pretty easy conversation, you know, maybe, you know, maybe a smaller manager would have taken a different, I don't know, but, um, but, but I think they have enough business from, from people. I recently was talking to one of these people that I would consider like

super high quality, you know, top 1% in the world in terms of strategies, et cetera. And one of the things that they told me that blew my mind, I asked them, I said, you know, what's one of the strategies that only the ultra rich know, but is available to everybody and a majority of your clients use it. And they blew my mind. They said, well, one of the things that a lot of these ultra rich people will do is they'll go and they'll buy a house with cash. They'll then take out a mortgage against the house, but they'll actually take the mortgage money and not use it to buy anything because they already own the house, but go and they'll invest the capital. And then when they make the interest payments or the payments on the mortgage, it now is tax deductible because

it is an investment interest payment rather than it being just for your primary residence. And so you're still securing the loan with the home, but you're not using it to purchase the home. You're making investments with it. And so I just, it was one of those moments where you're like, yep, makes complete sense when somebody explains it to you, but there's all these little things that the best in the world understand. They've seen it so many times, all their clients are doing this stuff. And it really does kind of separate, I think the best from kind of everyone else because they just understand this stuff to a degree that, uh, you know, many others don't to some extent. Yeah. It's a great strategy. Like I, it was cool when I, you know, I bought my first

home, my second home and I never had a mortgage. I just bought them straight cash. And then we're like, damn, it's like these interest rates are like two and a half percent or whatever, you know, it's that's free money for 10 years, like interest only I'll take it. And, um, you know, and the other thing you probably uh well yeah it's like the the average person uh has a 750 000 limit of how much they could deduct of interest against their home but exactly like if you're if you're using it as investment capital which you and i probably are um that is completely a business expense so you don't have a limit yeah absolutely the other thing that i found interesting was i saw uh, that you tweeted that you in 2004 almost moved to Cayman islands. Uh, and basically the

idea was, um, you know, there's all these wealthy people right now, kind of over the last two years, they're all moving, right? So they're moving either to the low tax states. Uh, obviously there's places like Puerto Rico that have become very popular because the tax incentives, uh, came in for a long time, uh, served as one of those incentives. Uh, but you also said, look, you had no offices, no employees, but lots of income taxes. And so, uh, you thought about it, which I think a lot of people, once they make a certain number, whatever that number is for them, they start to think, Hey, are there things I can do to optimize my income tax? Uh, but you'd have to give up your U S citizenship. And I think that this is a key thing that a lot of people forget is that U

S citizens are taxed globally. And so many of the strategies that would be available to non U S citizens sound amazing, but even if you move there as a U S citizen, it doesn't matter. You're still getting taxed globally. And so you said, which I appreciated, you said for someone who was born in soviet union that was a deal breaker i'm not giving up my u.s citizenship so talk a little bit about the balance between like optimizing your financial life across whether it's moving or other things but also the importance of like having the u.s passport and u.s citizenship yeah listen um americans get taxed no matter where we go uh and america has reached everywhere right like you can't get away from america so um yeah to me the decision was i actually went out to

came in my that just happens to be my friend was in med school over there and i got to hang out and like check out some places i actually made a decision all right i'm i'm moving here and then so like once i came back so doing all my due diligence talking to lawyers and all that good stuff like yeah you know you gotta you know get rid of you know no more u.s citizenship and i mean to me that was a deal breaker because uh i just do feel like invest in america and i want to be part of this country because it still gives you the most flexibility to build things grow things um you know you have all kinds of freedoms here and uh and to me you know i have family here a lot of family here so that was you know in new york so that was another thing but i was not

it wasn't worth the money um it wasn't the at the time i would have saved a lot of money um And, um, and actually I would probably today, but, uh, um, but it was, it just doesn't make sense. I'm like, you gotta make, you gotta balance that out and, uh, figure out what's best for you. And I, I'm very glad I didn't because, you know, I wouldn't be able to, I probably wouldn't be able to build all these businesses that I did, um, over the coming years, right. That was 2004.

We're talking about, um, I wouldn't be able to build all that, all the stuff that I've built it about if I wasn't, um, if I wasn't here. Got it. So John and Joe, what, uh, what questions do you guys have? Hey Val, how's it going? Um, my question would just be around like what you're, what you're excited about, right? There's a bunch of new things going on in, in 2022 as we roll into the new year, but like what businesses are you looking at for the next five to 10 years that you're really

trying to invest in? I'm trying to invest in, man, it's hard to answer that. You know, how like everything is so inflated. Like I'm doing, I do a lot of angel investing. I do a lot of investing in general. And, you know, what you pay now for a seed or a series A, it's like, it's hard to see where the multiples are going to come from, even from winners, right? So no matter what category you look at, it's very tough. To me, obviously, there's so much going on around crypto and NFTs, right?

I'm a pretty big believer in blockchain and crypto. I'm less so in, like, I'm not an artist, right? I don't get art. I don't own expensive art. So to me, collectible NFTs, for example, like just don't make sense, right? Like they're monkeys. I'm sorry. But, you know, look, it's art in a way, right?

So what I think, though, there is this huge opportunity, what I call personally operational NFTs, right? A perfect example of one, I don't know many examples, unfortunately, but a perfect example of one is Zedron. I don't know if any of you guys were across Zedron, right? um that is something where yes you have an nft but the way i view it is like zedrun is a horse racing um it's like i don't know league or whatever and uh and it's a platform you could you know people could own horses there are horses that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars

there are horses that are worth a couple hundred bucks and everybody could like race them there are there are bloodlines there are all these dnas there's like just like real horse racing and by way i've never bet on horses in my life i don't you know i've never been to a otb or anything but to me that was very interesting concept because you imagine imagine like the way i see like i want some of these horses and the way i view it is like if if this becomes a big thing becomes like the next like a future nba i perpetually own a player in that league right but what if that goes to the next level right what if somebody sets up for whether it's nba or somebody that just does something around basketball let's just use basketball as an example

right what if a player just like a musician has masters and they could own those masters or they could sell those masters what if what if an athlete could have a master of themselves right and you could if you have that master like that play if you own the player you could play that player on an nba court um in the metaverse right so there's this to me that's more operational because there are statistics and attributes and all that stuff involved. It's not just a collectible. It's like a, it's again, it's a very like a moving part

and there's just so much activity going on, but there's also money that gets transferred and just like in the real NBA, but you kind of pour it into this metaverse that really has its own ecosystem. So, uh, so it's, it's a little more than just having like a, like, I know Gary Vee talks about like, you know, concert tickets, right. And, and it's in, in turning them into NFTs. Like this is beyond that because now you're taking, taking, um, you owning a player inside a league. Yep. Yeah. I like that. Something with more utility. It sounds like. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

John, what you got? Hey Val, nice to meet you. Congrats on all your success. John with an H. Yeah, it's Jonathan H. No, you know. So I'm just curious, what advice would you have for a young entrepreneur who has an idea and just wants to get started?

There's so much right now. It's hard. It's really about following what you love about your passion, right? That's going to like set you up for a long, long time. And if you're passionate about it, it's never going to feel like work. To me, my work, my businesses,

like it's it's i feel like it's a hobby i don't have any other hobbies that i suck at that it's like it sucks in my life that my hobby is my businesses right are my businesses so if you could find something that you like doing and turn that into a business into a business you will be way more successful um uh at it you know i could force things on people all day long if they don't have the passion for it it's going to fall apart and it's not going to be like it's not going to be that effective um so i mean that's probably my my my best advice and like uh i think the other thing is like your name like your the ethics are extremely important that i was i was a kid making money and um you know i was like 17 years 18 years old i owed people that i owed like people

that i made deals with uh i had this one it's like it's a story but like this guy lived outside of us back in the days i think we used like icq and i owe the guy you know because i had to pay five thousand dollars a month and i can't get a hold of him he's not answering my cqs he doesn't answer my you know instant messages or whatever i can't find the guy i own four months of like you know twenty thousand dollars i know he lives somewhere in denmark or something dude i chased that guy for four months to pay him you know and i would tell that to people they're like why are you chasing the guy to pay him like let him you know maybe he'll maybe he'll disappear and like you'll forget about the twenty thousand you own and to me that just that wasn't me like i i just

can't, I can't be that. Right. Like, and that stayed with me forever. Like just like, so, cause your name and your credibility is extremely important because when you have credibility and you're trustworthy, money will come to you. I promise. Cause people want to give you that money on their own and work with you. So over time, it just like pays the biggest dividends in my opinion. That's great advice. Val, when you start to think about building versus investing, how do you spend your time? Like what's your average day look like? I think that'd be fascinating for people to understand. Cause you, you basically, uh, I think of it as you have multiple advantages in life. You've got an

experience, you've got connections because of the experience that you've built and been doing this for so long. Uh, you've got a balance sheet and kind of capital that you can deploy. Uh, and then you also have like a, a knowledge and skillset. And so I kind of think of it like, um, you show up, you're like, Hey, I got all these weapons that I could deploy, but like how I do it. And when I use each one of them becomes a very important decision-making process. So like, how do you think about your day, where you spend your time and then also like building versus investing in terms of like what you actually do? Yeah. So most of my time today goes, I spend over 90% of my time on the company that I'm the CEO of. I'm a CEO of one company. I once was a CEO of

three it was a bad idea i learned early on not to do that you know put the right people in place and don't micromanage them uh i'm a ceo of one company called jacalio uh what what what i wanted to focus on is um so i took a three-year break i sold a couple of companies a bunch of years ago took a three-year break thought i'd like retired i couldn't do it and so i was like all right what can i build and what i wanted to do is i wanted to look somewhere where i'm i knew that it's a good chance that i want to i want to finance whatever i'm doing so i wanted to go into some direction where i'm not going to get up against all these tech companies with unlimited vc dollars i can't compete with that okay um so what i was looking for is an area that is not disrupted

very fragmented and i kind of wanted to help the main street this time around you know most of my companies like mobile fuse included work with like fortune 1000 companies who have multimillion dollar marketing budgets again in this case it's a mobile advertising company and um i wanted to do something with mainstream right mom and pop so like a lot of mom and pops out there do you know millions and millions of dollars um so in that case i came across uh an industry that was extremely fragmented was very far behind in terms of technology and uh uh it's it's the independent jewelers right so i built a you know i decided to build a platform that will empower them and i become part of that um ecosystem so for me that was my you know

thought process right like i connected my personal situation financial situation who i want to compete against and then i started deciding okay start filtering down what categories i want to go so i had some of my own filters in terms of what kind of business that i that i want so i came across like again to me it was a 300 billion dollar industry that uh like is up up up for but it's very complicated and i i can guarantee you like companies don't want to uh your vcs don't like to you know invest into companies like that because it's so complicated so many moving parts and i'm not talking about doing e-commerce and anything like that um so so that's that's uh and that's where i spend most of my time my day uh is i have strangest days like you made me wake up

early today what yeah i call myself the lazy entrepreneur right like it's it's uh i don't think i'm lazy to be honest with you but uh i like to call it because i wake up whenever i feel like it right but but it's also because from some from my childhood i like to go to sleep late like so a lot of people wake up early right they wake up five in the morning they do they do the gym and like they do all their like good work in the morning i'm the opposite i do it in the morning but before i go to sleep so my my my average time um time to go to bed is like four or five a.m in the morning wow that's yeah and i got better like i i had another company that was very international that i sold and i would know to go to sleep when i hear the birds chirping and

lights out um you know and that would be like 6 6 30 in the morning and dude at 3 a.m i probably had a red bull and hot dogs you know just to power myself through the night all right so occasional cup of noodles in there so let's say that you wake up at like 12 one o'clock when you know whenever you end up waking up what what do you do between then and like three or four o'clock in the morning when you go to sleep yeah so like depends on the day right if i wake up if i go to before i try to get my seven hours i wake up at 11 um you know i i go straight into work emails all that you know i'm usually already like seeing a bunch of whatsapps you know from all the all my all my teams and it's it's funny i think that they kind of know what the second

you're online and they see the little valves online thing i get all the messages start coming in through whatsapp you know um yeah so a lot of it is just kind of like block and tackle um any issues come up you got to deal with it and so during the day i spend most of my time just kind of focusing on operations but it's at late night like that's after you know everybody goes to sleep nobody's emailing you nobody's calling you that's when my work is really gets gets done like i could think about things um and come up with ideas come up with strategies um formulate things you know whether i have to put together a uh sorry uh like a little pitch for the for the team on so and do you have at the holding company level do you have just you and then each individual

team is kind of built out for each individual company or do you also have like you plus an operations person plus like a finance person at the holding company level like how do you think about that no i don't i don't have anybody uh so i mean i have like external teams our accountants This is my CPA firm. I have multiple law firms. And yeah, so I have those teams. I don't have anybody at the holding company full-time. I probably should at some point.

And that's something I am looking into. But each and every company has its own CEO, has its own teams. I don't micromanage the CEO. Because even if I want to, i i've learned to stay stay stay away from doing that you know you gotta you gotta like if you trust that person to run that operation you gotta let them let them do their job got it and so i don't like i don't like to um micromanage so i i speak to my speak to my ceos and my partners like

maybe once a week uh in each company and then my understanding is like you think about the holding companies like you own these businesses do you think about your investing activities etc as uh like a family office as separate or as part of the holding company and what i'm trying to uh help people understand here is uh the idea of a family office i think a lot of folks aren't quite familiar with how to think about that uh and so like anything that you can kind of share in terms of how you think of either structure or like the difference between when your money was with other money managers versus you managing it yourself and more of like a family office type structure yeah in a way i am kind of like a one-man family office right um i'm blessed to

be pretty comfortable with tech so i could be very efficient at doing it and again also pretty blessed to just understand finance and um you know kind of like i learned a lot about operations and taxes and all that kind of stuff over over the years um so yeah i think at some point you kind you know you outgrow that i would love to at one one point in my life to have a small family office that handles a lot of the the nuances but uh i'm not there yet so you know i think i think i'm okay for now and i actually like i like the the excitement and uh of managing my my stuff you You know, just to answer your question about, you know, when I had the money manager. So the money manager is really managing just one part.

Initially, I got him because I'm not good with bonds, right? Like I wanted to have municipal bonds and they were pretty good at managing munis. At one point, I just kind of got out of munis and, you know, and then because I had my own credit fund, it made, you know, I just moved that money into my own credit funds. So I managed a lot of money outside of Goldman even when I had him. but you know it was actually a great decision you know forget about taxes because that decision was made in like 2019 when I pulled out from from my money managers and and COVID hit early 2020 and I already sold down a bit of things I just felt that the market actually was literally

selling equities not everything but I was selling anything I could without taking too much of a tax hit or capital gains uh january and february before covid like literally i was so i finished selling a week before covid hit and uh and then once covid hit i was like i was waiting for that moment for years and years and years and years because it has there hasn't been a dip for such a long time uh at that point i just went all in i used up all my margin i mean i put everything into the into the stock market in march when you know you're seeing but you know but you got to be like ready for that because on the screen you're seeing is you're losing seven figures a day and uh if i if this this is wasn't my third rodeo i guess you know because the first one was the

dot-com bubble the second one was the great recession so i've seen this show already right i was not phased about all i was thinking was thinking about is like what do i get the capital to buy more on march 17 march 18 march 19 i was buying every freaking day um so actually that was a great great you know the fact that i wasn't with a money manager was amazing because i wouldn't be able to move as fast if i had a uh i have to deal with a money manager at the time yeah makes uh makes complete sense um it's fascinating to kind of see what you've built and and how you operate on a daily basis uh you guys got any other questions no i'm impressed thanks val for coming on val where can we send where can we send people uh to find you on the internet send them to your

twitter account is that the best place or somewhere else uh twitter i like all my companies are on linkedin as well uh so linkedin is uh it's a you know yeah twitter is amazing great as well i mean i know you guys are big on twitter so i'll say twitter all right i'm dropping uh i'm dropping your uh twitter account right now in the uh in the chat for anyone who uh who's interested go uh go check them out and make sure you follow them there uh dude listen thank you so much for uh for coming on this is uh this is awesome we definitely should uh should bring you back as uh you kind of continue i think that uh you got a lot of stuff to uh to teach people and it's pretty cool to see what you built so well congrats on all the success and uh we'll definitely do it again soon appreciate

you guys keep going at it too man just guys you guys bring so much um knowledge we got to move the show later in the day so you watch it so you're not sleeping i i i i watch it uh you know the reruns i love it man i love it all right you have a good day all right guys later