#832 The Sports Card Investing Boom w/ Dan Fleyshman
00:00 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 dan fleischman is a serial entrepreneur and investor he's the founder of elevator studios he was the youngest founder to ever take a company public and he also has a card shop in la called cards and coffee i really enjoyed this conversation with dan because we spent all the time talking about technology investing and sports cards. He's an expert in this area and I learned a ton from him. I hope that you enjoy this episode, but before we get into it, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial
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03:25 team is locked up for at least one year. All the centralized competitors have valuations in the billions of dollars. CryptoToday.com started out at $0 as the first decentralized token information site. You can read the white paper at CryptoToday.com. Again, go to CryptoToday.com to learn more. All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, we're out here in Los Angeles with SoFi for the Super Bowl. I have my friend Dan here. How are you, man? Just happy to be here. Awesome. Let's just talk about sports cards. You, I think, I don't know, maybe two years ago, we're like, hey, you should pay attention to this. I didn't because I'm an idiot.
04:24 But you've done a bunch of sports cards. You've got a shop now. But to me, what's so interesting is like the nft boom has happened but sports cars are still going as strong as ever and is this just like a shift in demographics and like society where people now don't necessarily want to buy stocks and they may want to buy some of these other assets so like what's going on there yeah so sports cars are an alternative asset the nft market kind of took off in the midst of when the sports car sports cars were like 2019 20 nft was 2020 2021 and now carrying 2022 the explosion and so some of the sports card people started buying into nfts you saw logan paul stevie you know gary v all these characters that were obsessed with sports cards or pokemon also start
05:06 getting an nfts and then going deep down the nft rabbit hole and so it's just another alternative asset whether people are buying sports cards pokemon magic the gathering or nfts it's just another way for people to showcase what do they like to invest into when most of us whether it's millennials or guys our age we don't want to just invest into the stock market we're investing the stock market also right this is not an alternative this is just an also yeah either or all right so let's talk about uh with the sports cards uh i saw you post at some point like hey i'm starting a sports card shop that's pretty cool idea but how big could that be right maybe that's right what's the addressable market this whole nine yards and then uh we started talking then you're like oh
05:45 yeah we did a little bit of revenue and then it was like a little bit more revenue and then more and then more and i was like wait a minute this is growing pretty fast like how big is this store like how many people are actually coming into the store and then you explained to me this idea of like live breaking and it's actually more e-commerce than it is physical store. So explain like how the business model works for live breaking. So we have a store in LA store in Salt Lake city. We're buying one in San Diego and then we're going to buy 51, a hundred percent of other stores across the country. The stores are like a flag in the ground. So people can come on there, bring their kids, bring their cards, buy stuff, et cetera. But you're right. It's five to
06:20 one sales online versus in person at the store. Also, we're in the middle of a situation where the streets in LA aren't that busy. And same with Salt Lake. That's going to get reopened. And hopefully that will change the three to one or four to one. But online, we're the only ones live breaking, which is opening packs of cars and boxes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So how does it work? So you, let's say that you and I were doing the live breaking. We basically just grab a random pack or random box. So people choose. So let's say someone's watching. So Roger wants to buy a pack, right? And we say, okay, great. This pack is $200. There's some packs are 20 bucks some packs are 200 some packs are thousands this pack is 200 bucks roger can
06:56 decide if he wants to pay all 200 or jennifer jessica jenny and robert they can all pitch in 50 bucks each and now they can split the 200 dollars ah got it okay so there's almost like a gamification component to it and also like a dopamine hit as to uh what's in the pack as you're watching and now the reason that people have us open up because you're like why don't you just buy the pack or the box and send it to my house yep a lot of people are not experts they don't know what they're looking for so they'll be opening it and they might hit a really good card and have no idea that they hit this rare card got it happened a lot of people also it's like going to a bar everyone in the group chats talking we're on whatnot we're on
07:32 twitch we're on instagram facebook and youtube all live simultaneously all right 24 hours a day and so people can go there and like you know what i want to buy a ufc or i want to buy into nascar or football or baseball basketball etc and instead of spending 50 bucks 100 bucks or 500 bucks they could spend a smaller amount and split it with other people got it and so once you open the pack live you guys keep the pack do you send it to them like what's the operations so we ship all same day okay so because we're again we're the only ones that are 24 hours because it's crazy to do the second that we open it it gets to the shipping station it has your name address phone number date everything on their instagram name everything when you bought it and then we are
08:11 packing up and shipping it same day got it and then it goes to your house now if you want to get it graded at psa we'll take it for you we'll literally drive it over there for you to drop it off so if you hit a big card we'll take care of it for you if you want or we'll send it to you and you can make your own decision what's the biggest card that you guys have opened on one of this for like somebody else uh we hit an eighty thousand dollar card and the pack was only like 60 bucks wow that was a big one because we hit like the ultimate ultimate card yep um recently we hit another card that was around sixty thousand dollars that was a more expensive box that was like a two thousand dollar box but yeah there's been some big hits yeah and then what do you think
08:43 about like nfts obviously you guys have a really good sense of this idea of scarcity uh kind of um the dopamine hit of opening these packs whatever it seems like there's similarities to nfts what's your thoughts there so it's the supply and demand factor right the difference with nfts is the supply can become larger if someone does multiple drops if someone's just going to do one drop and there's only going to be 10 000 or 1 000 or 5 000 i love that that type of supply and demand is great if someone has big demand like if gary v we know has huge demand and his v friends only have 10 400 we know is gary v going to keep growing growing growing is logan paul or stevie oki or whoever's doing nft are they going to keep growing growing that to me is interesting that their demand is
09:23 going to go up and the supply is going to stay finite or small in sports cards i know there's 2200 lebron james psa 10s i know there's 346 of the michael jordan number 57 psa 10 like i know the numbers of the certain cards over the course of time does michael jordan get more famous Does LeBron James get more famous? Does Serena Williams, Andre Agassi, all these characters, do they get more famous? And does their supply stay the same? Yes. And so that's what's interesting to me is that the supply will stay the same, but the demand will keep rising.
09:51 Yeah. It's crazy when you start to actually think about how much the similarities rely on not only what the original kind of primary sale or the original drop, but also you're essentially betting on the future of a digital artist or an athlete, et cetera. And so there's some very crossover with like venture capital type investing where you've got to understand where is this going, not just where it is today. Yeah, I care about the personal brand. Are they going to still care about this or are they just going to do another drop in three months, another drop in four months, another drop in three months? Then it's hard. It's just like NBA Top Shot. I love the concept of NBA Top Shot. But like if LeBron James is going to dunk 44 times this week, who's going to care about the dunk on March 17th on a random game? They all care about the final championship game.
10:32 They'll care about the playoff game. But are you really going to care about the random March 17th dunk on the second quarter? Not so much. So I love the concept of things like NBA Top Shot, but I wish the supply was smaller and it was focused on highlights, not just every. What else are you investing in outside of sports cards or NFTs? So I'm angel investing a lot. I started my syndicate. I'm a lot.
10:53 Last week, we raised $6.3 million in seven days for a chicken company. the week the three weeks before that six million dollars for cauliflower foods a healthy pizza three million dollars for icon meals and ufc invested like i'm firing away like two to four deals a month now wow but small like all two to six million two to six million kind of range of what we're raising through our group and we're looking at companies that are doing two to twenty million in revenue so i'm trying to catch them early that i can help them the chicken company was bigger because they're doing 48 million but most part two to twenty million and it's just I love angel investing.
11:25 I'm obsessed with it. Now I finally have the model to be able to execute quickly where I can fund a company within a week. And then lastly, I want to talk about Everbull. Obviously, they just announced that they're going to be moving towards this Bitcoin standard, paying employees in Bitcoin, etc. I've talked to the team there and I'm very impressed by them. I know you were an early investor and I've kind of watched
11:43 as they've grown across the country. What's going on there? So Everbull is a sellable chain. The founder, Jeff Fenster, he's always watched you and what you've done and he started hearing about restaurants and corporations and when you started saying that more companies are going to start holding bitcoin on their on their balance on their sheet he got interested he's like how much should i hold you know we have x amount of dollars now we just got this funding drew breeze just invested and we got all these new chains like
12:07 he started thinking about it and i liked watching his thought process and the way he listened and then recently is when he finally decided hey we can use our gift cards with crypto we could pay our employees with crypto people could purchase with crypto like this becomes interesting for us one the marketing of it of like getting a new audience to be able to want to go buy and have some fun being able to finally use bitcoin at their locations but two it's important it is the future it's up to us to decide how fast we get to the future yep and so by more and more brands like this saying hey we're going to do this now and literally everybody that hit me up about it when the press release went out i said that one thing and one thing only our goal is to
12:44 inspire more restaurants to do the same thing yeah that's it it seems like that's what they're doing right? Awesome. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? So my name is just at Dan Fleischman. And for you guys listening, you should do the same thing. One screen name, one bio, one photo across all platforms. Don't mix it up because we're in an ADD society. So if you're wearing that black hoodie, we're the same black hoodie in every single bio photo. Are you ever going to change your photo? I don't think so. I almost changed it to a board ape. I almost did it. I'm against changing the profile photos to the apes because it loses your identity it loses your uh kind of um uh recognition etc it's like i get why people are
13:23 doing it but uh just make it like that on the banner image or something but making it the actual profile picture i'm against in terms of like you lose a lot of the uh the value of the same photo i say about board apes in particular nothing like that can be replicated because i run a social media agency i couldn't go give dave chapelle or eminem five million dollars to put coca-cola american airlines as their logo as their bio photo for a week let alone permanent like they been doing it's mind-boggling from a brand culture perspective what happened with board apes it's fascinating to me yeah you own one you're gonna buy one well i bought 50 of multiple of them so i have friends that buy it for me my nephew has that big nft fund and my friends are big in nfts
14:01 and so i'll buy 50 with them and let the experts do it i like it awesome man thank you so much for doing this absolutely thanks for having me thanks so much for listening to today's episode i really hope you guys enjoyed this one make sure you're subscribed on apple spotify or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to palmscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.
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