Anthony Pompliano - The Future of Bitcoin & 2021 Predictions
22 Mar 2021 · 31 min
Anthony Pompliano, who worked at Facebook and Snapchat before becoming a full-time investor, explains why he put 50% of his net worth into bitcoin in December 2018. He points to monetary stimulus and the 2020 halving, which cut daily new bitcoin supply from 1,800 to 900, as reasons for a major price run ahead.
Questions this episode answers
December 2018.
2016 (began investing full-time around 2016).
Just over 60 companies (first fund).
Seed checks as small as $25,000; typical early checks $50–$100k; largest single check cited ~$30 million.
Started on Twitter in 2017; began email newsletter in May 2018; launched podcast in August 2018; added YouTube in January 2020.
Chapters
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All right, what is going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's podcast we have Anthony Pompliano. Thanks so much for coming on, my man.
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
So we've been in contact the past month or so now and I know that you recently launched the Capital University podcast with Bryce hall, but you have an extensive background not only as an entrepreneur, but a technology investor. For those that may not know who you are and your background, I'd love for you to give just a high level overview of what they should know.
Yeah, it's pretty easy. I was in the army for about six and a half years, did a deployment overseas to Iraq, came back, built and sold two software companies. I then went on to run a number of product and growth teams at Facebook and Snapchat and then started investing full time in 2016 alongside the investing stuff. Started to do a bunch of content as well. And so I kind of think of what I do now in two buckets. One is just traditional early stage startup investing and then the other is a entire content or digital media business.
Love it, man. Yeah, got a lot on your plate. So talking on the two SaaS companies, what were those in particular and what led you to the software business overall?
Stupidity. I literally didn't know what I was doing. First company I started with four friends or I'm sorry, three friends from high school. So four of us. And we pretty much did everything wrong, like we didn't know what we were doing. I always tell the story that like we worked with an outsourced development team and used an agency, paid way too much money for what got built. And I'll never forget the experience of we got back kind of one of the early mocks of what they were building and we're like, hey, how do people sign out of their account? And they're like, oh, you didn't tell us to build that. So, like, that'll be like another 500 bucks. And we were like, all right, this probably isn't, like, the best path.
Yeah, yeah.
Those early experiences, they weren't big companies, but they just were really informative and educational for me as I kind of got this, like, crash course. And then obviously, when I went on to Facebook and Snapchat, that was like that same experience on steroids of kind of trying to figure it out myself and then eventually working alongside people who really knew what they were doing. And so I felt very fortunate to kind of have all of those different experiences because it really kind of put me in a position to be successful when I started investing.
Yeah, totally. What were those two companies for, those that may not know, before you joined Facebook? Snapchat.
Yeah, the first one was online advertising. So we basically figured out how to monetize the login page for parents and students. So if you think of most public schools, they have some sort of portal where you can go in, you know, check grades, assignments, whatever. And those pages actually have some of the most traffic on the Internet, but none of them are monetized because there's just, you know, in a school district, you may have thousands, if not tens of thousands of parents logging in, like, on a daily or multiple times a day. And the schools, they're not in the business of making money, so they're not gonna go put banner ads or anything like that. We basically just put a link that said, you know, click on this link for a local business directory that has deals for parents and students. And so, of course, bunch of traffic gets siphoned off. They go, click on it. And then we charge businesses, I think it was like 15 bucks a month to basically list their business. So think of kind of like a Yelp like platform. And businesses loved it because it was a really low cost way to advertise to the parents and students of a local school. And then the second business was in the social media analytics space. We basically, when all the APIs were wide open, we would suck in all of the social media data. And we created some technology that did something we called identity stitching. So the whole idea is you act differently on Facebook than you do on LinkedIn, than on Instagram and Foursquare. But if I can start to stitch all that information together, and I know that that tweet you just sent out that doesn't have GPS coordinates on it, Came three minutes after you checked into the local ice cream shop with. Right. Then I can start to put some context around that tweet. And so we're able to work with everyone from sports teams to law enforcement, et cetera, with that one.
Very cool man. I had no idea about that. Man, that's so sick. So what led you to you build and sell those companies? What led you to investing? And where did you initially start in the realm of investing into different companies? And I know you have 83,000 people that follow your email list on a daily basis now, and you send out these messages and I follow you heavily on Twitter and I've learned a lot from you, just following you the last couple month or so. But when did initially you get into the investing world and what led you to it?
Yeah, so in 2014, I was working at Facebook and I had the fortunate opportunity to meet a couple of entrepreneurs that were either leaving Facebook as they started companies or entrepreneurs who had started a company they wanted to work with Facebook in some way. I didn't invest in any of them, which was like a really, really stupid mistake in hindsight. But that was my first kind of, you know, really kind of being thrust into the world of angel investing and technology investing. And so in 2016, I was thinking about, do I go start another business or do I invest? And, you know, the truth of it is I just didn't have an idea that I felt passionate enough about to like, go build another company. And so it was like, well, let me just kind of invest some money into these early stage startups and I'll see one, if I'm good at it, and two, it'll buy me some time until I figure out, like, my own idea to go build. And I did that investing with a friend of mine, Jason Williams, who had previously built the second largest chain of urgent care facilities in the United States. So he had kind of spent almost 15 years building this really big business. And so when we started investing, we quickly realized, like, we actually had a very differentiated way of looking at it, but founders really found that attractive. And so we were living in Raleigh, North Carolina. We didn't meet any founders really in person. Majority of the founders we were just talking to over the phone or doing video calls with. We tried to make really fast decisions because we were writing small checks. And that first fund, we ended up investing in just over 60 companies, if I remember correctly. And in that fund alone, we're going to have a couple of companies where we're seed investors end up being worth Over a billion dollars. And so it was kind of this, you know, really unique situation of we're trying to figure out if we're good at it. And we were able to meet some great founders and they pretty much did all the hard work. And so it was just double down on what, you know, I was already doing. And here we are today.
That is so cool, man. What were some of those companies that are now worth a billion dollars?
I can't say the ones that say worth a billion. What I will though is I'll give examples of a couple of companies that are in the fund. So one of the companies that's really interesting is this company, Imperfect Foods. It was called Imperfect Produce at the time. Basically, they go to local farms, they buy fruit or produce that is ugly, right? So literally it's an apple, but it's lopsided. About 20% of all produce gets thrown away because they can't sell it on the grocery store because literally it's ugly. So they would go, they would buy it at a massive discount, let's say maybe 80% discount. They would then bring it to a warehouse, package it up into a subscription box, and then deliver it right to your door. You as the end consumer might pay 50% less than you would at the grocery store. So if you're just cooking with the tomato, you don't care if the tomato looks ugly as long as it's, you know, healthy and still good. And you also feel like you're kind of doing good in the world because you're helping save some of this food that would have gotten thrown out otherwise. So that business has gone really well. They've now transitioned to like a full on online grocery store. And so during COVID obviously it's gone very well for them. Another business in that portfolio was a company called Everly Wellness. They basically started out doing at home diagnostic testing. So everything from food sensitivity tests to glucose or whatever it is. And that founder, a woman named Julia Cheek, she was a Harvard graduate, you know, really kind of just put her head down and built an amazing business. They were one of the first businesses to get approved for an at home COVID test. And so that business has absolutely exploded. But then there was other types of businesses in there that were much more kind of moonshot type ideas. So we invested in a business that would literally was working on how to freeze the human brain so that they could preserve the electrical connections. And the idea was the founder had won some awards for being able to do this on a very small scale. He was like A rabbit's brain. So he could literally cryogenically freeze a brain, keep 100% structural integrity. And the idea was, if I can freeze the electrical connections, eventually what I can do is, like, download that to a computer. Now, the probability of that being successful is, like, less than 1%. But if he can do that, it would be a grand slam from a financial return perspective. And so there were some of those kind of moonshots in there as well.
Got it. So you and your partner, you started the fund in North Carolina, and it was just you and him to begin with. It was. Got it. What would you say was the early stages of that fund? How are you guys vetting companies? What were some of the companies you guys were looking at? And what did you learn from starting a fund so far?
Yeah, so at this point, we managed a number of different funds, have kind of invested the entire spectrum. So everything from writing $25,000 check into a. All the way up to, I think the biggest check we've ever written is $30 million in a single investment. And what you begin to understand is, like, it doesn't matter at what stage you're actually investing in a company. Ultimately, you're investing in people, Right. You're investing in that founder. And that founder needs to have a specific skill set, but more importantly, they need to have the determination not to give up. Like most of the companies that we've seen fail, it's literally the founders, at some point just give up. And sometimes them giving up is smart because the business isn't working, it's not scalable, whatever. But most of the time, we don't yet know is this business is actually going to fail or not. The founders just get frustrated and they give up. And so I always try to remember, like, rule number one, you're investing in a person. Make sure this is a person that you believe can kind of navigate all the obstacles moving forward. And it's somebody that you want to look forward to, like, taking their calls, Right. The worst thing is if you invest and then people need your help and they're calling you and you're like, oh, my God, I have to get on the phone again. Right. It's very much investing in people and also founders taking money, like you're taking money from people as well. And so you want to make sure the investor you're taking money from is somebody you want to talk to. The second thing I think, is most of the rules in venture capital, at least historically, didn't make a lot of sense in today's day. And age. So things like I need to be the founder in person. Like, we did a bunch of investing. Never met anybody in person. Worked out pretty well. You know, you have to be in Silicon Valley to build a really successful company. Sure, that helps in some cases. But, you know, Everly Wellness, it was based in Austin, Texas. Right. We invested back in, I think, 2016, 2017, before it was kind of cool to move to Austin. And so I think that, you know, just questioning a lot of these assumptions. And thankfully, we didn't have the classical training of having, you know, been a associate at a traditional venture capital fund or anything like that. And the last thing I would say is really walking before you run. And that's, like, a very cliche piece of advice. But when it came to investing, I'm very, very thankful that we didn't have, like, a very big fund to go invest in on day one. Right. Our initial fund was just a couple million dollars, and we were writing kind of 50 to $100,000 checks. Sounds like a lot of money to most people, but the venture capital world, that's like, nothing.
Right.
And so what it allowed us to do is almost like, get reps in on a small scale. So then when we started to deploy much more money, you know, we kind of had that experience under our belt, and we were just much better investors, I think, due to that experience.
I love that. How much time do you spend on the fund and looking at companies and investing in companies nowadays?
So 100% of my time is spent on what I do. I think of the content and the investing as pretty much the same thing. Right. If you kind of think of, like, how I spend my day, I pretty much spend all day long talking to as many interesting people as I possibly can. And to me, the fact that that's like a job is comical because that's just like, you know, literally a dream scenario. Sometimes that shows itself or applies itself in. I'm recording a podcast episode. Other times I'm going on other people's podcast. And then other times is I'm talking to a founder about potentially investing. But that's kind of my guiding light. Right. It's just find the most interesting people in the world. And by doing that, that takes up 100% of my time. And then it kind of filters into, is it a content thing or an investing thing?
Yep. When did you start putting out content? I know some of your interviews on YouTube have over a million views, and you have this large newsletter. When did you start going hard on building a brand, putting out content because you're already busy investing in different companies. So what made you transition into going hard with content as well?
Yeah. So in 2014, I ran the growth team for Facebook Pages, the product manager for that team. And I had the great fortune to meet a lot of really, really interesting people, whether they were celebrities, they were people who managed celebrities, or they were brands themselves. So I met, like, the guys who run the FuckJerry Instagram network very early on, et cetera. And what I was able to do is kind of help them understand, here's what you should be doing with the Facebook part of your business, right? So I'm unaware of what you do elsewhere, but with Facebook Pages, I can really help you kind of scale your brand. And so through that, I learned a lot from them, just as much as they learned from me. And when I got to 2017, what I real the beginning of 17, I'd never built it myself, right? And so when I started to think about it, I was like, in. Having an audience is going to be one of the most important things in the future. It's kind of this new currency, right? And so I need to do this for myself. So I started on Twitter in 2017. I just put my head down for about 18 months and just focused on Twitter. The first 12 months, I went from like 2 or 3,000 followers that already had to about 100,000. And then in May of 18, I started writing the email. I started the email specifically to de risk the platform risk of only having a Twitter account. I was like, hey, I need to have a different platform that I can talk directly to people if I ever lose my Twitter account. In August of 18, I started a podcast. I've talked about it a million times, but, like, basically as a joke, somebody asked me to do it, and I was like, sure, I'll record a couple, but, like, I don't even know how to record a podcast. And it went well, and I just kind of kept doing it. And then I pretty much focused on those three things, Twitter, email, and podcast, until January of 2020. And then I said, okay, look, I'm ready to add another platform, which was YouTube. And the goal for this year was to go from about 3,4000 subscribers, whatever we had, to 100,000. We're recording this right now, and I think I've got just under 120,000. So I was able to kind of really figure it out. And then I'll just kind of keep focusing on those four platforms until I decide to add something new.
Love that. When it Comes to the podcast with interviewing people. What have you learned from some of these interviews, and how do you correlate those relationships to business? I know, for me, the podcast has been great with networking and meeting people, and it opens up every door in my life. But how do you think about podcasting, the future of the industry, and how do you personally navigate it?
Yeah, for me, the number one thing is just be selfish. And that sounds like really, really bad advice. But the reason why I say be selfish is when I go into an interview, I literally just ask the questions that I want to know. And naturally, I think that the audience ends up being similar to me. Right. They want to know the same types of things. And so I'm just, like, super selfish about if I walk away from conversation saying, I learned a lot, that was really interesting to me, that I'm kind of doing right by the audience. So that's kind of one big focus. Two is I'm always blown away by the types of people that are willing to come on the podcast. And so I really focus on being able to grow it as. As big as possible because it provides more value to the guest. Right. If a guest goes on a podcast that gets 5,000 downloads versus half a million downloads, of course, it's more valuable for them to go on the bigger one. And so I kind of think of, like, all the growth stuff that I do as that's the value I'm providing to the guest. The actual episode recording. That's the value that I'm driving for the audience. So you're kind of playing this, like, marketplace game. And the last piece on the podcast is it's forced me to really focus on kind of operating again. Right. Everything from the products. Right. So the actual. How are we recording this is an audio. Is it video? Where are we putting it? How are we cutting it, all that kind of stuff to also the operational stuff internally of, you know, the team and, you know, managing people and paying attention to the finances and. And all of that type of stuff. So it kind of scratches the operational itch without actually having to go raise a bunch of outside capital and feel like, hey, I'm doing a startup again, because that's, you know, you better be prepared for what you're signing up for if you want to go do that, because that can be. Can be pretty tough.
Totally. I love that too. And I know that one of the things you said is being selfish on your interview with billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya is that you say it.
That's right.
First question Right off the gate, you said, when was the moment you knew you were a billionaire? And when I was listening to that, I was like, this is what people want to hear. It's like that type of brutal bluntness is what gets the ball rolling, you know? So with that being said, some of these interviews and your relationships, what would your advice be to people that are starting up, starting their first company when it comes to networking, raising capital, and getting inside of that ecosystem that you've already been through? And now on the flip side, you're now investing into. Just to summarize it, what's your advice to young entrepreneurs today that are going to raise capital and grow their network?
Yeah, I think one of the biggest lies or misleading kind of thought process is that you have to have a network to be able to raise money and do all this stuff. Right. Does it help? Absolutely. Right. So I want to be clear that, like, having a network, knowing people can absolutely be beneficial to you. But I do think that it's underestimated how effective you can be. If you build something and it's working and you have to email somebody, if you cold email somebody with literally two or three sentences and you say, hey, I've built X, it's growing at this rate, month over month, I'm raising $2 million, and I'd love to talk to you about it. Like, most investors are not idiots, right. If you explain to them like, hey, I built this thing, it's in a space that they find interesting, and you're able to show some sort of traction or data point that like, hey, people want this and it's growing, they will respond. And so it helps to have a network. But I do think that the biggest thing you can do is just focus on building something that actually works. And in today's day and age, it doesn't take as much money. You don't need as many people as you even needed five, 10 years ago. And so I think that's kind of step one. The second thing is being very smart about not just raising money to raise money. Like, that's one of the other mistakes I see happen a lot is people think that it's like a badge of honor or it's a milestone to have raised money. Sure. But I do think if we change the narrative and we said, hey, you're selling part of your business. Right. Because that's what you're doing. You're selling some of the equity in your business, people may not celebrate it as much. Right. Like, if you can build the same business, you Know, let's say you build a $20 million business, right? And you can raise a ton of money or raise no money. Most you would elect to raise no money. Right. And so it really does depend on what you're trying to build, how scalable it is. Should you go raise money, who should you raise it from, what are the terms, all that kind of stuff. But I think that getting out of this world of just like celebratizing, raising capital would be much more healthier for founders. And just remember, like, you're selling a piece of your business, and the reason why an investor's buying that piece of your business, because they think that piece is going to be worth more in the than it is today. So you're literally giving up upside in order to raise that capital. Sometimes that makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. You just gotta be smart about it.
Totally. I do want to start talking about something that I know you're an evangelist on, which is bitcoin. It's been going crazy recently. It's all in the news. And I know that you recently had the Winklevoss twins on the Capital University podcast, but when did you get involved with bitcoin? How did you initially hear about it, and what's your predictions on the future of bitcoin?
Yeah, so kind of 2016, I think I heard about. In 2014, I did nothing when I was at Facebook. You know, again, stupid mistake. In 2016, I had a kid that I'd previously met. He was actually a high schooler when I met him. He was now a freshman, I think, in college. He basically sat me down and he was like, hey, you got to pay attention to this thing. He didn't pitch me on bitcoin. What he pitched me on was cryptocurrency mining. So this whole idea of you buy a computer, you plug it in, and it basically generates cash flow.
Right.
And so my father had grown up and spent a bunch of time in the data center business. I understood that business pretty well when I saw mining, it was data centers on steroids. And I said, look, cool, I'll take some money and I'll basically try it. One of the best things I've done in my life is always when I see something that's interesting, I want to play with it, I want to try it. I just, you know, it might be small first, but like, let me get hands on experience with it. So did that very quickly was like, oh, my God, this is going to be massive. And I became pretty convinced that, like the entire industry would be worth paying attention to over then like a six month period I went from, hey, this is going to be interesting to then I basically said I'm going to double and triple down on this to the point where I'm only going to focus on this for some period of time. And so really for the last like two and a half years or so, all I've done is just focus on it. I've got a very strong kind of conviction thesis around it. And you know, one of the great investing lessons I've learned over time is concentration builds wealth and diversification protects it. And I think that we've constantly told people over and over and over again, diversify, diversify, diversify. What I actually think people need to do is you need to diversify your income streams, but on the investing side, you need to concentrate your investments, right? If you're managing a stock portfolio and you have 50 stocks, you don't have 50 good ideas, right? That just means you frankly haven't done the work to have high conviction around five or 10 ideas. And so I think that that's one of the key pieces is I really kind of had the conviction to make a big move. And so it's public knowledge now. But In December of 2018, I took 50% of my net worth, put it into bitcoin at the bottom of the market. Obviously, when you're buying at sub $3,500 and now it's trading at 16, $17,000, pretty good. But the second investing lesson I've learned is the best investors in the world, they press their winners harder than anybody. So they cut their losses faster than anybody, but they also press their winners harder. And so even though I kind of made that investment decision and it's played out well, I've continued to kind of double and triple down on that investment as it continued to rise. I'm still buying bitcoin in the modern environment. And the reason being that if you liked it at 3,500 and you liked it at 5,000 and 10,000 and 15,000, well, if you have this long term conviction, you frankly don't care what price you're buying. You're essentially just dollar cost averaging into an asset where you've got high conviction. And if you hold it for a long period of time, it should play out well if you're right. And so that's kind of the investment thesis I've had with bitcoin.
Love that. What do you think is all the hype right now? The last three months or two months or so, when it's, you know, it was at 10,000. Now it's the last week or two weeks, and now it's at 17,000. What has caused that? And what should potential investors know about this time? When it comes to bitcoin, it's really.
Hard to pinpoint one thing, right? I always talk about bitcoin in this kind of weird way of. If you imagine everyone in the world is on like a spectrum and some people are like, all in. They're highly convicted, like me, and basically they've already crossed the finish line, if you will. And then there's some people who like, never even heard of bitcoin, and they're on the far end of the other spectrum. Well, every time one of these events or data points happens, everyone just kind of takes a step to the right, right? So, okay, Paul Tudor Jones wants to buy bitcoin. Okay, everyone takes a step to the right. So if you had never heard of it, maybe now you've heard of it. If you had just heard about it, now you start doing educational research, right? If you've done educational research, maybe you come convinced, hey, I should actually buy some. Maybe, hey, I should buy some. Now you actually go and do it, right? So everyone kind of takes steps to the right. Fidelity step to the right. This company, Microstrategy, or Square, they buy bitcoin and put on their balance sheet. Everyone steps to the right. And so every data point kind of just moves people along in the funnel. What I think is happening right now on a macro basis is it's really simple. The government is printing lots and lots of money. And so people are looking for inflation, hedge assets. They ran to bitcoin, gold, real estate, et cetera, over kind of this pandemic. And at the same time that that occurred, the bitcoin incoming daily supply got cut in half. So every four years, basically, there's this programmatic thing that happens where bitcoin gets cut by 50%. And so Bitcoin, at the end of last year, there was 1800 Bitcoin a day that was coming into the circulating supply. Today there's 900. So you have a supply shock. At the same time, demand is increasing. And so economics 101, if you have a fixed supply asset and demand increases, the US Dollar price is going to go up, right? So I think that it's pretty obvious kind of structurally why it's happening. The big debate is what happens in the future? Does demand continue to increase? Does it just kind of plateau? Does it decrease? Right? Everyone's got their own opinion but ultimately the market will figure that one out.
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. What is your high level advice when it comes to your investment strategy and how you vet companies and diversify? Not diversify, because I know that you said it's about focused attention, but what's your advice to young investors that want to get involved with whether that's starting a fund or just getting involved in different asset classes? Like what? From a high level. What do you suggest?
Yeah, so I'll give you kind of the life advice that I usually tell people. And advice is a strong word because I actually think it's really hard to give people advice as much as, like, these are like the financial rules that I think everyone should live by. The first one is just spend less than you make. Wild concept. But literally, if you make, you know, $5,000 a month, you should spend less than $5,000 a month. The second is get out of debt and literally do anything and everything possible to get out of debt as soon as possible. Because ultimately that's just going to kind of hold you back. The third is you've got to have multiple revenue sources or income streams, right? So whether that is you've got a job, you've got investments, you've got real estate, whatever it is, you got to have multiple revenue streams in order to just increase your earning potential. The fourth thing that you've got to do is you've got that, right? So once you save, whatever the amount of money you think you need to save, whether it's a month, three months, six months worth of kind of expenses, whatever that number is, once you save, invest everything else, right? That's how you grow your wealth is investing, not saving. And then the last rule or kind of rule number five is just, you got to be super disciplined and patient. Like, none of this is rocket science, Right? Those five things I just told you, there are literally thousands of books that have all said that. There have been. Everybody in their mom on YouTube has said that. But it's timeless advice for a reason. Right? It works and it's not sexy, but if you're disciplined and patient and you have a good plan, you, every single person should become a millionaire. I don't care if you literally make $10 an hour through the lifetime of your career. If you make the right decisions, you will become a millionaire. It's just you got to have the discipline to do it.
Yep. When did that discipline become relevant in your life? Was this something that you learned in college early on or when did you actually start to apply that? Because like you said, you can listen to it all day, but when was that moment for you where you actually got serious and shifted gears and started actually getting serious about this?
I'm a 32 year old guy who probably had the same trajectory of most people. Which means that after I came back from the military, I had made a little bit of money and you know what I did? Everybody else, I'm going to go get rich quick. And so I started doing foreign currency trading in college while sitting in class, like again, really stupid. I got very, very fortunate in that I turned, I think it was like $9,000 I put in to start with into 72. And I thought I was going to be the next Steve Cohen. This is going to be amazing. I'm going to go trade my way to be a billionaire. And then I started getting cocky and I started trading on my phone when I was doing a summer internship and I lost about half of the money. And so I was still up. But you know, losing tens of thousands of dollars was not a fun experience in terms of the portfolio. And so I very quickly realized, like, hey, I'm not a good trader, right? I basically just kind of got fortunate in the timing that I went ahead and put money into the market. I probably should go find more sustainable things. And so that experience was really eye opening to me of like, you don't have to be the smartest person in the room. You basically just don't have to be an idiot. And me trading foreign currencies was being an idiot. And so, you know, let me kind of cut my losses and move on. And so what that ultimately led me to was where do I feel like I have an advantage? And so I started reading as much as I possibly could, right? I read pretty much every book or profile or watched every interview on YouTube I possibly could find on the smartest investors in the world or the smartest entrepreneurs. And every single one of them said the same thing, like, concentration builds wealth. And I only want to operate in places where I'm either competent or I have an advantage. So like, for me, I own zero public equities, right? Other than in my retirement account. Basically I own a stock that gives me exposure to Bitcoin, right? Other than that, I own no public equities. Why? I don't understand it well enough. I have no advantage there and it's not my focus. So why am I going to just hold stocks? Because some people think you should hold stocks. No, I'm going to go spend my time on the things that I think I have an advantage and I've got competence around. And so I think that's a really key lesson for people is like don't try to do everything or do what somebody else is doing. Like find the thing that you enjoy and you have an advantage and then double and triple down on that. And what you'll start to figure out is like if your advantage is literally in trading like timber, then go be a great timber trader. Right. I don't even know how to buy timber, but there's people out there who are really good at it. Right. That applies to every single asset class. But I just think that like being interested in investing and understanding, like making your money work for you is one of the highest leverage things you could do if you do it intelligently. And so there's no reason not to do it unless you literally have zero knowledge. Then you should spend your time investing yourself and actually educating yourself before you start investing.
Yep, I love that. What are you most looking forward to over the next 12 months with everything that you have going on in your life?
Bitcoin is going to be something to behold. I think it is going to go on this breathtaking run through the end of next year in history of the asset. It's about 1112 years old now. It's basically had a couple of these really big boom cycles and then massive crashes. So It'll go up 10, 15, 20, 25x in price in a very short period of time. And then I'll have this like nasty 80 plus percent correction. Historically I think again it's always hard to tell how high it will go. But I do think that from a macro and structural perspective we're headed into one of those very significant price increases through the end of next year and then there will be a really nasty price decline. But that's been my main focus for the last two years, is kind of preparing for this. And so I think a lot about like, like you kind of want to see the thesis through and so we got about 12 months left here and I think it'll be pretty cool to watch.
Hey, that's exciting man. Well Anthony, last thing before I let you go. Where is the best place where people can stay in touch with anything that you have going on and get involved with your newsletter and everything?
Yeah, if you want the kind of day to day thoughts, I would just go to Twitter, just Pompompliano. And then if you want more of like the finance and business analysis, it's just pomp letter.com cool.
Well, Anthony, thanks so much for coming on the show, man. I really appreciate it.
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Casey.
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