Anthony, you've lived in a war zone, met and interviewed some of the world's wealthiest people, built and sold companies, invested in 100 of businesses, some of now which are worth 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars. What have you figured out about building companies and and building wealth that others haven't? I don't think it's, unique insights that really help you do anything. To me, it's really just the belief that timeless advice is actually timeless for a reason.
If you think of most of the things that I do on a day to day basis, they're kind of like old school ideas. I wake up. I focus. I work hard. I'm pretty persistent and dedicated. I bring, you know, high energy. I treat people, you know, well. I have a long term orientation, and I try to find problems and create solutions to them. And so, you know, maybe the lack of, kind of new and innovative answer is just so many people are trying to reinvent the wheel.
They're trying to find some new shortcut or some new way of doing something. But in my experience, just following that timeless advice of, you know, kind of working hard for long periods of time, and trying to do right by other people, has been kind of a winning formula. I think to understand where you are today and all the successes you've had, it's important to understand your early context.
I was listening to a story you shared on My First Million back in 8th grade when September 11th happened back in 2001. Can you take me back to that moment in time and how that shaped you and who you are as a person? Yeah. I mean, I was in 8th grade. 9:11 happens. I remember walking into, one of the classrooms in the school, and I I can't remember if I was gonna get somebody or something or whatever. But I remember that, the teacher basically, like, ushered me out very quickly out of the room.
And I was like, what what's going on? And she was telling her class something, but didn't want, you know, other people outside of the classroom to hear. So I remember going back to my classroom and, being like, what what's going on? And the teachers were all very frantic or or whatever. And so, obviously, not you know, we eventually figured out that 9:11 happened, and the school shut down. And this is North Carolina, where there's a lot of, families from, kinda New York, New Jersey.
They had parents come get the kids and and bring them home. And I remember I went home, and I was talking to, my dad. And I I, you know, I was in 8th grade, so I wasn't a little kid, but I also didn't really have the kind of global context. I remember just saying something to the effect of, like, you know, what happened? And he basically said, you know, some people tried to kill Americans today. And I could just tell that there was, like, a gravity to what he was saying.
And he said, and America's probably gonna fight back. And I remember thinking, I don't really know what that means, but, like, you know, that's a pretty, significant moment in history. And within, you know, days, obviously, we start going back to school. People all start talking about this, whatever. It just became very apparent to me.
Like, that was the first time I think I was exposed to, kind of true evil in the world, that maybe there's places in the world that they didn't look at the American way of life as, you know, kind of a shining light on the hill, but instead they actually looked at it as a threat, as something that, you know, stood for, the demise of their way of life.
And, you know, from there, I I think it just kinda changed maybe the view I had of a lot of, you know, current events as as I lived through them, but also, you know, gave me much more kind of global perspective than, you know, I had growing up as, you know, an American in, in the United States. Is that why you eventually joined the military or the US Army when when you were 17? Or what was the I think that was a part of it.
You know, it it, when you're in 8th grade till you're 17, like, you got a little time to, you know, cool off, if you will, you know, no matter how mad you are in 8th grade. And and, I don't even know if I was actually mad because I don't think I really fully understood the the gravity of the situation. But, definitely, I think, that was one piece of it. Probably the single most, like, impactful part of me deciding to join the military, outside of just, like, hey.
I think this will be good for me. I actually, you know, kind of, like the personal challenge of, like, can I go do this stuff? There's an element of, like, they're gonna pay me money. Also, it looks kinda fun. You know, you're gonna, like, jump out of planes and shoot guns and, like, do all these things that, like, you know, I can't believe they're gonna let us do type thing, was, Pat Tillman. And so, you know, I was playing football in high school. I know I was gonna go play in college.
Pat Tillman, had been playing in college, was in the NFL. He walked away from an NFL contract of a couple $1,000,000 to sign up to, to go be in, the, Army Rangers.
And I remember saying to myself, you know, here's a guy who if I take kind of this football thing to, you know, kind of the full extent and was fortunate enough to be good in high school, eventually be good in college and could get to the NFL, and he basically is willing to walk away from that, like, who am I to not wanna, you know, at least go kinda contribute in some way?
And so when I walked into, the recruiter's office, I just remember they were, like, pretty surprised somebody like me would be there, and I didn't know why. It's something that I'm really glad that I did. But also the time I did it was important. You know, I I'm I'm 36 now, and, there's guys I know that are still in the military. They always remind me that next year, at 37, I would be retiring from the army if I had stayed in for 20 years. But, but, obviously, I you know, I got out.
But it it reminds you that, you know, it's a very physical job. It's a young man's game. Guys who are still doing it in their late thirties, early forties, even late forties, it's pretty, pretty pretty impressive to see what they're doing. Being in active duty can be a very dangerous scenario on the day to day basis. I remember you sharing on Lex Fridman show that one day you're in a convoy and one of the vehicles in front of you just blows up out of nowhere.
The cost of mistakes were were very high at that time. When you entered the business world, was there a high pressure around the decisions you made when, for example, let's say, hey. We're trying to scale this business from a 100 k to a1000000 or whatever it might be. Was there a high pressure around every decision you made because of that in the military, or was it just, hey. Let's try these things and and see what happens?
Yeah. You know, I've probably talked more about the military in the last, I don't know, 3 years than I talked about the military in the first 10 years that I was out of the military or whatever. Right? And I think a lot of it was just, it was a really unique experience. I learned a lot. But I think, in hindsight, I was kinda, like, processing it all. And so I didn't really think about it. And, you know, there are times where it sounds almost insane, but, like, I kinda forgot about it.
And I was just living my life and, you know, kind of, operating. You definitely take away certain lessons. One of those lessons is I'll put more kind of a lot from a leadership perspective. If you ever hear, people talking to, athletes, and they're like, hey. When the pressure goes up, like, their blood pressure goes down. Right? They kinda get locked in a zone. The military is that in a lot of ways. You know, the the specific incident that you're talking about, IED goes off.
The entire team that was out there that day immediately reacted, like the training kicked in and it was almost like you were going through emotions and you weren't thinking about it. It was second nature. And so one effective training, but 2, you just were locked in. You're focused. You weren't thinking about the danger or, you know, anything else. And so when you go through those experiences, it's kind of like getting exposed to an extreme.
Everything else is pretty, you know, desensitized in comparison. And so, I don't know if I've ever felt a lot of pressure in, you know, kind of the business world, but not because it's like, oh, you know, we're not gonna die today. So, you know, it's not that big of a deal. I think it's just more so, I look at, a lot of the issues in businesses, kind of, puzzles and not really problems. And so if you look at them as puzzles, it's like, hey. There's a solution here.
We just gotta kinda figure it out. When you look at something as a problem, then, a lot of times, it can be like, well, I don't know if it can be solved. But, you know, if you think of a puzzle, all the pieces are there. You just gotta figure out the right combination of putting them together, and so it's more a a thing around persistence and and kind of, time investment than it is, you know, hey. Actually, we might not be able to solve this.
And so that that, kind of comparison of puzzle search problems, I think, really reduces stress. It really allows you to, kind of approach it from a, like, I can come up with a solution as long as I put enough time and effort into this, and it's been something that's really helped me over the years. Yeah. One of the guests we had on the podcast was this guy named Jacob Klug. He's a 20 year old, runs a no code, development agency, completely bootstrapped, do a 100 k a month in revenue.
You actually did something similar in in college. You built a couple of businesses, one of which was a website development company. Why go into entrepreneurship, and why build that type of company? A lot of people don't even know I did that. Yeah. I, I wanted money. Right? Like, I I I didn't have that much money, and I needed money. And, I was, you know, trying to build my actual business at the time, but I knew that I needed cash flow as well, and and the company wasn't, cash flowing.
And so I taught myself how to make websites on WordPress. I went to, you know, local businesses, and I think that, I was charging between, like, 3 to $5,000 to build these websites. And, you know, I got a crash course in the service business where it's really difficult. They're constantly trying to please people. You know, these people tend not to be that techno, technologically oriented. So whenever there's an issue, they're calling you and they need it fixed immediately, you know, whatever.
But it was great because it had all of the ingredients of building bigger companies, and it was kind of a low risk way to to do that. And, you know, I was thinking about this the other day when I was talking to a friend. I've pretty much been building and running companies now for more than 20 years. I I think that I've probably started my first companies, even though they might not have been thought that way, when I was, like, 12 or 13 years old.
And so you just kind of continue to increase the ambition. You continue to kind of build and compound your skill set. And so what starts out as, like, shoveling, you know, snow off driveways, or cutting lawns, then turns into building websites for, you know, local small businesses, which then turns into, you know, kind of more tech oriented businesses. And you kinda just keep leveling up over over, the years. It really is just this long, you know, multi decade journey of learning.
And as you acquire more knowledge, it gives you the confidence to kinda go bigger and bigger, which, you know, hopefully, won't be over for me for a long time. You've talked about ambition. One of the things that you shared in the past is that ambition can also kill companies. Why and when do you know whether to have more less ambition rather than more? You usually don't know.
And I think that you have to be comfortable with whatever the degree of ambition that you have is determines what team you build, how you fund the company, where, the product is positioned, what part of the market you go after, who you see as the competition. You know, all these components really are overlays or or, kind of downstream of what is your ambition. So if you want to, you know, build a, websites for local businesses, it's actually not that ambitious of a project. Right?
And so you don't have to have a lot of funding. You don't have to have a massive team of MIT engineers. You don't need to go after GoDaddy, right, or or whatever. You're you're kind of positioned in a certain part of the market. There's very specific kind of decisions that are off of, hey, I just wanna be able to make a living and and kind of go and and build these websites.
But then if you look at, you know, maybe a company, that I've invested in, VARTA, they're gonna go do, you know, manufacturing in space. That's pretty ambitious. Right? You need a lot of money. You do need those MIT engineers. Right? You do need to actually go and disrupt, right, some pretty big players. And and so it changes kind of the the decisions that you make in building that company.
And so the reason why I say that ambition kills a lot of companies is because, somebody, usually the CEO or and founder, has super high ambition, but they actually have all the other ingredients of a kind of lower ambition, endeavor. And so by constantly chasing the high ambition idea with a low ambition team funding, market positioning, product, etcetera, those two things don't match.
And so it's kind of like, you know, if you have a car and you just constantly drive it with your foot all the way down on the gas, eventually you just wear it thin. Right? Like, you know, the car isn't made to run at 120 miles an hour for months months on end. And so I think that a lot of people now are starting to understand venture capital is a very specific type of business, a very specific, kind of financing option, to leverage. But there is, quite a number of businesses.
You know, we we've built a lot of businesses. I have a lot of friends who have built businesses who you can use these kind of digital skills or or kind of, you know, Internet native approaches. But really what you're doing is you're building businesses that are profitable, that are able to, kind of be repeatable and scalable. But you don't necessarily have to go for kind of this massive multibillion dollar outcome that costs, you know, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars in funding to be able to do.
And so it's a question of, like, are you playing a slugging percentage game, or are you playing a batting average game? And, I try to actually position myself to be able to play both, in in a unique way. But just knowing, you know, which game am I playing, where's the ambition level that that I should be kind of following for the team that I have? The funding, the market positioning, is pretty important.
If you're back in college today, what would be some of the businesses that you would think about potentially starting? It depends on what your level of ambition is. But if you basically said, hey. Look. I'm a college student who, I wanna learn. I want to, be able to make some cash, and I want to be able to meet people. Right? I actually think in college, and kind of in your early twenties, the single most important thing that you can do is build your network.
Because if you do it right, those people will continue throughout your career as people that you can rely on for information, for, you know, partnerships and deals, for funding. And, also, you're if you're fortunate, we'll be able to find 2 or 3 people who'll be great sounding board for you throughout your career. And, there's this, you know, whole idea that people always wanna meet their heroes, but actually, you should spend more time with your peers.
Because if you go and you talk to your heroes, what they will talk about is calling their peers. And so your heroes are cool. Your heroes can teach you some things, but really the bulk of the time you spend in your business career is going to be with those peers, so spending that time to invest in those relationships is more important. In terms of ideas for, for businesses, I think that, a kind of creation is a key, kind of theme.
So creating websites, creating blogs, creating in you know, now podcast, creating, social media content, being able to create video content, you know, audio content, anything that you can create for somebody else, specifically, if you're a young person who understands these digital platforms in a way that they don't, somebody's gonna be willing to pay you for it. Right? And so, you know, they have an abundance of capital, but they have a lack of knowledge.
You have an abundance of knowledge and a lack of capital. As you put those two things together, and usually, you're able to unlock capital by switching knowledge with them. So I think that's 1. 2 is, I think young people drastically underestimate how valuable, their knowledge is, outside of creating stuff. So, I've always thought somebody should create kind of a college intelligence service. So what do college kids eat? What do they use? What what brands do they like? What services do they use?
Could you put, you know, some sort of app on everyone's phone so you could see what percentage usage of various things, they're doing on their phones? Then you could sell that to, hedge funds or sell that to, you know, people who wanna understand better an entire demographic of society. Right? The that knowledge is really, really important. And you could start out pretty simply by just running surveys. Right?
If you survey all the students at a school, you get a bunch of information, then you run around and you tell everyone, hey. I'll sell you the results of this. Right? Probably could be able to to get some stuff. Another idea would be, kind of research. One of the big things on the research side is that, again, you have an abundance of time as a young person.
And so if you have time and you understand how to use the Internet in terms of being able to look things up, you should be able to put those two things together to do research for people who don't have time. And so whether it's executives, c suite, you know, investors, whoever, going to them and saying, hey. Pay me $5,000 a month and I will create research reports on whatever topics you give me. I'll create 1 a week or something. And they're super well done. Make them look really nice. Right?
Somebody's gonna pay you, to do that type of stuff. And then, one of the things I did in college, which I would not suggest other people do, but it was a fantastic experience for me, was I started trading And learning how the market works by having skin in the game is incredibly valuable. Now it's not necessarily aligned with entrepreneurship in the traditional sense because you're not building a business. But understanding why does the market move? When I risk capital, I can win and lose.
Why is it happening? Right? It just naturally forces you to better understand so much about, the economy, about financial markets, about risk. And so, I do think there's an element of, when you're young, investing some money, but it has to be money that you're willing to lose and be okay with because you're probably gonna lose it. Right?
So, you know, as a as a kid, I remember thinking to myself, you know, if I'm willing to pay for school or whatever, you might wanna pay for a little bit of self education in financial markets as well. So there's all kinds of ideas and and, you know, again, I don't think that if you're a college student being above, shoveling driveways, cutting grass, you know, doing anything like that is, is a bad idea either.
It's just kind of what what are you interested in and what would you be enthusiastic about doing, you know, day after day after day for a long period of time and just go, start get started. Yeah. I really like your idea on selling knowledge. So about a year and a half ago, I met this guy named Noam Bardeen, who was the, former CEO of Waze. He ended up founding this company called Post. The company didn't end up working out, but it was trying to be this new news app. So I'm like, hey.
I'll survey a bunch of kids at my school. I'll get you a bunch of data, and then you can use that data. Of course, I didn't have the foresight or the knowledge at the time to actually sell that data, but I went ahead and did it after probably speaking to or getting in front of maybe a 100, a 120 people. 80, 90 people filled out the survey, which is incredibly high. It was a great thing. I think it's definitely something that that students, could do.
A few years after school, when you're 25 years old, you were on a plane in 2014, and you read a book that changed your life forever. What was that book, and how did it change your life? The book was, The Art of Product Management, and, I would have never bought the book, read the book, other than I was on the way to, an interview as a product manager at Facebook. I had no clue what the product manager role was.
I'd never been a product manager before, and I figured I probably should, you know, go go, be prepared for the interview, which was shocking, frankly, to, my parents and anyone who knew because I wasn't prepared for pretty much any other test I'd ever taken in my life, in school. But, I knew that, hey. This is a pretty big deal. And if I could get this job, you know, there's kind of a trajectory change in my life here. And I didn't know anything else other than, to go and and just read a book.
I got the idea, and I don't know if I've ever actually even told him this. But I got the idea because I had read that Mark Cuban, when he before he started his first company, he was working in a computer store. And he would take the manuals home at night, and he would read them. And he became the most knowledgeable person in the computer shop because he was the only person willing to just read the manuals.
And so he knew everything about every component, every piece, every, you know, computer or whatever. And so, eventually, that led to, him having the confidence to quit the job and go and and start his own company. And so if I wanna be a product manager and I don't know anything about it, then I don't even know other product managers. Right? So I can call up a friend and say, hey, what what should I say?
So I bought the book, after kinda googling around a little bit and it's the best recommended book. When I went into the interview, I remember saying to myself, the best shot I got at getting this job is to just repeat back what was in that book because I don't know anything else. And and so, thankfully, for that book, I was able to get the job, but it it, was a great kind of lesson because not only had I read about, you know, Mark Cuban doing this, then I did it.
And I can't tell you how many times since then I have, you know, bought a book and said I know nothing about this thing, but I'm just gonna read the book, and I bet you I'm gonna learn about that thing. And so, you know, there's a business, that we've been looking at purchasing for a while. And, literally, they're in an industry where I didn't know that much. And so I went and I bought the 4 Dummies book on that industry.
And somebody here at the office saw me with the book, and they were like, why do you have, you know, this 4 4 dummies? And I said, well, I don't know anything about that industry, but I'm gonna know a lot about that industry after I read that book. And it's this idea of, are you the type of person who wants everyone to think you you you're smart and, like, you know everything?
Or are you the type of person who is willing to say, if I don't know something, it's a sign of intelligence to then identify I don't know this, and let me go get the knowledge. Right? And so, you know, thankfully, at 25, I was able to do that, because it really proved to me, like, this is just a simple kinda life hack.
Like, just go read the book, and something I've carried, you know, for years since, and continue to do. 1 of the partners or venture capital partners I interviewed, which is the first in person interview we did, was this guy named Jason Schuman. So he's a partner of primary.
And he said that the smartest people, even if they don't know the the answer, they're willing to say that they don't know the answer and then speak to experts in the space and get back to an answer within 48 hours And I think that's one of the things that I've noticed some of the most successful entrepreneurs and also people can do in general So if you don't know the industry, don't know the answer, you're willing to do the research, you're willing to put in the homework.
And that's one of the things I admire about Mark Cuban, who is a guest of the show, is, yes, he spent a lot of time reading the manuals for broadcast .com, building out that company. But also, he entered the pharmaceutical industry. He had no experience in pharmaceuticals before entering that industry, but then said, hey. I'm going to be one of the smartest people in this industry, and I'm going to build a company around it.
And I think people who are able to not only out research, but also at work and then outsell, that is a very powerful combination. I don't think anyone knows this. But in 20 16, 2017, there was a a gentleman, who worked at Mark Cuban's, kind of investment firm slash family office. And I remember talking to him, and I said, what what are you guys doing? And he told me that they were, reading white papers and books on artificial intelligence and neural nets. And we're saying, what?
Like, Mark Cuban has got a $1,000,000,000. What what what are you what what is he doing? And, he's, like, yeah. He thinks that this space is gonna be really big, and, he's literally reading from scratch what's a neural net, how does it work, whatever. Fast forward 7, 8, 9 years, looks pretty smart to have been doing that. Right? And so, I I do think that one of the beauties of kind of being willing to go get knowledge is that it energizes you every time you know you don't know something.
You're like, oh, I know the playbook. Right? Like, I I know how to go get the knowledge. And so just put the time in, you you go and you do it. It is incredibly empowering versus there's probably plenty of people who are stuck in positions in their life where, like, I don't know this thing. And they've never seen the power of just going and reading the book or talking to the experts. And so they're they're kind of, you know, searching in the dark a little bit.
And so my suggestion to people always is just like, just just go buy the book, man. Just the you know, it's a great investment. It's $20. Buy the book. Read it. You're gonna be way better off. After so you ended up getting that job at Facebook. Were there any frameworks that you learned, at Facebook that you ended up implementing either in your investing career or when trying to build companies? There's a ton. That that place was still is probably very special.
One of the things was just incredibly high quality people. The operational tempo was very fast, and there was a focus just on kind of results. And, you know, one of the frameworks that I catch myself repeating over and over again to to founders is, on the growth team, we would be very clear about what we were testing, and then we would focus, you know, maniacally on making sure we ran the test perfectly.
And the reason why you wanna run the test perfectly is because if you run a test and it doesn't work, but you didn't run it perfectly, then you're left wondering, is it that this doesn't work, or is it that we just ran the test the wrong way? But if you always execute perfectly on the test, then it's either works or it doesn't work because of what you're testing. And so how do you always make sure there's clarity in kind of the test result? You have to execute perfectly.
And so you can apply that to a lot of things in your life. Right? But kind of, you know, very clear, perfect execution is a huge one. I would say, another thing that I learned is just getting high quality people in a room is is pretty powerful. But also to, letting those people kind of run and saying, look. Rather than everything be approval based, instead, what we're gonna do is we're gonna just let you guys be great. And if anyone kinda steps out of bounds, then we'll say something.
But just like, you guys know what the mission is. Right? You know what the North Star is. Go. 1, it's empowering for the people. But 2 is people start doing all kinds of crazy stuff that you never would have thought of. Right? There's no kind of, you know, central brain trust that could have come up with these ideas. It ends up being the line engineer who's sitting there, you know, late one day, and he's like, you know what would be cool? Right?
Create something and all of a sudden everyone's like, oh, that's awesome. Right? And and so I think that that's, like, been a huge, huge thing. And then maybe other one other one that that I think is, is just, like, pretty cool. People at Facebook measured everything. And so, there was at one point, Facebook was, trying to figure out how do we increase, like, the NPS, right, that people had.
But rather than use NPS, they created their own internal score, which was a survey question Facebook cares about its users. And they would ask you, you know, how strongly do you agree with this statement? And you rank it 1 to 5. And so they were trying to move this metric, and they couldn't move it. They couldn't move it. They couldn't move it. What was the number? I've I've I don't know. Maybe it was at, like, 62. So they would say 1 to 5, and they would extrapolate it out or whatever.
But, like, it maybe was, like, 62 or something. And, one day, they put a kind of, like, a, a a card in the feed at the top. And, whoever was the content writer or the designer signed the message from all of us at Facebook. And they put it into the testing system. It came back. And this metric moved. And it was like a celebration in everyone was so excited that the metric finally moved. We had quantifiably been able to change the sentiment that people had towards Facebook, whatever.
And what it did was it humanized the company. It was this very clinical you're you're interacting with Facebook. But when it says from all of us at Facebook, you make it feel like, oh, there's humans behind this site. And so, I mean, I was cool and clever or whatever. But to me, the lesson was, man, these guys can quantify anything. Right? Literally anything. They will figure out a way to measure it. And if you measure it, you then have a chance to move it.
And so seeing that kind of in in one of the, like, softest, least quantifiable, you know, parts of business, which is this, like, sentiment and and kind of like, NPS type stuff, really, really showed me no matter what you're working on, there's a way to put numbers to it. And if you're able to get numbers on it, then you should be able to do a lot of testing, that could lead to the outcome that you want.
Yeah. I think that's something that sometimes people forget is that at the end of the day, we're still all humans. We still like connecting with other humans, and I think, I think that's really important. Bitcoin is although one of the things you're known most publicly for, you've also done some really cool stuff that has nothing to do with blockchain technology. One of the more boring businesses that you're excited about today, are these line striping businesses for roads.
Why and how big of a role do you think they actually play in the future of our transportation? So let me give some context on kind of all these boring businesses, which is in the United States, 50% of jobs come from, small, medium sized businesses. You can think of these as, you know, businesses that are, like, not in the tech economy. Right? These are businesses that are kinda more blue collar oriented, Main Street type businesses. And, they really are the backbone of America.
And, what would I find unique about them is if you're like a solo entrepreneur in, kind of, the tech world, you basically are part of the laptop class. You go to a coffee shop. You know, you drink your iced coffee. You you write an email or something. You get paid some money. Then you go to your cycling class. Right? And you kinda go out with your friends. Like, it's pretty cake, you know, life. Yeah. Nothing wrong with it. More power to those people. Right?
But the solo entrepreneur in, like, kind of the blue collar industry or in Main Street business, like, they open their shop at 7 AM. They're physically there. Right? Usually, their family is running it, so their wife or their kids or, you know, whatever is there. They're on their feet all day. They close at 7 PM. Right? They're physically moving goods around. They're dealing with customers.
You know, if, if you run like a digital business, like, you know, let's say you have a substack or something, when people have complaints, they like send an email. Right? Or they request a refund. Like, you don't even know their name. Right? It's it's this very, like, impersonal thing. Whatever. If you're, like, a local business and someone's got a problem, they, like, come in to the store and they yell at you. Right?
And then, like and by the way, you have to, like, smile and take it and be like, I'm so sorry that happened. Let us, you know, correct it. Let's fix it. Whatever. So it's just like a very different experience, I think, than a lot of people in the tech industry. But, a lot of these businesses also, they struggle with things that we take for granted in the tech industry. Marketing, sales, product development, you know, even internal systems. Right?
I I recently, went and I visited a, a manufacturing type business, and we were walking on the floor. And it, it blew my mind because everyone had, headphones on. And I was thinking to myself. I'm like, that's the podcast audience. Yeah. I don't know what podcasts are listening to, right, or music. But these people are sitting here on this manufacturing and kinda factory floor, and they're working. But for, you know, 8 hour shift, they're consuming audio content.
And so we don't think of that in the tech industry. I record podcasts. I don't think about the person, you know, sitting there on the factory floor, but, like, that that is some of the people who are consuming it. And so when you see these businesses, there's a lot of opportunity where you can kind of go in, I think, and and and help.
Now line striping in particular, my interest there is if you believe self driving cars are going to be popular in the future, then understanding the technology they use, some of them use lidar, some of them use computer vision. The computer vision cars, they literally see the lines on the road. The more the lines are painted well, the easier it is to see. The easier it is to see, the safer it is.
And so, it's a tech trend, but it is an area where it's really really hard to disrupt the line painting businesses. And they tend to be very fragmented, and they tend to get long term contracts. There's a lot of elements to those businesses that that are unique. I've talked to a bunch of them. It's incredibly hard to get a deal done. We've tried to buy multiple businesses, and you're just dealing with, you know, people who have done a lot of deals before.
You're dealing with people who may have been working on these businesses. One of the businesses I talked to, I think the guy I've been working on for 24 years. Here comes, you know, idiot Internet guy, right, who wants to buy my business. Like, why would I sell to you? Right. Well, you're like, well, I'm gonna pay you some money. He's like, well, how much money? Right? You know? And and you're kinda going through this whole thing.
And then you gotta figure out if you buy the business, how you gonna run the business? Right? Am I gonna go and operate the line striping, you know, machine? Probably not. How am I gonna be able to manage the people who are doing that? Do we have an operating partner who goes and does that? Right? How are they gonna be able to do it?
And and so there's a lot of complexity in doing this, but I do think there's a really, really big opportunity there, to look at these tech trends as they're occurring. And then go figure out what is the pieces of this blue collar manufacturing or industrial world that plays into those tech trends. And say, look.
I understand the tech trend because of the tech industry experience, but I also wanna be able to participate in kind of the physical world economy, in a unique way that can help support these tech trends as they occur, wind striping being one of them. You know, many, many other, I think, examples that, that we've been looking at. Why do you think it is so difficult to buy those types of businesses? Well, think of, maybe the extremes.
So, in the tech world, let's say that you were, creating a I don't know. You were, gonna make a dating app or something. Right? And, you said, I'm gonna go raise capital, which is basically you're gonna do a financing deal. Right? You would come to me and you'd say, okay. I made my nice, you know, 7 slide deck here. I meet you. I forget who said it one time, but somebody said, angel investing in, kinda, early stage venture capital, which is young dudes flirting with old dudes. Right?
Like, which I always thought was, like, a hilarious, generalization. But, like, there's some conversation. And then for the quote unquote documents, it's just, oh, we're gonna use the YC Safe. So there's already agreement on it from an industry perspective on, like, all the terms. And then there's this element of, like, the person investing the money is expecting to lose the money. So, like, they don't do diligence in an angel investment. Right? Like, they talk to the founder, like, okay.
I'm in. Sign the document. Wire the money. I hope it works. Right. Which is very rare. When you go and you buy a business, you start out literally with, why do you wanna sell the business? What what do I not know? Right? And them saying, why do you wanna buy the business? Like, what do I not know? You know what I mean? So you're already starting out with, like, distrust almost. And everyone's kinda figuring out, like, why why would we do this?
And so there's almost like you're sitting on different sides of the table. Whereas, when you're an angel investor and a founder, you actually are making a a decision to end up on the same side of the table. Because you're gonna go forward and build a company together. And so I think that's one is just like the the, point at which you're arriving at the deal. The second is there is no YC safe. You're literally negotiating every single point.
There's a lot of things in there that, obviously, become sticking points and and people have to get comfortable with. The third is you're buying control. It's much easier to you know, okay. Here's, you know, 50 k and and, basically, I own such a small portion of the company that, you know, I have no say. If you're gonna own the business, things like, well, what if I sell you my business, what are you gonna do with my people?
I'm not even gonna be involved anymore, but these people have worked for me for 15 years. I know their families. I know their kids. I literally remember when their kids were born. Right? We celebrate their birthdays at the factory floor. Like, what's gonna happen to them? You know, there's a business that we looked at recently, kind of in the manufacturing space. They're one of the largest employers in a very small town in Kentucky.
And so if you do something to that business, literally, that town could feel, you know, kind of negative impact. And so I think there's, you know, just kind of other aspects that aren't included in these, like, tech deals. And the last thing is just, like, how do you agree on price? You know, one of the one of the crazy things is, a lot of people, especially private equity folks that, you know, I talk to and and, try to learn from, A lot of spreadsheets.
Well, you know, here's what the business does. Here's a multiple. Here's what we think it's worth. And frankly, there's a lot of business owners that just say, I don't care about your spreadsheet. I got a number in my head. You either pay me the number or I'm not selling. And so you have somebody who's trying to be a rational economic actor, and you got somebody who's, you know, more kind of emotionally thinking through they just pick the number out of thin air and this is the number they want.
Sometimes those people can meet and agree, a lot of times they can't. And so it's just it's just a harder deal, I think, to do than, you know, maybe in the tech industry, we're just, like, very spoiled because we figured out YC safe. There's this, you know, kind of minority, investment interest. We end up on the same side of the table. It's very much a, like, how do I pay it forward? Right?
And, and so maybe we should be fortunate, you know, to to kind of be in an industry where those things are true. So you you're spending some time focusing on the the line striping businesses mainly because you see that autonomous driving will become a big thing. AI is also something that a lot of people are focusing on and investing in now.
Are there any boring businesses or or niches under that subset that people should be paying more attention to that will also become big because the AI wave will become big? Well, back in 2016, 2017, we had a business, where we started out, first with GPU mining. So, we're mining ETH, to start and, you know, start out very small, grew a little bit bigger. My partner, Jason Williams, had a, a business that he was running, which takes car tires, turns it into electricity.
And so it, you know, breaks down these car tires and gets a bunch of, kind of commodity, outputs, and then is able to generate power. That power, they could then sell into the grid. We said, well, rather than just sell it into the grid, why don't we also mine right here, you know, on-site? And so we started kinda getting a little bit, you know, kinda deeper into this. And then my father, had been in the data center business for a long time. And so we started saying, Well, hold on a second.
You have data centers. There's this mining thing. We also see these GPUs being valuable in terms of self driving cars, you know, 3 d rendering, you know, DNA sequencing, like, all this kind of stuff. So I have a tweet back in 2017, I think it is, where I say, you know, the c p, the world runs on CPUs today. Eventually, it'll run on GPUs. Probably one of my most prescient tweets, and I did absolutely nothing. I didn't buy NVIDIA stock. I didn't, you know, like, like, just show buy NVIDIA.
Well well, so, you know, at the time, when I was we were operating this business, and so, you know, we clearly saw where the world was going.
I think that, you know, if I could go back probably, out of many of the businesses that we've operated, run, you know, acquired over the years, that business, I wish that we had kind of spent more time, put more energy into, you know, and and really kind of, kind of pushed further because today, what is kind of the physical world, you know, kind of support of AI on the data centers? Right? Would be a it would be an amazing, amazing business. And so, you know, lesson learned. Right?
You kinda you you live and you move on. But I think that, every tech trend, you definitely can find these real world businesses or opportunities, that that kinda support them. How much money did that business end up making? That business? Yeah. Well, we, early on, we mined a decent amount of Ethereum, and then I was real smart. I was sort of mining at, like, $8, and, I sold it all at a 150. So and we made a decent amount of money, but, not anywhere near Yeah.
I do. Today, I think, Ether trades at $24100. So, yeah, we sold it at 1.50. You kinda you you, like, cut yourself short by, you know, whatever. But it's also hard to predict, though, what the real ceiling is. Yeah. There's 2 ways to look at it. Right? It's, oh my god. Look how dumb I am, which, like, yeah, I kinda think, you know, look how dumb I was. I sold it at a $150. But but, also, it gave me capital that I otherwise wouldn't have had that I then went and used. Right?
And some of that capital ended up being capital I used to buy Bitcoin at $3,000. Right? And $3,000 is now 60 k. Whatever. 60 k. Yeah. So, like, you know, you kinda live and you learn, and, it it's impossible to predict what would have happened. So I just try not to spend any time on, you know, that stuff and just say, look. What are the lessons I can take from those situations and, you know, use them to apply moving forward?
Out of all the businesses that you've spent time with, invested in, built, what do you think most entrepreneurs get wrong when trying to scale their business? There's a lot of founders who they dream, but they don't have goals, which is really hard. You know, if if I had to say, like, it's hard to kind of, breakthrough to where you got a business. Right? You kinda have an idea, but but to get a real business going, you you can't be a dreamer.
You really have to have kind of goals and and a plan to to get there. So I would say a lot just from an aggregate number of people who wanna start a business. They get stuck in kind of dreams, not goals. Of those that break through and kind of get to a business, then I would say, really, there's there's kind of 2 things. 1 is, can they get the right team? And, you know, some people can kinda get it right for the first iteration of the business.
But in order to scale past that, you gotta kind of upgrade the team. And they might have difficulty doing that or or whatever. So, I I think that kind of each stage of the business provides, you know, new challenges. And then another thing, I see a lot of founders I I think, maybe it's not a a fatal mistake, but it definitely negatively impacts the business. They just operate without speed.
And, that speed, you know, we even with our businesses, like, I will talk with people and they'll say, okay. Let's do x. And then I'll say, okay. When do you think you can get that done? And they'll say, you know, it's Monday. How about by Wednesday? And I'll say, it's 12 o'clock. How about by 3 PM? And they're like, okay. And I'm like, why is our default that we're gonna do it by Wednesday when, you know, we it's a 1 hour exercise. Like, just go do it right now. Right?
And so I fall into the same thing. Right? It's hard to always kind of be, you know, on edge and, hey, let's just do it right now. But if I can instill that in the team, then they can instill it back in me and we hold each other accountable. You get just this, kind of speed and and and this iteration that gives you an advantage.
But I think it also signals kind of an offensive mindset that allows for you to kind of fight complacency, you know, flight, any, fight any sort of degradation in your organization. It keeps the culture really, kind of vibrant and and alive. I think that's probably the biggest thing. My buddy, Sriram, over at, Andreessen Horowitz, he he wrote a short blog post. I think he called it clock speed. Like, what's the clock speed in the organization? Right?
And so maybe it's like, having a low clock speed is, you know, the the big mistake that I see a lot of people make. And not only are you successful, but you've also sat down with a lot of other successful people through your podcast, including Mark Cuban, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks. What do you think are a few traits that separate these hyper successful billionaires from the average person? I do think there is an element of, ambition plays into it.
I think likability is actually really, really important, and people kind of underestimate that. So when you spend time with a lot of these people, you kinda walk away and you're just like, that person is just fun to be around. Right? And so if that's your personal experience, like, obviously, it probably people that they're hiring or trying to sell to or whatever have a similar type of experience, and they just wanna be around them. So that's important.
I think things like working hard is kinda table state. Like, of course, they work hard. I do think that they probably have good ideas. And some of that's intelligence. Some of that's creativity. Some of that is just, kind of being around and in the flow of things and kind of, you know, figuring out how to put pieces together. And and then there's a very interesting dynamic of, like some people call it, like, contrarianism. I tend to think of it as high disagreeableness.
I know that I have a high disagreeableness. My wife and I talk about it a lot because, being married to someone with a high disagreeableness means when she suggests things, I immediately think no. And so I have to, you know, sometimes remind myself, like, hey. This thing that is this amazing quality and, you know, a huge, advantage at work is probably a detriment at home. And so, like, how do you kinda, like, learn to turn it off a little bit?
But I do think a lot of them have a a high disagreeableness that they're able to kind of naturally just rely on. Why is that an advantage? Well, if you want normal results, then you kinda follow a normal path. But if you reject the normal path, then it opens you up for an opportunity to get abnormal results. And so the world is built to push people down a normal path with, you know, realistic expectations, like the whole, like, be realistic. Right?
A highly disagreeable person just tells you, I am being realistic. Like, we're gonna do whatever. And and, you know, maybe Elon is the extreme of this, you know, if you kind of read about the way he operates where he's just like, no. We're just gonna do it in a year. And everyone else is like, it's gonna take 20 years. He's like, we're gonna do it in a year. And, like, maybe it actually takes 5 years. And so everyone will critique him and be like, well, he said 1, but it took 5.
But, you know, another way to look at it is like, well, everyone else said 20 and he did it in 5. Right? And but it's this disagreeableness with the consensus. It's disagreeableness with, kind of, the the standard path. It's a disagreeableness with the normal result. And, also, a lot of times, this high disagreeableness means somebody is stubborn. And so when they try something and it doesn't work, they kinda keep trying, right, until they kinda figure it out.
So I think that's, like, a really important quality that, again, positives and negatives to it, but but, you know, a lot of these guys, that I've met have. And you have a book, that comes out on September 24th called How to Live an Extraordinary Life. For someone listening to this podcast, what are some of the things that they can do today to level up their life? Yeah. So the book is, you know, a series of 65 letters that I wrote to my kids. I started writing, these letters.
My wife asked me, when our first child was born, hey. Can you write her a letter? Like, she'd love to read it, you know, later. So I wrote a letter. And that letter was, you know, frankly, like, a dad writing to his first kid just being like, this is awesome. I'm glad you're here. Right? Like, there was no life advice. There was no any it was just like, this is cool. And I was super excited, you know, whatever.
And then, I started to say, well, you know, I never really thought that I was gonna live past 35. And it was somewhat maybe of, like, a joke. As I was growing up, I used to joke that, you know, I'm not gonna live past 35, so I might as well get everything done now. And, as I started to get closer to 35, I was like, oh, like, I might have a shot to, you know, kinda live past that. And so I said to myself, look. You know, God forbid anything ever happened to me.
Like, what would I want my kids to know? Right? And so I I wrote one letter. I wrote 2. I wrote 4. And somewhere around, I don't know, 7 or 10 of them or so, I said, you know, this maybe, actually, I should turn this into, some sort of book so that not only my kids could read it, but other people could read it. And, what I tried to put in the book were ideas that I personally had learned, and implemented in my life.
And, you know, there there's things in there, such as when you're working at a job. You know, I was at Facebook. I spent 2 years there. At the end of the 1st 2 years, I remember talking, with my father. And, he said, look. You can, you know, keep working there. It's this amazing place. Just be careful that you don't work somewhere for 10 years, but you really only got 2 years of experience 5 times. Right?
If you're gonna learn 90% of the stuff that you're gonna learn there in the 1st 2 years, but you stay for 10, it it you're you're dead. Yeah. You're dead for 8 years. Right? Like, you know, understand how much are you gonna learn, you know, and all this kind of stuff. So so things like that. There's you know, a really good one is, I've never seen a problem that can withstand a proper workout.
So if you ever think about problems that you have in your life, if you're really stressed about something or really worried about something, normally, what will happen is if you go, and you kind of put a max effort workout in, regardless of what max effort is for you, you wanna go run, run, you wanna lift weights, whatever, usually, what will happen is because of the physiological changes in your body, you are better suited to actually solve the problem or kind of deal with the stress, etcetera.
And so there's a lot of kind of health and and, you know, oriented type, advice in the book. And then I think that there's a lot of stuff in terms of personal relationships. You know, one of the things that I think people kind of, forget about is we live in a world where everything you do is about relationships. And how do you, you know, maintain good personal relationships, business relationships?
There's a whole slew of things that, I've learned over the years, and so, you know, trying to impart that on my children, is important. But I wrote the letters in a way that, my kids are young today. I want them to be able to read this when they start to read, but I also want them to be able to read it when they're 25, 30, 40 years old. So how do you kind of write it in a way where it makes it as timeless as possible, was somewhat of a challenge, but but, hopefully, comes through the book.
And before we wrap it up, we have a couple of closing questions. One is, what's the best investment you've ever made? Best investment I ever made is, by far, my family. When I think about what do I get the most kind of joy out of, and happiness, spending time with my family. If I think about the thing that I spend the most amount of time doing, so with my family.
And it is probably the thing that, will pay off dividends, you know, throughout my entire life, whereas any one individual financial investment or whatever has kind of got a a life to it. And so, it's a weird way to think about it because when people are asked about investing, usually they think about, like, where did I put dollars? I think about where did I put time and time being the kind of more scarce, more valuable asset.
And if you look at family as kind of, like, the best investment, it also means that, if you can make your biggest investment your best investment, that's like a grand slam in life. And and so, I've been able to do that and, you know, very fortunate to to be in that position. And second, what's your greatest failure, and what did you learn from it? My greatest failure? In 4th grade, I was on the plug it down plane. The the soccer goal was there. I just missed the kick now. The kick.
Lost the game. Championships were over. I wish I wish I had that good of a memory. No. My biggest, my biggest mistake, I think when I was younger, it probably was just like, I didn't understand the power of constantly being the student. I was so desperate to want to, you know, get respect from my peers or or or people. I was so desperate to, you know, be in a position where folks were like, oh, this guy, like, he got it. He's smart. He's successful, whatever.
That when you're young and you don't have the substance yet, you you kind of puff your chest out. Right. And you're like like, no, I I I'm good. Like, don't like, like, I'm amazing. And then as you get older, I I think I heard some time, when somebody said, you know, successful people spend all their time feigning, stupidity because they just wanna sit around and talk about their mistakes.
Because it actually shows that, you know, they're so wise, they're so experienced that they don't have to talk about the successes. They just spend all their time talking about the failures, and that shows that they learned all these lessons. And so I do notice that, you know, myself and peers, as we've gotten older, I I kinda don't care. Like, people think whatever they want about me. Like, whatever. I know what I did. You know?
And so, if I could go back, I think that I would just kind of take more of a student approach, you know, from, from day 1, and I probably would have more knowledge and be, you know, even better situation. And lastly, if I slid you over a phone and you could call your 20 year old self, would you call? And if so, what would you say? Yeah. I'd definitely call. At 20, I was in the desert in Iraq, and I have my 21st birthday there.
And I probably it sounds so bad, but, like, I'd probably call and talk shit to myself and just be like, hey, dude. Keep your fucking head down. Right? Like, you'll be okay, but, you know, whatever. But no. If I just if I had to, like, give advice to my younger self in general, it probably would really just be focused on, you're going to figure it out. Like, stop worrying about it. Right? Like, you're going to figure it out. You're going to end up finding success, enjoy life.
Like, don't be so, you know, kind of, like, concerned with doing it. And maybe I wouldn't have actually found success if I hadn't been concerned about it. I don't know. I I didn't get the chance to run that version of, you know, kind of simulation. But, yeah, I think just, hey, just chill out. Right? Just enjoy life, and and, all will be good in the world. Probably be the advice that, that I would've given myself. Awesome. Well, I think that's a great way to end it.
Thanks, Anthony, for taking the time to join the show. We'll have a link, to all of our socials and Anthony's socials in the episode description down below. You can follow him on x or or Twitter. And thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Thanks for doing it.