How To Turn $100K into $4,000,000 with Distressed Investing

How To Turn $100K into $4,000,000 with Distressed Investing Speaker 2: So after Scott came on the pod and was like, I have my distressed guy in Europe. I'm like, Ben, find me the distressed guy in Europe. Unknown Speaker: I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. Speaker 2: All right, so Scott Gallo is on our podcast and we ask him, we say, you know, we heard the story that you were buying distressed FTX claims after FTX went into bankruptcy and everybody hated it. It was like, it was a disgrace. It was the symbol of a bad, bad business, a bad investment. I heard that you were buying up claims on the cheap and that those claims are now being paid out, you know, in full or even more than full because Sam Bankman-Fried, whatever he was doing his thing, he had owned enough assets that would make all the creditors whole. And so he tells a story about how he's got this guy who's brought him into a couple of deals and he was talking about distressed investing. Speaker 3: And when he told the story, he kind of dismissed it. He was like, I bought $10 million of FTX shares or something like that. Speaker 2: Or $2 million, I think. Speaker 3: Sorry, whatever it was, it was like a seven-figure bet. And he sort of just said like, yeah, I just did this one thing. And Shaan and I were like, Rewind, what? And that's where you told the story. Speaker 2: Also, it was a moment where it's like, hold up, put some respect on the podcaster's name. I mean, I think a lot of people make fun of Scott. There's like the inverse Scott Galloway index and stuff like that, basically about his bad calls he's made in his life. And I think in general, people don't really realize, and Sam, you do a good job of this. You're like, actually, you were an entrepreneur who sold a company for $100 million. He never really talks about it that much. And then he's done some interesting investing stuff. And I just feel like Because he's so good at the gift of gab, I think people sort of bucketed him as all talk, no walk. So it was interesting to hear one of his interesting walk stories. So then I got in touch with Tommy and I said, tell me about this. I'm interested. What are you doing? What's going on? And he had some interesting stories. So I wanted to invite him on the podcast. To do two things, teach us about this category of distressed. Both me and Sam are pretty much novices in this. We're missionary guys. We like vanilla. We do very basic stuff when it comes to business and investing. This is more exotic and it's got me interested. I want you to start We're here with a little crispy description of like, what's the big idea with distressed investing? What are you trying to do? How do we wrap our minds around this? And then I want to play a game called First, Best, Worst, Weirdest, which is where we go through maybe the first play you did, the best play that ever worked out for you, the worst deal that went sideways, and then just something where shit got weird while you were doing it. Can you just make us a little smarter? Teach us distressed investing one-on-one. Speaker 1: What are we talking about? Oh, man. Okay, so I am the bottom of the food chain of distressed investing. So there is a whole industrial complex of large distressed investing firms out there. You have Oaktree and Silverpoint and Fairlawn and you guys, Apollo, everyone's heard these names or maybe if you follow business and investing, I guess. So for myself, I kind of came up a different way, which is my parents were bankruptcy lawyers and I sort of learned, I knew a lot about bankruptcy and generally what you're trying to do is you're almost like value investing and the toolkit is you know a lot about the legal process. The trick that I've from studying a lot of distressed investing is You know, and there's this famous Michael Price saying, which you guys have probably heard, but if you haven't, it's sort of, he says, when you're investing, you always want like the stake in the sizzle. I think what, where the okay investors in distressed do right is they find stake. You know, you find something and maybe it's a double. But where the guys that really knock the cover off the ball and have outstanding returns, generally are looking for that sizzle as well. Speaker 2: The stake is the kind of the known value that's there. It's the substance. It's the thing that will give you a margin of safety when you buy. The sizzle is the upside of how good this could be if things go right. But you still have the stake even if things don't go great. Speaker 1: Exactly. And that's even what the whole pitch on FTX with Scott was, which is, You're buying a stake, you're buying 20 cents, you know you're going to get 30 cents in cash back, plus you have all this crypto sizzle. And unless you're, you know, I don't want to say a Luddite, but unless you're just really, really aggressively against crypto, there was a lot of optionality built into that. And if you look at the history of distress, some of the best ones have been financial service bankruptcies, Ponzi scheme cases, as well as like the dot-com cases were actually pretty good. You think of things like ComDisco, which was a famous large bankruptcy. And a lot of those actually, they kind of petered out because there wasn't as much debt. It was just equity values went to zero. So if you look at the history, they can be pretty good. And that was kind of the playbook was, as my friend would say, who's a pretty smart investor, he says, you avail yourself to the optionality, you know, so because you sort of set yourself up to either buy that for For free, you get it for free or buy it extremely cheaply. So that's what we're doing in FTX and that's what we really try to replicate in almost everything we do, no matter if it's crypto or just general distressed. Speaker 3: Is your company just you? Are you just a guy or do you have a team? Speaker 1: I'm just a guy. I mean, I have a small team. I think Scott calls me a lifestyle business guy, but I would describe it as what's nice about what I do is I get to choose when I work, how hard I'm working. If there's no deals, I don't have to work on stuff. And also, because I'm in a low-cost jurisdiction, You know, that passes through to my clients. So, you know, is Scott paying the usual fees that you would pay if you went to a big distress firm? Probably not. I mean, maybe because they want Scott as a client, but for the most part, the fee structure would have to be higher. Your cost structure is higher. Speaker 3: So can I dumb this down like in a way, like I'm kind of a caveman and you can tell me if I'm right, but basically you find distress deals, you convince rich people to buy them and you take a small cut. Is that right? Yes. Speaker 1: Or I invest my own capital. Speaker 3: Or you invest your own money and you're so good that people come back over and over again. Speaker 1: Well, if you lose money for people, they generally don't return your phone calls. They might call you, but they don't pick up when you call. Speaker 2: So let's walk through an example together. And I think we should use FTX because it's a pretty well-known company. It's kind of what we were already talking about. So walk me through the origin story of the FTX deals so that we can kind of see like we can get like a blueprint of the type of thing that you're going to try to do. What is the type of thing that you do? So where does the story start with your FTX interest? Speaker 1: Yeah, so we were I had already been involved in a number of crypto distressed situations and I should back up to just say as a backdrop like So having studied so many different investors throughout my life and kind of that's what I was really always interested in is principally just being an investor. One of the things you'll realize is the guys with really good returns also invented a category. So I was very interested in crypto distress as a category and I thought, hey, crypto is the future. No one's willing to touch crypto. So back in 2014-15, I was already looking at Mt. Gox. Myself and at the time my partner, we were the largest buyer of claims in Mt. Gox. Speaker 2: But before you tell the Mt. Gox story, I just want to double-click on, you said, some of the best investors, they ended up, like, actually now when you look back, they kind of had invented a category. Can you give a couple of examples of people, of guys who did that? Speaker 1: So like Howard Marks is the prototypical example, right? Like he kind of invented the whole idea of like institutional, not just him. There were other people, of course, but he was in, you know, a very early and basically him and a group of people invented the idea of institutional asset class to distressed investing. So what that does is it compresses It lowers cost of capital and really brings a whole pool of capital that we've never invested in this. So the long-term returns might go down, but it's because the actual cost of capital is coming down. And so your tailwind returns are just enormous. Speaker 3: And what does that mean? Does that mean that, like, institutional investors, they were, like, normally afraid of this and Howard was like, no, this actually makes a ton of sense and it's actually kind of safe and here's why. And so he convinced large institutions to buy into that, is that what you're saying? Speaker 1: Yeah, to allocate. And the same thing with, like, early venture guys. I mean, I guess before you have, like, the 70s and 80s, I mean, Alan Patricoff and people like that, these were guys that really invented the category. And, of course, They have huge firms now and, you know, the valuations for startups, but it's like it's this wall of liquidity that creates these kind of tailwind returns, which are fantastic. You want it. I mean, you kind of like that's the most amazing thing is catching one of those waves. Speaker 2: Like YC is a good example of this or YC basically. It created the category of the accelerator. It created the category of this pre-seed, pre-everything, pre-product, pre-revenue, pre-traction, investing. And so that really wasn't a popular category. Now it's a whole industry. There's angels and there's super angels and there's seed funds and pre-seed funds. There's a whole industry now that specializes in that category. But it really started, even Paul has said this, as an experiment. He was curious. How early on could you fund somebody? Could you fund a student? Could you fund a grad student? And, you know, he sort of thought it might be too early, but he wanted to go see what happens when you do that. Speaker 1: Yeah, and even, you know, for me, when I was starting my hedge fund, my very first, when I was really a kid, some of my early investors were Goldman partners that were partners when it went public, and they were all sort of early LBO guys, like levered buyout guys, before private equity became an institutional asset class. And their returns were just insane, like insane returns. Speaker 2: Hey, real quick, our sponsor for today, Hubspot, actually did something pretty cool. If you like money stuff like this, you like investing wisdom like Warren Buffett or Monish Pabrai, well, they actually put together a nine investment principles document. There's a free document you can have of frameworks that they shared when they came on the podcast. You can get it right now. It's actually just a mental model that separates, I guess, the elite investors from the average investors. So you can get it right now. Scan the QR code or click the link in the description. All right, let me get back to the episode. Okay, so let's go back to your story. So you're saying... You got excited about potentially being the first in a category of crypto distressed. Distressed already was a thing, but nobody, most people were afraid of crypto in general. So especially the institutional guys weren't going to go in there. So you're like, okay, maybe I can carve out a niche of distressed crypto. We're all looking for a thing. This could be my thing. And you're saying the FTX story actually started before that. Before FTX, it was Mt. Gox. Sam, are you familiar with Mt. Gox? Do you know the rough story here? Speaker 3: Yeah, it was sort of Coinbase before Coinbase, but it had some nefarious characters involved. Speaker 2: Yeah, so there was a huge kind of like sort of hack problem with Mt. Gox. Tom, what happened with Mt. Gox? What did you actually do there? Speaker 1: Let's start with that one. So Mt. Gox was really the first. It was almost 80% of the volume at the time in 2014 when it went under. And it was the largest exchange. I mean, other than going peer-to-peer and going to a Starbucks and buying Bitcoin, like that was where you traded Bitcoin. And they had a pretty aggressive hack. They tried to cover up the hack, which was the real crime was the cover-up. Eventually, they filed for insolvency in Japan and what's called a Chapter 15 in the States. That's kind of irrelevant. It just recognizes the foreign proceeding as the main proceeding. And, you know, you could buy claims. For a while, you could buy them for about a fifth of the market price of Bitcoin. This is when Bitcoin is like $300. And then in 2018, the state actually sold some Bitcoin to have enough to pay people the cash value of their claim at the petition date. When I say cash, I mean fiat. I'll try to use fiat. And so you could buy below the cash. You get the Bitcoin for free. Speaker 2: Sorry. So just to slow this down for a second, when you say buy the claims, what you're saying is, I was a customer, let's say, of Mt. Gox. And boom, I lost my money. It's insolvent. I don't know what's going to happen with this. It's going to go through a bankruptcy process. I'm hoping maybe in a few years I'll be able to get something out of this. And guys like you knock on the door and you say, I'm so sorry for your loss. You know what? I'll offer you something today for the rights to that claim you have as a customer, as a creditor in this bankruptcy thing. It's gonna take a long time. It's a little uncertain, you know, so I'll give you, and in that case, like, for every kind of dollar worth of claim, what were you buying the claims for at Mt. Gox? Speaker 1: Yeah, so the original trade, Bitcoin, was at about $300, and we were buying the claims for about $80 per Bitcoin. Speaker 3: Were you a Bitcoin person or were you just a distressed person? Speaker 1: I would say, yeah, I studied economics. I remember reading about Bitcoin when it was like $10 and I was like, wow, that's cool if it works. But other than that, I had no, I was like, this is pretty crazy. Speaker 2: All right, so dumb question. They get hacked so they don't have the Bitcoin. So what is underneath? I get in the FTX case because he had invested in all these underlying companies and they still had some assets. What did Mt. Gox have that made you think that the claims would be worth anything? Speaker 1: So just if you want to do it in Bitcoin terms, there's about 800,000 Bitcoin that was supposed to be there. Within a first month or two, they basically found 200 Bitcoin. Speaker 2: Found 200 or 200,000? Speaker 1: 200,000. Okay. Speaker 2: So they found 200,000 of the 800 that's supposed to be there. Yeah. Speaker 1: Right. So now you know, you know, this is, this is, you know, distress actually the math, even though I studied math, math and distress is always super simple. Like 200 over 800. Okay. You got 25 cents. So guys are going to get back 25 cents. We're basically offering them 5 cents. This is on the Bitcoin dollar. Speaker 3: You bought the assets after you learned that he magically discovered. So you're like minimal downside, potentially high upside. Speaker 2: So the stake there was they got 200,000 Bitcoin sitting there today and it's $300 a Bitcoin. I can buy it for 25% of that value. So that's your stake. And your sizzle was maybe they'll find more, maybe Bitcoin price will go up. Is that right? Is that the right way to think about that? Speaker 1: Basically, yep. Maybe they'll find more and you get a 5x return on Bitcoin. That was the original pitch. And I remember the first hedge fund I pitched it to, the guy literally laughed me out of his conference room. And whenever I saw him around town, he would just be like, Bitcoin. I mean, it was like 2015 to be fair. Speaker 2: It's the Bitcoin loser. I'm imagining like the big short here because I don't know anything about this world. So my only reference point is movies. So I'm imagining you're Michael Burry. You're sitting in your room by yourself. You're pouring through the papers and you're like, you're like pen and you're like, you know, doing the math. You're like, $200,000, $800,000, $0.25, $0.05. The equations are popping out of your head. And then you go to the hedge fund and then they sort of laugh you out of the room. And they're like, listen, do you want to just get lunch? Because we're not doing this. Do you want to make something out of this hour? Were you just getting laughed out of the room in that way? Speaker 1: Well, I remember the name of the fund. I won't mention them. They're out of business now. If that's any, this is any God, but, uh, it was big name names. Speaker 2: Yeah. They're dance on the graves. Speaker 1: The guy won't remember, but the, the firm was Southpaw. I don't know what happened to the guys at Southpaw. Uh, it was like a $2 billion hedge fund. Anyway, it doesn't really matter. It was forever ago. And to be fair, fair to the guy, like I said, Oh, this crypto exchange, my claim for fifth of the market value. He's like, Crypto? You mean like Bitcoin? And I said, I said, yeah, yeah, Bitcoin. He's like, you want me to buy Bitcoin? And I was like, well, you know, the claims get five times your money. And he's like, he started slapping his knee. He was like, Tom, that is the funniest shit I've heard all week. It is like, what else are you working on? Speaker 2: And I was like, what's the real idea? Speaker 3: Were you an employee somewhere? Speaker 2: Were you on your own? Speaker 1: How much did you buy? Okay, so I had a small hedge fund. So I bought about $200,000 worth, like literally nothing. But for my small hedge fund, that was like, I was like, well, it's like 10% of my money. I got to like, you know, it was only I don't know. I had so much. I mean, it's a really small hedge fund I was running. I said, OK, I can't. This is like, you know, I could get in trouble. I can't, like, make this too big. So I like to call some of these guys I know. And when you're when you have a small hedge fund, the nice thing you can do is you can't have somebody out of a relationship. Like you can do a million. Like if you buy a $10 million deal, You can get, I don't know, I'm just making up a name, Oaktree. You call Oaktree. I mean, they won't do $10 million deals, but you say, hey, you want nine of this? I want one million of it. You don't even have to pay me anything. I just need you because I need the money. So you make friends and you kind of figure out ways to get symbiotic relationships with some of these cats. I mean, similar to probably Indian trees, like the coopetition. You know if you want to dress it up and make it sound fancy. But I mean that's how I spent my whole career is like co-op petitioning with like all the big distress firms. So they call me with tiny stuff that they can't do and I call them with big stuff that I can't do and I ask for either allocation or a fee or something. But generally I'm asking for allocation because I'm not like a registered dealer or broker. Speaker 2: What did you end up making on the Mt. Gox trade? How much did you end up getting in and what was the in and what was the out? Speaker 1: Yeah, they were across a number of different SPVs and we had a later hedge fund that was buying all the way up. So they probably made like two, three times their money because they were literally buying all the way up through the distribution. They'll still buy claims to this day. But our original investor made about 38 times his money. Actually, it's more than that now. It's over 40 times his money. Speaker 3: Over what period of time? Speaker 1: Oh yeah, like seven years. Speaker 2: And is that because Bitcoin price appreciated basically? Speaker 1: Yeah, so some of it is about 5x of it is the discount and then the rest is their appreciation. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: But he put it on in 2000. The guy I'm describing was our real first outside LP, outside of the fund, which liquidated and we sold the claim. And I think that claim we bought, the original claim we bought from a Googler actually, it was pretty funny. And I always joke because I was a kid and I had my standard documents, but I didn't have documents for like a Japanese court. And he was like, so how do we do this, Tom? And I was like, You know, I don't know. And he said, well, why don't I ask? So I always joke that Google wrote my original purchase documents for the purchase of, you know, like, I don't know the name of the firm, Step Shoe and something or some firm that worked for Google, because this guy was like a big up at At Google, but yeah, about 40 plus times, but a lot of it is appreciation. But the really interesting thing about that guy that originally did the deal with us, this family office guy, is we were buying the Bitcoin for free because he put that trade on in 2018. That was the big short moment because you were getting it for free. Speaker 2: Explain that. Why did you get it for free? Speaker 1: Okay, because the rough math at the time, in 2018, Bitcoin was like 10 grand, 12 grand-ish, and the trustees sold a fifth of the Bitcoin. So they sold about 40,000 Bitcoin and brought in about $600 million of cash. And so there was $600 million of cash and there was about $3 billion of crypto or $2.5 billion of crypto. We were buying the claims for below the cash value, the cash look-through value on the claims. So we were buying for about a $400 million valuation. There was $600 million of cash, and there was about $2 billion of crypto. So that was the time when I was like really banging the table. Because before that, it was all Bitcoin, and it was cheap, but it was quite directional. Speaker 2: Why do they sell it for below the cash value at that point? Is it because there's still a time delay? Is there an uncertainty? Speaker 1: Yes, and there was uncertainty around whether who got the uplift in value. So in 2018, there was this big argument, who gets the uplift in value? Does it go back to Mark Appellas? Like the guy that kind of Didn't do us right, or does the uplist in value go to the customer account claim? It's the same thing happened in FTX. The same thing happens in all the crypto bankruptcies. Who gets appreciation and value post-petition? Petition meaning the date the company files for insolvency. Speaker 3: I'm an absolute outsider. I'm learning all about this right now, but like Mt. Gox and particularly FTX, those were pretty big news headlines. And as an outsider, when I see this, I just think, oh, I'm sure like there is no opportunity because everything is being taken care of. Like they're going to catch the bad guy. But then also all the big dogs are already after this. Like there's no way to make it money. There's no opportunity. Not me. Someone else is probably like on top of this. But the way that you're describing yourself, maybe this is like you're underselling yourself, but you're kind of describing yourself as like just a smart guy who just like kind of gets in the mix and figures it out. Speaker 1: Take out the smart part. Speaker 3: Well, you're doing it again. You just did it again. But you, like, how many, like, literally, how many human beings, like, how many human beings are actually getting after this, like, for the Mt. Gox? And like, who do you phone? Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of questions in there. Okay, so, You're right in some sense. All the big firms have a corner on the bond. If you want to try to play the bonds and stuff like that, you can't open up a Fidelity account and trade distressed bonds. You call them and you say, oh, can I get a quote on this bond? And they're like, well, that's in default. You're like, I know it's in default. I'm asking what the quote is. And they're like, oh, we don't trade in defaulted bonds. They're way too risky for you to be looking at. So you'd have to have real prime brokers. And, you know, you have to have serious money to play that game. Also, you have to worry about getting run over by big distress firms. Speaker 3: Sort of actually just like in the big short where the two guys who had the garage hedge fund, which was big, I mean, big for a regular guy, it was $20 million of their own money they're playing with. They were like laughed out of chase or something like that. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, the same thing with derivatives markets. I mean, you have to have serious setups and serious, well, I call them lines. You have to have lines with your PVs to be able to do this stuff. And so I knew the other side of the market or kind of the, that's why I said I'm the lowest And today we're talking about the second rung of the totem pole, which is the claims market. So there are probably like 10 firms out there that really do trade claims. And, you know, I say this lovingly because I'm one, most people in space are not super smart. It's kind of like the, I don't know, in IT, maybe it's more like the, oh gosh, I'm going to offend somebody, like the network administrator. I don't know, like the kind of like the lowest level of IT person. This is like the lowest level of distressed person. Yeah, and so, but I kind of like hanging out with the rejects. What can I say? Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: Anyway, so you're kind of like a, what's that, you know, they have a shark and they have a thing that like lives on the shark. Speaker 2: The food chain, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, you're like that little thing that eats the stuff that falls off the shark. And the shark kind of likes you because you keep the barnacles off it or something. And that's you as a trade claim buyer if you befriend some of these larger stress firms. The cases we're largely talking about when you have cryptocurrency exchanges going under and things like that, you're talking about customer account claims. And customer account, what's nice about that, like both in FTX and then if you go back to Mt. Gox, is the docket was largely customer account claims. And so it's all trade claims. There's not a lot of structured debt. And so, certain setups are just not appropriate for a small person or home gamer to be trying. But, you know, you can literally buy claims. There's nothing that stops you. Speaker 3: But do you go, do you put out a press release and you say, hey, all 100,000 FTX or Mt. Gox claim holders, please email me and let's talk? Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: If you've been wronged by this curly haired man, call me. I'm here for you. Speaker 1: Okay, so yeah, so in, okay, Mt. Gox is a good example. Fortress was my competitor on that docket, and they were buying up claims too. Pete Brigger's a big Bitcoiner, and he's one of the founders of Fortress, and they were buying up claims, and they were my competitor on that case. They were the only two people really buying claims. We almost worked together, but we're still friends and everything, and yeah, we're still friends. They actually did do like press releases and tried to get people that way. For myself, this is gonna sound ridiculous, but the entire 14,000, you know, 14,000 creditors or customers was a leaked list. So, one of the things about distressed, yeah, so you were able to use the leaked list to actually find people. My favorite is when you find somebody and his name's like some random name, like Spin Erickson, I don't know, make up some, and he's in tech and he, on LinkedIn, he's like, You know he's part of the Bitcoin group and then you ping him and you're like hey do you have a Mt. Gox claim if you do like we could buy it from you. And he's like how did you find me and you're like well let me see you're under 35 you're into tech and you're part of the Bitcoin group. And they're only three with people with the same name. Speaker 3: So like this is work. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, you're hustling. There's a lot of work. Speaker 2: The work here is you find the person, you contact them, you get them interested, you verify their ownership and that they haven't already sold the claim to somebody else. There's like a whole bunch of work that you do so that guys like me Could just invest in, just buy the claim and we feel like, all right, you've done the diligence on this. You've done the cleanup work on this. That's what we would have to trust you and that's why you get paid a carry or a fee from investors. Speaker 1: And you know, what's interesting is, so it is a lot of grunt work. That's why I think sometimes it gets like the more like, you know, guys holding footballs who, you know, played hockey or something in college. You know, there's not, it's not like the brainiest side of distress. But actually, there's a lot of intricate, like, I'll call them corner cases, like claim corner cases, where you really do need to know a lot about the legal side. I mean, with ChatGPT, it helps a lot. But still, it helps to have a wonderful experience and, you know, prompting chat is just as important as anything. So the more you know, the more powerful it is. Speaker 3: But it seems like a good life for you. Yeah. You're hanging out in Italy. It seems like you work project to project. And what's the upside here for you? Like, can you make tens of millions of dollars in one year? Speaker 1: Yes. I mean, I don't know, not, I mean, seven figures, definitely. Eight figures is pretty hard. What happens is you get people that push back on your fees. They say like, oh, you're not in New York, you're not a real firm, like it's just a few guys, like you're just a broker. But you know, you build a reputation over time and then people will pay you more and more. But you can definitely make seven, eight figures, especially in a good year, especially if you have something work out and you ever promote on it. Speaker 2: So let's walk through that game I talked about. First, last, best, worst, weirdest, whatever. Maybe you were a kid, maybe you were in middle school or something like Sally didn't want her bike anymore and you're like, oh, your trash is my treasure. So what was your first foray into buying distressed assets? Speaker 1: OK, so my parents really were bankruptcy lawyers or lawyers. My mom specifically was a consumer bankruptcy lawyer. So I used to hang out like at the courthouse as a kid and like hang out with the clerk's office and with like U.S. trustees and stuff. So I kind of grew up like really. Speaker 2: Did you like it or she just like didn't have daycare and you had to go? Speaker 1: Yeah, basically. Speaker 3: I had daycare. Speaker 1: A single mom, basically like no daycare. Tom's got the clip-on tie and he's in court with me. So a lot of clip-on ties. Yeah, this is my associate. Yeah, so and this is like paper files everywhere. So no, so I grew up kind of hanging around it. We'd always hear about stuff from, I remember when I was a kid first hearing about like HUD houses. I was like, what's a HUD house? What's that? Oh, you can buy these houses. They're really beaten up, but you can get really good deals. I remember my brother and I flipped a hud house. My mom put up the capital. I have no idea what the numbers were. We probably bought it for $20,000 or $30,000 that my mom put up, and we probably sold it for $60,000. We did the demolition ourselves, which is a, I have to say, God love my parents. I'm glad I wasn't injured severely. Doing demolition when you're 14 is probably a bad idea. Speaker 2: Listen up. The old playbook is slowing you down. AI broke the funnel. Loop marketing fixes it. It's a new era for marketers. AI is capturing search traffic, channels are fragmented, and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before. Hubspot's loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption. It's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster, connect deeper, and grow smarter. The modern growth playbook for the AI era. Built by Hubspot, designed for today's marketer. Get the Loop Marketing Playbook at hubspot.com slash loop-marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind. Speaker 1: All right, back to the pod. Speaker 2: What was the story of the baseball card shop? Ben told me there was a baseball card shop story. Speaker 1: So these are the kind of things I was talking about when I was a kid. These deals would come up. There was a whole thing where the baseball card industry went through this. They were printing cards. They said they weren't printing. I don't know if you remember this, Shaan. And there was a bit of fallout in the collection market for baseball cards. And I'm sure a few of them went under, probably like the microbrewery thing, where people overmade microbreweries. And then I've seen a bunch of microbrewery bankruptcies. And I remember seeing it was the entire shop was $3,000, which is a lot of money when I was a kid. And my mom was like, you want me to put up the money and you buy the whole thing? I was like, we can do that. I was like, I would hear about these things as a kid. And I guess it probably colored my my imagination for what was possible. And then I kind of like between that and, you know, I was really obsessed. So I started, I guess I bought my first stock when I was 11 or 12. I can't remember. But I was sort of obsessed with Warren Buffett as a kid. But I mean, and then what happened, guys, over time is I sort of melded the two things together. It's like, what would Buffett do if he had the specific knowledge, you know, that of all term, like specific knowledge of bankruptcy, plus what he knows well, which is like, you know, valuation and sort of like deep value investing or value investing. So I kind of melded those two things together. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's almost I actually think there's three there's you have knowledge of the law and not a not a not as fearful. It's like I speak the native tongue of bankruptcy court, right? So it's like, okay, I feel I can get more certainty than the people who hold the claims, right? Like I have a better idea of where how this will play out and how long it'll play out take to play out and where the puck will land. So it's like knowledge of the legal code Deep knowledge and interest in deep value investing, which I like admiring Buffett and Howard Marks and a bunch of these guys and really learning from their playbook. And then the third is just the entrepreneurial hustle to go cold call, knock on doors, raise the capital, get the claims, do the verifications, go travel to wherever and make it happen. So you kind of needed that Venn diagram to be able to do what you do. Speaker 1: That's what I'm hearing. And I think for me, I got kind of obsessed with the adventure of investing. For me, You know, like my very first like real distressed investment was this thing called Ethenex Energy where people had all these restricted physical shares. And so like I literally drove around like the Northeast and bought shares off of people and like we'd go into the local bank and get things medallion signature guaranteed. And I was like, oh, I'm just like Buffett in Snowball where he's like going around and buying shares of the hunting lodge. Speaker 3: He's like knocking on the door of Geico. Like, can you give me a tour of the office? And like, like trying to like figure it out. Yeah. Speaker 2: If somebody hasn't read Snowball, can you tell us a sort of a Buffett hustle story or a Buffett devalue distress story? Speaker 1: Gosh, I mean, I must have read it at least 10 years ago. So yeah, I mean, he was famous for there was some security. I can't think it was a hunting club that he joined just so he could buy stock in this. I mean, maybe you guys have heard the story, but there was like a hunting club that also had oil on its land. And so it's probably a hypocritical story where he like, you know, gets all the hunting gear and like joins the hunting club. Buffett doesn't give a shit about hunting. Speaker 2: Hello, fellow hunters. Speaker 1: Hello there. He's got his rifle on his, you know, like, you don't suppose you want to sell some of your shares, do you? So I can't remember exactly what the story was, but it was something along those lines. And I think it was like, you know, you could, you know, now, you know, one of the things I took away from Buffett is you're always using your unique competitive advantages, just like in any business, right? And all the lessons from business kind of apply to And just pure investing. And, you know, using those new competitive advantage, at the time, there was all this informational arbitrage. That's probably less and less now. There's still scuttlebutt, meaning like making phone calls and channel checking and like getting out in the field and hustling. And hustling goes a really long way. But, you know, now you have other advantages, like you can invest in Japanese insolvencies. Buffett couldn't invest in Japanese insolvencies because he didn't have Google Translate. So, you know, you just have to keep pushing the boat out. To me, that's the real lesson of Joel Greenblatt or Warren Buffett. Joel Greenblatt was like a famous specialist investor, which is, you know, you play the field and you use everything. Speaker 3: We just talked to Howard Marks and both Shaan and I have read a bunch of Buffett stuff. You're doing something. I have, you know, I don't want to, I don't know how great of an investor you are other than like this one topic is really fascinating to us and you seem wonderful, but you're doing something that they do. Which is you use really great language. So you've used a few phrases. You've used a few really good phrases that helped me understand things a little bit more effectively. So you're like, I just you just got to keep pushing the boat out or you're talking about like scuttlebutt like you've used these words that have done a really good job of explaining what you do, which in my head means you have done a very good job of creating a framework on how to think about this type of stuff. Speaker 1: For me, I think it's all about valuation, just how you manufacture the valuation is like the sauce and like how you, you know, you're making your sauce, like you guys are doing venture deals, like so much of it is probably access and connections and reputation and being able to get allocation, but also being able to vet founders or vet VC firms and like, you know, and also knowing what the docs look like, like all that kind of like Not a Venn diagram, but that whole like soup that makes it work, that we have the same thing in what we're doing. I mean, Howard Marks is an absolute legend. And, you know, he has a very famous, I mean, I'm sure he talked about Bruce Karsh who did, you know, a lot of the investing and Howard Marks is like the great communicator. I mean, the guy, I mean, that's one of the things I think people don't appreciate is you can still work on investments, make really good returns, but those guys are like monster communicators. Like, They are great at fundraising and they're great at what they do. They have multiple skill sets or they have partners to back them up. Speaker 2: You sent us a list of your like core philosophies and you told us the first one, the stake and sizzle philosophy that you live by. Tell us about some of these other ones. So one is shop Madison, not canal. What does that mean? Speaker 1: Okay, I stole that one. I like it because what deep value and distress, the mistakes they make is they sometimes buy like value traps. They buy real crap. The idea is you want to buy Real stuff that is cheap, that could be good. So like the phrase is, you know, you don't buy, you know, handbags on Canal Street because those are all fake. You buy them, you try to get a good price on the Madison Avenue when they're discounted. Not, you know, because, you know, fool's goal is a real problem in distress. You just say, oh, this guy put $200 million in it. It's only 10. It's like, yeah, but it's worth zero. So you got to be careful of this kind of bias that runs into like, oh, it's such a good deal. You're like, is it? So I mean, you know, assets become liabilities and liabilities can become assets when you get in a restructuring situation. Speaker 2: Alright, let's do the next one. He said, start young. The first decade is tuition. I love this. This could apply to any field, by the way. I think that's a great phrase just in general. Speaker 1: Well, you guys, come on. Y'all know a lot of this stuff, but for me, I started when I was 12. I was terrible. I think the first, I could tell you the first stocks I bought. I bought Home Depot because Bob Nardelli, who was passed over for Whoever, I think maybe Jack Walsh or maybe Emmett, whoever became the CEO of GE came over to Home Depot and he was going to GE Home Depot. Well, that didn't work at all. And, you know, so I wasn't investing at all in valuation. I was based on a story in HBR. There was this huge article in a Harvard Business Review and I was like 12 years old, like reading this being like, oh yeah, ethos. I don't even know what this word means. He's going to change the ethos. So that was like the first stuck. Yeah, I was like, ethos? I never heard of this word. Sounds smart. Sounds provocative. And so that was like the first stock. And the other one I bought was Inco, which was a large nickel producer in Canada. That actually did work out. It was based on like the rising price of nickel I read about in Foreign Affairs. And the third one was from a Forbes article. It was EMC, which is a chip manufacturer. I can't remember what happened to that one. I think I, you know, the thing is, is like, you know, this is the thing about stocks, especially when you're young and you've never done anything, you buy them and you're like, okay, I bought them. All right. And then day two, you're like, now what do we do? Speaker 2: My kids are, um, I have a one year old, a four year old and a five year old. And for my four and five year old, I just, uh, like they were trying to earn something. They wanted like ice cream or a treat or a toy or whatever. It's like, if we do this, can we have that? And I was like, here's what I'm going to give you. I'm going to give you, A hundred dollars. They're like, a hundred dollars? I was like, I'm gonna give you a hundred dollars each. But, because I was teaching about like, we were at the, we were like waiting in the parking lot and I was explaining what a grocery store is. I was like, yeah, so somebody owns this business and then they buy the stuff and then they sell it to us. I was trying to explain what a business is and I was like failing miserably. I was like, oh my God, why is this so hard to explain what a business is? But I basically told them, I gave them a hundred dollars each and I, this weekend, I'm going to present to them Five stocks of products that they use and buy. So like we bought a Nintendo Switch. So it's like here's Nintendo stock. And I'm gonna let them pick and let them invest it in an account where they're gonna start to see whether it's going up or down. And I'm gonna have them explain whatever their logic is of why they picked either Nintendo or whatever, Yamaha or whatever stock that they pick. And then they're gonna get to ride the ups and downs of this. So I'm with you on Stardom Young, even younger than you would guess. Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I just think that, you know, I don't know, you know, my own experience, like, you know, you'll meet guys, this is a common thing, I'll meet guys, I don't know, when I'm here or on holiday or wherever, and they'll have an exit. Like, I met a guy who's like a very early employee at Airbnb, and he had probably $80 million or $100 million. But he's never actually invested money. So now he's 45, probably 50. And now he's like, you know, I'm so good at this, like, I'm gonna buy some Duolingo and I'm gonna, you know, do this and do that. And I'm like, well, you just need to respect the fact that you've actually never invested money. I mean, you are amazing operator and you got a rocket ship. That's awesome. Speaker 3: Well, we say that all the time on here, which is there's a huge difference between investing and earning like via a company. Speaker 2: Not just a difference, it's almost like the opposite. It's like a power lifter that then goes and tries to do ballet or something. It's like, oh, yeah. It's all about action. Action, action, action. You got to do stuff, right? You're trying to do as many things as you can, be super productive. As an investor, it's like sit on your hands. Inaction is your friend. All the money's made in the holding, the waiting, the observing. And as an entrepreneur who was rewarded for taking action, you get punished as an investor for taking too much action. Speaker 1: It takes a ton of experience to be good and, well, even to be okay. Speaker 3: A question that Shaan has asked me before that I love, which is basically, how do you invest your own money? I want to ask you the same. Since you are a professional investor, do you have 100% of your portfolio in a variety of deals like this or are you doing any passive stuff or is it all active? Speaker 1: It's all pretty active. Yeah, I don't, I don't, you know, like, for me, it's like tax advisors, great. People that like, you know, estate planning advisors, great. Guys that want to manage my money, no thank you. Partially because I enjoy it. But also, I don't think that I've reached the capacity where I have more money than I know what to do with. I think that I can still find a lot of deals. Your opportunity set when you have a million or 10 million or whatever is just a lot better than if you're at 100. The optimal strategy changes based upon your capital base. Speaker 2: So when you say active, do you mean it's all distressed? It's like your specialty? That's where you're putting most of your network, the majority of your network? Speaker 1: Yeah, I put most of my money into our own deals. Speaker 2: You were saying early on with your hedge fund, you were putting 5% into that deal. You weren't allowed to because you have as investors to get as crazy as maybe to match your own conviction in the deal. Now, that's not the case anymore. How concentrated have you gotten? Have you ever been at a point where you're just insanely concentrated? Speaker 1: I kind of like it when it hurts a little bit because I'm so concentrated, but maybe that's me. I don't know. I feel like it's a little bit like an entrepreneurial bent. If you're not pushing yourself, then I wouldn't feel comfortable with it. I mean, I understand if you have a big exit. For me, I'm constantly investing in other deals, friends' deals. I feel like I have a pretty good deal flow in the distressed area. And then the claims work. I wouldn't say it's free money, but you can almost reliably compound your money on a small base, like a few million bucks or something. You can reliably compound that at pretty aggressive rates. Speaker 2: What do you mean by pretty progressive rates? What is that? Is that 15 percent? Is that 25 percent? Is that 30 percent? What are you talking about? Speaker 1: I don't know. Probably 30 to 50, depending on the year. You can probably easily get higher than that. Speaker 3: There's these guys, Shaan, like I used to live in Texas and they're guys who like, I didn't know what their job was. I'm like, I don't know what you do, but you're really wealthy. And I just started calling them capital men. They're just capital guys where they just like buy things. Speaker 2: Did they like it when you called them capital men? Speaker 3: It's a good phrase, Tom. You're a capital guy. Speaker 1: Maybe, I don't know. I guess for me, I feel like I've spent my entire life studying like the history of sort of like modern investing, like guys that bought banks out of bankruptcy before, you know, when you could do that. You know, guys that have minted enormous fortunes with, you know, like there's a guy that bought a tobacco company around the time they were doing the settlements with the tobacco companies who made a fortune. So I've studied a lot of these things and I've always wanted to be, to do Just one deal like that. So I guess I've always aspired to do that. But I mean, if you there's that phrase, you know, what is it a position well bought is already half sold. And I do think when you're doing sort of very special set sort of deep value distressed stuff. If you're selective, the problem with the fund and the big institutional money management firms is they always have to constantly be finding deals. The nice thing about being a little bit of a home gamer is you can be very selective. You can literally do nothing in a six-month period or a year if you just can't find anything. And there's still new claim work and bring in income, but you don't necessarily have to swing. I mean, over my lifetime, I've seen deals where guys have You know, turn, you know, $20 million into $3 billion and, you know, $6 million into $80 million in one year. I mean, you see some incredible deals in the space and, you know, you're getting high optionality, low risk because of the price you're paying. But it's a ton of work and a lot of brain damage, for sure, and a lot of hustle. And that's not necessarily the claims. Speaker 2: Alright, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story. Let me tell you about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours and I hit send and it froze. They flagged the transaction. They locked my account. They put me on hold for 45 minutes and then they told me I got to visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury. And so now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money, I can pay invoices, I can reimburse the team, all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column NA, and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC. We've kind of hyped up what you do. We've been glamorized a little bit in this episode. We've glamorized you and what you do. Give us a little bit of the ugly. So first on the asset class in general. So for example, startup investing, I could tell you it's amazing. You meet these entrepreneurs. They're telling you about the future. These are the smartest of the smart, young, ambitious, creative people. And when it works, dude, you create the next Facebook, next Airbnb. You can get 10,000 X. And then you go and start doing it and you're like, oh, and also, you know, you're going to be wrong most of the time. You think you're going to learn so much from these people. It's like you hand them the check and then you kind of don't hear from them that much after that. You're not actually going to learn that much, nor do you have any control or say in at all what's going on in your investment. And by the way, even when it works, it's going to take 10 years for it to get liquid. You might be rich otherwise. You know, this is not the way you're going to get rich. It's the way it's a hobby for people who are already rich. And that's like, If I was going to say, what's the real talk of angel investing, that's how I would describe it. What would you say is like the ugly side or the bad side of what you do? What's the downsides of this asset class? Speaker 1: Well, distressed in general, as a small player, you can get totally hosed. Every now and then I'll hear someone, even smart friends will say, oh, well, you know, KKR is going to make sure everyone's taken care of because they don't want the bad press. I'm like, what are you talking about? It's not like Wobegon. They are going to walk all over you in bankruptcy court. So I never understand this logic. And it's only from many years of Being like, oh, they're going to play nice. No, they're not going to play nice. And don't ever assume that. And sometimes you do get a gift. They'll do things that'll be a little more gift-like to wherever you are, if you're in a preferred or if you're in equity. God forbid you're in equity, but if you're even in claimant and things like that. So that's one of the ugly sides. I think also one of the ugly sides is You know, it's very transactional and financial so doesn't exactly you don't get people who are like giving you the starry eyes of the future. A lot of times you're sitting across people arguing over a pie that ain't growing. In fact, maybe the pie is bad apple pie that's already gone off. So it's like they're really arguing over something that could be either dying or shrinking. So I think it has an emotional toll on you being in distressed investing. Also, you are actually hearing people's life stories. I will not mention names, but companies will go bankrupt and this will be someone's entire life's work. And they're Picasso. And they're spending two hours telling you about their Picasso. And you just can't, you just gotta let him, you're almost like a guidance counselor walking them through, you know, maybe doing a deal or a transaction and trying to be as respectful as possible with the fact that this person might have just lost their life's work or their family's fourth generation business, et cetera, et cetera. So you have people and they emotionally are in distress. So it is a tax on you, but also you need to be as respectful as possible. And I don't think, what else? I mean, I think as a small player, it's very hard. I think for me, I would say that investing isn't, I wouldn't say I'm good. I'd say I'm okay investor. I'd also say that it's a bit of a disease. So I kind of like feel compelled to do it, even though sometimes maybe it's not the best thing for me. So I always joke that it's kind of a disease. Like I'm looking at this stuff on nights and weekends, on Sunday morning. You know, I'm, you know, just like you might be having another call to start up that you think is interesting or trying to get on an allocation for something like I'm doing the same thing with my deals. Like I'm trying to learn a little bit more and see if I can So, yeah, I don't know if I answered your question. Speaker 2: No, you did. The second part of the question is we've been glamorizing you a little bit, but you called me before the pod, or you called Ben, and you were like, hey, if you Google me, you're going to see some stuff. Do you guys want to ask me questions? Do you want me to talk about that on air? Do you want me to clear the air about this? Hey, here's an opportunity because if somebody Googles you yeah, there's like a settlement case I don't know what's going on with this. Like what do you want to say about this? Speaker 1: Yeah, so and I that's why I said I said Ben I got like you haven't said anything about this and I'm wondering why you haven't and I just want to put it out there which is yeah, I was involved in this receivership in Delaware and I got some pretty nasty headlines and I have to say As I've gone through my life, I've had a lot of ups and downs like anybody or any entrepreneur for sure. And this was a down one and I'm glad to have it behind me. But basically, it was a receivership that I was in charge of. We made a lot of money for the shareholders. So the court didn't like some of the way I went about my activities and sort of aggressively slapped me. I'm on the wrist or maybe in the face and I'm glad that everyone in the, it's called fun.com, is getting a good recovery and I'm glad to have it behind me. But yeah, it's like something I wanted to bring up because I didn't want to act like it was, something didn't happen. Speaker 2: Okay, but what'd you do? You're like, ah, it's not my best. What'd you do? Speaker 1: So, the biggest thing is, so I was running this receivership and of course, because of that, I was in charge of doing everything. I do administrative work or like running the bank accounts and doing the taxes. And while I think I'm a good... Speaker 2: Sorry, dumb question. What does doing the receivership mean? You're taking it through bankruptcy? Is that what that is? Speaker 1: It's kind of like a bankruptcy, but it's in state court. So this was in Delaware Chancery Court because the company was a Delaware court. And so my job was to sort of marshal all the assets. There were no assets when I showed up. So this was basically a pump and dump. Penny Stock. I bought up 20% of the company and then I went to Delaware because the guy who was running it actually got arrested for a different fraud that he was doing, this guy named Jason Galanis. And so because of that, I was like, oh, because I knew all along that this company likely owned the domain name fund.com, plus they own this ownership of an ETF company called Advisor Shares. So I went and got myself a point of receiver. There was no assets in the company and my goal or my remit from the court was as a receiver, almost like a bankruptcy trustee, was to marshal all the assets and then try to pay out as much to shareholders as possible. I think I did that. The court, and I did do it, but I had a shareholder who was very unhappy with the way I was going about it. He complained to the court. The court looked into my activities. They didn't take kindly to some of the things I did, whether it's the tax position or how I was moving money around and the fact that I was investing the money in deals that I was doing. And so they pretty aggressively slapped me and that's where the headlines come from. I, of course, the whole time feel like I did my best to cooperate with the whole thing. And I'm glad to see that we have a good settlement with the new receiver. I'm the CEO of the Receivership. And again, the outcome for all the shareholders who were involved is pretty darn good, which I'm glad about because at the end of the day, I didn't want to all just go to lawyers fighting over this. And, you know, that's that's kind of what happened. So not my brightest moment, I would say, because I feel responsible as a person in charge to do everything and do it properly. And I don't think I'll be being a receiver of anything anytime soon. Don't think I'll be doing that again. Speaker 2: Okay. Well, you know, sorry to make it awkward. I just had to ask, try to understand. Speaker 1: No, no, I'm glad you do. And I've, you know, my thing is for me, reputationally, as someone who does what I do, it's important that I try my best. But I think in the end, over time, I'll be able to talk about it more and more. Speaker 2: Sam, you look highly amused by this question and answer. What are you thinking? Speaker 3: The headlines aren't good. Yeah, I saw the headlines. I understand why you'd want it addressed. It's not a good headline. Yeah, I'm reading it as you spoke. So did you admit guilt? No. What's implied with the settlement? Speaker 1: So the settlement is just, well, the settlement in addition to the fine from the court, the court fine me $2 million. I paid $2 million of what they considered were constructive trust profits in, plus I paid for the Special Master. That was another $750 or $800. So it's basically $3 million. Then the settlement was $3.6 million plus $800,000 that was in escrow, plus about $10 million in claims. So I gave them claims that they say were commingled within my personal investments. Speaker 3: Do you think there's something wrong? Speaker 1: And there was no admission of liability. Speaker 3: Yeah, so I don't know how to even ask this question. I can't ask this question. There's no admission of liability. Speaker 1: Well, you can ask, because you should. My only thing is, I'm glad that it's a good outcome for shareholders, and I wouldn't want anyone to be inflamed by the stuff I say. Any shareholder would be like, oh, he's not admitting. In my estimation, it's a lot more gray than the court tries to make it out to be, but at the same time, I respect the court. I was grazed by lawyers. If a court says, I don't care what you're arguing, I just agree with you. Speaker 2: We've had a bunch of people who've come on this podcast before that I think have had stuff. I think it's fairly common in the world of business, you do business for 30, 40 years, that at some point something can, it's extremely common for something to go down where you get sued or you sue somebody or whatever happens. That part's not uncommon. What is interesting, like Sam, I don't know if you remember when we had Martin Shkreli on and he sort of got this character which is like he's the bad guy and he like leaned into it and like inflamed it and like did a bunch of stuff, which was like really crazy. Speaker 3: And he got in trouble for it. Speaker 2: And then he had the issue where you got in trouble and he was like, hey, everybody made money. And then they're like, yeah, but like you went to jail. So like, you know, something happened and he paid the price. And I remember you were telling him you were like, and this was this is now like years later. He had like literally like done his time. And again, he's quite a character. Like Shkreli is like an actual He's an actual character. I think he plays up that character and I think he likes it. He likes mixing it up in that way. But I remember just thinking like, it's so interesting how to handle something like this. It's such a tricky spot to be in. Because there's many versions of things like this. Like there's, I did something wrong not knowingly or unintentionally. I did something wrong intentionally. Then there's like the Shkreli case, which is kind of like, I did something wrong intentionally, but everybody like made money. And so who's, you know, so it all worked out, right? And even for example, like Elon right now, I think is getting sued in like, you know, 15 different courts by 15 different people, like publicly feuding with the president and Sam Altman and others, right? There's a lot of people just like constantly mixing it up, and I don't know, it's very interesting to see how that side of entrepreneurship, that side of business, that side of investing. Speaker 1: I definitely think it has to have, you know, maybe not as aggressive as mine was, but I definitely think people think over time you're going to have scrapes with certain stuff. The whole bad guy thing, and I know Scarelli did kind of lean into that, I guess. Even now I feel like, well, I don't know if it does now, but kind of, I don't know. It's a different way to do it. For me, I kind of like Don't view it as a good thing for me. I kind of view it as like something that if someone's going to be a business partner to me, I need to be able to explain and, you know, frankly, probably more candid than on air, but at the same time, like, try to respect the outcome of the whole thing. Speaker 3: How long did this last? Speaker 1: Gosh, 2022? Speaker 3: Oh, wow. That has to feel horrible. I've gotten in trouble before when I was in college and just waiting to hear the verdict. I remember that feeling. I think your consequences are significantly worse than my consequences, and I can't imagine three years of What's gonna happen? Speaker 1: For me, I tried to resign myself to whatever happened. I have to accept responsibility for that. That was a big one for me. So I really was bracing for the worst, but trying to do the best. Also, even with the settlement, but way before the settlement, with different things that went on in the case, I was really trying my best to be constructive and cooperative with what the court wanted me to do. But at the same time, You know, not everybody's going to love your decision making. I guess it's like, you know, in a weird way, it's like, you know, it's it's you know, I grew up in the South where people are way too like. I don't know. Maybe my upbringing was a bit too people-pleasing, but this was more like, you have to do the right thing whether someone likes it or not. You have to do what you think is the right thing. So that's what I really, a lot of what I got out of this, and I tried my best. And people might not like what you've done, or what you've made a decision like, oh, you're doing this, you're trying to hide this, or you're trying to do this, and you're not cooperating here, but you're still trying to find some middle ground. But it was a big one. It was a big, big one over me. Speaker 2: I wanted to ask you, we can end with this. I want to ask you for a bit of a reading list. If I was going to try to get smarter about this stuff, what are the most influential books or blogs or people that are worth checking out? Give me your top three in no particular order, but what's your short list on stuff I would go read just if I wanted to get smarter about this stuff? Speaker 1: So I think on the list, because I shared a book list, of course you have people like Seth Klarman and Margin of Safety. It's a hard book to find, but if you Google around, you might be able to find a copy that you can read. Speaker 2: Isn't it like a $2,000 book now? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a thousand plus. It's good. He talks about different stuff. I just think that he's kind of a goat in the kind of deep value. You know, Baupost and Seth Klarman are pretty influential. But, you know, an easy guy to find, you know, anything by Marty, not Marty Litman, but Now I'm trying to think of his name. From Third Avenue Value, he's written a few books on distressed investing and he was the one that kind of stole the idea from him where it's like an asset is a liability and a liability can become an asset in a bankruptcy and it's so true. And you think about it with a lease, if you have 50 leases and they're all below market, well, a debtor can assign, assume or reject leases. So if you're all below market rents, you can assign them and they can become an asset even though leading up to the bankruptcy, You know, they can be a huge liability to make those payments. Speaker 3: You like Kierkegaardian? Shaan, have you read about Kierkegaardian? Speaker 2: You've told me about him, but I haven't read anything about him. Speaker 3: Oh my gosh. That's one of the best biographies of all time. Speaker 1: Krikakoring. Oh, you like that one? That's a really good one. Speaker 3: Oh my god. Yes, The Gambler. That's one of the best biographies. Basically, he's an Armenian, I think, I think Armenian, immigrant. Yes. Raised in Central Valley, California. Went to the army. When he got back, his first little business was a small airline, which basically just means he somehow convinced someone to lease him a small Cessna and would fly people back and forth from like I don't even know all around california like it sounds more glamorous than it was but he grew that over something like. We've been friends for 15 years and have sold the business to TWA, which was the large airline company at the time, and he made a little bit of money, but he parlayed that into buying what would now become the Las Vegas Strip, and then he parlayed that to buying this other thing, this other thing, this other thing, and he worked his way all the way up from being a nobody, poor, no-running-water immigrant to owning what was the car? Chrysler, and I think he also owned Warner. Did he own Warner? But he for sure owned Chrysler. MGM and the biography is basically his thinking. He's very calm. He's very methodic. He's very like kind of traditional immigrant like where he was like straightforward. It is what it is. I don't stress about it, but he was a total kind of degenerate gambler and he died with a net worth of something like 15 or 10 billion dollars. Speaker 1: Sounds about right. Well, you know what I actually love, because you were asking about books, Shaan. I actually think the entrepreneur biographies, either autobiographies or biographies, can be amazing. There's one called Zeckendorf, which is by a guy who's a big real estate guy in New York who made a billion, lost a billion. There's one, it's How to Lose $100 Million and Other Valuable Advice by Arthur Little. There's all these entrepreneur books that are like, some are out of print, some are still out there. And of course there's like, you know, special set investing, Joel Greenblatt, You Can Be A Stock Market Genius. These are great books for when you're talking about securities markets. But I actually think the best investors are people you've like never heard of. Because, you know, they make a hundred million bucks and then they're like, I'm out, peace. Like, you know, you might, and their stories aren't recorded. I think I put E.P. Taylor in there. So you want to hear the E.P. Taylor story real quick? That was a really great one. So E.V. Taylor, during the prohibition, he would go up and buy up breweries and his whole thesis was like, one day this is going to be done. Like we're not going to, we're all going to start drinking again. So he would go around and buy up like You know, manufacturing, distribution, bottling, that was a play on that. And he would roll them up because the capacity was so low he could buy them for peanuts. And that was it. That was his one trade. Like, you know, of course it took him 20 years of work to trade out. But, you know, he minted himself, you know, some serious dough. And then he wrote a book about it. So I think these guys, you know, you can do- Is the book the biography of Edward Plunkett Taylor? Speaker 2: Is that him? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's him, Edward Plunkett. And he founded the Lifer Key Club. I don't know if you guys have ever been down there, but it's like a famous club in the Bahamas. Like Prim Lotsa and well Sam Bankman-Fried was across the thing at a place called Albany down in the Bahamas. Speaker 2: Did you ever bump into Sam Bankman-Fried? Any good SBF stories? Speaker 1: You know what's funny is like so I was in crypto and then Sam became like this like Rockefeller of crypto like John D. Rockefeller of crypto. I was like who the hell is this guy? Like I never even really I never really ran across him in passing and a lot of people that worked for him were like you know whatever EA or EI. Effective altruism, yeah, EA people. So you had a lot of EA people around. I just didn't know any of those folks. They weren't like hardcore crypto people. It's kind of a weird thing. When I saw him coming up, I was like, man, how did I miss this? Where'd this guy come from? Speaker 3: We had Robert Green from 48 Laws of Power on the pod like two weeks ago or something like that. Have you ever read 48 Laws of Power? The book is what it sounds like. Speaker 1: I own the book. I think I breezed through it. I haven't read all of it. Speaker 3: 48 Laws on acquiring power or whatever. It's very sociopathic, but that's kind of the point. It's sociopathic, but it's real. And one of the laws is like to reinvent yourself and and also we had talked to him like we were like when you have social media, you can like talk to your people and talk to your audience like. While you're on the toilet like any any hour you can tweet anything. How do you deal with that? And he was like basically like you want to have You want to have planned silence? So you like you know the best way to be loud and in everyone's face sometimes is to just shut up and and and not say a word appear for a while and disappear for a while and he was talking all about like powerful people who kind of come out of nowhere John Rockefeller is one of these guys who He was one of the richest men in the world before everyone, like no one had seen a photo of him. And it was all part of a plan, I think. And it sounds like Sam Bakeman Freed, we didn't give him enough credit because when at least when I saw him coming up, I was like, oh, he's just an autist and he's just this typical Silicon Valley type of like, He just doesn't know. He doesn't have any manners. But it turns out it was probably all planned, where he was like, I want to appear as though I slept on this beanbag. I want to appear as though I'm playing video games while I'm talking to Sequoia over a $200 million deal. And it was straight out of Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power, which is pretty funny. Speaker 1: I mean, I met a ton of people that work there, of course, and a ton of people that were like in the orbit. And it's kind of crazy to see the different. I guess like Munger does it best, right? The Lollapalooza effect of like the whole thing, like everybody's getting drunk off the money. Speaker 3: Were they straight? Speaker 1: Like straight laced? Yeah, like almost all the people all these employees. Speaker 3: They didn't know anything because I think we're just normal nerds They're just normal workers just normal. They weren't part. Speaker 1: I think they Know I mean like I met the lady she was ahead of payments, and she was like an expert to getting like Payment licenses so basically like banking licenses around the world and she had worked for Somewhere and then she got, then CZ pulled her over to Binance and then she got poached by Sam. She was just the best. Of course he had to pay her like she was the best. She was making millions of dollars a year. But like some of their contracts were insane. I mean Sam was giving out 10 year contracts to people. Guaranteed 10-year pay contracts, you know, like million dollar contracts to like salary employees, a little bit like the, you know, like AI, you know, meta thing. I mean, it's a little bit like that because he had so much money coming in from VCs. And of course, he had an unlimited, you know, well, not unlimited, but he had a big customer base to dip into. So between that, I mean, he was making unbelievable, like whatever you want to call it, unconscionable contracts to. Speaker 2: Dude, just to put this in perspective, I think Zuck, I think the news about this stuff kind of came out, you know, let's just call it even three, four months ago. Okay, so let's just say this has been going on for three, four months, the researcher stuff. If you go look, so four months ago, the stock was at about 500, let's even, let's go April 1st, so 586. Today, the stock's at $7.84. So he's spending this money or he's making these offers, which has multiple effects, right? First, it raises the price for all of his competitors. So he's like, cool, even if they don't take my offer, now they have to pay 100x what they were paying for talent before. Like, way to screw up their business. In his own business, the stock since then, it's now at 784, so it's up 33%. So what's 33% of it? It's almost a $2 trillion stock. Speaker 3: $600 billion or $500 billion. Speaker 2: And he's basically offered the equivalent of $20 billion for this talent, right? Maybe $40 billion max. And so he's basically said, cool, I'll put out offers and try to spend $20, $30, $40 billion. I already made back $600 billion in the market just in that time by strengthening my story of us being all in on AI. It's not like the Facebook business changed that much in four months where it's up $600 billion because of the actual user base growing or even revenue or earnings. Yeah, they beat by a small, maybe 8% beat or something like that. But the reason it's up is because everybody believes AI is the future. And who do you think is going to win in AI? And you get punished if people think you're not going to win. Apple stock is like going down right now because people are like, Apple has no AI strategy. They're going to lose. And then somebody like, you know, Meta, at least the story is Zuck is all in, going to win, poaching great talent. We'll see, you know, so there's a believability to it. So it's crazy that you can spend so much and somehow net out way ahead like he did. Speaker 3: It's crazy. It's crazy. That is the market. Hey, Tommy, we appreciate you doing this, brother. Speaker 1: Oh, guys, thanks for thanks for having me on. It's good to meet you guys in chat. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: That's it. Speaker 3: And we appreciate you. That's the pod. Unknown Speaker: I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel. Never looking back. Speaker 2: All right, let's take a quick break because as you know, we are on the Hubspot Podcast Network, but we're not the only ones. There's other podcasts on this network too, and maybe you like them. Maybe you should check them out. One of them that I want to draw your attention to is called Nudge by Phil Agnew. And whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make, the new habits you could do, the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference, that's what that podcast is all about. Check it out. It's called Nudge, and you can get it wherever you get your podcasts.