Anthony Pompliano launches $250M SPAC targeting profitable fintech companies, unveils AI wealth platform Sylvia

an asset manager with like a trillion dollars under management already. So, uh he's off to the races left and right. Big week, big week for Pomp. Uh fantastic show as well. So, uh excited to invite him into the studio and catch up with Anthony Pompiano and get a bunch of great takes. You're here. Welcome, guys.

I love to see the uh the suit, but we need some ties going on. I know. Caught us caught us lacking. Caught us lacking. We're working on a tie. We're working with a on a tie that has ads on it. That's that's our next ad unit. We'll send you one. Thank you so much for joining. Uh how are things going?

Uh what's latest in your world? How are you spending your time? Because you got a lot of a lot of different things going on. Yeah, look, I think that the future is very similar to what you guys are doing, right? You got to be able to operate businesses.

You got to be able to invest capital and you got to be able to uh create content on the internet. And if you think of what a business really is is you got to build products, you got to be able to uh invest resources and then you got to be able to market those things.

And so I don't think there's any different than what people used to do in the past. It's just now that you do it more as kind of an individual brand rather than a company. And that's what we've been doing. Yeah.

What what was the the the kind of the I feel like you're going through like the V2 of the Pomp media strategy. The there's a daily show now. Uh and you were building businesses before. What did you learn from those and where is this going with the next uh iteration?

Yeah, I mean look actually we we used to have a daily show uh very similar to what you guys are doing.

uh the best business show which was hilarious when people would have to cite us breaking news you'd have to write the best business show crediting uh good nice little troll there but no I think you guys are doing it the right way right it's like everyone is upleveling and the way I describe it is when content started on the internet um everyone was basically on like their webcam and then they were like in their kitchen in their webcam and then it was like oh I have like an extra camera instead of the webcam now we pretty much just think you need TV quality with digital distributionally and so everyone is leveling up you guys have built Yeah, I think you guys just got a 4,000 square foot facility, you know, all this stuff, right?

We've got obviously studio stuff and uh it's just the the cost of the technology is compressing and now with a very small team, you're able to have massive reach and I think that's just going to be the future of uh all this content. Can we just glaze X for a little bit? I know you've built a business on X. We love X.

We talked to the team earlier this week. I just think that like it's so underrated as a distribution platform. people think YouTube and there there other great platforms, but the the the current moment with X has been particularly good for us.

And I wanted to know what your uh what your take on X is, how it's been going, and any uh any learnings that you have to share. Is Linda hiding behind your camera or something? Got a gun to Yeah, she's got a gun to her head. Yeah. No, we're gonna we we we just invited Linda on the show. Amazing. Amazing.

Um, no, look, I I think that every platform is very unique in what it provides, both in terms of the type of audience. Obviously, you know, who's on LinkedIn is very different than who's on X. Uh, LinkedIn finds out things maybe a week or two after people on X find out about it.

Um, but also, I think the type of content that lives there is really important. Uh, both in the form factor and also the actual substance of it. And so, it it doesn't make a lot of sense to go and talk about, you know, kind of daily news on LinkedIn. It makes a ton of sense to do that on X. Yeah.

And so what I think many people, including ourselves, have figured out over time is that we were essentially using X as an engine of growth to drive people elsewhere. Go watch on YouTube, go listen to the podcast, go read the email, go to this website, you know, whatever.

Why not be able to just bring that content right there in the feed? And I think that that's really what they have leaned into and that's why it's working.

And so the daily show that we have with them, I literally sit at my desk, talk direct to camera, we cut it up in this modular format and deliver it right in your feed. You don't have to go anywhere. you just consume it right there in these bite-sized components.

And it's no secret that your guys kind of clip strategy and the live streaming, everything you're doing is like very excentric. And I think that doesn't mean you give up on the other platforms. It just means that you're building for X and everywhere else is kind of the exhaust of that uh content. Yeah.

Yeah, it is crazy. Like there was all this fallout from like, oh, they banned links. I can't link to my YouTube videos. And I'm like, but you can just upload those videos here.

like like they literally have a video product like like and oh like you you you wanted to link to text like you could just put the text on X and it'll do way better and it's not that complicated and yeah you might have to change your monetization strategy a little bit maybe the rev share is going to be different on YouTube it's like a per video thing and X it's monthly but like it all works out you're just playing for attention and reach and obviously X has this the thing that I like about the flywheel is like is like on YouTube I could every once in a while another creator like you would comment on my video or I'd comment on your video and we'd see each other.

But we couldn't DM each other on YouTube. But on X, it's like if somebody sees a clip and they respond, "Oh, I think you know Pump's wrong about this or I love this. " Like we can all hop in a DM group chat immediately and just start talking and then hop on the show, do whatever.

And so like I think the water cooler with all this stuff is actually really really uh inventive. Anyway, Jordy, you got No, it's been it's been interesting. people, you know, will point out they're like, I don't understand how TBPN is like has has so much attention. The YouTube channel, the YouTube channel is small.

It's like, yeah, we don't really spend any time on YouTube. We were happy to just focus on one platform as, you know, a very young, a ton of important uh tech people hang out. Yeah. Uh anyway, I I let's talk about the other news. Uh the spaxs in the news. How do you raise $250 million? Where's that money come from?

That's so much money. I I mean we Jordy and I both raised money at various times, but like it wasn't six months ago that I think we were on the show talking about how there's nothing intrinsically wrong with back. Totally. It's just been maybe misused or abused in the past and also just bad timing, right?

Because timing timing and and ultimately what matters is the underlying asset, right? Are you you know so give us the pitch for your spack and then we're going to pitch you spacking TBPN. All right.

Uh I mean look I I do think it six months is actually an interesting time frame because uh that's about when I decided hey I I should go do this and you know look I got the big audience for years bankers have been coming to me saying do a spack do an RTO do all these things in the public market and I always joke that we're all about the same age pretty much everyone in our generation watched the social network and wanted to be Zuck or invest in Zuck.

So everyone ran to the private markets it was like you know Wall Street and hedge funds all that stuff is kind of loser stuff now the cool stuff is in tech. Um but we have a world where this undisiplined monetary and fiscal policy is a huge persistent tailwind for liquid assets.

Crypto and Bitcoin obviously saw benefit from this gold public stocks etc. And so I think a lot of people you're starting to see them say, "Hey, how do I marry technology stuff with liquid assets, right?

" And so you're you're going to see that um with the Spack in particular, I agree with you guys that the vehicle itself is not the problem. It's that people were basically doing public venture capital, buy a money losing company with a high valuation and you got to try to grow into it.

And some people did do that, but a lot didn't. And so it got a bad name.

But what I really have talked about is like look if you the other thing sorry to interrupt you there's an adverse there was an adverse selection issue at the time as well which was that the companies had huge access to capital in the private market so if they were spacking it was possible that they had exhausted yep you couldn't do the stripe thing and just billion tender you would spack or something.

Yeah but but there are businesses today that are fundamentally good businesses that have bright futures that maybe should just get public and get remember years ago talking to a public markets investor and he was like, "Well, yeah, like once you're in the public markets, like you shouldn't ever need to raise capital again because you're supposed to just be a going concern.

" And I was like, "Wait, what are you talking about? Like businesses lose money. I'm in venture. Like this is what you do. " And he was like, "No, no, no. Like, like if you're publicly listed, you should not be losing money for a long time because then you just shouldn't be a public company.

" I was like, "Oh, I didn't even think about that. " But yeah, anyway, sorry to cut you off. Yeah. Well, I I think that um you know, I've always looked at this as if you buy a good company that has all the right criteria to be a public company, um and you do it at the right price, which is an important component.

Basically, if you're a disciplined buyer, then it doesn't matter who the sponsor is. It doesn't even matter what the vehicle is, right? It should do well in the public markets to your guys' point. Um and people weren't doing that. And so, I think that that is kind of one big component.

The second thing is a huge part of what we specifically have said uh publicly and in the filings is we want to buy a profitable company. So, we don't want to buy a company and then try to make it profitable. Like, that's hard. Let's go buy a company that is already profitable.

And the reason why that 6 month mark was so interesting that you mentioned that is that's about the time I started to get lots of inbound. And I frankly don't know why. I think some of it was the political change in DC. I think a lot in financial services there was like a regulatory shift from a headwind to a tailwind.

So, people are like, "Okay, like this may be a better time to go into the public market. " And then also like think of all of our friends who have built companies that started sometime between like 2015 and 2020. those companies are just now becoming big enough to actually be public companies. Yeah.

And so there's like that cohort of people are now like ready to get into that public market and so they're looking for the vehicles to be able to do that and we hope that you know we're one of many that they consider to uh to be able to do that. How does the actual deal work once you find a company?

Are you buying a minority stake in the company or are you buying the whole company and then the the as I remember it was like you'd usually see like a couple hundred million dollars in a spa but it'd be trading at four billion and then you take a company public and then the share price goes from there.

Is that roughly correct? I I I I don't know enough about that. The best way that I know to describe it is like the spa gives you a lot of optionality which is why I'm attracted to it. So you we raised 250 million into the spa.

um you have the ability to buy a lot of a company or you can buy a very little bit of a company, right? But you have $250 million of cash. You do have to go to those investors and say, "Hey, this is the deal that I found. This is the deal that I negotiated in terms of the economic terms. " They vote.

So if you bring them a bad deal, they can also just say like, "Ah, screw it. We're going to take our money back and like, you know, good luck.

" So you have to do a good deal, but you also have the ability to use pipes and other kind of capital markets tools so that you can size up in terms of total capital invested in one of these businesses. And then the beautiful thing about this is it's a negotiation with a target company.

And so it's two people in the market coming together and saying this is what we think it's worth, right? This is what they're willing to take. This is what we're willing to buy. And I think that that tends to if people are rational and disciplined uh actually end up with something better in the public market.

And it's different than a venture fund where the money is not literally sitting in the venture fund. They need to make a capital call with a spack like the money sits in T bills, right? Is that is that correct? Correct. It's in the vehicle. Um some people have interest, some people don't.

You there's some nuance there, but basically you can go to someone and be like I have the money. Like I don't raise the money. I don't but LPS can't tell me like hey sorry you know I'm not going to send the money. like I got the money and uh and he's good for his 250.

So, so I I mean I'm super fascinated by this whole industry. Uh and so are people pitching you? Do you expect this to be something where uh you get an introduction from a venture capitalist or an investment banker or just a founder?

Is this like a founder deal or are you going to be going outbound finding some business where they're not even considering selling because they're profitable, they're happy and you kind of come in, give them the pitch and say, "Hey, this might be the right time to look at something else. Let's let's do this deal.

" Yeah, I mean there's a bunch of rules again in terms of like what you can do. So right now I can't talk to any target companies and uh that'll be true for another 24- 48 hours. Um but once the deal is closed, I can actually uh talk. I've got a ton of people who have been reaching out to me.

Uh you know, frankly, some of them are probably interesting, some of them aren't. I don't know. I haven't, you know, talked to them or done the work yet. Uh but also I think that you have an idea of like, hey, it would be interesting to go talk to these types of businesses, right?

And so you want to go and and figure that out. The whole key what what categories are are you excited about?

what is what is kind of you know what are you just going to kind of ignore right I I don't imagine you're going to like defense tech obviously doesn't make sense or or I would imagine doesn't make sense maybe only in partnership with TVPN no uh we're very focused on financial services um we do have a like a legal mandate we could do things outside but financial services is a focus and the the idea there is um I think most people you know it's no secret right I've got a reputation from all the Bitcoin and crypto stuff and so like are you going to go buy that and I just look at financial services as it's all becoming one thing.

You know, Robin Hood is a traditional exchange business, but they have crypto as a fast growing segment. Kraken is a private crypto exchange, but they're adding US equities. And so, we're just seeing the merging of the new and old worlds in finance. And I think that's where you're going to continue to see this go.

similar to, you know, what we're building with Sylvia, that's what we're going to uh do on the spack side is we're just looking for um where can you get distribution directly to my audience with financial related type products, services, and companies. Um and then that's where we want to play. Yeah.

Talk to us about Sylvia. I know you got 18 million sitting in cash. We got some recommendations for hyper cars you could pick up if you need one, but uh break it down. Stable assets. Yeah. Who who who before I tell P1's Well, before I tell you about Silia, who's the best sponsor?

Like, maybe we should just talk like, you know, you guys should just uh just boast them up a little. Well, next up we got Wander. So, we could talk about finding your happy place. We sing Find Your Happy Place. Find your happy place.

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People dream of organic integrations like that right there. We're gonna clip this. We'll both promote it. It's a dream come true when Thank you for Thank you for participating in that with us. Yeah, you're you guys got it.

Um, so Sylvia is uh Look, I I think every single person I know uh who is in like the business tech finance world, they got the spreadsheet and the spreadsheet is basically the thing that ties together all your accounts in one place. So you know just like what do I own?

Yeah, there's not usually a lot of expense related stuff. It's all about, you know, uh how much cash do I have, what are my investments, what are they worth, all that kind of stuff.

And so what we did is we built essentially a box that you go and you attach your brokerage accounts, your cash accounts, your crypto accounts, uh your private investments, your collectibles, people have added precious metals, guns, cars, houses, all kinds of stuff. Um in that box, it gets encrypted and anonymized.

And then what we did is we overlaid a bunch of AI models on top of it so that you can do simple things like you can prompt it and say you know what's my debt to equity ratio or analyze my stock portfolio and tell me uh where you see risk but also you can email Sylvia, you can call her on the phone.

Um for those that are wondering, I do not have $18 million in my checking account and 500k in my savings account at this very moment. That was some great that was some great dummy data. But yeah, it's interesting because I feel like mint. com was popular and kind of fell off and maybe even got shut down.

I I was getting an email about that. Maybe it's done. Uh and so obviously this is a this is an opportunity, but it's very but those are very expense related, right? It's all about like saving money and there is a huge market. Obviously people in America, there's a lot of people focused on saving money.

But I do think that there is this very specific cohort. You know, the the data that we have right now, we just crossed over $2. 5 billion dollars connected on the platform. Um, it's been about four weeks. You think about it, it's less than a thousand users that have connected accounts. Wow.

And so these are people who are multi-millionaires who are going onto this platform on average and connecting these accounts. And so to them, it's less about, you know, how do I save money? And it's more about how do I make more money? And that's what they're really trying to figure out. It's like where's my money?

Where are my assets? And then what can I do to actually grow those assets? And we think that there's something interesting to build there. We're going to let you go, but uh finish it out with where can people get started with Sylvia?

Uh well, after they go and they stay at a wander and they sleep on an eight sleep, then they can go to uh cfossilia. com and they can check it out there. Okay. Thank you so much for stop. We'll have to have you back for a deeper dive. This is fantastic. Excited to follow this back. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

Uh next up, we're going over to OpenAI land. Uh we got Nikkun coming in from OpenAI talking about a new release, new tools and features in the responses API,