Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
My guest this week is unique and so requires a short story. I met our guest Michael Mayer because of Twitter. I followed and enjoyed one of several pseudonymous accounts that he maintains to experiment with ideas. His various accounts have wide followings.
I think many of the best accounts on Twitter are anonymous or pseudonymous, and I've always made a point to get to know the ones that I like best. As it turns out, Michael was also an entrepreneur. He'd been building a new company and was raising a small amount of outside capital. I didn't personally invest, in part because he raised it so quickly after I spoke with him. Ever since I've gotten to know him better and followed his company Bottomless with interest.
You know that I'm always hyper transparent about any potential conflicts of interest, so it's worth noting that while I'm not an investor in his company, I expect to be at some point in the future.
The topic of our conversation is both his social media activity and his company. I'm a coffee fanatic and the problem he is solving is one that I live. I order a weekly bag of coffee beans, but I often have too much coffee or run out. Bottomless solves this by shipping you a simple scale, which you can keep wherever you store your coffee. You connect it to your wifi and set your bag of coffee on it. It automatically orders new coffee for you at the right time, thus the name Bottomless. If you like this conversation, check out bottomless.com and their product. With this podcast, all I'm really trying to do is find, meet and learn from interesting people. Michael certainly qualifies. I hope you enjoy this unique episode. Maybe we can begin by you telling me why you choose to write synonymously online.

**Michael Mayer** (2:09)
So a lot of people assume that I do this because I want to sort of protect my real life identity from anything offensive, I might say. And that's not really the case. I mean, that's part of it. It is useful to have this firewall between anything you say online and your real personality. But the crux of it is that I just don't think who I am is that relevant to people out there in the world in terms of like what I'm saying. Why should people care about a picture of my face, a link to my LinkedIn, it's noise.
And I think the best way to be successful with publishing online is to have the best signal to noise ratio. So you go to my account, you see nothing about me, you don't see a picture of me.
You directly get to the content. So I guess, yeah, I just don't, I don't think my identity is the most relevant thing in the world.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:58)
What have been the most positive things to come out of that that you didn't expect? Maybe if you had assumed it was gonna be a success, I'm sure you didn't assume that, but what have been some of the positive things that have happened as a result?

**Michael Mayer** (3:09)
It surprisingly doesn't matter whether my public identity is connected to my account at all. I don't think I've seen any difference.
I myself am not a famous person because of it, but it's somewhat easy to transfer that social capital into the right places when necessary. And so it's somewhat overrated to accumulate social capital only under your own name. I still have control of the various accounts that I have and they're still my own capital. It's like a Swiss bank account or whatever. I can transfer out of it whenever I want.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:41)
Yeah, really interesting concept. So let's talk a little bit about your personal background before we get into some of the tech and entrepreneurial type stuff.
So just tell me kind of your backstory. I found it really fascinating when you and I first talked and I think people will appreciate it as the fertile soil for what's gonna come next.

**Michael Mayer** (3:59)
The most interesting thing about my background is probably less where I am today and more about my speed of progress in the last five years and where I was five years ago. A snapshot of where I was five years ago. I had dropped out of school. It was a unranked university, by the way. And if you went and found my university on the US News and World Report, it says unranked. And I had dropped out of that because I couldn't hack it there.
I was working at a restaurant and watching dishes and doing prep work. And I was working with a lot of Spanish speakers and they had a nickname for me. They would call me Tortuga, which means turtle in Spanish. So I wasn't even particularly succeeding at that.