We Built an AI CFO to Help You Grow Your Net Worth | Anthony Pompliano

Anthony Pompliano (0:00)

They are coming after us. Peter, do you know what it's like to wake up one day? And you've been waiting for a trillion dollar company to compete with you? That happened to me. It was awesome. These companies have tens of thousands of employees. Our engineering team's less than 10 people. But it's not about how many resources you have now. It is all about how do you get the most leverage using the right approach with the models. That is ultimately the goal of the business, right? If you use this product, does your net worth grow faster than if you did not use the product?

Peter Yang (0:29)

Hey, everyone. Today, I'm really excited to welcome the one and only Pomp. A long time ago, we both worked at Facebook, but Anthony has since had a very different path from the corporate ladder. He became an investor, a creator, author, and now a founder running Silva, which is an AI CFO for independent investors. So welcome, sir. Really excited to have you here.

Anthony Pompliano (0:46)

Absolutely. Great to see you again.

Peter Yang (0:47)

Yeah. So why don't we actually start with your career? Because I think it's very interesting. I think, why don't we start with this? I read your book, How to Live an Extraordinary Life, right? And you're very successful at your career. But how will you actually define what an extraordinary life is?

Anthony Pompliano (1:01)

It's one of my favorite things to talk about, because I think everyone has a different definition. And you can learn a lot by asking someone what their definition is. Some people are like, my extraordinary life is I want to work as hard as I possibly can and solve problems for other people. I think other people say, I actually want to work as little as possible, and I want to travel around the world and experience things. Some people judge their extraordinary life by how much time they spend with their kids or how many material possessions they have. And I think the conclusion I've come to is most people actually don't define what it is, and so they don't really know what they're chasing. For me personally, I think about two components. I want to work hard and solve problems for other people, but I want to do it in a way where my kids can see me doing that on a day to day basis so that they implicitly learn things like hard work, effort, et cetera. And so what that means is I want to blend my life, my professional and personal lives come together, and I want to build these businesses, solve these problems, but I want to do it in front of my children so that they're able to kind of soak that stuff in.

Peter Yang (1:57)

Got it. Okay. So you want to kind of lead by example for your kids. Yeah.

Anthony Pompliano (2:00)

Correct.

Peter Yang (2:00)

So dude, so like 10 years ago or something, we were both at Facebook, right? And I remember asking you, I don't even remember this. I'm like, hey, Anthony, how did I become a PM? I really want to become a PM at Facebook. And I feel like a lot of people in the Bay Area, they don't actually define their life themselves. They kind of let the company define their life for them. They're like, hey, you're successful if you become a director or if you become an LL set. And I've always found your career super inspirational, man, because after Facebook, you went to do a whole bunch of other things, kind of struck out on your own. Maybe you can kind of walk through this journey that you've been on and some of the decisions that you've made along the way.

Anthony Pompliano (2:30)

Yeah, look, I think there's two types of people. Some people are kind of, let me put together a 10 year plan and figure out what I want to do and then work backwards. Those people usually, they kind of know where they want to go to college when they're starting high school and then they work towards that path. There's folks who in college say, hey, I want to be an MD at an investment bank and then they work backwards and say, well, in order to do that, I got to get a job at this organization. I got to stay there for three years. I got to do this, this, and this. My career has been very different, right? I kind of took the second path, which was I'm very interested in business, technology, and finance.

I want to stay on top of what the latest, greatest, newest things are, and then I want to find opportunities and be as opportunistic as I can. And so what that allowed me to do was, even if you think about Facebook, I had never thought about going and getting a job at any company. I right out of college started my first business, and after those first two businesses, I really realized that, wait a second, I don't know how to scale any of this stuff. I'm really good at going zero to one, and then I kind of have basically a successful small business that isn't really venture backable. And so the idea to go to Facebook was, maybe I could learn that there. They're pretty good at scaling, they're pretty good at growth and analytics. And so the opportunity was, I have a problem, let me go solve that, I'll go to Facebook. If you think about after Facebook, I wanted to learn investing, and it was because I didn't have an idea to go build my own business. And so it was, well, let me go find other people, I'll just put some money in their business, and then I'll help them. And maybe that'll help spur an idea for me to eventually create another business. And fast forward to today, the Silvia product is maybe the best example, where the best engineer we had working at any of our companies, he was thinking about leaving, didn't really know what he wanted to do. And I said to him, I said, look, I know the one thing about building a company is if you can solve a problem, you're able to build the business. And so I just thought for a couple of days, what is the biggest problem I have in my life that also the audience would likely have as well? And I had a spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet was a big pain in the butt because I had to go update it every single week or month. And so I just said to myself, well, let's just solve that problem for me, and then we'll see if other people want it. And so whether it's getting a job at Facebook or starting a company, it literally is, how do you go and find the biggest problem and then opportunistically go and tackle that? I think it has, for me, been a much better path than, what do I want to be in 20 years or 10 years and then working backwards?