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Anthony Pompliano built his reputation as a laser-eyed crypto evangelist. These days, he’s more interested in your brokerage account.
Pompliano, who spent years proselytizing digital assets, told Semafor’s Compound Interest show that he now sees most of the crypto market as a lost cause. “There are a couple of assets or trends in the crypto industry going to the big show,” he said, naming Bitcoin, stablecoins, and tokenization as survivors. “Everything else — good luck.”
Pompliano is a creature of the bubble of the past 10 years, leaning hard into crypto during its hype cycle and now, as one does, pivoting to AI.
But his bigger bet isn’t really on any asset class. It’s on a type of person. He calls them the “independent investor” — digitally native, higher-income, deeply skeptical of gatekeepers, and convinced they can beat traditional wealth managers with the help of AI. This cohort is vastly underestimated by Wall Street: smarter than the industry gives them credit for, and wealthier too.
“If you were a Google engineer, do you think you’re smarter than the average financial advisor? 100%” he said. “If you are an intelligent person who takes the time to actually go and focus on this, you can drastically outperform the advice coming from somebody whose job is to not get fired.”
It’s also the customer he’s building for. Since launching publicly in May 2025, his AI-powered platform Silvia — which is more portfolio analyzer than manager and isn’t licensed to touch customers’ money — has attracted $40 billion in assets loaded onto it by users worth, on average, $2.5 million. Pompliano said regular users have grown their net worth by between 16 to 40% in six months (a period that tracked with one of the strongest equity market runs in recent history).
The pitch is a direct challenge to the wealth management industry, some of whom “hate me. They hate Silvia. They think we’re trying to put them out of business,” he said. But he argues the future belongs to people who want to manage their own money.
It’s the latest shift for Pompliano, a financial influencer who bristles at the term: “Warren Buffett was the original finance influencer, right? He had a newsletter, which he used as his annual letter. He had a conference.”
He also sparred with Liz over whether a good financial advisor is sometimes supposed to talk you out of what you want to do, and offered a more circumspect take on the Trump family’s meme coin than his usual boosterism might suggest, drawing a straight line from presidential merch to digital memorabilia, while acknowledging that politics makes everyone’s brain break.
In this article:
Transcript
Anthony Pompliano:
If you were a Google engineer, do you think you’re smarter than the average financial advisor? And so, again, it goes back to if there’s more access to information and you are an intelligent person who takes the time to actually go and focus on this, you can drastically outperform the advice coming from somebody whose job is to not get fired.
Liz Hoffman:
Welcome back to Compound Interest from Semafor Business. I’m Semafor’s business and finance editor, Liz Hoffman, joined by my colleague, Rohan Goswami. Rohan, I think you are a little more online than I am.
Rohan Goswami:
Yeah.
Liz Hoffman:
What percent of your timeline would you say is financial influencers?
Rohan Goswami:
Oh, man. It’s like 80% FinTwit. It’s not just the influencers, but it’s 80% FinTwit, 10% cats, 10% tennis. It’s a healthy mental health positive mix.
Liz Hoffman:
That sounds pretty toxic, but our guest today is probably one of them, Anthony Pompliano. He’s a finfluencer, investor, crypto guy, now kind of reinventing himself as one does as an AI guy, but he’s really kind of a creature of the bubble of the last 10 years. He spent his career on Wall Street right at the front edge of crypto, digital assets, and, really, the attention economy.
Rohan Goswami:
Yeah, he like a certain media company that we work for. He’s got a newsletter. He’s also got a podcast, which has attracted an impressive array of guests. Again, very relevant and germane to the bubbles that he’s written to become this massive presence. He’s had Michael Saylor on, the MicroStrategy CEO Chamath, the king of SPACs, a certain Liz Hoffman, who our viewers will know I’d be very familiar with.
Liz Hoffman:
I’m open architecture. I’m plug and play. I’m everywhere.
Rohan Goswami:
You are. You work in any room. But he’s managed to build a real publicly traded business that, to your point, does a lot of things, Bitcoin treasury. He has this sort of personal CFO AI thing. There’s a lot that he’s managed to build using and leveraging his personal brand.
Liz Hoffman:
He’s kind of the epitome of that sort of attention flywheel that’s driving a lot of investing right now to the children of a lot of people, including occasionally me. That said, AI, obviously, there’s a lot of hype and a lot of potential for grifting, but it’s obviously just incredibly real and important in a way that crypto isn’t at least to me. And nobody has any idea what it’s going to mean for how we invest and how markets work. Like you said, I did go on his podcast. I’ve never seen him not in a suit and tie. He’s not out there maxing much of anything. He’s not hawking peptides. He’s a little bit of a millennial mixture of kind of an Alex P. Keaton and a Scaramucci. I don’t know.
Rohan Goswami:
Oh my. That’s a-
Liz Hoffman:
Does that Alex P. Keaton reference land for you or have I outed myself as old again?
Rohan Goswami:
No, no. You got to stop aging yourself here. And I have to say, it’s not a crossover I ever would’ve expected, but he is kind of the perfect balance of really your generation and my generation. He is kind of channeling smack in the middle right there. But look, let’s take a quick break, and when we come back, we’ll have Pomp on.
Liz Hoffman:
Anthony, welcome to the show.
Anthony Pompliano:
Thanks for having me.
Liz Hoffman:
Let’s start here because we were talking about it on the mic before you joined. Would you call yourself an influencer, an investor? What’s the difference these days?
Anthony Pompliano:
Yeah. Well, I definitely don’t think that the influencer tag is something that most people take seriously, and the world is shifting to where it started. Warren Buffet was the original finance influencer, right? He had a newsletter, which he used as his annual letter. He had a conference. He basically was one of the first investors to realize if I keep talking to Carol Loomis and using distribution, that is going to build this reputation. And then, the impact of it is that there became a Buffett premium, and you saw it when he stepped down. The stock went down about 15%. Same assets just without Buffett was 15% less valuable and so that Buffet premium. Now, the reason why I say that is because there’s a ton of people today who sit in this gray area. For example, is Bill Ackman an influencer? He’s a massive social media following. He’s an excellent investor, right?
Rohan Goswami:
Yeah.
Anthony Pompliano:
I don’t think anyone would say that he’s an influencer. It’s just that he is a capital allocator. And so, if you go through all of these different components, I tend to think that the mainstream media, they like to use that terminology frankly because it’s a slight. But I think when you go and you actually talk to founders, you talk to LPs, you talk to people in the market, they realize that now, you have a very hard time competing, allocating capital in the public or private market without distribution. And that’s why you see so many different capital allocators spending time, whether it’s going direct or simply trying to go and get on all the new media distribution platforms.
Liz Hoffman:
But there’s a difference I think between Bill, as you say, came to this a little late, I think got slightly red pilled during the last couple of years and found a real amen corner on Twitter that really validated a lot of his world opinions and then said, “Oh, actually, this is an interesting distribution channel for my investment ideas.” I do think there’s a crop, and I’m curious if you put yourself in it of people who are sort of natively online, but also interested in finance and kind of reverse engineered that same trade a little bit.
Anthony Pompliano:
Nope. I think it’s the exact same thing. If you think about me in particular, I was managing institutional capital for public pension funds and didn’t have a very big audience. Now, I’m not Bill Ackman, but at the same time, I think that if you go back and look at Warren Buffet, Warren Buffet started his career literally selling horse picks like gambling picks, and he used to buy stocks and then go write in the newspaper about those stocks. So when you see this, this is a story as old as time, and it goes back to there’s a age thing. I grew up. I got a cell phone when I was in high school. Most of the folks who are a little bit older, they weren’t on these social media platforms, but I think that there are very few people who actually started out natively on the internet and then became investors. What I think you see is that a lot of folks, they were already building companies, they were already investing, and then they started to adopt that. That’s my story, and I think that’s a lot of other people’s story as well.
Rohan Goswami:
Buffet came of age in an era where Americans got their news really one of two, three ways: TV, radio, newspapers. And now, we’re in this clip economy. Everything travels, everything’s viral, but it feels contained. If I were to pull 10 people on the street, I imagine most people over the age of 50 might know your name, but wouldn’t necessarily know what you’re up to. Do you think that there’s a way to penetrate and grow the market or is it just that the sort of old heads are going to be sort of stuck not knowing and consuming conventional legacy media about finance?
Anthony Pompliano:
My belief on the media side is that the AI revolution is going to have a much bigger impact than people think, but the three areas that are going to be safe are scoops, long-form profiles, and live coverage. Those three things AI is not going to be able to do. Now, my other kind of big bet in the media space is that you’re going to see a bunch of people on the internet who are realizing, “Hey, I can go it alone, and I can figure out how to build an audience and be authentic and go, and I may even have an advantage in some cases. But having the power, whether through licensing, partnership, JV, et cetera, with a legacy brand, that is going to supercharge what I’m doing.” And you’re starting to see this. Spotify is getting into the game. There’s a lot of people who are licensing their content there.
Netflix is doing this. But you also see things like Acquired Podcast is now writing a piece before every episode in the Wall Street Journal. We’ve seen a number of other organizations, whether it’s the news corps of the world, even CNBC to a degree, they’re doing partnerships maybe in events or in certain types of licensing deals. And so, what I think you’re starting to see is that the legacy media is in panic mode. They realize they do not have a foothold on the internet. One of the things I always tell people is go look at the YouTube channels of all of the legacy media outlets, not just in finance, but across the board. They pretty much don’t have distribution there. Every once in a while a video will go viral or something, but a lot of them have 5, 10, 15 million subscribers, and they get a couple hundred views on videos.
And so, the opposite is true though when you look at the people who started out on the internet is they can go viral all day long on the internet, but they don’t have the built-in distribution of television or print-type stuff that legacy media does. And so, really, if you were to design this from a first principle standpoint, well, what do you want? You want both. You want the internet nativeness and the ability to go viral on those platforms, but you also want kind of the heft and the legitimacy that comes with the legacy media as well. And I think that’s why you’re starting to see these two groups come together, and ultimately, it’s just going to be media at the end of the day.
I actually just look at it as you have to adapt to the time. Some of the people that you all or me are probably drop everything when they publish. They explicitly just say, “Hey, I’m just trying to get it right, and I have a very specific view of the world, and here we go.” And I look at somebody like a Ben Thompson maybe if we go to kind of tech media. I don’t think that Ben would argue that he is a hardcore journalist, but I think that everyone looks at him, and they’ll use the word analyst. And so, guess what? The analyst perspective is super valuable. There’s kind of a blending between an analyst and a journalist when it comes to the type of coverage that he’s doing.
And so, I think that’s really where everyone is trying to create this black and white world. They’re trying to put people into these buckets, but really, at the end of the day, go across every single mainstream media organization, and it’s the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Fortune, Forbes, just go through everything. There is a lot of blogging that is going on, and it’s because they’ve got to get things out fast. They’ve got to be able to react to current events, and the incentives of media have driven us there. I don’t fault those organizations for doing it, but it’s just like the obsession with the purity of journalism. Some people still do it, but that number is dwindling very quickly.
Liz Hoffman:
There’s a hundred times more financial content than when you and I, and I think we’re about the same age, started our careers in finance. Do you think the average consumer investor better off, worse off?
Anthony Pompliano:
Well, I definitely think they’re better off for two reasons. One is they have access to more information, and it’s probably more accurate information. But also, two is they have more access to the market itself. And so, it’s one thing to give them information, but they can’t actually make it actionable. If you still got to call your stockbroker and the stockbroker talks you out of what you want to do, that’s obviously not a very good thing. I think the single most interesting and probably most valuable group in finance is what I call the independent investor. And I’ve been obsessed with this concept for the last couple of years. We’ve built products. We just are very, very focused on trying to serve these people. And the independent investor is basically somebody who is digital native. They tend to be a little bit more sophisticated, higher income, and wealthy. And the reason why I call them an independent investor is they get most of, if not all, of their information on the internet, so that’s podcasts, that’s newsletters, that’s X or Twitter, Reddit, et cetera. So they are thinking independently from the mainstream conversation.
The second thing is that they do not trust a financial advisor, an RIA. They don’t work at a wirehouse or anything like that. They want to be in control of their finances. They want to allocate the capital, and they want to live or die with the results of that allocation decision. But then, the third thing is this group of people have been convinced that they cannot achieve their financial goals through their W-2. So they’re not quitting their jobs and becoming like a professional investor. What they’re doing is they’re saying, “Look, I’m going to keep my W-2, but now, I need to use my financial portfolio to be able to get further ahead in a financial manner than I otherwise would.” And so, they’re thinking independently, acting independently, and they’re chasing financial independence. And so, that independent investor, to me, they’re way smarter than people think and they have way more money than people think, and I think that’s why you see the big financial institutions all trying to get into that channel.
Liz Hoffman:
But hang on, let me poke at that for one second because isn’t your stockbroker occasionally supposed to talk you out of what you want to do?
Anthony Pompliano:
No, they shouldn’t.
Liz Hoffman:
Okay. If you want to just YOLO on zero data to expiration options on Nvidia, you should just be able to do that all day with two times leverage?
Anthony Pompliano:
Well, to be fair, that’s what Wall Street does all day long, too. But second of all, if the stockbroker was so smart, why aren’t they richer? Warren Buffet’s always said, “Wall Street’s the only place where millionaires go, and they get advice from people who make 50 grand a year or whatever.” So this whole concept of somehow the people who work inside of these organizations are smarter than the actual people with the money, one, that’s probably not true. The second thing is that what we find is go look at the returns of people who have believed in these technology trends or used these products much earlier. Who are all the Bitcoin investors? Who are all the early AI investors? Who are all the early space investors? Who are all the early prediction market investors? Most of them have this mentality, which is very much an independent investor.
And the reason I know this is we’ve built this AI CFO product. So it’s called CFO Silvia. And people come in and they verify their assets. It’s done in an anonymous, secure way, so we can’t connect a person to the actual portfolio, but we can see on an anonymized basis what are people allocating to on the platform. People are actually much more concentrated and much better investors than most people give them credit for because ultimately, what they are doing is I always go back to if you were a Google engineer, do you think you’re smarter than the average financial advisor? 100%. If you are sitting inside of a large financial organization, let’s say you work at a hedge fund, in your personal account, are you smarter than the financial advisor, the RIA, the stockbroker? 100%. And so, again, it goes back to if there’s more access to information and you are an intelligent person who takes the time to actually go and focus on this, you can drastically outperform the advice coming from somebody whose job is to not get fired.
Liz Hoffman:
Well, hang on, those are two different people, a professional investor and a Google engineer. And I believe that they both think they’re smarter than their stockbroker, but it’s possible that one is and one isn’t, right?
Anthony Pompliano:
I believe they’re the same person. It goes back to they’re both independent investors. And you can go and you can look at doctors. You can look at an accountant. All of these people are on the internet, and their day jobs are different. But the Google engineer may say, “You know what? I’m investing in my personal account, and I am using my understanding of tech and software and maybe even AI or CapEx spending, et cetera, and I am then going to go allocate my personal portfolio accordingly.” The same person who works in that hedge fund, they may be looking at the same things. They’re looking at all the big tech companies. They’re trying to use their knowledge of all of that to go and allocate into the market. And so, ultimately, what I end up seeing is that there is a group of people, the independent investor, who these folks on average on Silvia... Maybe I’ll just use that data.
CFO Silvia’s average user has a net worth of over two and a half million dollars. They ask Silvia 15 questions per week per user. Most people that in the last couple of decades, they don’t ask 15 questions to their accountant, financial advisor, their CFO all year long. And so, what you’re finding is that when people start to use these tools and get this information, the results speak for themselves. So what we’ve seen on CFO Silvia is that people actually grow their net worth over the last six months 20 to 40% if they are a regular user of the product. And so, whether you’re just getting access to information from a podcast, whether you’re using AI tools, et cetera, you are empowering these people to do this. And I think that is a significantly misunderstood trend in finance.
Rohan Goswami:
What is Silvia solving for them that they can’t solve using their existing media diet or Claude or ChatGPT? What is the platform actually doing for them?
Anthony Pompliano:
I can speak to my personal experience as to why we built it. So about a year ago, all of a sudden, it was like the mandate came down from the heavens. Everyone should use AI. And so, I said, “Okay, let me go try to figure this out. I like finance and investing. Let me go try to use these tools.” And I started asking ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, “Hey, how do I get my tax rate down? How should I think about this stock in my portfolio?” But the problem is when you ask a general purpose model a question, it’s no different than asking Google. They don’t have any context to your personal finance. And so, they give you generic answers. So if you ask, “How do I get my tax rate down,” it will simply tell you something like, “Well, if you have real estate, you should look at bonus depreciation. If you have stocks that are down from when you bought them, you should look at tax loss harvesting.”
It’s not very helpful because I still got to go take this idea, go through my portfolio, try to figure out which asset, and then go do the work. Instead, what we built is we built something where you come in and you actually attach your portfolio, your bank account, your brokerage account, your crypto account, all your private investments, real estate, cars, collectibles, et cetera. And then, you begin talking to Silvia. But every single query comes with the context of your personal portfolio. So now, when you ask, “How do I get my tax rate down,” Silvia will actually go and say, “This specific stock, you can tax-loss harvest. Here’s the exact amount of money that you’ll get a benefit from. This piece of real estate, you can bonus appreciate. Here’s how that works.” And so, the reason why this becomes really interesting is I personally believe that there is a trifecta in this AI and finance intersection of what is going to create value. Personal context is incredibly important, frontier intelligence is incredibly important, and specialized workflows are incredibly important.
Rohan Goswami:
Right.
Anthony Pompliano:
We recently saw OpenAI came out with a personal finance product. We saw a surge in signups because they came out with a product because now, people had a reference point. We have a great technical team, but investors built the product. So it’s not good enough just to build software. You have to understand the specialized workflows of an investor. And so, we like to say Silvia’s built by investors for investors, and that’s why you see over $40 billion of assets on the platform in the first year.
Rohan Goswami:
But there are also financial players, Robinhood, some of the crypto exchanges, that are also doing or promising to do the same thing that you guys have already done. They, of course, have massive user bases, pretty affluent user bases. So what’s your edge? What’s your moat against the new entrance?
Anthony Pompliano:
I know more about our users’ financial life than all of those platforms do. Robinhood doesn’t know anything about your real estate. They don’t know anything about your cars. They don’t know anything about your credit cards that aren’t the Robinhood card. They don’t know anything about your private investments. We have all of that, right? We probably have the largest data set in the world of wealthy people talking to an LLM with the context of their personal portfolio. And so, when you think about that, we’ve been able to continue to have the system improve. We’ve built a bunch of proprietary technology. We’re orchestrating across multiple agents. We’ve built an entire agentic file system. We’ve got semantic cron jobs that allow you to set custom notifications with natural language. All of this technology, again, we go back to, what are the results? Show me a platform where the more somebody uses it, the faster their net worth grows. That data point, we think, is very compelling to users.
Liz Hoffman:
What did you make of Robinhood’s announcement this week that they’re going to have agents out there sort of trading a set amount of money in the background?
Anthony Pompliano:
I think it’s a no-brainer. Incredibly smart. I think Vlad and that team over there, they really, really understand their users. And actually, I don’t look at the fact that they don’t have private investments or cars, collectibles, real estate. I don’t look at that as a negative. They are laser-focused on serving the brokerage market and understanding that a bunch of these private investments are going to start to get public liquidity, and they want to basically dominate across that everything type exchange. And so, because of that focus, well, naturally people are going to want to use these AI tools. They already have an AI advisor.
Next thing that people want to do is say, “Hey, can the AI just go execute the trades for me?” I also think that if you look at the product that they built, they were able to do a couple of very small nuanced things that may not seem important. For example, it’s essentially like an SMA, like a separately managed account for the AI. So the AI can’t tap into your entire portfolio unless you actually say, “Address all of my portfolio.” What they have is a separate account that you can move some money in and almost like in a testing ground.
Liz Hoffman:
Yeah, I kind of like it actually for a slightly different reason. You know, I think over long periods of time, and maybe this is where you and I disagree a little bit on the value of the engaged and, what do you say, the independent investor, the best way to build long-term wealth is to set a plan, look at it occasionally, but not too much, and don’t touch it too much. And I actually wonder if the sort of here’s a plan agents will be rebalancing, but actually might get rid of some of the terminally online late night sort of furious trading that I think, hard to say, has been overly helpful for financial health for people over the last 10 years. I don’t know. It feels a little more like the sort of self-directed versus set it and forget it 401(k). I think it’s interesting for a slightly different reason.
Anthony Pompliano:
Well, I don’t disagree that there has been a rise and frankly a poison that has infiltrated the financial markets where we have a bunch of young people who are essentially gambling. Let’s just call it what it is. They’re gambling. Whether they’re using prediction market sports gambling, or they’re betting on triple-levered ETFs, they’re just gambling. And again, every single person I know who is an investor at some point, they got tempted, they gambled, they lost some money, and they realized, “Don’t do that anymore.” Now, with that said, what I do see is that the agentic trading, the part that people kind of forget about this is it’s superhuman intelligence. It is smarter than you. And so, you should be able to, if it’s a good piece of technology, say to it, “I want to find stocks that are most likely to double in the next year that have a low correlation to my existing portfolio and are in these three sectors.”
The AI should be able to go and figure out what that is and build you a kind of a custom index, if you will, and go and allocate your capital there. And there are ideas you wouldn’t have thought of before. There are companies you wouldn’t have looked at before. They’re maybe rebalancing things that you wouldn’t have done, et cetera. The AI component of this is augmenting the human. Now, what I also see is from the financial advisors, we get tons of inbound interest from very large financial advisors or RIAs, and there’s two types of reactions. There’s a small group of them, they hate me. They hate Silvia. They hate all this stuff. They’re like, “You’re trying to put me out of business.” We don’t think of it that way at all.
But what we find is the largest, most successful RIAs are coming inbound and they’re saying, “We want to use these types of technologies, whether they use Silvia or some other AI type technology, to make our financial advisors more productive. So if our advisor today can serve maybe 100 to 110 clients, can we use these tools and now can the advisor actually service maybe 150 or 200 clients per advisor?” Now, the tool is actually something that helps them become more profitable and make more money rather than something that they fear is going to take their job.
Rohan Goswami:
Is that the human element of this business that as AI takes over more and more, there needs to be someone at an RIA or a broker that’s sort of serving as a last check?
Anthony Pompliano:
So we’ve made a very conscious decision not to touch anyone’s money yet. There’s some regulatory stuff. There’s a bunch of stuff that we think that is kind of a zero to one moment when you go from, “Hey, we have data, we have information, we’re providing insights, and you are pulling the trigger on any decision that you make as the user.” The second you start touching the money, in the case what Robinhood does, they’ve got what, 10, 15 years of experience of holding people’s money, the security, execution, all that stuff, so they’re very well situated to go do that today. Where we’ve decided to sit is we actually look at this and we say, “Okay, if we can give the information to the individual, then we believe that that individual is smart. We believe that they can make the decisions for themselves.”
And I think that this idea of the last check of the human, if you look at our business, the CFO Silvia products inside of public company, $40 billion in assets would, if we were a fee only taking RIA, we would’ve built the fifth-largest RIA in the country in one year with 10 or less employees. And our users ask, on average, 15 questions per week, so you think about just the amount of inbound that a human would get. Now, the reason why we look at that is we say, “We have found a cohort, that independent investor.” They don’t feel like they need to get on a phone call. They don’t need to have an in-person meeting to feel like they’re getting the right information. They tend to be tech forward, digital native, et cetera. And so, we think, again, it may be a group that is an early adopter today, but over time, you’re going to find many more people who do this, and the young people are going to become the old people with more assets. And so, the trend here is kind of a 10, 20 year thing.
Rohan Goswami:
Yeah, the rap against going into wealth management was that you had to deal with some of the crankiest, worst people on the planet, really rich people who were trusting you with their money. It doesn’t sound like that’s your customer base then. It sounds like they’re actually, from a customer service perspective, pretty easy to manage even though they are really rich.
Anthony Pompliano:
Well, part of what we think is we’re giving them a tool, right? It’s like if you sell somebody a shovel and then they go out in their backyard and they have a hard time using the shovel, is that the shovel’s fault, is that Home Depot’s fault, or is that the person using the shovel? So again, we can always make the product better. We do the best we can to be very responsive to people when they have suggestions, feedback, or bugs. But at the same time, what we’re essentially doing is we’re giving them a do-it-yourself product. You’re going to come, you’re going to hook up all your data, and then you’re in charge. What questions do you have? What do you want to do with this thing? And the value you get out of it is kind of the effort that you put into it.
Rohan Goswami:
Who are your competitors here? Is it Goldman’s Wealth Management? Is it JP Morgan? It almost seems like you’re not really competing with those guys.
Anthony Pompliano:
My message to every asset manager, every private bank is we have a group of people that we know you want. You should come talk to us, and we’ll figure out how to work together because-
Rohan Goswami:
So are you for sale?
Anthony Pompliano:
No, no. What I mean by that is think of the old school wirehouse. An old school wirehouse, what do they do? They basically have distribution, and a fund manager would come to them and say, “Hey, I have this fund, whether it’s an ETF, a private fund, et cetera. You’re the wirehouse. Help me distribute it.” Well, from our standpoint, if you go and you listen to the public earnings calls of all of the major financial institutions, a lot of asset management firms, et cetera, what are they all talking about? We’re trying to get to the private wealth channel. We’re trying to get to the retail channel. We’re trying to get to the self-directed channel. The reason that they cannot get to that channel is because they are built to go through the RIAs and the wirehouses.
But these people are not at the end of that road. We have a massive audience of people who fall in this kind of self-directed, independent investor bucket. And we started with zero products. We are racing to build as many products to service these people as possible. These people are coming downstream, and they’re trying to figure out how to get in communication with these people. And we’re all probably going to meet somewhere in the middle in terms of we’re all going to be servicing not only the individuals, but the institutions over time as well because these tools are going to become pervasive.
Rohan Goswami:
Let’s take a quick break right there. We’ll be back with more from Anthony after this.
The View From
Rachel Oppenheim:
Welcome back to What’s Working, the show within a show featuring Compound Interest Season partner Amazon Business. I’m your host, Rachel Oppenheim, Semafor CRO. Joined by Doug Gray. Doug, let’s tackle everybody’s favorite subject: as VP of Tech at Amazon Business. Tell us, what does AI-powered procurement actually look like when it’s working, and what is the biggest misconception that leaders have about it?
Doug Gray:
When AI-powered work procurement is working, it’s almost invisible. In a good way. People get what they need quickly. The right guardrails are already built in, and leaders have real-time clarity into the spend and risk without chasing reports or cleaning up issues after the fact. I see a big misconception about AI is that it’s just automating buying.
In reality, the win is taking busy work off the table, the searching, the comparing, the approving, so that teams can focus on the decisions that actually require judgment, like supplier strategy, budgets, and risk. And that only works when you have an AI you can trust. Gartner research indicates that high-quality, well-governed data is the single biggest differentiator in ROI on AI initiatives.
This enables more accurate insights, reduces risk, and maximizes the value that AI can deliver across procurement. That’s what makes our tool Spend Anomaly Monitoring so valuable. You can trust the system to spot what’s unusual, so managers don’t have to approve every routine purchase just to stay in control, as we’d say at Amazon, it has high earned trust.
Transcript
Liz Hoffman:
You’ve been a crypto bull or a Bitcoin bull at least for a long time. And I think you said recently that a lot of crypto has turned into a clown show, and it’s dead and never coming back. It’s like a pretty big pivot. What’d you mean by that?
Anthony Pompliano:
I’ve always been a little skeptical, I think, of the long tail of assets. I tend to think that right now though, it is getting exaggerated. There’s kind of a magnification of this trend. My general thought process is that no different than sports, we are seeing a maturation or a graduation process. There are a couple of assets or trends in the crypto industry. They’re going to the big show. They’re going to the Major League Baseball, and they’re going to go and compete in the traditional financial space. Bitcoin, stablecoins, equity infrastructure, tokenization, those assets, they’re kind of moving on. They’ve graduated to that big show. Everything else, good luck. And when you just look at all of the other stuff, if you think that you are building some sort of decentralized NFT-based membership community, et cetera, it’s been around for five or six years. There’s no bid. The institutions don’t care.
And so, I tend to think that the first 15 years or so of this industry was all about what the early adopters wanted. We now are in the mass adoption type phase. And so, now, it’s all about what do the largest pools of capital want? And if you go and you look at ETFs, that’s maybe a great place to see this play out. These asset managers saw the success of the initial Bitcoin ETFs. Every single one of them went to CoinMarketCap or whatever list, and they said, “Okay, well, what’s the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth? Where do we stop?” There’s two or three coins that have ETFs that have any real size to them. Everything else, they just have basically abandoned and said, “We don’t care about that stuff. We don’t think there’s demand from our clients or the capital pools that we service.”
And so, I think that’s what you’re seeing is you’re seeing a very small, but very important number of things move on to finance. Everything else will die away. And ultimately, I think that the crypto industry hasn’t won until we stop talking about crypto and we just talk about finance.
Rohan Goswami:
Can we talk about what winning looks like? There was a particularly devastating article in The Times this weekend about the CFTC and the sort of laissez-faire approach they’ve taken to enforcing the mature good parts of the industry. Do you think that that approach helps or hurts when it comes to institutionals taking this more seriously, the idea that the CFT is sort of maybe asleep at the wheel or maybe even playing favorites here?
Anthony Pompliano:
Well, I definitely don’t think the CFTC is asleep at the wheel. I know Mike who’s the CFTC chairman. We’ve had him on the podcast before. I think that if you look at what they’re doing on the prediction market side, for example, they’re fighting to be able to oversee that. They’ve been very explicit. I think they’ve actually even gone a step further than maybe some people in that industry had expected them to in terms of them not really wanting markets that could be manipulated and the mentioned markets and that type of stuff. So I think there’s very applicable examples you can point to and show that they are doing their job.
At the same time, I think that everything is relative, and if you look back at the last administration, these people were on a war path to try to shut down an industry. And so, if anyone comes in and basically just says, “Hey, we’re not going to try to shut you down,” immediately, everyone’s like, “Oh, they’re being too easy on them.” They’ve loosened the standards. But the last standard was literally if they could and they did put some people in jail, shut down bank accounts and really go after folks. And I know that because some of our companies fell into this. Some of the companies we had invested in, they were dealing with this, et cetera. And so, the reason I bring that up is if you go and you actually take a look at the CFTC and even the SEC, I think what they are trying to find a balance for is, how do we enforce the rules but encourage innovation? And that naturally is a very healthy tension.
Of course, we would have way more innovation if we just said there’s no rules. I don’t think most people are advocating for that. At the same time, I don’t think most people are like, “Let’s have the strictest rules and no innovation.” And so, finding that middle ground is always going to be this kind of tightrope walk.
Rohan Goswami:
Absolutely. There should be middle ground. But doesn’t it give you a little pause when you see some of the reporting or some of the stories around the allegations of self-dealing with this administration? For example, what did you think of the Trump coin and the Melania coin? Is there not something a little scary to you at how intertwined the politics and the finance of it all have gotten around the first family?
Anthony Pompliano:
Well, what is the difference between them doing anything versus every other politician on the Republican and Democrat side, insider trading on stocks, or a plethora of other things? So again, it’s not saying that anything is right, wrong, whatever. I just think that as a society, we’ve gotten to the point where it is very obvious that there are people in positions of power and influence who are going to use the information that they have available. Now, the rules, I can’t change the rules. They can change the rules. The rules that are in place are the politicians are allowed to do this stuff. I think there’s a lot of Americans who think that’s probably not a good idea in terms of if you’re a senator or a congressman being able to trade on this stuff. I think the exact same thing when it comes to the White House.
And I think you hear some administration officials say, “Hey, we want to change them doing it. We don’t want to do it either.” Now, with that said, the other component of this that I always find funny is I always point back to, do you remember when Elon Musk brought the Tesla cars to the White House and Trump was standing out there and he said something to the effect of, “Everything is computer?” So the 78, 79-year-old man who’s sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue who thinks everything is computer is probably not the one who’s designing the meme coin, right? Again, does that mean that family members, people close to him, whatever? There’s nuance to all this stuff. The reason I bring that up is, again, it kind of comes back to this idea of as a society, we have to ask ourselves, what do we want to allow? What do we not want to allow?
Again, you get in this very weird dynamic, and I don’t claim to have the answers to it. I think this stuff is super complex. And obviously, when you overlay the politics on it, everyone’s brain breaks, and no one wants to have a rational conversation. But I do think that you can draw a direct straight line from Republican and Democrat politicians and the White House. It’s kind of a free fall, and everyone is trying to figure out, “Hey, where’s the line?”
Liz Hoffman:
Hang on though. I don’t want to skip past that too quickly because you’re right. Members of Congress shouldn’t be trading stocks, and I think most Americans agree with that, and probably in a couple of years, they will not be. We will fix that problem. But the president’s family has a meme coin and pumps it on the internet and has made a lot of money on this. You’re someone who I think cares a lot, as you said, about the sort of institutional flavor of this asset class, that it can really be a major part of finance going forward. You don’t think that undermines confidence in some way?
Anthony Pompliano:
Well, just think about why are they doing it or how did they do it, right? The same team that has all of the memorabilia that they’re selling is selling the meme coin. So what they looked at is that it’s digital memorabilia. Now, again, whether you agree with that or not, that is the thought process. If you’re selling a T-shirt with somebody’s name on it, if you’re selling cologne with somebody’s name on it, if you’re selling a hat with somebody’s name on it, or you’re selling a digital coin with their name on it, it’s all kind of in this memorabilia bucket.
Now, again, it goes back to I always find it funny because what do politicians do? They literally sell merch as part of their campaign strategy. That’s how they raise capital sometimes. So again, it goes back to this idea of if I could wave a magic wand, every politician would do nothing. They would just sit in their offices, and they work for the American people, and we would all be happy. I don’t think that’s reality. I don’t think that we’d have a lot of people running for office, frankly, if all they were able to do was just sit there and do it.
Rohan Goswami:
But surely, it would be better for your industry if the president just said, “Look, I’m regulating this. I’m a big fan of this. I think American innovation is awesome. But while I’m in office, I’m going to step out of it because it looks and feels wrong”?
Anthony Pompliano:
Yes and no. The counter argument is the politicians prior to this administration, they said, “We’re not going to touch this. We’re not going to own it. We’re not going to use it. We’re not going to test it, et cetera.” And then, they went absolutely bananas trying to go and regulate it out of existence. And so, there’s this weird dynamic of imagine a regulator. Let’s say that you run the CFTC or SEC. If you’ve never used crypto or AI or any of these technologies, how do you come up with the rules? And so, again, there’s this balance of like, do we want people using their position of power or influence to enrich themselves and take advantage of other people? No. And I think that’s true across the aisle, across all levels of government, et cetera. But at the same time, we actually want the politicians to use the technology. And so, it becomes this very weird dynamic of what is the balance?
And again, we have kind of an AB test here. The last administration, they did not use it, they did not want to use it, and they want to regulate it out of existence. This administration’s basically a 180. My guess is that most Americans are like, “Hey, is there some kind of middle ground here? We don’t want the last ones. And then, this one is doing what they’re doing. So where is that middle ground?” Again, I don’t know if you can get that. I think that people are either very bullish or they’re very bearish, and you see this in conversations with investors. People either love crypto or AI or whatever, or they hate it and think it’s overvalued and it’s going to zero and all their friends who own it are idiots.
Rohan Goswami:
You mentioned another really polarizing quote, maybe financial asset, maybe just gambling, just now, which is prediction markets. What do you think of that space?
Anthony Pompliano:
Well, I think there’s three components to it. Who’s doing it, how are they doing it, and what are they doing it with? And so, if you start with who’s doing it, do I think that a 15-year-old kid should be encouraged every time he turns on television or goes on social media with being barraged with sports gambling ads or prediction market ads? Probably not. I think that there’s a lot of societal negative impact from that type of stuff. At the same time, do I think that a 45-year-old farmer who wants to use a prediction market to hedge or create insurance type products for their crops? I think that’s a great idea. So I think who’s doing it is always lost in the conversation and we paint this broad brush.
The second thing is how are they doing it? And I think that if you simply have, let’s take sports gambling where there’s a house and odds and all that stuff versus a prediction market, which is peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer is better. And I think that’s why you’re seeing so many people go there and say, “Hey, I’d rather do it here or in a prediction market structure than a sports gambling structure.” And the third thing is, what are they doing it on? I have been very, very loud. The mentioned markets, I think, are absolute dumb, and we shouldn’t be encouraging that stuff.
Rohan Goswami:
They’re crazy.
Anthony Pompliano:
I don’t think we should be having people bet on what’s the color of someone’s tie or how long the press conference is going to be or that type of stuff. Again, I’m always torn. I want people to do what they want with their money. At the same time, I look at the second and third order effect on society of if we have a bunch of 15-year-olds betting on how long is the press conference going to be, you start getting into some weird spots. Now, with that said, I am surprised at how little adoption these have had so far when it comes to the professional sophisticated investment community because what I’m really excited about prediction markets is the idea that, okay, let’s say I think Tesla’s going to beat on their car delivery number. Right now, I can go and I can buy the stock, but Elon may say something on the call. The EPS may come out in a certain way, whatever. I’m right, but the stock goes down. That doesn’t feel good.
The isolation of these economic data points or these corporate data points, now, I can just isolate that and actually invest. You’re increasing access to markets, you’re making things cleaner, you’re getting more data and accuracy to markets, and I ultimately think you will solicit more capital into financial markets when you’re able to do that. So that stuff is good to me. It’s just who’s going to be the paternalistic, okay, this is okay and this isn’t.
Liz Hoffman:
Maybe you gave me this idea when I was on your show a couple of months back or I inceptioned it in your brain because I think you’re totally right. And that huge portions of basic, at least short-term kind of price discovery are going to happen on prediction markets. But isn’t the answer that the prediction markets have to? I mean, investment banks make decisions all the time about what bets to take and what products to offer. Don’t they just need to grow backbone and say, “We’re going to be doing this and not this”?
Anthony Pompliano:
Look, I think that there’s going to be different approaches. Some are going to say, “Hey, we’re actually going to let the users come up with the markets and we’re just here to be a facilitator,” and it’s kind of like user-generated content in social media. And so, there will be prediction markets who say, “We are going to set the markets. We’re going to be maybe very loose with the markets that we pick.” And then, another entrant may come and say, “We’re going to be super strict. We’re only going to do economic markets, or we’re only going to do sports. We’re only going to do this.” But this is the beauty of America is let these people compete and see who ends up winning. And I think that what we’re finding is already there’s two that are very big.
Robinhood’s trying to make a play. Coinbase is trying to make a play, crypto.com. There’s a bunch of people who are trying to vie to be in the top three to five players here, but the winner is the consumer. The products are getting better. The pricing is getting better. The markets are getting more liquid because of the competition, et cetera. And so, in a weird way, you kind of need them to all fight it out and come to the market with different strategies because at the end of the day, the consumer ends up winning over the long run.
Liz Hoffman:
You know, it’s funny. We had the CEO of Vail Resorts on the show last week, and we asked whether he hedged weather in the prediction markets. And he said, “No, the product just doesn’t quite work.” And I was on Polymarket and Kalshi yesterday and counted them up. There’s 750 bets on weather right now, and somehow none of them is a good fit for a company whose their biggest risk is to the weather. I mean, it’s just a really telling, “Who is this for?”
Anthony Pompliano:
Well, what becomes really interesting, I think, is you’re going to start to see custom products [inaudible 00:38:33] No different than a bank. I mean, there’s the famous scene in The Big Short. He shows up and he says, “Hey, will somebody sell me the exposure,” right?
Liz Hoffman:
Right.
Anthony Pompliano:
Yeah. And so. I think that whether it’s Vail Resorts, they’ll go to one of these prediction markets and say, “Hey, we don’t want a single city with temperature. Instead, what we want is we want these 10 locations in a single market that we can go and we can use as a hedge.” And I know for a fact that these organizations are very interested in this. We’ve seen Kalshi, for example, talk about the agriculture space. And I know that they’ve been talking to, whether it’s farmers or different organizations, about what are the problems you have with the current hedges or insurance that are available and where could we possibly solve?
Rohan Goswami:
The advantage to Bitcoin, of course, was that everyone could see the algorithm. It was decentralized. No one person controlled that. That isn’t really true for prediction markets, which are kind of black boxes and right now can resolve those markets however they want to. And there’s been a lot of uproar about the resolution of particular markets. There was one around the removal of the Ayatollah. Do you think there needs to be more regulation in the short term? Do you think that self-regulation is an answer to prediction markets?
Anthony Pompliano:
I don’t know if the government is better at judging what qualifies as we’re boots on the ground in Venezuela or not versus the prediction markets. I tend to be very skeptical of the government playing referee on stuff like that. With that said though, I think that the private market will give feedback to these organizations. And the reason why we’re talking about it is because people were freaking out when they made the decisions that they made. And we’ve seen the executives of these companies come out and say, “Hey, we hear you guys. We’re going to try to be much more explicit and detailed in our descriptions of what will qualify and really kind of look through this stuff.” And look, I think this is part of the game of being an early adopter. If you go back and you look at something like Bitcoin, in the early days, your heart would be jumping through your throat every time that you were ready to send a transaction.
You’re like, “I hope it gets there, and I hope I don’t make a mistake. And there’s all these letters and numbers. What am I doing?” Now, I think that people are, one, much more comfortable. Consumer behavior has changed. The technology’s gotten better. There’s kind of a protocol in terms of test transactions, et cetera. I think prediction markets are in the early stages of figuring this stuff out. And my guess is three years from now, we’ll look back at how they did definitions of the settlement of a market very differently, and we’ll kind of laugh as to how elementary it was today compared to where they eventually get to. It just takes time.
Liz Hoffman:
Yeah, the fine print on some of these things are going to be like museum pieces.
Anthony Pompliano:
Oh, lawyers? Lawyers are going to make money.
Rohan Goswami:
They always do.
Liz Hoffman:
Listen, I think that’s a good place to end it. Honestly, thanks, Pomp. This was a lot of fun.
Anthony Pompliano:
Thanks for having me, guys.
Liz Hoffman:
All right. Rohan, what’d you think?
Rohan Goswami:
I walked in a bit of a skeptic, I think, as I am of a lot of the financial influencer community and walked away like he’s incredibly cogent and such an incredible front man for what he’s doing, for the spaces he believes in. I don’t fully agree with him on the regulatory landscape and the Trump family’s sort of decision-making around their involvement here. But I will say he is, to your point, maybe a lot more nuanced and thoughtful than a lot of his peers in this space about these matters.
Liz Hoffman:
It’s funny. He doesn’t quite... When you spend time with him, he’s very different than I guess I would say his YouTube page thumbnail images, which are like super laser-eyed and very optimized for YouTube thumbnails. He’s obviously thoughtful. I’m glad we got him going on prediction markets. I actually am now wondering whether he inceptioned that idea in my head or I put it in his.
Rohan Goswami:
We’re going to have to run the tapes there. Yeah.
Liz Hoffman:
Is it the sort of the price discovery that so much of what’s happening in some weird combination of stock and option markets should be happening on prediction markets? We were talking to the Vail CEO last week who’s biggest risk in the world is, “Is it going to snow in winter?”
Rohan Goswami:
It’s weather. It’s “Will it snow enough?”
Liz Hoffman:
That market does not serve him. And I think our suggestion to him, to Rob Katz was, “Why don’t you call Polymarket and Kalshi and tell them this is what you want because they will find the other side of it?” But I do wonder, he was talking about The Big Short, and the sort of enduring narrative from that was that a big client came to a big investment bank and said, “I want to bet against these mortgages.” And the investment bank did what they do, which is of course-
Rohan Goswami:
Selling a product.
Liz Hoffman:
... and they went and found the other side of the trade. And so, you do worry a little bit that as prediction markets get more institutional, that just sort of by definition, the two-sided market is going to leave retail holding the bag. And I feel like I’m going to be writing these stories in five years and being like, “I wrote this story in 2013.” So time is a flat circle.
Rohan Goswami:
Yeah. I think one thing that Pomp said that was really interesting was about the profile of his users because I would have thought, if I hadn’t done any prep for this interview and we hadn’t talked to him, that it would mostly be retail dudes with maybe 100, 200K to play with, not a net worth of two and a half mil or millions of dollars, $40 billion on platform. I mean, that is crazy to me.
Liz Hoffman:
Well, yes. And his point’s well taken that we built one of the largest RIAs in the world with 10 people, but they didn’t. I mean, people have not made a decision to move their money. That’s different than sort of fiddling around with it. I actually was surprised that he is not more worried about the big private banks and wealth management firms saying, “Get out of our client’s business.” This is what happened with JP Morgan and Plaid very famously. And there was a real fight about as a customer of a bank like, “Do I own my data?” The big banks were kicking Plaid out of their systems. And I don’t know, he seems to think he can be an on-ramp for these wealth managers. I wonder whether they’re going to say, “We don’t want you talking to our clients,” and just sort of yank that access.
Rohan Goswami:
I think that it’s a really clever idea, but also, I don’t know what’s stopping JPM or Goldman from just building their own. These guys have huge, huge software businesses embedded into all of their product selling functions.
Liz Hoffman:
You know, it’s interesting. I remember a couple of months ago, I was with someone who’s a private banking client at Goldman, and they pulled out the app, and they looked. We had to go to three different screens before I saw the return on their assets over the last year. And I was like, “Yeah, that’s pretty strange,” and they’re like, “Yeah, retail’s pass/fail.” So I don’t know. I think Pomp is obviously thinks that that independent investor that is super plugged in, maybe a little more traditional than the kind of online YOLOers, but really wants to run their own money. It’s a big bet on them. It’s certainly not a bet the industry has made.
Rohan Goswami:
Well, that’s it for us this week. Thanks for listening to Compound Interest from Semafor Business. Our show is produced by the wonderful Josh Billinson.
Liz Hoffman:
A special thanks to Anna Pizzino, Katherine Bilgore, Claire Einstein, Rachel Oppenheim, Tori Kuhr, Vilanna Wang, Garett Wiley, Stephanie Chang, and Daniel Hoeft.
Rohan Goswami:
Our engineer is Bob Mallory. Our theme music is by Steve Bone.
Liz Hoffman:
If you like Compound Interest, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want more Semafor, you can sign up for our email newsletter in your inbox at semafor.com.