Prediction Open · timeframe Feb 2030
Pompliano predicts Series A and later venture returns will compress to 15%
“Now, what we've seen over the last decade or so is so much capital coming to the market. Maybe there's been an incremental increase in the number of good companies created every year, but it's not kept pace with the amount of capital. And so my thought process…”
Disclosure
Pompliano sold Reflexivity Research to DeFi Technologies in an all-stock deal
“We sold that research business to a publicly traded company in Canada called DeFi Technologies. They were an asset management firm. They had crypto ETPs in Europe. If you have asset management, you need research. You put those together. Not a new original idea…”
Insight
Pompliano: Believing in luck is poison that strips people of agency
“What I realized was, luck is actually poison, because it strips people of agency. So if you constantly rely on luck, if you constantly fall back on good luck, bad luck, what you're saying is that you have no agency.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Facebook ran a 90-day project to grow Zuckerberg and Sandberg's followings
“There was a three-person team that was assembled. It was a ninety-day special project, and the whole goal was to help those two individuals grow their following on Facebook, which, when I tell people that, they always think it sounds a little almost vain, but …”
Assertion Contradicted
Pompliano claims average VC funds outperformed QQQ by 400 basis points
“QQQ's been compounding it, call it, 1313 and a half, maybe 14%, depending on what their starting point over the last decade or so. The average venture fund, if you give them all the credit for their paper marks, 17% a year or something, maybe 18%. So if you ju…”
Insight
Pompliano: Cash flow optimization creates non-dilutive quarterly funding for balance sheet investments
“By optimizing these businesses for cashflow in a way you're getting non-dilutive fundraising on a quarterly basis. It also allows us to play offensive game of you have a balance sheet. That balance sheet can be used to start companies. We could acquire compani…”
Insight
Pompliano: The hardest part of investing is selling correctly, not buying
“I used to think that the hardest part of investing was buying the right assets, and I'm now fully convinced that the hardest part of investing is selling correctly”
What-if
Pompliano claims Google would have sold early for slightly more money
“Google, they just got a little bit more money offered to them early. They would have sold.”
Opinion
Pompliano claims the U.S. Army is the world's best leadership teacher
“Academic leadership, the military, and the Army in particular, is probably one of the best institutions in the world to teach that stuff. They've really studied it. They've got a lot of real-world experimentation of what works and what doesn't.”
Assertion Supported
Facebook's social good team created Amber Alerts and voter registration features
“The last team I worked on was something called the social good and goodwill team. And that team was tasked with a pretty interesting mandate, which was go do good things in the world using the size, scale, and advantage that Facebook has, but don't worry about…”
Assertion Partly supported
Pompliano's first $3.5 million micro-VC fund invested in four unicorns
“The very first fund that I ever managed was about a three and a half million dollar micro VC fund. Maybe the biggest LP externally was like a hundred K. You're me and a buddy, and we're like, are we good at this? Do we like doing this? Can we do just enough mo…”
Disclosure
Pompliano's investment firm launched nine businesses to leverage its audience distribution
“We've created an investment firm where we've created nine businesses, and the goal really is, how do we create businesses in certain sectors where we have a competitive advantage purely through distribution?”
Disclosure
Pompliano and Will Clemente co-founded Reflexivity Research with $500,000 seed capital
“We put 500,000 dollars down on the balance sheet. And we said, hey, we're going to be partners on this.”
Assertion Supported
DeFi Technologies stock surged from $0.51 to over $3.30 after Reflexivity acquisition
“The stock went from 51 cents, worth a couple hundred million dollar market cap at the time, to today the stock trades somewhere between three dollars and 30 cents and three dollars and 50 cents.”
Disclosure
Pompliano structured Professional Capital Management as a C corporation
“The way that we're structured today, we have a C corporation. We raised from a great group of investors, many that people would know. It's a combination of a couple of funds, but also a number of very successful corporate executives.”
