Jesse Pujji

There's a huge hedge fund information business. I remind every one of my friends, you know who the richest man in New York is? It's nobody who works at a hedge fund or private equity. This person's richer than Schwarzman, richer than all the hedge fund guys. Michael Bloomberg. No way.

By far, he is the richest person in New York because he sells all the information and the picks and shovels to all the finance people. When I worked at Goldman, there's a ton of information businesses. Alternative asset guys are great customers because they're very rational. If you make them money, they don't mind paying you a lot. They're not price sensitive at all. They're very urgent.

They need the thing when they need it. One of my ideas was, let's create a business... where the customers are hedge funds. And within a week, you and I could go get probably $5 billion of ad spend on Facebook, like agencies and friends who are running a lot of spend. And we survey them. And you can pay them a ton of money to survey them.

And first you do it for Meta, then you go do it for Google, then you go do it for Amazon. Then you basically go through the biggest public companies and you create information that the investment and hedge fund world uses. And I think that's easily a 10 million EBITDA business, maybe more.

Yeah, absolutely. Let's get into it. So what do you got for us? Well, what genre do you want? Because I can take us in many different directions. I think maybe I'll start with my formula. It might be helpful and then we can talk about some of them. Having launched a bunch of businesses, some which have been very successful, some which have failed, I think I've gotten a better formula down.

One of my favorite things is unique insight and unfair advantage. Part of unique insight is I always tell people, look at your own situation. Who do you know? One of my favorites is cross-sections of things you know. Like one of the very successful businesses we started last year is called Ox Insights, and it's helping private equity firms understand marketing.

Like we basically do diligence for them and help them get it. It's like, okay, well, those are two cross sections that were kind of unlikely bedfellows that we've been able to build a very successful business in. So that's one. And then the unique insight is like, what's the problem in there that somebody's got? An unfair advantage usually around distribution. Who do you know?

And so I'll start with one for fun. I'm not sure the audience will love this one, but when I was running Ampush, I was making like $200,000 a year doing GLG and like alpha sites calls. And the reason was because all these hedge fund dudes had like 100, 200, $300 million positions in meta. And they would call me every quarter and they'd go, what are your clients doing? Are they spending more?

Are they spending less? And I was like, man, I don't have time for this. So I went from $500 an hour to $1,000 an hour. I'm not kidding, $2,500 an hour. And I saw no drop off in volume. So I was doing whatever number of calls a quarter. And so I'll give you two ideas actually that came from this. So the first idea is, You know, hedge funds, there's a huge hedge fund information business.

I remind every one of my friends, you know, the richest man in New York is a richest person in New York. Who is it? It's not, it's nobody who works at a hedge fund or private equity. This person's richer than Schwartzman, richer than all the hedge fund guys. Someone in real estate? Nope. Nope. Michael Bloomberg. No way.

By far, he is the richest person in New York because he sells all the information and the picks and shovels to all the finance people. When I worked at Goldman, there's a ton of information businesses. Alternative asset guys are great customers because they're very rational. If you make them money, they don't mind paying you a lot. They're not price sensitive at all. They're very urgent.

They need the thing when they need it. One of my ideas was, let's create a business... where the customers are hedge funds and within a week, you and I could go get probably $5 billion of ad spend on Facebook, like agencies and friends who are running a lot of spend. And we survey them. And you can pay them a ton of money to survey them.

Or you can give them a trip to the Bahamas every year in exchange for doing this survey. And all the survey answers every quarter is, did you spend more? Did you spend less? Whatever. What are your metrics? You basically collect a bunch of really... And you go to hedge funds. You say, I'll charge you...

$100,000, $200,000 a year to have access to this information and it's going to give you an edge. My better idea even, by the way, for pricing is we're going to hold a reverse auction. Only 20 people will get this information. Bid to your highest bid that you're willing to pay for it.

And first you do it for Meta, then you go do it for Google, then you go do it for Amazon, then you basically go through the biggest public companies and you create information that the investment and hedge fund world uses. And I think that's easily a $10 million EBITDA business, maybe more.

Dude, there was a company that we paid $100,000 a month at Goldman, maybe not quite that, maybe $50,000 a month, called First Rain. And it was literally a fancy Google Alerts for public companies. Because the argument was, you need to know first when something happens to your stock. And we are the fastest, best way to get you that information. And it was literally just Google Alerts.

And so I think there's a lot of ideas in this vein. And this is a good example, by the way, of getting super thoughtful about a customer and what they need and who they are and how to approach it. But that's one of my ideas for that world. The other one is a broad idea. I mean, you know, you've heard of Alpha Sites or GLG, right? Yeah.

So for anyone who's listening, there's probably 10 of these companies. All have been extremely successful. Their customers are hedge funds, private equity, consulting firms. And they basically supply them with expert networks, expert experts. I used to work at Goldman, right? And I had to get smart on the trucking industry.

So I went to them and I go, hey, guys, I want to talk to a guy who owns 10 trucks. I want to talk to one of the biggest, you know, I want to talk to two truck drivers, like actual truck drivers. I want to talk to someone who ships through three different trucking carriers. I want to talk to someone who's built the truck engines, the special diesel engines. I made this whole request for them.

And within two weeks. They had experts for all of those people. And I'm sitting there asking, how does this diesel engine work? Is the technology actually going to change the game? Blah, blah, blah. I'm learning all about it. And they've all been very successful. I'm talking nine-figure EBITDA. Multiple companies have hit nine figures in EBITDA. I think that whole space is going to verticalize.

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