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This is Moneywise, a podcast where host Daniel Berk is joined by high-net-worth guests to explore exclusive insights into personal finance and lifestyle tailored for other high-net-worth people, or those on their way. They'll get radically transparent about the numbers, revealing things like their burn rates, portfolios, and spending habits. This podcast was made for the Hampton community, a private, highly-vetted, peer membership community for founders and CEOs of fast-growing, tech-enabled startups. Check it out at https://joinhampton.com/.
Today's guest is John Arrow, who bootstrapped his company to 350 people and sold for a $100,000,000. 70,000,000 of that went to his personal bank account. He has his own plane that he flies wherever he wants, and he has a house in New York and in Austin where he flies himself back and forth whenever he wants. This episode is awesome. This is a very interesting guest.
Daniel Berk:I hope you enjoy. Hello, listeners. Welcome to another episode of Moneywise. Today, I have John Arrow with me. I appreciate you joining Moneywise today, John.
John Arrow:Hey, Daniel. Great to be here.
Daniel Berk:Awesome. It sounds like you're in New York today. You're usually in Austin, though. Tell me what takes you to New York.
John Arrow:I split my time between Austin and New York. I think those two cities pair incredibly well together, and it looked like in New York we had some
Daniel Berk:better weather today. But you told me right before this, it's gonna be like hotter in New York today than it is in Austin?
John Arrow:I like the heat. I'm one of those people that doesn't complain about the hot months in Austin. It's perfect
Daniel Berk:That's fine.
John Arrow:Right here in New York. They pair so well together. I think this could be a second Austin, maybe if we figure out the mayor situation here.
Daniel Berk:I'm in Charleston and I love the heat until it gets really hot. In Charleston, I try to go anywhere else but Charleston in July and August. It's terrible terrible weather. But look, I'm excited to talk a little bit about who you are today, what brings you to Moneywise. If you could tell us kind of a little bit about yourself, and I know you've started a number of companies and businesses.
Daniel Berk:Tell us what, you know, makes you kind of a good guest to bring on the show.
John Arrow:I'm a lifelong entrepreneur. I connected with Sam several years back, and one of those things is I'd never had a boss in my entire life. I remember growing up and I was that kid, that annoying kid who would knock on your door trying to sell you different things. When he was seven or eight years old, I would always have the lemonade stand out at every street corner in the hot Texas summers. In the winter, it does get cold there in Austin, we have one month that gets down in the fifties, I would be selling hot chocolate.
John Arrow:And so, I learned at a really early age that if you were resourceful, and you had grit, and you tried to do things, you could make money. Then in high school I started a software business, and I wasn't really a big fan of going to public high school, it kind of made me not want a nine to five job. So I dedicated myself and my goal was, look, once I am earning a thousand dollars a day, that was my goal, I don't have to go to high school anymore, I can drop out. Well, I eventually hit that goal and my parents said, no, you're not dropping out of high school. And I was on the fence about whether I was going to go to college or not, I'm so so glad I did, because it allowed me to really scale my business faster by meeting other like minded people at the University of Texas that I was able to build ventures with.
John Arrow:And it just shows, goes to show you that just because you don't need to do something, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
Daniel Berk:The thousand dollars that you were making in high school, what were you doing?
John Arrow:So originally I started building websites for people, this was back in the day of GeoCities where everybody needed to be a be a .com company, like everybody needs to be a AI company today, and I realized I had this slight advantage that I knew how to make these things really really well, or at least I thought that they were well. Looking back, they probably weren't that great. I mean, if you're serious about your business, you shouldn't hire a 14 or 15 year old to make your websites. But I was able to do that so that I generated some initial capital where it allowed me to kind of look at the space separately, and I realized I could make a software product to basically help parents monitor what their kids were doing online. My mom growing up, she was a psychotherapist, and so she told me these stories about parents really not understanding AOL Instant Messenger and all of these platforms, and their kids would get into trouble talking to strangers.
John Arrow:I realized, oh wait, I know how to help prevent this, so I made a piece of software that did exactly that, and put it out there, had a PayPal buy now button, and before I knew it, it was selling a thousand dollars a day, every day.
Daniel Berk:Wow.
John Arrow:So I continued scaling that. Eventually when I got into college, I saw what was gonna be happening with mobile, and I shifted all my focus to that, which we can get into.
Daniel Berk:Yeah, and you mentioned .com, tell me more about how growing up in the .com era, I don't know if we wanna call it a bubble, but that period of time, how did that shape the way that you thought about growing businesses and making money?
John Arrow:I was extremely fortunate that I got to grow up in two of the .com epicenters. First I was living in Seattle for a while, my dad worked at Microsoft, and so I got to see everything that was happening there, then we moved to Austin, was really ground zero for for everything that was interesting happening on the web, at least in my view. And I was trying to make sense of it all as as as a young as a young teenager at the time, I was thinking, okay, wait, why are all these companies worth so much all of a sudden? All I can see that they're doing is throwing elaborate parties and and and spending a bunch of money. The way I reconciled it after the bust, is that no, they weren't actually doing anything that useful.
John Arrow:They were convincing other people that they were, and that was an extreme cautionary tale for me, where I realized you didn't need to go out and create this perception that you were generating value, just go generate value. That's what led to the software company, I said how can I just get people to buy things? I don't want to have investors, I don't want to have a boss telling me what to do, I just want to start making more money every day than I did the day before it.
Daniel Berk:I love that. That's very cool. I reached out to one of your buddies, Neville, before the episode. Asked him, hey, I'm having Jon Arrow on Moneywise, and I wanna kinda hear some of the behind the scenes of Jon Arrow, of what makes him tick, of the history that you guys have together. So I have a couple clips.
Daniel Berk:I'm gonna share one right now, but I would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Neville Medhora:Jon is just an interesting guy. He hang glides. He has always flown planes. I remember he would never really drink all that much and I asked him one time, know, once you really drink and he's just like, honestly, if I drink, I can't fly within twelve hours or twenty four hours. So I always want to be prepared to fly.
Neville Medhora:Like, that's the kind of, guy John is. He has a bunch of eccentricities like, he'll walk around downtown, but only with earplugs because he wants to save his hearing for for when he's old.
Daniel Berk:Obviously, Neville probably has a lot of history with you, and it sounds like it was cool. I asked him. I was like, hey, tell me about John. I'm having him on Moneywise, and he sent me seven and a half minute voice note off the cuff of all the awesome details and eccentricities of of who you are, kinda what makes you interesting, and I'm really excited to dig into some of those. I even told him, might as well just upload this voice note as a podcast because that's that's how good it was.
Daniel Berk:But tell me more about planes and flying and some of that that he just divulged around drinking and wearing earplugs. How does all that fit into who who John Arrow is?
John Arrow:Well first of all, Neville is such a great guy. Mean that just speaks to the serendipity of Austin that you find your people in these types of places. Right? I mean, there's a saying that San Francisco might be the best place to start a company, but Austin's the easiest place because you meet incredible people that are helpful like Neville. I've known Neville almost longer than anybody else in Austin, you know, I immediately connected with him over the entrepreneur aspect of it, and I don't know of another city where there's that same gravity where you find those people.
John Arrow:And so one of the things is, once you find somebody like Neville, they get to learn what makes you unique pretty quick. And I think I was a freshman at UT, and I was really into flying airplanes, I had just gotten my pilot's license, I still try to fly regularly today, I'm really really into it, and that was exactly right. It's like, okay, I have this optionality where if I take a sip of alcohol, unlike driving, it's not about blood alcohol at all, it's literally one sip of alcohol, you have to wait eight hours, and then technically it needs to be below point o four. But if you were above point o four after eight hours, you were going probably too hard to begin with. And I love that option, I kind of approach you know, life in that way too, it's like why should you close doors unnecessarily.
John Arrow:I mean there's times to doing it, there is a real cost to options just like there are derivatives, but that was just something that I loved so much. One of the things devil knows about me too is that I wanna try to live as long as I possibly can, ideally forever. I'm really into the whole longevity camp. Hearing is a thing that we haven't figured out how to preserve and to protect, I'm really cautious of that. I'm around airplanes, I'm around guns, and if you live in Austin part of the year, you're in the live music capital of the world, so there's a lot of loud things going on.
John Arrow:It also breaks your concentration, your flow state. I get so many of my ideas, I get so much done while I'm walking, I don't want to be distracted by it. I used to wear the earplugs, now I wear the AirPods, which are a lot I think more socially acceptable to wear to rather than earplugs, and I think it's a game changer. Think it's the best product that Apple's ever made.
Daniel Berk:Yeah. I I walk around with AirPods too. Are you listening to anything, or is it just noise, or just nothing?
John Arrow:I love podcasts, and I listen I listen I listen to this podcast, listen to to other podcasts that I like, but generally, I start out just with silence, and trying to block out as much of the world as I can, and taking it through visual stimuli rather than auditory.
Daniel Berk:Yeah. Find sometimes when I'm looking for deep work, I'll put my I have another pair of headphones, Bose QuietComfort, and I'll put those on, and I'll turn on the noise cancelling, and you know, an hour and a half goes by, and I realize I haven't been listening to anything but just the fuzzy noise canceling sound. I'm like, oh, that was actually kinda nice, listening to nothing for a couple hours.
John Arrow:It's rare these days, right, to be able
Daniel Berk:to just
John Arrow:be with your brain and not be bombarded by something.
Daniel Berk:Yes. Now, I wanna listen to another clip from Neville. There's a few. They're all good. They're they're juicy.
Daniel Berk:So here comes another one.
Neville Medhora:You can ask him about what they did for my thirtieth birthday party. They were about to sign their company and make a life changing amount of money, and it happened to be my thirtieth birthday party, you know, a decade back, and him and his co founder Mickey went to Cuba with me illegally and and and six guys, and we couldn't communicate with the outside world, and they had to leave two days early. The the party we're gonna be there for a week. They had to leave after a few days to go sign their company away, and they went to this foreign country where they couldn't communicate with anyone.
Daniel Berk:We didn't even know if
Neville Medhora:they were alive when when they went back. He created the subscription process company.
Daniel Berk:Okay. So we'll get to the subscription process company in a few minutes, but you gotta tell me and the listeners more about this thirtieth birthday party because Neville just barely explained it and I was like, wait a second, I need a whole episode on this.
John Arrow:Neville is somebody who makes the most of every single experience. He will just basically want to live it up as much as possible. Like every moment, know, you've probably heard about he wears like a death clock to know how much time he has left. And so naturally, you're turning 30, you have this milestone, he says, what's the most difficult, what's the most illegal country to go to, and decides he wants to go to Cuba. And I didn't really know much about Cuba other than that we weren't supposed to go at the time when he asked me, I'm like absolutely, let's let's do that.
John Arrow:And so we literally couldn't buy tickets from The United States, and I was not gonna fly my plane to a communist country. We ended up in Cancun, we bought in cash, which I don't care you know how much you fly, nobody's ever buys a plane ticket in like cash, like literal money. And it's the most suspicious thing ever, we went to Air Cubano, they give us these tickets, they give us something supposedly that's a visa to be there. We get on the plane, we're completely segregated between the Cubans and basically the Americans that aren't supposed to go there, we're not allowed to talk to them, and then we land, and it was like getting off of a time machine. I felt like I was back in the nineteen sixties, and it was one of those those countries that I'm so so glad that I went there, it's definitely a paradise loss, and I mean how fitting was it we went to the most socialist communist country right before doing the most capitalistic thing in the world of of selling a company.
John Arrow:The crazy thing about it, your cell phone doesn't work there too, so they didn't even know whether we got out, if we were okay or not. We just left and hoped that they would return someday.
Daniel Berk:That's so funny. So did you know that he was like, did they die? Like, did were you aware of his concerns about your life when you left, or were you just like, oh, I just gotta go deal with this company sale?
John Arrow:I was more concerned about theirs. I mean, we were at least on the path home. Sure. They wanted to to basically get every aspect of the experience. My favorite memory was I think it was Neville's brother decided to start playing guitar and trying to earn money in Cuba, which theoretically they're not allowed to do.
John Arrow:And he started making money, people would put money into this hat, and then we went to the best communist restaurant there was, which everything's the same price, and enjoyed a meal based on the money that that that he had he had earned in Cuba.
Daniel Berk:What a what a crazy story. Yeah. I don't know if I worked in an airline and someone came and bought money with cash, like I think I would just instantly assume something incredibly illegal or suspicious is going on, but what year was this? Was this like 2015?
John Arrow:I think it was like maybe 2013 or so, and it was one of those things where it was only illegal if you spend money in Cuba. Theoretically, it was laws if you didn't spend money. Also, in Cuba, very nicely they would not stamp your passport passport if you were nice to them. We had one person in our group, I think it was Noah, Noah Kagan, who decided to be like, oh, you're not gonna stamp my passport, already know how this all works. And they grabbed his passport stamped it, and so he he has that stamped in there, probably probably caused him some trouble later on.
Daniel Berk:That's fun. Love Noah. Good friends with him from some of the business we've done together. That's that's such a funny story. Okay.
Daniel Berk:I have another clip, and we'll we'll we'll jump into some other fun stuff, but I think this one's maybe the most interesting.
Neville Medhora:When they went back, he created the subscription process company where you could sue anyone for $97 a month. He created like suing as a service and it actually helped me a lot because I had this big problem where Amex misplaced a million of my points like eight years ago. And this was when, you know, airline points or Amex points are worth like a ton of money. And they replaced like over a million of my points. I could never get them to fix it.
Neville Medhora:It was a clerical error on their side. They said go to Starwood. They said go to Amex. You know, it's back and forth circular thinking no one could solve the problem. So I tell John Arrow about this.
Neville Medhora:He's like, hey. I have this company that's gonna sue them. Let me try to handle it. Literally, in two days, the head of American Express Legal, the the full head of the entire department, she calls me on my phone and was like, hey, you have a problem. How do I solve it?
Neville Medhora:I was like, just give me all my points back. The next day, all my points in my account. I had been working on this for like over a year, and I called John and I was like, dude, what did you do? And he's like, oh, I just sent them a thing that said they got hacked. Like clearly, you messed up his points and and placed him in someone else's account, so you clearly got hacked.
Neville Medhora:And the number one thing that companies hate credit card companies is getting hacked. And and he just solved it. I remember thinking like, dude, this this guy is like he just thinks in different ways.
Daniel Berk:So tell us more about the story because it sounds like you're some type of genius hacker for money for hire type of, you know, behind the scenes stuff. But like, was that a simple process for you or did you have to do some deep work figure that out for for Neville?
John Arrow:Well, like like Neville, I love doing these experiments, and so one of the companies that I started after I I sold Mutual Mobile the first time, I kind of sold this company twice, we can get into that. I said, wow, I had access to this amazing team of lawyers, literally the best best lawyers money can buy, it's so unfair that other people don't have access to that. Big companies do, and so if a company does something that isn't right, you're not really able to do much, it's not worth doing much. And so I said, well what if you created a company that basically automated small claims lawsuits in The United States? There are a lot of pain, you have go to the courthouse and do that.
John Arrow:And so that's exactly what we did, really small team of people, this is before AI, so everyone's manually filling out forms, delivering them to the courthouse, running them. And we were actually responsible for more lawsuits, our company in Texas than any other company, because we were the ones filing these things. It was it was pretty pretty hilarious, I mean we had courts reaching out to us like why, you know, who who are these people? But the crazy thing about it is, most of the time these companies, once they're caught and once they realize they weren't doing the right thing, they'll get in touch with that person and they'll want to make it right. And and they'll they'll want to settle it or they'll realize, oh we just just didn't realize the issue.
John Arrow:And so that was the case of what was going on with Devil, he was owed these points, these points points should have been his points. He had tried, he's a smart guy, he's one of the smartest people that I know, and it's just American Express isn't gonna take anyone seriously. And I've been an American Express user for many many years, they're really good, but sometimes they get into an issue where they're just not gonna deal with it. And so what I did is I helped them use the site, we had somebody create all the paperwork, and I think initially we didn't get a response, and so what I did is I have a service that gives me the email address of everyone at the company, and I said, well obviously, know, American Express, there must be something wrong here, because they're normally a great company. So I think we sent out an email to every single employee at American Express with the subject line possible data breach.
John Arrow:Right. Obviously, there must be something wrong if Neville
Daniel Berk:doesn't Someone's have gonna get that email.
John Arrow:Yeah. Right, and obviously, once the c you know, people don't aren't gonna really interrogate exactly what it means, but once enough people forward this to the CEO, the CTO, the CLO, it gets looked into, and American Express to their credit, once they realize it, they did a good job, and they they credited him points. Some companies can be more difficult, but that was the whole spirit of that of that website.
Daniel Berk:That's that's really interesting. Now now I'm wondering if Neville should have asked for like two or three x of the number of points. Like, actually because of the trouble, give me 5,000,000.
John Arrow:Yeah.
Daniel Berk:That's funny. That's funny. Well, okay. So tell us more about Mutual Mobile. You've mentioned it a couple times.
Daniel Berk:Of course, that's one of the main businesses that is, you know, what led to your wealth. But tell us more about it. What what is Mutual Mobile? What did you do? And kind of where are you at now with that?
John Arrow:Kind Kind of like how I met Neville when I was at the University of Texas, met some other entrepreneurs, and we were entering college when the iPhone was released. And it was this amazing moment, it was probably, for people that don't remember the iPhone being released well, it was it was like chat GPT times 10, in my opinion, at that point. It was the device that was going to change the world. Everybody saw this, I think I don't think it was, you know, we had a super unique enthusiasm about it, but my myself and my co founders, what we realized is that this was going to change every aspect of the world, from education to financial services to defense, you name it. And we said, we want to build iPhone apps, but we can only build so many, there's a shortage of people that can make these things.
John Arrow:Let's try to amass and develop the company that is capable of helping the enterprise world create mobile applications. And so that's exactly what we did. We had the largest number of IOS engineers under one roof outside of Apple for for several years, just by having that scale, it meant that most of the Fortune 1,000 when they wanted to get something made, they came to us. So it started with mobile, and then we parlayed that into tablet, into Internet of Things, we did stuff in the self driving realm, we've done stuff in any type of new emerging tech. Before we sold the company, we started doing a lot in AI, before ChatGPT was a household name, and so that they kind of gave me the launch pad to know what I was gonna do next.
John Arrow:But like I said, we sold the company twice, so in 2013, it was like the height of the mobile bubble is what I what I call it, we were doing close to $45,000,000 a year. We were receiving revenue multiples on the valuation of the company, we were we were seeing like two x revenue multiples, which is insane for a company in kind of the So you know, we didn't think of ourselves as a services company, we thought of ourselves as a solution company, but still a two x revenue multiple was was pretty interesting. We decided that it probably made sense to run a process and sell the company. We were split on whether we should sell the whole company or part of it. I was of the belief, I was the CEO at the time and chairman, I was like, let's sell the whole thing, this is a really really good deal.
John Arrow:The fact that we're even entertaining $100,000,000 valuations and that we've raised no money, I mean this is a really really magic moment. And we had companies ready to buy the whole thing, we ended up going with WPP, the large advertising conglomerate, great company, because they were willing to let us do a deal, a minority deal, while we still stayed in control after we sold. And so that's exactly what we did. After we sold, I left as CEO, I went and flew my plane around the world, did interesting new companies, like things that let people sue anybody, and then you know, helped as a chairman, helped, but I wasn't running it. And then about five years later, asked they me if I'd come back as CEO, and I said, okay, but on one condition, and that condition is that we sell the rest of the company.
John Arrow:So that's what I did, and we sold the rest of the company in 2023, and I just finished my earn out about a year ago or so. Now I'm looking at looking at new things.
Daniel Berk:Okay. So 2013 was the initial partial acquisition, and walk us through some of the numbers behind that. What was the actual acquisition? How much also did you make from that acquisition?
John Arrow:So I mean, we had no capital raised into the company. So a lot of times when there's venture deals, it's a situation where you're giving money back to the investors. There were zero investors in Mutual of So we had five five total people, and we decided, look, whoever wants to sell a portion of their their stock can do so, and I decided to sell the majority of my stock at the time, and that in the valuation, I think it was around $70,000,000 or so. And so, it was a very good very good exit for me, it was one of the best decisions that I ever made. I'm really glad I did that then.
John Arrow:And it was one of those things where we kind of got to look down the other alternative reality too. We got to keep running the company, we got We were in the company for ten years after that, which was incredible. We we we worked with hundreds of interesting companies, we during the course of that hired thousands of people, and it was a great journey. But you know, one of the things that I've come to realize through other exits too, is that you never regret selling. It's never happened to me, and I don't think I know anybody who's ever regretted selling a company.
John Arrow:I've met many people who have regretted not selling a company though.
Daniel Berk:I've heard more of the latter as well. So you mentioned five of you who were actual shareholders. How many people were at the company at the time of the sale in 2013?
John Arrow:I think it was around three and fifty or so.
Daniel Berk:Okay, 350. So you made 70,000,000, what did you do with that money? I mean, that's a life changing amount of money, what happened, you know, the day it hits your account, what was that feeling like?
John Arrow:I think what's really interesting, like, think about the day the day before, I mean, this money didn't come out of nowhere. You had you had this, but it was on paper. Right? So it wasn't It's not like all of a sudden, you know, you knew you had it, but you had 99% of your net worth locked up into what was an illiquid asset. And when you're going through a process of selling a company, you oscillate between days when you think your company's worth a $100,000,000,000, and when you think it's worth nothing.
John Arrow:Right?
Daniel Berk:Yeah. It's
John Arrow:like, this is very is this time period where you're you're really curious. I mean, think that was one of the fascinating things about going through the process is you wanted to see where where it ended up, because we had we had an offer for a $100,000,000 for the company, we went with less because we wanted flexibility on some of the terms. Yeah. And so the day after the wires hit, you're thinking about your bank account balance, and it's it's literally like an order of magnitude higher than it was before, maybe two orders of magnitude. And so it changes your perspective on everything, It's something if you used to think about something costing a $100, it's like it costs $10 now, we were kind of going through that that mindset.
John Arrow:And I had been really fortunate that I had made made a fair amount of money before through other businesses, but this was definitely you know, kind of an order magnitude more. And biggest thing I realized is, wow, you know, this is a situation where I never never need to work again in my life. You think about risk free interest rates, even then when they were relatively on a low side, mean you could just you can just paint interests. And so they kind of I didn't really do anything that differently after I saw it. I think I maybe bought I think I bought the first Model s Tesla in Texas, which they weren't supposed to sell me.
John Arrow:It's a long story, but they weren't supposed to have it. But other than that
Daniel Berk:Why weren't they supposed to sell it? I'm interested.
John Arrow:Texas had this protectionist law, they've gotten way better, where you were not able to buy directly from the dealer. You had to go through another third party dealer. Any of your cars in Tennessee, had to go to Colorado or something. I just showed up at at the Tesla shop, it was a showroom, I said, I wanna buy this car right now. They made a call and they're like, look, we can't sell you this, we don't even have a way to give you like temp plates.
John Arrow:I'm like, I don't care, I don't need the plates.
Daniel Berk:Yeah. I I just came from Cuba, I don't What care about
John Arrow:they did, I did not ask them to do this. I did not tell them not to do it, I didn't ask them to do this. They made me fake I think they made me like a fake California temporary bag or something and put it on the car. Maybe it a real temporary, I don't know. But I did get pulled over, and the cops were thoroughly confused by the situation.
Daniel Berk:That is so funny. You did get pulled over. How soon after getting the car did you get pulled over? A week
John Arrow:later, and they're like looking
Daniel Berk:at this plate, and you
John Arrow:know, like, oh, know, Californians are strange people, I guess this is how it works there.
Daniel Berk:That is so funny. Oh man. Okay. So you mentioned you already had achieved some wealth prior to that acquisition. What was your net worth before the $70,000,000, you know, paycheck, and and
John Arrow:It was like flirting, like liquid network. Liquid network was probably flirting around a million dollars before Okay. It's all done.
Daniel Berk:So yeah, you weren't going from from nothing to to wealth, but 70 x. And what was the pay structure of that exit? Was it all at once to hit your account 70, or was it a payout over some period of time?
John Arrow:The majority of it was was upfronts, and then there was an earn out component, but the vast majority of it was upfront. And I I always encourage that, I mean, think earn outs Yeah. Unfortunately are really problematic. There's a thought they're gonna keep things aligned, but in reality, they often don't, and they end up as a as somewhat of a mess. I've I've never ever talked to anybody whose earn out went really well.
Daniel Berk:So that initial payout was, let's say, 55,000,000, 60,000,000?
John Arrow:It was a significant amount. I can't go into the exact amount because of an annuity, but I can say the vast majority of the I mean, of the money went onto the balance of the company. Was all secondary to us, and I took I took the I took the lion's share of it.
Daniel Berk:Okay. So majority upfront, and you bought a Tesla, what what did you do with the rest of the cash? Did you leave it into, you know, index funds, or did you invest? Are you building new companies you mentioned? I mean, tell me more about what you did with that money.
John Arrow:All of the above, I mean, think one of the things that's fascinating about money is it makes you more the person that you already were, in my opinion. Right? And so before that I was investing, before that I was doing experiments, before that I was flying airplanes, and so it kind of turned up the rheostat switch on all of those in a in a big way. I think one of the great things about it is you could start to make riskier investments. It was possible to obviously not just do index funds, you could do things that were more exotic, you could get more into angel investing.
John Arrow:I was working a hundred hours a week before that, and all of a sudden I had this abundance of time, I could take the airplane that I love flying and go on further destinations. So I did a lot of, I kind of turned up the rheostat switch on all of those things. Did a lot more investing, and one of the things that I found, the more investing that I do, I like it and I think it's a great passive thing to do. That being said, enjoy the most experimenting and starting new companies. I think that's the most fun.
John Arrow:It maybe doesn't necessarily have the highest expected value, it's just investing, but it is something that I that I enjoy immensely. I mean, of the things too is it it allowed you to kind of get into areas where you you didn't really necessarily have domain knowledge, but you wanted to you wanted to learn more. Super into rocket ships and and outer space just through largely because of serendipity of knowing Neville and other people, got invited into a very early round of SpaceX, and so got to kind of do that just because I lauded to go to see rocket launches, I didn't even think it was, you know, investment grade, but it leads to more serendipity, it lets you it lets you kind of flip the quarter more and more once you're not as afraid of losing.
Daniel Berk:Yeah. What's the what's the best place you flew your plane during that period of time? You said you went to some fun places.
John Arrow:Probably the Lesser Antilles, so Okay. One of the Extreme Eastern Caribbean was a blast.
Daniel Berk:A miracle.
John Arrow:This was before a lot of the flying was before we really had electronic charts. I had an iPad, but I don't think it was that great at the time. And so you take off and not always know where you're gonna land, which is kinda cool. And Yeah. If you're commercial plane, they'd never do that.
John Arrow:But you can do that as a private pilot and just say, oh wow, that runway looks amazing. Let's look it up, distance is good and there's this small little island with a beach and that's about it and a runway. You land there and maybe there's a hotel room, maybe there's not, and then you fly somewhere else the next day.
Daniel Berk:And you're just I mean, are single engine planes, right? So what's the, yeah, so what's the what's the distance that you can really go on this? This is
John Arrow:a Cirrus SR 22.
Daniel Berk:You can do
John Arrow:about a thousand nautical miles without stopping. Nice. You've a single engine, so if that thing stops, you're pulling the parachute of the plane. The plane has a giant everchute that it floats down.
Daniel Berk:I'm assuming you've never had to do that, but now I'm wondering. Okay. I was like, let's let's open up that You
John Arrow:only have to use it once.
Daniel Berk:Yeah. Exactly. That's a that's a one and done type of thing. And then you mentioned some exotic investments. Yeah.
Daniel Berk:You used the word exotic. Tell me tell me what like is the most exotic investment that you've made and and why?
John Arrow:When I say exotic, I mean investments that I probably wouldn't necessarily say are investment grade. I mean things like when friends that you admire a lot are starting a new company, you can do an angel investment into their company, or you get invited into some type of SPV, where you really don't know if this is gonna work out or not. When you have when you have kind of more shots on goal, you're willing to take that chance, and most of those do not work. I don't think that's a sound strategy for people to just do lackadaisically, but because of some of them, because of the power law, the ones that have worked have immensely paid for the ones that have have not. It also ends up getting more and more things, more great opportunities on your plate, the more of those that you that you do as well.
Daniel Berk:So when you're not spending money and flying and investing, where's the rest of the money sitting? Is it in mostly index funds, or do you have a financial advisor and and wealth manager?
John Arrow:I'm really against kind of wealth managers and financial advisors by and large. I know there are some good ones out there, and there's some people that if they if they have a good relationship, think that's great. My take is it should be your business to kind of understand your own personal finance and your own business. I've invested my own money since I was 13. My my dad gave me access to a brokerage account, so I feel very comfortable doing that.
John Arrow:Look, it's hard to bet against The United States, I I love the S and P five hundred, SPY, Dow, I think there's these other companies like Apple that keep compounding over and over again, Google and Tesla. One of the great things about these companies is that if you if you buy and hold them, they're going to appreciate, and so you know, think there's companies that you just don't you don't sell them.
Daniel Berk:Yeah. No, that's that's fair. I I I've heard that a lot, I have a similar stance on wealth management, think good for people who really just don't wanna think about it at all, but if you wanna really be involved in the numbers, think there's good ones and there's bad ones. We'll keep it at that. Back to the story, you said you were hired back as a CEO of Mutual Mobile.
Daniel Berk:Tell me like what financially triggered that for them, and then for you, why accept the role if you're more financially free, then you never need to make another dollar again, it sounded like. Why'd you go back?
John Arrow:I was definitely conflicted when it was presented to me. There was definitely a financial motive, in that I still, even though I sold the vast majority of my my stake in the company, I still had a significant amount of value that was locked up in this illiquid security. So there was a desire to see that become something, and that was the motivation, I like to see things through and complete them. Also, the world had changed a lot, we had a lot of new emerging tech, I was curious to be back into that role, and it's fun to hold the reins of of of a company where you are managing hundreds of people, that was really thrilling, I had missed that, had After I had sold company, we literally went from 350 people to when I was doing my experiments, maybe I had three people again. So I wanted to put myself back into that perspective.
John Arrow:The reason that I think they had asked me to come back is we sold that first valuation at the top of the cycle. Again, businesses like ours don't normally trade for two x revenue, there's something really special going on when that happens. And if you look at kind of your typical advertising agency, it trains it trades for maybe one times AR at most. A lot of times it's like something like point seven five AR. So this was a special moment.
John Arrow:The other reason that I wanted to come back is I felt like I owed it to the employees and to the team. I helped build this thing, I have responsibility for it, and I wanted to I wanted to make sure everybody had a good outcome.
Daniel Berk:What was the valuation? Well, you mentioned it was a 100,000,000, give or take valuation, the first sale. What was it when you came back, and what was it when you left the second time?
John Arrow:Right. So the the company, it didn't do poorly during that time, but it certainly didn't grow at the same rate. So you kind of had two compounding factors working against valuation. One, growth had slowed a ton, and then two, you ended up in a situation where the market began commoditizing. Right?
John Arrow:Whenever there's a new technology, there's tons of fragmentation, there's all of these new companies, everybody's starting something, and then inevitably consolidation hits. There's acquisitions and prices go back to the baseline and things commoditize, we're starting to see this in AI already. And so we were while we were kind of the new novel company back in 2013, when I returned in 2018, or maybe 2020, yeah 2020 I guess, things had changed, and we weren't trading at the same multiples, it was a much more established business area, and so when we started running a process and looking at buyers, before it was everybody was a potential buyer, I mean we had term sheets, SAP, from Deloitte, from Accenture, you kind of name it, and now we were looking at more traditional IT services companies, a lot of international ones, and these were companies that weren't really strategics in the same way that the first round were.
Daniel Berk:Okay. So you joined the second time, that was 2019 you said?
John Arrow:I don't know, I really think when that was, maybe it was 2018.
Daniel Berk:2018, say for five years, so 2023. It
John Arrow:took a lot longer than I thought.
Daniel Berk:How long did you think it would take?
John Arrow:I thought we could probably do it in a year, and there was a lot of things, I mean we could have, you could always sell, you can always sell, but if you want to get what you think is a good price, it makes sense to do things in the business. So I ended up Sure. Rather than just putting on the CEO for sale hat, I ended up putting on the the CEO, let's get our hands dirty, let's figure out how to get this business growing again. It was a lot of fun, it's lot of work. Yeah.
John Arrow:I think it was more fun in some ways the second time, surprisingly, because you didn't have the same risk profile.
Daniel Berk:So you had less to lose, you already won.
John Arrow:Yeah. Exactly. This was more like kind of a victory lap. It probably meant too that I didn't take it quite as seriously, but I still took it pretty seriously, it was just more fun. It was much more of a balance, rather than a full on, this is the only thing I do.
Daniel Berk:And what was the second exit like? What were the numbers behind that, and what did you make personally?
John Arrow:Because that one definitely is still under an NDA, but the valuation Okay. It was, you know, it was a very good valuation for everybody involved. You know, the great thing about it is we we had an initial investor, WPB bought shares, we made sure that they had a great outcome, especially considering where the business was at. Everybody who sold the second time was was happy with it, and it was the right thing to do. I mean, if we if we had waited and not sold, I don't know, given what's going on with AI right now, I don't I think we would have had to lay off hundreds of people.
Daniel Berk:That's rough. Yeah.
John Arrow:Right now, what you can do with some of these tools that are out there kind of makes mutual mobile and companies like it not as relevant. You need to change, there's gonna be amazing new businesses, and I can talk about a little bit of some of the new things that I'm working on in the space. But I think the traditional companies that produce digital products, why do you need them now?
Daniel Berk:Yeah. Were you fiddling with some of these side projects during that second term as CEO, or was that like everything in one bucket type of role?
John Arrow:We could see where things were going with AI, so we were really fortunate that we got to do a lot within within machine learning with computer vision. Even though LLMs weren't really the mainstay, we saw what was about to happen, like we we were like, wow, this is really powerful, it feels like there's an inflection point there, and so I knew I wanted to do something in AI even before ChatGPT came out. It was just kind of a happy coincidence, and I guess it was November 2023 that ChatGPT was launched, that I was basically a free agent again.
Daniel Berk:And you were Is that when Freedom GPT sort of came to life? Tell me more about Freedom GPT, and you know, how you started getting involved with AI and LLMs.
John Arrow:Yeah. Daniel, did you ever use AOL Instant Messenger growing up?
Daniel Berk:Oh, of course. I was tall kid, nineteen fifty three. That's it. Because I'm tall, I'm six foot five, I basically stopped growing when I was 15, so you can I do the
John Arrow:remember using it too, thinking it was such a cool piece of software, it's how you'd There say it to your was this one user on AOL instant messenger called Smarterchild, and it was this robot that you could talk to? When I was like 11 or 12, I thought it was like the coolest thing ever, it wasn't really AI, it was just a bunch of if then statements. But you could ask a question, and then SmarterChild would reply to you, and very quickly you'd ask something and it would say that's not appropriate, I'm not gonna answer it. That was the first time a computer told me
Daniel Berk:Yeah, push back.
John Arrow:Yeah. Right? Like who's this computer to tell me that?
Daniel Berk:Right.
John Arrow:And that was 11 or 12 year old John, and then I didn't feel that way again until November 2023 when I first started using ChatTeapTea, I was so excited about this, had been following This super powerful technology is deciding what I can and can't ask a computer, that doesn't seem right. So immediately I knew, if I co founded Cheroen from Mutual of Mobile, we wanted to start a company that let people use AI without needing to get permission. And we knew there was going to be a bunch of models that were going to be coming out, a lot of them were going to be relatively open and uncensored, some were going to be proprietary like like OpenAI's, and we said let's just create the place where everybody can go and use whatever AI is objectively best for what they're trying to do, maybe you're trying to ask a math question, and then subjectively best. You and I could ask the same question about something, and there might be a different model that's better for us just based on our history of using it. That's what we wanted to create, we had, very quickly after launch, we had a couple million people using the platform, and it's it's been a really fun business.
John Arrow:I think it's something where it's a rising tide situation, as there's new models that get released, we put them up there, and so it's one of the first ways that people use a lot of the new AI products.
Daniel Berk:Yeah. When when you think of new companies now, I'm curious, we have something called the threshold number on Moneywise, and it's True. You know, the the number that you're attaining for before you feel like you've made it. You don't need to make another dollar for the rest of your life. Is Freedom GPT and some of these other companies, the investments you're making, is it to make more money?
Daniel Berk:And if so, I guess what amount of net worth are you attaining for? Or if not, you know, what was that number when you did finally reach it?
John Arrow:Might be as money as a proxy, right? It's like it's like crude oil or something, it allows you to do more of what you already wanna do. The tests that I look at is what Naval Rabi Khan says, he says, in life, the best intelligence says, are you getting what you want out of life? And I view money as as kind of a symptom, a side effect of doing other things with high impact. It's very important, it's fun to make in its own right, but the bigger thing is, are you kind of achieving the impact that you're going to achieve?
John Arrow:I'm of the belief that we're of this phase that there's gonna be massive abundance, like what Elon's saying with with the robots coming with Optimus, that we're gonna have to look for other ways to derive meaning in the near future.
Daniel Berk:Future. Future, right?
John Arrow:Yeah, for sure. I think it's gonna be something where if you have access like to scarce resources that you previously had to give money to create, what's the point if you can get as much of that as you want? There are gonna be things that are still require money land, and and probably you know, certain works of art and names and different things like that, but I think it's maybe more of a Maslow's hierarchy of needs question. Early on when you're starting a company, it comes down to the whole ramen profitability thing. Right?
John Arrow:Let's create enough money so that you're at least self sustainable, you can feed yourself, you can pay your employees. Eventually as you kind of transcend that ladder, and get up to the more self actualization side of it, it's more are you are you getting out of life what you what you really want. And so there was a moment I think after Mutual of where I realized I didn't need to work again, and I kind of tried not working, and I realized I just loved building too much, and so Freedom GPT and some of the other projects that have going on now are are side effects of that.
Daniel Berk:Yeah. No, that that's fair. I think that's a certain like a philosophy or world view of money Yeah. In general. When you think about like the philosophy or the principles behind Freedom GPT and even the direction of some of the businesses and investments you're making now, walk me through how you, you know, you view some of this like open world freedom, even Freedom GPT, the naming nomenclature of it, obviously has a connotation.
Daniel Berk:Why? I guess why does it matter to you for people to have access to that that's unfiltered?
John Arrow:Going back to KEVT, a company we talked about where I let anybody sue a business. This was this really leveling force, where people didn't have access to attorneys, and I saw kind of the good that can come out of that. There was this whole digital digital divide early on with who had access to the web and who didn't, there was another kind of version of this with who had access to banking and not not having banking. I saw the same thing playing out again with AI, where there was gonna be a class of people that had access to artificial intelligence, the top tier, and then there was going to be a people that didn't or maybe were were taking advantage by it. And so I saw this call, this real need, let's have that place where we make sure that people aren't left behind by it.
John Arrow:Already, if you're looking with what Anthropics I'm an investor in Anthropic, great great company, but it just boggled my mind now, they're asking you to submit photo ID verification before you can use some of their models. Yep. Which is who are they to say? You don't need to show an ID to vote, why all of a sudden you need to show an ID to, excuse me, I'm a I don't I don't want to get into But it's just mind boggling to me that that that's that they're the ones that get to police that. And you can come up with some reasons, why I understand some of the downfalls.
John Arrow:I do think AI needs to be regulated, but I'm was sure of it that the things like Anthropic were doing were gonna become the norm rather than the exception. So we wanna make that that area where people are not left behind, and can always use the AI model that's best for them.
Daniel Berk:No, that's that's an interesting world view for sure, and I think it's likely to your point earlier, it's gonna be in an ever evolving world view as technology continues to kind of force opinions on the matter. Back to money, just briefly, what's your current net worth, liquid and illiquid, and what does your actual personal spending look like every month?
John Arrow:It's well into the 8 figures. The vast majority of it is is is liquid in stocks or some There are some private things that are out there that are not liquid now, but will likely be liquid very very very soon. But most
Daniel Berk:70 of five, give or take, 80 liquid?
John Arrow:It's probably closer to probably closer to 60 per 65%, I think is liquid.
Daniel Berk:65. Cool. Yeah. Cool.
John Arrow:And and I think that's like kind of like the right mix for me. Like, I don't I don't feel like any of your investments should give you heart palpitations or keep you up at night. And my goal with investing is is it should it should sustain whatever your spend is in life. You should always kind of a given quarter, maybe not a given month because there are market fluctuations, but on a given quarter ideally your net worth steadily increases, even without you needing to be dependent on an income source. I mean it's great to have diversified income sources, think that's really really important.
John Arrow:But ideally Yeah. Your investments are at a point where no matter what you do, your net worth is kind of continually increasing.
Daniel Berk:Okay. And so well into the eight figures, we're we're talking, I mean, closer to a 100 or or closer to 50?
John Arrow:Somewhere in between that.
Daniel Berk:Somewhere in between that. Let's call it 75 for the sake of the conversation.
John Arrow:So well into the eight figures, but on the south side of 50 currently.
Daniel Berk:On the south side of okay. Cool. No, that's helpful. And 65% of that then in liquid assets?
John Arrow:Stocks, basically, yeah.
Daniel Berk:Okay. What does your personal spending look like? What do you actually spend your money on outside of flying? You fly every week, right, give or take?
John Arrow:I fly either myself or I'm or I'm being flown, but pretty much every week, yeah. Okay.
Daniel Berk:Do you fly private, or is it all commercial Do you or in your
Neville Medhora:own place?
John Arrow:When it makes sense to fly private, I will. I don't think it's I think it's something where when there's an experiential need behind it, or when there's like a real work need, maybe there's two cities that aren't connected. But I like to try to fly myself places, I feel like that's what makes I me a better do want to switch planes to more capable planes soon. So I'm flying once a week either myself or by somebody. Okay.
John Arrow:The way I think about spending is something that I thought a lot a lot about like the way The thing to be careful with spending generally isn't over indulging, maybe private air travel is the exception to that. But if you think about spending in general, like if you went out and bought a ton of different things, you went shopping, you had kind of this extravagant vacation or something, you come back, you're probably not going to lose money doing that. There's a lot of people that do that and they get tired of it. I think Paul Graham kind of came up with this idea, the way that you lose money is when things kind of trick you into thinking they're investments, and they're not. Right?
John Arrow:So like if you spent years laboring over a business, throwing capital into it and it keeps losing money, that's what you need to be more careful of than just like over indulging. It's like if you went out and ate a bunch of ice cream and pizza one night, you're probably not gonna feel like doing that the next day, you kind of got enough of that out of your system. Whereas if you think you're doing something that is an investment that's not, that's what gets you in trouble. So I think as it relates to kind of personal spend, don't feel like that's something I'm I'm less careful in watching. I think most of my personal spend right now is what I would call discretionary legal, where there's Okay.
John Arrow:There's different matters that I'm in where it makes sense for me to spend money on that, and it's probably like, you know, 20 to $30,000 a month in that.
Daniel Berk:Okay. And that includes cost of living, you know, do you own or do you rent?
John Arrow:I rent just legal.
Daniel Berk:That's just legal. Okay. So let's include then the home you live in. It sounds like you have a spot in New York and in Austin. Is that that driven by other real estate?
John Arrow:I have a condo that I that I I own in in Austin without a mortgage. It's like about $2,000,000, and then that's Okay. I have HOA expenses, tax expenses, that's probably and they have room service there, it's at the W Hotel, so that's a little dangerous, you end up using that a lot.
Daniel Berk:How much how much do you use that? It's like everyday type of thing, or a couple of times a week?
John Arrow:More than you think, yeah. More than
Daniel Berk:you think. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe not more than I think. If I lived there, I'd probably use it every day, because I hate I hate making my own food.
Daniel Berk:I'm I'm like a two year old in that sense. Is very convenient.
John Arrow:So my my residence in Austin's probably it's probably like around thousand dollars a month all in if you take all the HOA and taxes and other expenses. And then I have a place here in New York that I'm in right now, and I rent this place, and it's like 11,000 a month. So that's that's kind of.
Daniel Berk:So 10 plus 11 plus about 30, which is the discretionary, and Yeah. Then the the fun stuff, I mean, the plane, what does it cost to upkeep the plane and fly, you know, once a week, give or take?
John Arrow:Plane's interesting because there's fixed expenses and there's variable expenses, right? So this plane Most of the expense for a plane is like if it just sits there, every year a plane needs to have an annual inspection where they take it completely apart and put it back together, or nearly so. Wow. So it doesn't matter if you fly one hour, or several hundred hours, they're doing that, right? Then you have the variable expenses, are the fuel and the time on the engine.
John Arrow:Most of the expense for a plane on variable isn't really the fuel, it's the wear and tear you put on the engine. So a lot of people think of the economics as having an engine reserve program for the aircraft, but the plane itself is not, it's not that crazy. I would say all in on the plane fixed variable expenses probably comes out to somewhere like maybe 7,000 a month.
Daniel Berk:Okay. So you're looking at like, you know, 50 to 65,000 a month in overall spending.
John Arrow:Right. I'm thinking of just other things, like there's, yeah, there's
Daniel Berk:What do do for fun? Yeah, I was gonna say, mean, sounds like you fly for fun,
John Arrow:but like It's funny, I've never really been chewing to cars, but I I ended up getting a lot more cars because I fly to these small little airports, and none of them Some of them would have cars, but a lot of the really small ones do not have any transportation. If you're somewhere really remote, like Marfa, the next closest rental car could be like a couple 100 miles away. And so I started putting small cars, or not small cars, just kind of cheap cars at a bunch of these little airports in Texas, and then I let other pilots use them and rent them out, was called VFR car.
Daniel Berk:That's very cool.
John Arrow:It's really real, I actually Up until recently I did this, then I started realizing, okay, the Tesla Robo taxi thing's almost here, we're not gonna need it anymore. I just I just got rid of all of those cars, I only have two cars now.
Daniel Berk:How many did you have at the top?
John Arrow:I think we had like maybe like seven or eight.
Daniel Berk:Okay. So it wasn't really a business, it was more of like, you had these cars for you, and you might as well make money on them.
John Arrow:Might as well just let it up. It was more to like, other pilots do, because they'd fly somewhere really cool, and like, do I get around? There's no taxi,
Daniel Berk:there's nowhere. Yeah, it's a whole thing. Yeah. You manage all the logistics of this yourself, or do you have like a chief of staff or a personal assistant?
John Arrow:I have an assistant that I use for this, but I I try to involve kind of my friends that are interested, my brother Zach, also my younger brother who's interested in similar things, and we kind of work together on a lot of these projects.
Daniel Berk:Okay. That's very cool. I've heard, you know, a number of times through this conversation, you speak a lot more, I would say intentionally, about the way you've presented yourself as someone with wealth, someone who's achieved great success in business, and almost like not really deferring happiness before a future milestone, which I really appreciate about you. Tell me, are you still chasing something else, or are you happy in life, feel like you've made it, and now just keeping yourself busy?
John Arrow:I'm excited. I'm excited about this next phase. I I have a family office called Age of AI, and I think this is gonna be the most significant time in human history. I definitely wanna be a part of ushering that in. Mean, it is insanely amazing that you can have an idea now, and in five minutes have a piece of software.
John Arrow:Have you tried this yet? It's it's incredible.
Daniel Berk:Which one?
John Arrow:Have you tried like Cloud Code or
Daniel Berk:Yeah, all of them. Yeah. I I pay for I pay for five different tools personally, and then in my full time role, I have another 10 different tools that I use at the enterprise So, yes. I was up late last night. My wife and both kids were asleep.
Daniel Berk:And from 09:45PM until 1AM, I was just building skills in Claude Cool. Because I got lost and deep into the rabbit hole, and I was like, alright, well, here we are. It's 1AM, time to go to bed, but I just built some fun stuff.
John Arrow:That is so awesome that you did that. I love that you did that. I I was I was doing the same right before right before we jumped on.
Daniel Berk:It's a mind blowing world. I mean, and I feel like, you know, you and I were talking about it. It's like, oh, I just did that last night. But still, there's such a gap, a humongous gap, where I go out into the world for coffee, or I get lunch with someone, and it's like most people in the grand scheme of things still Austin and New York are little different, but most people like in a suburb just don't even have the first idea about what's happening in tech right now.
John Arrow:It's be a COVID level difference in the world this time next
Daniel Berk:year. Yeah. And I think it's already happening, I mean, to many of the points that you've made. Well, John, this has been a really fun episode. Neville said something to the effect of, I think John's the most interesting man in the world.
Daniel Berk:And I I agree. Like, you are really an interesting person. I think anyone that has a plane and a hangar that can just like leave and go wherever they want, whenever they want, like, that already puts you in sort of a category of your own. But I think just the way that you've built successful companies and now you're, you know, tinkering with AI at a, you know, a pretty grand level. It's cool, man.
Daniel Berk:I appreciate you sharing some of your thoughts with us. Do you have any, like, specific, you know, business ideas right now, and we can kinda end with this and bring the plane in for a landing, pun intended. Any business ideas that you want to start that you haven't started yet?
John Arrow:Every week, now that it's so easy to create software, I'm I'm starting. Because right before we jumped on, I was playing with this idea, how can you prompt an AI to go make money for you? I think that's pretty interesting. Mean, obviously
Daniel Berk:Tell me when you figure that one out and DM Okay. Me the
John Arrow:Well, here's one here's one thing that's interesting, and I hope it's okay to involve you a little bit in the show. I I just I created this thing right before with Zach, my brother, it's called otu.net, and you can type in anybody's name and it just shows them unclaimed money. I typed in your name, Daniel. Looks like you got you got $465, you just need to fill out one form of money that's owed to you and they'll send you a check. Then I Ode
Daniel Berk:to the, like, t o or the Yeah. Number?
John Arrow:O, yes. Think this Oh, is just
Daniel Berk:tu.net?
John Arrow:Right. I see that you have some crypto services, and I think it's Wyoming, has over a $100, I won't say how much. Then you got something in Illinois, I don't know if it's is that true or not, something that PayPal is holding. I just pulled up a full report, mean how how crazy is that? I just was doing it on some of my friends too, it's all kind of similar things, and then it shows you based on what it could learn about you, class action lawsuits that you might be entitled to collect
Daniel Berk:as I'm sure there are so many.
John Arrow:And there's so many, right? Mean, that's what's amazing, can just prompt an AI now and and and have it go generate revenue for you. So I love those types of ideas. I think that's gonna be that's gonna be the Rubicon moment. At some point, rather than creating a piece of software, I'll send you the report, but rather than creating a piece of the software, you're literally going to be able to tell an AI, go produce this outcome, and it will just give you the outcome.
Daniel Berk:Now, I'm seeing I'm seeing the $4.83 or something, but I actually see $2,100. See some from AT and T, MetLife, Bank of America.
John Arrow:Yeah. See a Merrill Lynch one too.
Daniel Berk:Merrill Lynch? I wonder why I
John Arrow:have I'll money that send you this report in a minute.
Daniel Berk:Please. That's that's cool. See, I think we we are already seeing it, but there will be so many one man shop billionaires created in the next five years, and I think more wealth created in the next five years than the last twenty five combined. That's that's my opinion. I loosely hold it because so much changes so fast, but I think we're we're at the precipice of something that's never happened before in history of technology, so it's very exciting.
John Arrow:What an amazing time to be alive, and we get to ushering What
Daniel Berk:an amazing time. Yes, absolutely. John, this has been such a good episode. I really appreciate you coming on Moneywise, and I hope you take care. I'll see you soon.
John Arrow:Thanks, Daniel. It's been a blast.