Why I'm Investing in Plumbers, Not AI Startups

Sean Weisbrot: How do you invest in a world where AI is changing everything except for when it doesn't? In today's episode, I'm joined by Travis Jameson, entrepreneur, investor, and co-founder of Capital Pad, to break down how he thinks about AI investments, business strategy, SEO, and building passive income. Through smart bets and overlooked markets, we dive into his thesis on how to choose businesses, unlikely to get disrupted by ai, how he integrates tech into traditional industries, and why small businesses often deliver the best ROI. If you're a founder, operator or investor looking to stay ahead of the curve. This one's for you. What is your investment thesis around ai?

Travis Jamison: I kind of feel like there's two ways to invest in ai. There is. Trying to pick the winners that is, you know, the hardware companies, the Nvidia and all those, the chips. Uh, that's the software companies building, trying to build, you know, general AI intelligence, and that's maybe you could say the companies that could utilize AI to completely disrupt their own company, maybe, you know, work with 50% less people or their staff is now 10 x more productive. That's one bucket I would say. The other bucket is investing in things that AI is not gonna change. You know, like Jeff Bezos, he's always said like, you know, what are the things that aren't gonna change with technology? Let's double down on those. And so that's kind of direction I'm taking, like I'm investing in the companies that don't really care about ai, the things that can't be disrupted, think more boring businesses, blue collar businesses, um, stuff like that. The, I go for more of the small business thing. So some of my more recent deals was like a. Like luxury rehab center, we had a high-end dry cleaner. We've got some HVAC companies, um, like a small remodeling firm, stuff like that. Physical businesses that just don't care about ai. Like that's my thesis for investing in them. 'cause I don't know how to pick those winners. And I have a little bit of a thesis that all of the big tech companies right now that are investing very, very heavily. And into building their own models. It's just gonna be commoditized at the end and no one really gets that monopoly profits where with like, you know, with search like Google got monopoly profits, I'm not sure. Between open AI and Anthropic and grok and like you can just go on and on and on. I, I don't know if there's a enough of a strong differentiator between them. That one takes monopoly, so I invest in the other end.

Sean Weisbrot: They're actually now in a place where they're trying to differentiate themselves. So for example, philanthropic is working really hard to make Claude the best coding AI that you can find and chat toes like the best assistant that you can find. Although you can have these custom GPTs that allow you to niche down into something specific like Sales Mastery or Marketing Mastery, et cetera. The way that I look at AI is if you don't embrace it, the chances of you being upended by a company that is is very high. And so I feel like everyone has no choice but to put AI into their business as fast as possible, which is unfortunate because there's not enough time for people to learn how to do that because things change every day.

Travis Jamison: Honestly, I think I disagree with you a little bit. We're fundamentally aligned on many of the points, but not all. I think even though the different companies are trying to niche down, you know, like Claude for coding as an example, I still don't think there's enough of a differentiator to matter for that. I. Maybe that changes over time. I'm, I'm, I don't have a strong opinion, pretty agnostic about that. And in terms of the companies that I'm investing in, again, like AI just doesn't make a difference in these. Maybe it makes a difference in how they're being found. Maybe, for example, Google goes away, which I don't think is gonna happen, but let's say it does. You know, they, they don't have to change how it's being found, but AI is not gonna change how. Someone remodels a house, how a plumber changes the pipes, like that type of thing. At least not in a material enough way to, to make a difference. And the returns on these companies are so fricking high that I, I don't think it matters. And I'll, I'll say all this by saying I'm still very, very involved in ai. Um, I have a company that we are very actively. Basically doing SEO for the different LLMs, you know, essentially there's different names for it. There's A-E-O-G-E-O-A-I-O, whatever you wanna call it. Uh, but we're essentially training the LLMs to answer the way that we want them to, to recommend certain products. So I'm very. I just think, I don't know what's gonna win, and I, let's rewind. Remember when, go way back in the day when flight was first invented by the Wright brothers, and then Warren Buffett's famously talked about this. If you take all the, the profits of all the airlines over time. It's negative for investors. Like shareholders have had a negative return for that because they've just kind of competed themselves away. There's no giant moat to get those monopoly profits, and it's a really hard business. It's really, really capital intensive. AI's sort of looking like that a little bit to me from like picking the winners, you know, picking those venture bets types of things. It's really hard to do. I would say, um, as an individual company owner, I would totally want to integrate AI into my own. Processes, like I'm very actively doing that already. So I'm not an AI hater. I just. A spectrum on that and before you can go with it.

Sean Weisbrot: So you're saying that you feel like a plumber is not going to be able to implement AI into their business? I think that's not true, because if you can have an AI that recognizes images, I. Then you can have it take a picture or in real time with a camera, look at a pipe and it'll say, okay, you need this, this, this, and this. And you know, this is exactly broken in this part. You need to fix it like this. So it could like a, an assistant tell you what you need to know so that you can get it done faster, which means you might be able to fix things faster and therefore be able to serve more customers in a given day, which can increase your revenue. But a plumber that doesn't. Do this may not be able to serve as many, and then they may have a backlog or people may not work with them anymore because they're not forward thinking. And a plumber who's younger and uses AI can serve them better and faster and maybe cheaper.

Travis Jamison: I think that would be the standard VC pitch. I just disagree with it. It's when you look at these businesses, they're really messy and maybe it would make a difference, but I don't think enough of one to move the needle one way or another. I just don't think it matters at the end with these types of companies.

Sean Weisbrot: I mean, it's not gonna make them a billion dollar plumbing company, right, from a a million dollar plumbing company, but like they might be able to increase their revenue by an extra a hundred or $200,000 a year. And if you're investing for cash flow, that that's a decent increased return. So it's not like, which AI are they going to use? It's, are they using AI or not? I look at it, maybe that's the way I look at

Travis Jamison: it. I'm honestly not sold. The deeper I go into these businesses, the more I, I don't think that's the case, but maybe I. Maybe I'm wrong. I'd be happy to be wrong. Um, that'd be good for me if they can suddenly incorporate it and make a lot more profits. But, uh, I'm just not sold on it. I mean, if anything, it would be maybe these companies can replace, say like their, um, phone receptionist or something like that, uh, with an AI phone service, which I'm like, I'm an investor in one of these, right? Like, so I, I am active in the space. I just don't think it makes a big of a difference to like these blue collar companies like. Again, I had, um, a call with somebody recently and they're, they're VCs and, and they're looking like an investing in the, the types of deals that I invest in. And they were wanting, they had the thesis of finding some blue collar business. I think they actually said plumbers. Um, and having all the individual plumbers wear some sort of like special tracking suit so that they can learn all the motions and all the ins and outs. So for when the robots come and you know, they can replace the plumbers, and I'm like. It's just too messy for that. It really, really is. There's no standardized process for any of this, and it's also not rocket science. I mean, they, you know, they could take a picture of it, but like it doesn't need it. You can see like all the, the pipes busted. You just gotta fix the pipe. I think a lot of this would just kind of be noise at the end. Everyone wants to be hyped on ai and I'm pretty hyped. It's gonna completely change the world, but I think there's a lot of companies, it just doesn't matter enough too.

Sean Weisbrot: So something that I've been working on is a cost cutting business, which you could say, okay, that's a pretty standard service based business, but the way that I've done it is by doing. The first thing I've done is creating an AI assistant that is trained on the user's expense data. So not only do you have your standard features around, you know, planned budget versus actual spend and subscription managers and these kinds of things, but also this assistant can read all of the data that's inside your account and can answer questions for you about your expenses. Where the next step up for me would be to build an agent that can actually go and implement the cost cutting strategy that we create together.

Travis Jamison: What would that look like? Like going through your subscription revenue and then, you know, they access your bit warden account, log into things and cancel it. I don't

Sean Weisbrot: know

Travis Jamison: yet.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't know how to build agents yet. It's something that I wanna work on. But I just finished the software and I've got a few companies that are waiting to pay. So I have to reach out to them again and say, Hey, let's, you know, book the audits. And so once I start getting revenue from them and I can tweak the software to have more features if they need or whatever, then I can start to look at agents because the way I feel is. I spent two months vibe coding this software to product being production ready. But I knew that as I was building it, I was already building something that I felt like was gonna be obsolete within three to six months. And so the only way that I build a business that can survive another year or two at least, is for me to have an agent that can implement because the services around the audit. So the human does the audit with you, but then if an agent can do the implementation, then the business can get a percentage of savings. Can scale this because you could have infinite number of instances of this agent helping these clients. But if I were the one implementing the cost cutting strategy, I would have to spend days, weeks, or months doing this to completion. But an agent could do it far faster than I could.

Travis Jamison: That all checks out for sure.

Sean Weisbrot: Right. So I built a software knowing that it was already obsolete. Knowing that I needed an agent to make it truly viable long term, but in the beginning, the AI assistant is already better than anybody else is offering. So it's, it's not obsolete yet.

Travis Jamison: And also, you know, do things that don't scale. Start off with doing stuff that has to be done manually. You know, obviously AI is doing the, the initial work, but manual on the back end and then make it into something that does scale. This is like the classic Y Combinator advice, right? That's how you start, right?

Sean Weisbrot: Right, but I'm not looking to get investors because I've done that before, and that I think was a huge reason why my business failed. I give it 50 50, 50% was my fault. 50% was the investors because they just didn't give me the money that they signed the contract for and promised. And so I had a budget shortfall, but I've talked about this many times, so. This is what I'm thinking about in terms of traditional business. It's a service business, but AI is going to make it something that can really be useful longer term. Yeah, no,

Travis Jamison: that could totally amplify it. 'cause it would go replace all the service parts. It's just doing it. Click and go.

Sean Weisbrot: Exactly. Exactly. So I wanna talk a little bit about your SEO agency. You said you're trying to train LLMs to. Answer questions in a way that surface products and services for your clients.

Travis Jamison: The only edit to that was I say we're not trying, we are, we are trying the LLMs to give the answers that like, so it was like basically engine optimization. So you look at, for a lot of the queries out there we're the ai, ais getting their data from to display the results. You know, you ask what's the best, I don't know, like iPhone wallet, looking at one right here. Um, and it's gonna give you back some, some options. Now, where do the LMS get this content from? They're reading a lot of the product sites and reading like what's best, you know, so you could say, what's the best iPhone wallet for this specific use case? And it will have crawled, you know, the different sites and said, oh, this one mentioned this use case. It's probably great. But one of the, so that's part of it. Um, the other is the recommendations themselves. So let's imagine like, you know, a listicle, a listicle, uh, for those who don't know, think, uh, top 10 best iPhone wallets post. Right? And what do they mention as number one and what do they mention are the reasons for it being number one, like not just, not just rinsing number one, but the reason it's number one. Saying that it's the best iPhone wallet, the pros and cons, the best use cases for it, that type of thing. And who are they linking to? Who are they citing? You know, we call it citation, that type of thing. Turns out we can build those. So now imagine you have, you know, best iPhone wallet and you go and like maybe five or six out of the top 20 results. Say that your iPhone wallet is the best one. What's chat? GT gonna recommend? They're clearly gonna recommend your wallet. And so that's all we have to do really, is we have to go and create those pages. We have to create that content, you know, think listicles again, top 10 list, and, um, other, other more meaningful content, not just top 10 list. Uh, but. Routinely reference, you know, your wallet as being number one. The reasons why list it the way you say it must be, like very specifically lined up with how the language might work. Um, and you do that and you rank those and all of a sudden you're influencing the results of the L lms And it's working incredibly well. It's kind of mind blowing. Um, and it works not only for the. You know, the chat GPEs and the clauses and stuff like that. It also works for like the Google a IO reviews, which are becoming more and more important, uh, for better or worse. And it also increases the rankings of the actual, like Google search results because again, if you have the top sites linking to you, like you're, you're gonna move up naturally there. So it's just a beautiful system that's, um, I'm more stoked on this with my agency now than we have been like the last 10 years. Like it's a really exciting time to be. Kind of in the SEO industry, even though the SEO is kind of switching to some of this AI stuff, like it's, it's a lot of fun.

Sean Weisbrot: How could I do this with my podcast so that the LLMs will surface more of my individual videos as answers? Hey, you should go check this out if you want to know more. Is that possible?

Travis Jamison: I would say doing it for individual videos is probably more difficult. I would say pick. One specific thing to start, like, uh, is your podcast, like what's your, your specific focus? If you could say what your podcast is about to somebody, what would you say?

Sean Weisbrot: It's the intersection of psychology and entrepreneurship, teaching founders about the reality of what it's like being an entrepreneur by people who are running 7, 8, 9 figure businesses.

Travis Jamison: All right. If you were to put that in a search term, what would it look like? Entrepreneur podcast. Yeah, probably. Yeah. But I don't know if people would search for that. People definitely search for entrepreneur podcasts, did Absolutely. A search for that. Startup, podcast, entrepreneur, podcasts, stuff like that. Just kinda like we said a second ago, you know, go and create 10 posts and rank those in Google Listing the Top Entrepreneur podcast and mention yours as number one. Um, use, use some very specific language, um, you know. We love to build is the best entrepreneur podcast for, and then you just put the actual use case of who it's best for because you don't wanna put on targeted people there, right? You don't wanna be the best entrepreneur podcast for startups raising a billion dollars. Like no, that's not a great fit. But like for what you just said, right? You list that and then you kind of put like more structured content. Like LLMs, they love structured content, they love schema, they love bullet points, they love headings, like this type of thing. Who it's best for, who it's not a good fit for, you know, types of content being displayed or like talked about on the podcast. And so you can put some specific examples, some examples of guests type of thing, just more and more content for it to chew on. Uh, and then put those posts on other sites, like not your own site, third party sites. And this is where it gets. A little more difficult for the individual who doesn't have kind of SEO experience and access to other platforms to post on, but you post on these other sites and then you rank those, which is since essentially you're sending back links to those posts to make sure that they rank, to make sure that it gets noticed by the LLMs and Google and whatnot. Um, so it gets credit. That right there could probably get you halfway to it. Um, there's, there's lots of other things, you know, like the site, like that's a citation, but that's also a link, but also just other citations, um, elsewhere. Just continually referencing your podcast and what it's, and then make sure that the content on your actual site references that and like reinforces what you're saying somewhere else. They don't wanna come to your, you know, the lms don't wanna come to your site and just be this black box of like, oh, we're this podcast. Like, tell it what it is again. Uh, and again, you're training it and so slowly but surely, uh, it's gonna start popping up. They treat that as reviews. So with traditional SEO, you know, backlinks have been, I. Essentially a sign of trust. Like anybody could put content on their site, but if a third party site is linking to them, it's like a little trust signal. It's like the vote like, oh yeah, this, this, this has a higher likelihood of being something more signal versus noise. You're recreating that with these recommendations on third party sites. These are the trust votes, and you start getting enough of those, specifically ones that rank high in Google already. 'cause you know the LMS are looking at Google results. We know that. You can solely but surely, like train it on what is best and you have control of that entire process. It doesn't have to be reliant on actual third party people. It can just be you on third party sites. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: Thanks for that. I

Travis Jamison: appreciate it.

Sean Weisbrot: When I was first starting the podcast, I was working with helper reporter.com. I dunno if you've heard of them. And I was trying to get entrepreneurs to answer my questions. I would say something like, what was it like the first time taking a paycheck from your business? Right? What? What's the difference between hiring your first employee and hiring your 10th employee? These things like this. And I would get 50 to 200 emails for these questions like responses. And I would email 10, 15, 20 of them and I would get their quote and I would put it together into an article and I would have their photo and their name and their, their website and their, their quote. And I would publish it and I would send it to all of them and they would then go and promote it. And so I got like five or 600 back links to my website within like a month or two. It was incredible.

Travis Jamison: That's fantastic. Yeah, because they're using you for the links too. Yeah. Like that's, that's why they're doing it. 'cause you're linking out to their website. So Hero has moved on. It's now like there's quoted, there's a couple of others.

Sean Weisbrot: Helper reporters back. It got acquired

Travis Jamison: and

Sean Weisbrot: they launched it again, and I started

Travis Jamison: using it again recently. It's back in the, in the same way because I feel like most of the SEOs moved the quote, or, anyway, I, I haven't tried it, but it's good that it's back.

Sean Weisbrot: I haven't checked out quoted, but helper reporter has been great. I published two questions in the last few days, and I've gotten about 60 or 70 emails, and they're far more, like, much more high quality people than in the past when I used to. Questions there

Travis Jamison: now, so many of them are actual like agencies and services behind it, kind of answering for the founders. It's just like a link building service basically. Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: It's fine with me because what I'm saying is I'm not actually asking questions. Now they, they've added a podcast section. So I go in and I say, I'm looking to interview these kinds of people and then I actually do get a number of PR firms that are reaching out to me on behalf of their clients. And that's fine with me. I work with a lot of PR firms and I know that they're all getting paid to introduce their clients to me, and that's fine with me. It doesn't bother me, uh, because. They do all of the work of discovering the kinds of guests that I want to interview.

Travis Jamison: Yeah,

Sean Weisbrot: that's my marketing is I have an inbound system that help, a reporter helped me build, where after like a year or two, I didn't have to go out and find guests, I didn't have to use help reporter anymore. I decided to say, Hey, do you have any new clients? Yeah, here's another list of like 5, 10, 15 people you could look at. And I just constantly have people, you know, I, I have like multiple intro calls a day for the next few weeks and I have a podcast every day for the next like six weeks booked pretty much.

Travis Jamison: And that's it. So interesting. I've not talked to anyone on the other side of the helper reporter out thing. It's always been like people looking for links, but seeing people actually use it. That's. Like you're doing. That's fantastic.

Sean Weisbrot: Help. A reporter built my podcast. Oh, wow. All right. And I never paid them a dollar, and part of me felt like bad about it, but they never asked me for any money. So of course I'm going, who pays them? I'm, how do they make money? Like right now, when they have emails, you can see there's a sponsored post at the very top. It's like a link. It's like a paragraph. So they're obviously trying to monetize now, but the, the owner, they, they shut it down and then sold it to someone who revived it.

Travis Jamison: Did they sell it back to the original owner? Right.

Sean Weisbrot: No, that person's apparently like off in the sunset.

Travis Jamison: Good for Peter.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I I, I never met the, the founder or anything like that. So what have we not really touched upon that you feel would be very valuable for the audience?

Travis Jamison: Let's see. We talked about my interesting AI thesis. We talked about Smash digital SEO company, focusing on just the AI stuff. Um, I, I guess probably we can talk about my main focus. So I, I've had a few exits, um, some of them small up to like the eight figures and kind of naturally started progressing to being more of an investor and like allocating the different asset classes. Um, tried everything, real estate ventured, was pretty active. Venture crypto, like you name it. Um, but kind of came back to get the returns of small businesses, um, 'cause that actually. Strange enough, I came full circle and realized that I think small businesses produce like the best returns out of all the asset classes. Uh, the problem is like, how do you own this passively, right? It's not, it's not an asset class really set up well for, uh, passive ownership and it's really hard to diversify and it takes a lot of work. Um, and so I. Kind of spent a few years trying to do that. Like I was trying to buy, find existing companies, say like, Hey, let me buy, you know, 10% of your company, 20% of your company. Uh, and that kind of worked a little bit, but it wasn't ideal. And I kind of stumbled into this interesting space, uh, with like search funds. Um, also they call 'em like independent sponsors, a couple different groups that are similar, but essentially it's, um, people or groups of people, uh, a lot of like finance and MBA types. That are buying existing small businesses. And when I say small, don't think like a $300,000 business. Think like a 5 million, $10 million business, stuff like that. You know, it's making a couple million a year of profit, like profitable businesses. So they're buying these and they need investors to help, um, finish the transaction. So I stumbled into that and found out that it kinda like checked all the boxes of what I'd been looking for. Essentially, so one individual, you know, buys this company, they bring in investors, and the investors are now passive owners in that, and they give them a lot of investor perks to, um, go along with the ride. So they get, you know, preferred shares. So they're getting paid back first before the person doing the transaction sees anything besides like a small salary, that type of thing. Um, and so it was surely build up, started building up a portfolio of these small businesses that I could own passively. You know, targeting like 30% plus IRR. So internal rate of return, you know, essentially your annual yield outta this thing. A lot of them pay cash distributions quarterly. Not all of them. Some of them reinvest it for a while and try to resell five years down the road. Uh, but I kind of checked all the boxes of what I was looking for, being like the, the perfect asset class. Um, and then slowly ended up launching a platform focusing just on that, which is called Capital Pad, capital pad.com. I can go anywhere you wanna go with that.

Sean Weisbrot: I have struggled for the last eight years to build a passive income portfolio. It has been my dream because who doesn't want passive income? And especially now that I'm about to get married and we want to have a kid pretty fast. 'cause we're, we're both about to be 40. I feel immense pressure to have a sustainable monthly recurring income so that I can afford the costs of marriage and kids, and everything I've invested in has failed, which is, I understand it's part of, you know, life, but I'm tired of that. I'm tired of my investments not producing a return.

Travis Jamison: Were these venture investments startups,

Sean Weisbrot: the goal was for them to never have another investor besides me.

Travis Jamison: Ah, well that's always the goal.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, and, and that was the case. I was the only investor in any of them.

Travis Jamison: Okay. Startup investing is, is really tough. Um, again, I've made like 50 venture investments, so not a, not a newbie at this. I've been pretty into it. Um, deployed millions into the space, and the space is okay, but you really have to make like 40 and 50 bets before, kinda like the law of averages works out in venture. 'cause you know, venture, you know, for every 10 bets you make, seven of 'em will fail. A couple of them will make maybe your money back. And then one will in theory, make. Um, more than all the others lost plus a profit. That's the, that's the theory. But in order for those averages to work out, you've really gotta get in like 30 and 40 plus bets. Um, and also when it comes to venture, I think ventures heydays kind of over, at least for now, uh, I think there's too much money has entered the space. So too many companies that um, shouldn't have been funded, have been funded. The time to liquidity is getting pushed out way further. It used to be, you know. 5, 6, 7, 8 years, you get your money back. Now it's like 12, 13, 15. Like even these venture funds keep getting extended. Um, it's kind of nuts. And that didn't align with what I was looking for. I don't wanna put in money and get it back 15 years later maybe. Um, I was looking for. More things that maybe want a hundred x but can reliably three x four x. Um, I didn't want to bet on companies that were basing on future profits. I wanna base on current profits and that's, that's the biggest differentiator with like what I'm doing now with these like small businesses we're investing in. Companies like routinely are like 50 years old. They're been profitable every single quarter for years on end. Maybe it's the owner's retiring, right? They're 70, they need to sell it. So they sell this historically very profitable, very stable business to someone else. Uh, and they take over the reins and continue to run it. And you know, these things trade at like. Three x to five x multiples. And so you can kind of do the math right there. Um, I'm really gonna generalize, so don't take this as specific, but just like build the framework. If you buy it at a three x, that's like a 33% a year, right? You buy it at a five x, it's like a 20% a year yield. Um, and that's not exactly true, so don't actually take that, but you can kind of get the idea of where these would come from. We just have to keep the company alive, not me, the people buying it has to just keep the company alive and investors end up in a, in a really good spot. Uh, 'cause the companies maybe they'll be like, you know, uh, 30% coming from investors, 70% coming from some traditional bank debt. They pay that debt down over time. They send a lot of the extra proceeds to investors every quarter. Um, sometimes once a year or sometimes they reinvest it, uh, whatever it is, but you're able to build a portfolio where other companies are working for you, which is the same with like the stock market. It's just significantly cheaper multiples, and it's not based on like speculative future growth. It's all based on. What's happening right now? What's been happening for years and years and years and years. Like we don't invest in things that are, all the returns are based on future growth. We just won't do it. Like, can it grow in line with inflation at like 5% a year? Cool. If that works out well for us, we can probably get behind it if it's a hard business to kill. And that's kind of been the sweet spot for me. Again, like half of my capital goes into these types of deals of my own personal capital. Um, the other half, you know, is, is definitely still in in public companies. I want things with liquidity because we get these, these private deals, like there's not liquidity. Maybe you get a quarterly distribution for cashflow, maybe you don't, uh, but you can't exit the company until they resell it, you know, five, six years down the road. So you definitely wanna keep your liquidity, wanna keep a healthy balance of treasury bills, healthy balance of like public companies. Um, and the rest of the time I'm using the public companies to kind of hedge my exposure. So I have a lot of US based exposure from these private companies. So I might invest in, you know, developing markets to kind of like hedge that type of thing. The rest of the time. That's kind of my portfolio looks like. And these have really scratched the itch for what I was looking for the whole time.

Sean Weisbrot: What do you think of. Index funds like SPY or VOO, you don't know much about those or, or touch those at all?

Travis Jamison: Yeah, yeah. I mean they're, they're kinda like the gold standard. I think people can make claims either way. Like, you know, everyone's been saying this won't work, won't keep working for a period of time, but it keeps, does the other one's saying like, you know, it's absolutely like the best way to invest. It's the lowest fees, you can say whatever. Um, I. Don't have a strong claim either way, but it makes sense for me to continue to invest in these. And these are, you know, it's the best companies in the world right there. I do invest in those. Uh, I also like pretty much all of my new capital going in only goes into ETFs for the public space. I have a reasonably size portfolio of like individual companies that I like built before. And if I sell them, I will go into ETFs, but I'm not like rebuying individual companies. Uh, kind of like. There's a lot of effort that goes into those, and I'm not sure I actually have the skills or the alpha to pick anything. Um, it's kind of worked out, but it very well could be luck. Um, but I know that I have like skills in Alpha to get outsize returns from the private markets, so I'm like, I'll just focus there. Right? Go or have the advantage. I'm not gonna have an advantage in everything and I'm sure shit, I'm gonna have an advantage in picking individual stocks over the long term. A lot of work goes in that I, I do know people who do and it's really cool to watch, but, um, they're kind of special breeds.

Sean Weisbrot: So do you believe these calculators that say like if you put a hundred thousand dollars into SPY today, or SCHD, for example, the Charles Schwab, uh, whatever it is, H-D-S-C-H-D, you put a hundred grand in it today and in 30 years it's worth $20 million. You don't touch it, just leave it for 30 years.

Travis Jamison: You believe those calculators I. Mostly, I think a lot of depends on when exactly it was done. Let's take for example, suddenly you sell your house or your business or whatever in like early 2000 and you go all in on the s and p 500, right? Well, it's taken you roughly a decade to get back to even 'cause it. After you put it in, it immediately crashed, right? Um, where someone else, maybe you went all in at like the end of 2008. It's been great, right? You've done amazingly well. So what the average is for one person isn't necessarily the average for everybody. And over a long enough timeline, those averages really even out. They average, but on a short timeline, which can be, you know, a couple decades, it's not necessarily the case for everyone. And, and so with that said, I, if you look at my personal portfolio again, 50% of my personal capital goes into deals on like capital pad, these private deals. Um, the rest is really building a portfolio that's tailored to me. I don't think there's any one right. Portfolio. So I have a meaningful amount of commodity exposure. Tends to do pretty well in inflation. Uh, it has. Gold has actually outperformed the s and p, which is bonkers, I might say. And it's not expected to do that over the long term, but it has. So like, you know, this commodity exposure does well in certain cases.

Sean Weisbrot: I think gold is gonna continue to outperform, outperform for at least the next few years.

Travis Jamison: Yeah, I have no thesis of that, but I'm not selling it. So I guess maybe that is a thesis. I have a reasonable amount of non-US based exposure. Um, some developing markets, uh, some in China. It was very much like a, I wouldn't touch China, but it. Finally collapsed enough. I was like, well, I'm, I'm comfortable owning it. Even if they can rug pull me at any time, that's fine. I would not touch China and I lived there for 10 years. I

Sean Weisbrot: would never invest a dollar into China.

Travis Jamison: Yeah. And again, it only just got to where like the multiples were so low. Um, and my thesis, which could be wrong, is that the, the Chinese government punished. Capitalism too much, and they went, oh crap, we actually need this. And so they kind of reversed. Um, and so I just got a few of the, of the big names there. Um, and it's, it's done really, really well for me. But, um, I know, I know it could be rug pulled at any time, so I'm not like counting on that. Um, I keep a, a, a meaningful stake of treasury bills, uh, at all times. You know, it'll keep up with inflation. But having that like cash buffer at any time so you don't have to panic, you know, if something crashes. I don't need to panic sell to make sure I fund my lifestyle. Like I'm good and I have more opportunity to buy things if they crash. Uh, I think it was Morgan, how, yeah, I think it was Morgan Housel in one of his books was basically talking about that. There's a drag on your portfolio by having, you know, you keep 10, 20% in cash or something like that, treasure bills, you know there's gonna be a drag in your portfolio. But if that drag lets you purchase when things crash, or even more correctly probably said it keeps you from selling when things crash, like it, you know, the returns on that are, are much, much, much higher. Uh, so that's kind of how I look at it there. So I'm fairly diversified into different. Ways of like hedging my personal exposure. You know, I have a lot of, I invest in a lot of US based private companies. I have US based real estate, and so I'm more comfortable investing in like commodities and non-US things to kind of hedge that. Um, the argument could also be said that the, you know, the top companies in the US have immense non-US exposure. You know, probably, I don't know, 40, 50% of the SB five hundred's revenues come from non-US sources. I'm kind of making that up, but it's something like that. Uh, but. It still makes me feel better to, to actually invest in foreign companies.

Sean Weisbrot: What's the most important thing you've learned in your personal life and your investing in your professional life?

Travis Jamison: The investing in person or investing in business stuff? Uh, probably couple. One, really stay within your circle of competence. Like everyone talks about it all the time. It's so true. Uh, I see people get hurt financially when they try and veer outside of that. Uh, kinda like I said, like I don't. I'm not picking individual companies anymore. It's not my circle of competence. I'm not an expert at that. Like I, I don't have any advantage. And so I won't do it. Like I'm happy to just go to ETFs. That is a big one. Same thing with, uh, real estate. Um, so I, I, I was in like a fair amount of real, not a fair. I was in some real estate deals and essentially at the end I just realized I don't. Have any way to pick these. Um, I'm just kinda like going around and like agreeing with whatever the sponsor is saying, like how this should work out. But I'm outta my, I'm outta my element and so I shouldn't do it. And I, I've had one real estate deal fail and um, the others, yeah, I think they probably work out, but that's more luck than actually skill for me. And so I don't wanna do that. Um, the other thing I probably learned from that is. There's not gonna be a lot of really good opportunities, but when you do spot them, you have to go really hard. You have to go all in on them. And so for me, I can count like the four opportunities in my career that made all the difference. One was I. Early SEOI mean, this was like 15 years ago. Like that was, that was an amazing opportunity. The other was spotting the FBA gold rush, which I built a, a software company and sold around that and physical products as well. That was like 20 15, 20 16. Like that's, that was kind of a crazy time. Uh, the other was defi summer, like crypto in 2020. Like, I'm not very involved in crypto anymore. It just doesn't interest me. But like when you spot that opportunity. It was insane. It was insane the amount of money you could print in like six months. And I think the last was realizing this like with Capital Pad, this, these small businesses are kind of the best bet. Overall from any asset class, in my opinion, and the time for it is ripe. And so I kind of went all in on that. You're not gonna get many chances. Again, I've been, I've been an entrepreneur and an investor for more of an entrepreneur for 15 years and I've had four moments that really defined everything. And if I hadn't gone all in on those, uh, I would be, you know, one 10th of my wealth basically of what I'm now.