From Facebook to the face of crypto: Inside Anthony Pompliano’s wild career | TechCrunch

Bang. Bang. In the winter of 2014, a 25-year-old Anthony Pompliano was reading a book on a plane that would change his life. 

The former army sergeant from North Carolina — who had turned 21 while serving in Iraq — was on his way to a job interview at Facebook for a product manager role. Pompliano had founded two small tech startups after he left military service and sold the second, a track record that attracted the attention of recruiters at both Google and Facebook. But he had spent his life so far away from Silicon Valley that he had no idea what a product manager even was.

That didn’t stop him from pursuing the job. Instead, he read some product management blogs that were all mentioning the same book. So he bought a copy. “On the flight to San Francisco, I literally read a book called ‘The Art of Project Management,’” he told TechCrunch. “Then I went into the interview and tried to regurgitate everything that I had read in the book and not sound stupid. I was fortunate enough to get the job.”

Ten years later, his level of fame in the tech industry is so wide that he’s known by a single-syllable name: Pomp.

It wasn’t a straightforward path. He earned his Valley street cred doing “growth hacking” for two years at that Facebook job; he then had a potentially near career-ending controversy with his next employer, Snapchat. He bounced back to become an investor with an enviable track record, then gained fame as an unflagging advocate for bitcoin and crypto. Today, his businesses encompass multiple podcasts and newsletters, venture investment and research firms.

Pompliano just announced his most recent venture: Professional Capital Management. It’s a company he created about two years ago to incubate startups and provide traditional asset management with some of the profits from those incubated companies. Pompliano is upfront that this business idea is going to be difficult to pull off, and that’s one of the reasons he’s attracted to the idea. Any normal person, he said, would probably not sign up to do incubation and asset management at the same time.

But his story is of an unconventional rise to success and a reputation built on hard work, luck, respect and always taking his shots.

The man behind the “bang bang”

To know Pompliano is to know he’s a man of routine. First, there is that catchphrase he uses at the start of each podcast, “Bang. Bang.” 

Pompliano laughs that he has “no clue” why he started saying it. “I did it three or four times and then I didn’t do it, and the audience was like, ‘Hey, what happened?’ And I realized they almost became like an inside joke with the audience.”

He also wears the same blue and gold striped tie whenever he makes a television appearance — and which he wore during both interviews with TechCrunch. Every day, he tweets on X the same, “Good morning. Today is going to be a great day. Let’s get after it relentlessly.”

And while that might sound cheesy, “Pomp is one of the hardest-working people I have ever known. He just gets it done. I love the guy,” Mark Yusko, founder and managing director of Morgan Creek Capital Management, told TechCrunch. Morgan Creek is a North Carolina-based hedge fund claiming more than $1.3 billion of assets under management.

In addition to the newly formed Professional Capital Management business, Pompliano’s business interests span: 

• The Pomp Podcast, which has over 530,000 subscribers on YouTube and has hosted names like venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood and boxer-turned-investor Jake Paul.
• The Pomp newsletter, which has over 260,000 subscribers and three tiers, from free to $10 per month or $500 a year.
• Pomp Investments, his family office for investments 

In addition he:

• Was a co-founder of early-stage investment firm Full Tilt Capital, which backed companies like Lyft, Reddit, Everlywell and Imperfect Produce, which sold to Morgan Creek in 2018. 
• Has over a million followers on Twitter, over 558,000 total YouTube subscribers, 135,000 followers on Instagram and is a frequent guest on financial TV shows like Fox Business and CNBC.

Within the Professional Capital Management venture, Pompliano folded in his existing crypto hiring firm Inflection Points, which recruits, trains and employs people in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency industry. 

He also partners with founders in other ways. He sold one of his first incubations, Reflexivity Research, to DeFi Technologies earlier this year in February. Founded with a young bitcoin investor, Will Clemente, who had gained social media fame by documenting his investment, it is a well-known provider of Bitcoin, crypto, DeFi and economic analysis.

Earlier in 2024, he also co-founded the financial news and research newsletter and podcast, Opening Bell Daily, with former Business Insider reporter Phil Rosen. With former TechCrunch reporter Jacquelyn Melinek, he launched Token Relations, a firm that helps blockchain and crypto projects form direct relationships with their communities, developers and token holders.

His variety of business interests is deliberate. One of the things he learned over the years is that “people who get complacent get disrupted.” That’s why he reminds himself on a daily basis to approach investing from a beginner’s mindset, because every time he thinks he’s got something figured out, the game changes, he said. 

“If you look through the evolution of the investing that I’ve done, or even the businesses that we’ve built, we’re constantly trying to iterate and evolve to make sure that we’re using the latest and greatest to be able to stay kind of ahead of everybody,” Pompliano said. 

Always the entrepreneur

Pompliano was perhaps trained since childhood for business. The oldest of five boys, his father is founder of the data and information technology services company Anexio and his parents always encouraged their children to be entrepreneurial. Pompliano and his brothers took that encouragement literally, and were always scheming up ways to make money. 

“We’d find stuff around the house and say our parents don’t need this anymore and would go try to sell it,” he said. “Or a friend would be selling something, and we would buy it and try to flip it,” he remembers.

While Pompliano can be surprisingly modest when talking about his own abilities — and to this day says he’s not sure why Facebook hired him, setting him on this career path — during a 2017 episode of the Breaking into Startups podcast, he shared some insights. By that time, he’d already left Facebook and was in a rebound phase with his career.

In thinking over the 150 people he himself had interviewed for roles at Facebook, he’d learned that there were two attributes that were harbingers of success in tech: people who can adapt to new info thrown at them and still calmly make strong decisions. And people whose instincts were to work with others to solve problems.

Pompliano says the second attribute has become “a life principle. Nobody does anything by themselves. It doesn’t mean that you need 100 people,” he told TechCrunch. “A lot of life is about getting along with other people, being likable, being able to collaborate. Success in business is less about what you get out of it, and it’s more about what value do you deliver to somebody else — how do you solve their problem?”

Those who know Pompliano say both of those traits are his superpowers.

He is “uniquely articulate in his ability to communicate with people,” said Andrew Spellman, founder and managing partner at Fifth Down Capital. Spellman invested in and is on the board of