>> Thank you very much. Welcome to what's going to be, I think, one of the best
sessions of the entire Super Summit because we've got some really great people on
here. My name is Mark Halpern from Part -Time Investors LLC. I run a group of 62
private investors called the Triple D Mindset Club, and we're not going to talk
about that today so much. Okay. Okay, this is about antifragile. If the lights were
not in my face, I would ask for a show of hands, how many people don't know what
that is. But what I'll do is I'll just, I found some definition which I'm going to
read and then we'll go through the introductions. So there's a concept called
antifragility and here's the definition. Antifragility is a property of systems in
which they increase in capability to thrive, which means their performance increases.
As a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes,
faults, attacks, or failures. That's pretty interesting. So that's what we're gonna be
talking about today. But before we talk about the antifragile investments, I'm gonna
ask everybody to introduce themselves for about 60 seconds and just say who you are,
what you do, and then we're going to get some other things. Good morning, everyone.
Happy Saturday, everyone. I'm a real estate investor for about 24 years. I'm outside
of the Philadelphia area, I actually know Mark quite well, and I primarily do mostly
multifamily investing. We've done a little bit of everything. We're going to be
building our first new home development next year, we're also building our first
industrial building next year. We also own an HVAC business as well. So we're pretty
diversified in what we do. We definitely love the real estate market in our area
and we've invested in other places around the country as well.
Thank you. And good morning. I'm a, I had a past life as a professional athlete
and I've transitioned into being a venture investor, and I have a sports -focused
investment firm. It's a single member, so it's all self -funded. But I focus on
media, team ownership, club ownership.
We currently, we're working on making some investments overseas, looking into buying
clubs. So I'm from the Philadelphia area, so it turns out we live near each So,
but thank you. - James. - Hello everybody.
I am from here, Brooklyn, New York, and I invest alongside with my father and my
sister into I guess just whatever warms our souls. We mostly focus on fine art,
the contemporary art market, and blockchain.
>> Hi, my name is [inaudible] originally from the UK, I spent the last 40 years
investing in technology emerging markets, getting into sort of various trends and
geopolitical things, currently focused on sustainable solutions and financial systems.
>> My name is [inaudible] I am from Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, California Bay Area.
I have been focusing on technology since the age of 14. I went to college for the
deep tech, tech, physics, electronic engineering. And I turned myself into an investor
about 15 years ago. But I always focus on deep tech.
Right now, what I focus is impact investment that focus on on how to using
technologies and changing human's life and then environment at the same time.
Currently we focus on energy sector, AI, and of course some of the surrounding area
like farming and data center AI. Thank you. - Oh,
very good. This is really a great panel. And we always want to foster more
relationships between the sponsors and the investors and all the participants here. So
I'd like to actually combine two questions here, and one is if we'll just go down
the row, if everybody could say what things are you looking for, what are you
looking to invest in, and in particular, if any of those things are anti -fragile,
please highlight that as you're speaking. Okay. As far as what we're looking to do,
we kind of have a game plan for next year to be doing a lot of building, so
we're like I mentioned, we're building a new home development and we're also building
an industrial building and currently what we're looking to do is acquire as much
land as possible, whether it's stuff that we can acquire right now or put options
on it, I do feel land is probably the number one most antifragile thing because if
things go, the whole definition of antifragile is things that would go up even if
the economic circumstances change and I never seen places where land really goes down
in value, especially if it's something that can be developed. So develop lands
getting harder and harder to find and the regulations to actually build stuff is
getting tougher and tougher so we're just trying to get our hands on whatever we
can land -wise.
So, at the moment, we're focused on acquiring more media companies,
adding them into our current ecosystem, and finding really talented creators,
content creators, and then teaching them how to monetize their talent. So I feel as
though there's no end to people's attention as it relates to social media,
content sharing platforms so and also in youth sports particularly soccer,
which is my my focus there are billions and billions of hours of Games and training
sessions that have been captured on phones etc. That aren't organized so part of my
strategy has been to To dominate the media space and I've acquired the three largest
media platforms in the country, but the next phase is how do I capture those
billions of hours and organize them so that they're searchable? And I think that's
pretty anti -fragile, just because kids won't stop scrolling, so.
- And since they won't stop scrolling, we want to invest in more technology,
artificial It's definitely deeper into crypto, which we have strong conviction on.
I love to meet people who are innovating, and we're not afraid of risk. So if
there is, we want to be early at the risk of being wrong.
But if we can understand it, we think there's potential for it, we want to take a
chance on that. And we're into art, because art to us is anti -fragile,
and that is a big part of our investment thesis.
- Yeah, I'm intending to look sort of five years out and saying where we're likely
to be in five years time given that, you know, when you're investing P or VC,
you're actually not gonna exit for five to 10 years. So I'm figuring out if I put
some money in now, how am I gonna get that back in five to 10 years time? So
looking at that, you start looking at, you know what is the US looking like, what's
it going to look like in five to ten years time, what are other places going to
look like. So I'm looking at the big picture, I'm a seller of real estate, I'm
happy to sell you land, I have too much of it, land does go down sadly,
so I bought it in the last distress and I'm happy to flog it now and buy it back
again. But I think if you're looking at the very, very big picture,
I think that Africa is the place where you want to be for a variety of reasons
and I'm happy to go into detail face to face on that one. But I think places like
media again and technology, I think we're seeing radical shifts in technology in the
way people work and do things and I think that's where the big picture opportunities
are. And I'd be getting out of a lot of conventional assets like office of U .S.
residential properties. Linda? In terms of our assessments,
in the past five to ten years, depends on the technology on our portfolio companies,
we have been prepared for the green energy, AI. Everybody talks about AI as of
today, but we have been participated and prepare probably like focus and 70 years
ago and same thing as the green technologies.
At the same time, next year and the next five to 10 years, we are ready basically
helping the enablement, I would say, of different sectors from transforming the energy
sector to green, electromagnetic power, for example. And then because of that
transition, we can help the data centers when they need double the capacity because
of the AI status coming. The farming industry and also a shortage of food and a
lot of these things happen with the inflation and value and then the nutrition as
that. So we're helping the farm industry transition to some of the greenhouse
technology, for example, to be able to put the food on your table from one day or
a few hours of transportation instead of a few days ago, and then they can up to
double the 30 times more of the,
has a quantity or volume from one land pieces of 25 acres,
for example, so they can transfer their traditional farms to helping with hydroponic
farms. And then clean water is an enablement of our technology by providing them the
green energies. That's also help on the carbon free,
emission free. With the AI, we could do the deployment,
the safety, the maintenance, everything better in terms of management side of it. And
last but not least, we were hoping from the development countries like Africa and
then also from the metro area so every kids can access to the internet Internet
because lower cost of the energy so they can access to it and through the lower
cost premium of any Internet or can be free. So that's the fourth goal of what
we're trying to achieve in the next five to 10 years. So we need a lot of
alignment with everyone of you and also everyone in the world, two different regions.
So So we partner with, our strategy, partner with a lot of different regional
leaders on to that. - Very good. You can see the diversity of the concepts that
people are talking about, which is really great. Just looking at the time, 'cause
I'm dying to ask you about vertical farming, if you've done any of that. I think
we're doing that too bad. Do you have any comments, Linda, about your chance on
vertical farming? It was a really hot topic, maybe seven, eight years ago. Did you
get into, 'cause you mentioned hydroponics. I don't want to put you on the spot
here, but. - I don't want to argue with too much time, but just one sentence. So I
am, actually right after this meeting, tomorrow I'm gonna meet with the Rhode Island
governors. We have a meeting right there. So they are grouped all the farming
industry over there, like mostly a private family farm. So they are transitioned from
traditional to hydroponics. So we are on that move. We also partner with a lot of--
there was association with 200 ,000 corporations in the world on the farming side.
So we partner with them and then try to bring in the green energy,
plus all the things in the farming industry in terms of greenhouses, how to control
the climate inside the farming, and also how to be able to be 80 percent or double
the nutrition levels of those produce, and again 30 times up to the volumes of
production. So that's where we're heading to. Yeah, yeah, hydroponics is an amazing
thing, and I'm investing some houses and anyway I don't want to get into all that
as well because yeah I did hydroponics back in the 19th and vertical farming but I
mean getting back to again the bigger picture two -thirds of all the worlds remaining
arable land is in Africa and it's largely unused and Africa is a net importer of
food now they have the cheapest arable land in the world now if I'm planting in
Africa, your New Jersey is not even close. You're like a thousand times more
expensive. So, and again, if you look at land, this land is currently worthless
because it doesn't have the infrastructure in place and the irrigation systems and
the logistics and the payment systems. So if you're looking at, and this is where I
see the opportunities, this is very, very cheap way of producing food in a world
that doesn't have food. But the food is not getting produced because the capital is
not going on and the technology is not going on now If you look at the people on
here, you have a lot of the technology you have technology You have connections, you
know how to get stuff done and promote stuff and you know land and development and
other systems I personally think that that is the opportunity for a lot of people
in this room is to start looking very much outside the box and say, hey, we've got
some great things in the US, capital markets, technology, management skills, everything
else. Why are we all running around chasing the next real estate deal? When there
are whole continents out there that lack these basic technologies and skills where
people in the US can apply those and make shitloads of money.
- Fascinating. I thought it was a great repel here.