#40 How They Built It: Titan - On Democratizing Access to Elite Investment Strategies and The Future of Public Markets | Joe Percoco, Co-Founder & Co-CEO

Joe Percoco is Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Titan, an investment firm focused on leveling the playing field across the wealth spectrum. In part one of this episode, Joe and Daniel discuss insights from Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, rethinking the investment platform, and understanding your company’s OS.
Last updated
August 14, 2023
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Before launching Titan, Joe Percoco managed investments at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Company.
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#40 How They Built It: Titan - On Democratizing Access to Elite Investment Strategies and The Future of Public Markets | Joe Percoco, Co-Founder & Co-CEO

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“There's often a binary debate occurring in society, which is about crypto assets—is the asset class a zero? And it's a bit of the wrong debate to be having. The right question to ask here is, are there crypto-assets that deserve a weighting in your portfolio?” – Joe Percoco

Joe Percoco (@joepercoco) is Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Titan, an investment firm focused on leveling the playing field across the wealth spectrum. Titan manages over $500M for 30,000 clients and has recently been valued at $450 million at the close of their Series B round. Before launching Titan, Joe Percoco managed investments at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Company.

To listen to Joe’s bonus interview and learn more about his green/yellow/red light approach to each week, click here.


Chapters in this interview:

  • Joe’s background and insights learned at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey
  • The frustrations in investing that led Joe to build Titan
  • Investing in international markets
  • Building a platform that makes investing accessible to all
  • Investing in crypto with Titan
  • Understanding your Company OS and hiring the right people for your tribe

Links from this episode

Terminology

Book Recommended by Joe

Key Takeaway

Joe places a lot of weight on company culture and the importance of finding team members that really fit into the established tribe. He compares this to understanding your company’s operating system, it’s core “biology,” and assessing whether potential team members truly connect at that level.

“The second most important product you ship is how everyone works together. The biggest unlock is the realization that most people underweight working on the company OS. And if you think about a company, at a molecular level, the biology of a company, what is the atom? And is this a high-performing atom? Or is this a mediocre atom?”


Transcript

Daniel Scrivner:

Joe, welcome to Outlier Academy. I'm so excited about this conversation. Thank you so much for making time.


Joe Percoco:

Thanks for having me, Daniel. I'm stoked to be here.


Daniel Scrivner:

So, I wanted to start with just having you give a quick sketch of your background because you had some interesting experience at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, I want to ask a couple questions, but maybe just to start for anyone that's not familiar, just flashing out your path before Titan.


Joe Percoco:

I'm originally from a small town in New Jersey called Hillsborough. I don't know if you ever driven through New Jersey like 287, or I-95. It's one of those exits off of that. There's probably about 30,000, 40,000 people in the town. Just to paint the color of that town, the hallmarks are probably the coals in the bagel store. And you have to make one of two really important decisions growing up, which is do you play tee-ball or soccer, that's my hometown.


Joe Percoco:

When I went to Penn undergrad, I went to Wharton, there's a high degree of culture shock. It was just like this isn't the farmland that I knew I was growing up from. Penn was a ton of fun, and I learned a lot. Met a lot of really awesome souls. It seems like there's a bit of an assembly line where you graduate right from Penn and just walk into 200 West Goldman Sachs.


Joe Percoco:

So I followed the assembly line, went there, really had a special time. I worked for a little bit also for the current CEO at Goldman, his name is David Solomon. He's awesome. But yeah, then I realized that wasn't the right position on the field for me. And I knew I wasn't destined to be an advisor. But I knew I was destined to roll up my sleeves and be on the playing field getting muddy.


Joe Percoco:

So, I flew out to San Francisco and joined McKinsey in their tech practice. So I worked with a bunch of really awesome clients there from PayPal to Step up, you name it, and it was so fun to projects we were working on. And then I knew I was closer to this position on the field that I should be, but not quite. And so ultimately, I said, "I need to go do these things myself." And in particular, investing was probably one of the most embarrassing problems I couldn't solve for myself. And that was the origin [inaudible 00:02:04] my Titan began.


Daniel Scrivner:

I love that progression that you laid out of.


Joe Percoco:

Yeah.


Daniel Scrivner:

For the beginning all the way to Titan is fascinating. I'm curious for if you could share or if there's something that resonates for you. We've had people on the show that have certainly spent time at Goldman and spent time at McKinsey. And something I'm always fascinated by is both of those are iconic places to work. And it sounds like necessarily wasn't quite the right fit, but if you learned an incredible amount and those were still formative experiences.


Daniel Scrivner:

So I'm curious, is there one or two a gym, a secret, an insight, just something that you still hold with you or think about, from your time at Goldman and your time at McKinsey, that you can share with people listening?


Joe Percoco:

That's a really great question, Daniel. Goldman, reminded me, I know there is a work smarter, not harder, that seems to be the cool thing to say these days. There's a bit of a contrary, an idea, which values work ethic, which is from another era that I wasn't born in, I don't know your age, you probably weren't born in it too, that it seems like a different era, pre World War II, actually very much valued work ethic. And that was part of the cultural norm. I think what Goldman Sachs is exceptional at is crafting that environment. Is that what you've seen as well? Or at least heard from other guests?


Daniel Scrivner:

Well, I haven't heard it articulated that way. But I think it's fascinating. And the way that that resonates for me is in my background, a big part of my backgrounds in design, that sounds very similar to the culture at Apple, where it's definitely you're working with really bright people, everyone's trying to work smarter, they're not trying to just grind themselves into the ground. And yet, it's absolutely a culture that the bar is very high for the amount of work that's expected. And it's in a really positive sense. It almost harkens to me being in the military, where there's just like, you need to roll up your sleeves and then do the work mentality.


Joe Percoco:

For sure. And one of the amazing things, it's almost like as if they've only taken the positive aspects of the military, and embedded it personally into their culture. So, all the analogies like you feel like you're in the trenches with peers, there's a singular mission. We're going to roll up our sleeves and do whatever it takes for our clients that work on our behalf.


Joe Percoco:

I definitely learned that DNA from Goldman, and obviously, part of that you grew up with it, just being a big athlete growing up way back when that was already, I was biased to those environments to be very clear, but it was something that I feel like it might be being lost a little bit these days, which is the charm of working relentlessly hard for a mission.


Daniel Scrivner:

[inaudible 00:04:42] having pride in that. It's actually something to be prideful of if you really love your work, you're really giving it your all.


Joe Percoco:

So that's Goldman. I made a shift in McKinsey. I think one of the things when I reflect back on that experience is they might not articulate it this way. But architecting people to solve problems in a systems thinking way. I feel like coming out of McKinsey, one is able to take whatever issue or problem there is. Take a whiteboard marker and draw it. And I forget that there's that really famous book which is it takes the top 1,000 words in the English dictionary and only uses those words to describe like an airplane or microwave. I think it's called Thing Explainer.


Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, Thing Explainer, I have that at home.


Joe Percoco:

The Thing Explainer.


Daniel Scrivner:

That's great.


Joe Percoco:

Bill Gates recommended that one. And I feel like a core skill one needs to have is just being able to be master of the universe of something. If someone says, "Hey, Daniel, I'm thinking about starting a lemonade stand. Should I or should I not?" You quickly need to become master of the universe and be like, "Okay, these three things matter. Will my friend like it? Are they good at it? What are the alternatives?"


Joe Percoco:

So in theory, you've just created three different buckets, each of the system. And from there, McKinsey was also really exceptional at helping me open my eyes to what it means to architect a team to go attack those said things. And so, when you put those two and two together, team-focused work ethic, plus the ability just to understand how the universe works, and drive people to attack it, it's ultimately, why I felt so prepared to go to Titan. I was like, "I feel like I have the core backbones of what I need to know."


Daniel Scrivner:

That's fantastic. Thank you for both of those. Shifting over to Titan, you hinted at this earlier. And I think something I always love asking founders, entrepreneurs is if there was a founding secret or a founding insight that made you like, "We have to go and build this company."


Joe Percoco:

I feel like this is the drum roll part, drum roll.


Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, exactly. If I had an effects button, we do a drum roll.


Joe Percoco:

I have a deep degree of humility before I comment on these sorts of things. Because it seems like every book under the sun tries to claim like, "This is the universal truth." So I'm just going to say, from my experience-


Daniel Scrivner:

I like it.


Joe Percoco:

... this stuff is so hard for a variety of reasons. I could not imagine working on a problem I personally did not feel exceptionally frustrated by, I literally just cannot. You unlock your finger painting on the shower, where the steam hits on product ideas. That's how much I'm obsessed with this problem. And I just know, I'm just going to bring my best that much more.


Joe Percoco:

And so what the frustration was, no one teaches you how to invest, no one. You don't have a college teacher, rarely do you even have a mentor, oftentimes, even once parents are necessarily the most educated about investing. And that was the knowledge I had walking into arguably the best finance school in the country. And then here I am at Goldman Sachs doing finance things.


Joe Percoco:

And yet, I can't even figure out how to move my own bank account, how to literally go take the cash from Bank of America savings to investment account. This was before Robinhood and so forth. I don't know if you had a similar journey. But to me, investing was one of the most embarrassing problems I didn't solve until a friend did for me.


Daniel Scrivner:

It was a little bit different for me, I've just always been fascinated by it. But I think similarly, and that's why I was so excited about this conversation in part is I recognize. So I feel like I've been able to assemble my own map of the terrain and figure out what makes sense or feels right for me in that space. But I think, broadly speaking, that it's completely broken, to your point that not only are we not equipped with just really basic education, so that the bar to just understanding these things at a conceptual level is really high.


Daniel Scrivner:

But then the other one is just the sophistication. I'm glad we're in a wave where those platforms like Robo-advisors, as an example, that are making things less intimidating. But I would say generally, it's still very intimidating. And it's a very, in your own head you feel negative about it, doesn't make you feel good. You understand what you're doing.


Joe Percoco:

What's funny is the drum roll, the secret insight. It wasn't necessarily even, like what I just said, which was the frustration. It was the idea that there's two different menus. And you get where I grew up from, no clue. I could barely spell investing, but then seeing what high finance is like in particular, from an investing standpoint, I was privy to know, most of the smartest peers coming out of Wharton, who now are some of the best finance professionals in the country. That was my peer group at Penn.


Joe Percoco:

And I saw the jobs that they took, working on behalf of institutions and investing their capital buzz terms include private equity venture hedge fund. In reality, going back to the system's thinking that we discussed earlier, the mental model here is very simple. There are human beings who have expertise to manage money, and they currently have vehicles designed to only do it for things that can give you multi billion-dollar checks. And so I realized that Wall Street's just like one big restaurant. If you are an everyday American with sub 10 million of net worth, you're seated in the front, you're given a menu.


Daniel Scrivner:

You get the kids menu.


Joe Percoco:

You get the kids menu, you get the shitty chicken tenders, the French fries, you get the option for a mutual fund. And then once you're done, they shush you out of the restaurant. But as soon as you cross the wealth divide, a waiter named Morgan Stanley taps you on the shoulder, they kick off those chicken tenders off your table so, "You, come with me through the back," you walk through the back, all of a sudden, you're in this new world, you get a new menu, and you got the chef waiting for you behind.


Joe Percoco:

And that's what frustrated me the most was not necessarily me trying to figure out how to get into the restaurant, is the fact that even once I figured out how to get in, everything you're discussing, Robo-advisors, you name it, all these other different platforms, they're predominantly front of restaurant vehicles. And that was the, roll up your sleeves, Joe, you got a 30-year journey, you're breaking down, you're merging both sides. I knew it instantly.


Daniel Scrivner:

That's fascinating. And that's a really interesting analogy to think about. I think building off of that. One thing I was curious about is how you think about how you fit into the broader market. And it feels like we've started to shade that a little bit with you're trying to take sophisticated strategies that I think you're totally right, they should be available to everyone, but they aren't or they haven't been historically, you're trying to make that for mainstream investors. I'm curious. There's also words like active and passive. Do you guys think of yourself as maybe similar to an active ETF? How do you think about that?


Joe Percoco:

I think about it like a human use case. I never used to be a fan of history or biographies, I used to find it quite boring. Now I've literally totally flipped because what you realize is the world changes, but humans don't. And investing is one of the oldest human behaviors. Actually, let me... Not one of the oldest, can you say eating and breathing, it's probably one of the oldest human behaviors.


Joe Percoco:

When you think about passive, passive, the primary human use case is make it go away. "This investing thing is important for my financial health, I would like to make it go away." It's the newest and the smallest in terms of revenue, human use case. So, Jack Bogle at Vanguard, he invented the index back in the 60s.


Joe Percoco:

Before then, there was no real way to invest in index. And then go a little bit further back in history, you have the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, where you can trade the first stock, the Dutch East India co. Robinhood, is in theory, a modern operating system for that a 400-year old use case.


Joe Percoco:

And then the third and final use case is Show me the way. I actually wrote instead of a Robinhood, or the second use case, which is Get out of my way, I literally just want to do whatever I want, I want to profit from it, I just want to be part of it, I want to gamble with it, whatever.


Joe Percoco:

The third use case is I want to give my money to someone to actually do this whole thing for me, that is called investment management. That use case is several thousand years old started by the Phoenicians, where they would pay 20% of profits, they would take 20% of carry from ship owners for the goods coming off the ship. And the last great operating system built in this category is a little company called Fidelity, which right now manages $4 trillion on this technology called mutual funds.


Joe Percoco:

And I think I just saw an eye roll from you because yes, a mutual fund is a VHS tape. And so that's where we sit, which is just like there's a ton of passive players and exceptionally well, there's a bunch of really great folks in the second category. No one is yet to say who is the next Fidelity, who's the next T. Rowe, who's the next active management operating system. And that's what we're building.


Daniel Scrivner:

I love it. Getting into the specific strategies. In a second, we're going to come to something I know that you're working on shipping, which I'm really excited to chat about, which is a new crypto product. But before we get into that, I think just to stay in the public equity, the typical investment universe.


Daniel Scrivner:

Talk a little bit about the three strategies you have today. So flagship, opportunities, and offshore. And I know we can get super deep. So I'm just curious, staying at a high level, what's the pitch for each of those? Are they generally managed the same way?


Joe Percoco:

Daniel, here's a pitch. To grow your money, to compound it at really high rates, you need to have exposure to certain different asset classes or certain different sectors of the world. One of the most important sectors you need to have exposure to is blue-chip tech. These are monopoly players, flagship does that.


Joe Percoco:

Another thing you have to have exposure to are the future stars. Let's call these the emerging bets on things that could be blue-chip in the future. That's opportunities. We also should not be US-centric for diversification reasons, but also having humility that some of these best companies in the world are now in India and China, that's offshore.


Joe Percoco:

And fourth, crypto, we believe deserves a fundamental slice of your allocation. And so that's crypto. And you can chart the vision from here, which is the goal is to do a fidelity and so forth was. So, we're just going to keep rolling out products to expand things we can invest you in, private asset classes, venture, real estate, you name it.


Joe Percoco:

But more so, we've got a number of different people like legacy mutual fund managers who manage $1 billion to $3 billion reaching out saying, "Hey, I want a mobile app too for my clients, can I just launch a product on Titan?" So, in that last 30 seconds, you got the master plan. That's it. That'll probably take us 10 years to do. So, we're in year three.


Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, it's amazing. It's super interesting. One follow-up question on the offshore piece. I'm curious for your take. From my experience, so I've tried to really make an effort to read more, think more about China, India, and that part of the world. And I think part of that, for me, is finding new sources that are more local, part of that is finding investors or people in those spaces that I think are really interesting.


Daniel Scrivner:

So I'm curious, because in my experience, there has been that I think in the US, we really discount that. We're maybe more bullish on something like India, but because of some of the tension that we feel with a country like China, I think a lot of people either think it's, and I've heard everything from, "It's a scam, you shouldn't invest in any Chinese company," which seems extremely silly to people that just I think aren't open-minded to it. What would your pitch be of why that's not the case, why we all need to have an allocation to that part of the world and just be invested globally, instead of just in the US?


Joe Percoco:

It's a really great question. It has deep roots, which is the idea that you, Daniel, are like a citizen of the world. You take earnings that you get from your job here. And it's what I said, "Okay, I need to deploy this productively, which companies deserve my money. So that way, they can use it productively to continue pushing the world forward."


Joe Percoco:

And the world is comprised not just of the United States of America; obviously, we're a really important place. But there are things in India that say, "Daniel, Pick me, pick me. I actually need to go take everything you just did in e-commerce in the United States, I'm going to go impact several billion people here in the Indian region to go do that, or in China. Ignore what my government is saying, pick me, I'm just a company, I'm here to impact a billion people in China, with helping them assess how they socially buy goods, and that's going to push the world forward."


Joe Percoco:

And then what that gives you, Daniel, is a sense of agency, you get to pick. So, whereas a passive product just says, "Daniel [inaudible 00:17:19], just give literally a little bit of money to everything. Have no discernment." What makes investing such a beautiful exercise is you actually do get to play judge and jury. And the companies are the ones coming to your court, and they're pitching themselves on why they deserve your capital.


Joe Percoco:

And, for us, we're just a conduit. We're saying to you, "Hey, Daniel, there are companies in China, India, that are asking for your capital, and we actually think they deserve a piece, because they can push forward a part of the world further, and you will capture a slice of that value, aka your wealth is going to grow." So that's like how I just think about the world with respect to investing. The conclusion here is you are a powerful person.


Daniel Scrivner:

Go and use that power and actually invest globally.


Joe Percoco:

You should. Invest globally, invest across asset classes but never forget that power that you hold.


Daniel Scrivner:

[inaudible 00:18:10] agency.


Joe Percoco:

You are judge, and you are a small judge, but a judge in the capital markets, and you deserve to be that judge.


Daniel Scrivner:

It's fascinating. I love the way you laid that out. One thing I really was curious to talk about is, so one area of focus that it seems like you guys have over-indexed on in a great way is a really unique investor experience. So obviously, you're rebuilding a modern version of fidelity, you're going to continue to roll out more strategies.


Daniel Scrivner:

And I think some people would look at that. I want to ask you a question on this in a second. But I think some people look at that and think like, "Well, that's fine. But anybody can do that." I'm sure you would say, "No, that's not the case." We could talk about that.


Daniel Scrivner:

But I'm curious on around investor experience, everything from investors on the platform getting video updates, getting pushed notifications about portfolio and research updates, literally a fundamentally new model there that seems amazing for modern investors, talk about that, and talk about why that's so important in what you're excited that you've done there.


Joe Percoco:

This goes back to that whole, the world changes, humans don't. This is the part where the world can change. Historically, every investment product has been a black box. Even if you, Daniel, were a customer of one of the richest hedge funds in the world. In order to figure out what's going on with your money, you have to hopefully get a call with their team, or wait for a 15 to 30 page PDF that comes once a quarter.


Daniel Scrivner:

That you have to go to the website and find and download it.


Joe Percoco:

You have to go to the website. It's usually written in over-ambitious prose as all these people think they're Jane Austen, and they like to have a very cute quote to start and like, "Okay, you do what you do, you're not a great writer." But with that aside, it's pretty obvious that there's a new solution. The same technology that empowers LeBron James to tell a million people that it's Taco Tuesday at his house, you can actually go give to an investment manager and say, "Go explain what you're doing to all of your client [crosstalk 00:20:04]."


Daniel Scrivner:

In real-time.


Joe Percoco:

In real-time. And what we call as internally as project cockpit OS. Historically, that cockpit was closed. You go stay in coach, give us your money and they'll work on it. They'll figure out where they're driving you and they ultimately just get off the plane and you're there. With mobile technology, let's call it Taco Tuesday tech, you can actually have courtside seats to your own capital, push-button, Phil Jackson walks over and says, "Hey, Daniel, here's exactly what's going on in China. Here's why we're investing you in India."


Joe Percoco:

And the cool thing behind this tech is not that it just unlocks a whole experience, it makes investors more confident to stay invested when the plane has turbulence. The biggest thing people confuse is turbulence for the plane itself going down. It's ridiculously harmful. And with push-button, Phil Jackson comes over. Not only do you feel fine during turbulence, you may actually say, "Yo, Phil, can I put in more money during turbulence?" It's like the best time to buy.


Joe Percoco:

And so, this goes back to that operating system piece. We're not just here to do our own products. Eventually, the goal is to say, "All right, let's go and power all the other Phil Jackson's in the world that aren't Titan employees to be able to have this relationship with their clients."


Daniel Scrivner:

Super fascinating. And I love that you have so many good analogies here. You are a master at these analogies, but I love that concept of people confusing turbulence with the plane going down. That's especially true in crypto to talk about in a second. But I'm curious, we talked about that's the goal, obviously, one of the biggest things that unlocks is that ability for people to continue to, I guess, build and maintain a really high level of conviction. "This is the right thing, I know what's going on. We're making smart decisions." How have you seen that play out? What feedback have you gotten from customers on the platform? Or how have you seen that positively shape people's behavior?


Joe Percoco:

There's been for periods of time where Titan has looked really stupid, I.e market and Titan are both way down just because of volatility, it's totally natural, but outside in, historically won't be like, "Why is this chart thing down 20%?" And just like okay, "What happens when push-button, Phil Jackson walks over, and it's a period of turbulence?"


Joe Percoco:

We've maintained 98% to 99% user retention during those periods, and we've grown assets every time. And I don't say that on behalf of Titan, I say that on behalf of excitement for the world. The 25-year-old version of myself, if that happens to me, I'm taking out all my money and putting it to cash. Well, there goes 10% annual returns on whatever small wealth I had at the time.


Joe Percoco:

And so now I'm just on a mission, given the whole idea of making a black box an open box, what it just can do for one's own mental sanity. A byproduct of our mission is we're going to probably make the smartest generation of investors ever because now all of a sudden, you have very smart people commenting on the world to you. So it's just so important for a variety of reasons to really nail this.


Daniel Scrivner:

I wanted to ask and maybe it will be a little bit of a mirror of the answer to this question. But I wanted to ask about how you think about your differentiation in your moat. And we've talked a lot about the differentiation piece, and maybe that box is checked. But one thing I'm always interested to ask founders, entrepreneurs is what you think the most difficult to copy aspect of your model is?


Daniel Scrivner:

Meaning, you obviously, in business, you're competing against a bunch of other sophisticated players, a lot of people are going to try to clone and copy what's out there. What might people look at Titan and say, "I'm going to do that." And they're just totally going to fail at being able to ship that?


Joe Percoco:

Let's call it like two people. Or there's a few different entities that may try to come after us. There's the Stanford, Penn, or Harvard dorm room student.


Daniel Scrivner:

[inaudible 00:23:46], like 10 years ago.


Joe Percoco:

10 years ago, to coat it. Then there's new incumbent upstarts. And then there's legacy players. So for the dorm room student, the unfortunate reality of consumer FinTech, which is why there needs to be more entrepreneurs working on the problem is it's really difficult to just start regulation, legal barriers, just the technology needed to be able to accept a large variety of counts, non-trivial. And we're still at the point in time where no one solved it.


Joe Percoco:

In terms of the incumbents, and let's say the fidelities, ultimately, when you think what we're building is, we're building the operating system between demand and supply. Demand are the Daniels in the world. I have money, I want to invest it, supply. All these investment managers and investment products that could use that capital of the judge and jury, and we're building the layer in between.


Joe Percoco:

And so what you have from that is a business that has network effects as marketplace dynamics. And what it rests on, in particular, is a fact we're building a consumer technology company, I.e the Cockpit OS, the Phil Jackson push-button experience inside an asset management category. And so it's like you're merging two difficult disciplines into one singular network effects-based business.


Joe Percoco:

And so it's why this should be a winner take most dynamic, and why we're excited to scale. But we're very humble about competition in particular because we know our place in history, we are here to carry the torch and grab it from some of the old players who have historically have had it.


Daniel Scrivner:

That's a great answer. And we'll get into crypto in just a second. But I'm curious building off of, it feels like a thread through our conversation is I know earlier on, you felt that frustration with wanting to invest in a sophisticated way, in an intelligent way being really frustrated at your options. I'm assuming that means you're just inclined to study investors, whether it's people like Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger or other investment figures.


Daniel Scrivner:

I'm curious for your take, just as you look out at the field, I guess, who do you think is interesting? Who do you guys pay attention to? Who do you feel like you've learned from? So it's so much more about you and less about Titan, but I'm just curious, for your take there.


Joe Percoco:

You should see one of our Slack channels internally, which is the whole investment management team, I.e, all of the investment analysts who are in charge of making investment decisions across products. We have a Slack channel, we have several Slack channels per product. But one of the fun things that occur in these Slack channels are people just highlighting reading material, and just highlighting different people that they were spotlighted.


Daniel Scrivner:

It gives me FOMO. Like, I want to be in that Slack channel now.


Joe Percoco:

I know. Honestly, one of our engineers proposed the future of can we just expose the Titan Investment Management channel. As it's like a premium Twitter. Like, wow.


Daniel Scrivner:

It's cool idea.


Joe Percoco:

There's a thing going on in the world, Titan Investment Management has a point of view on it that's actually really smart. So from an investing standpoint, obviously, Buffett and Buffett is a boring answer. But one that continues to be revered for the reason that he nailed the core universal principles before others had. And those universal principles are like, diversification is only required if you don't know what you're doing. Smart concentration is actually important.


Joe Percoco:

He was one of the ones who thought through the idea of compounding what 15% annualized returns can really do. The fact that there's a big difference between stock price and business fundamentals. This is just like, check, check, check, check, check, nothing's really changed. The issue that he had, and it was nice to see him evolve, was, the whole industry had a big bias towards price.


Joe Percoco:

So I.e, value. If you have a stock that you're looking at, Daniel, you do a really great research, you'll be like, "Wow, this is a really high-quality business. But the price of the company being sold to me as judge is too high. I'm going to pass." What the industry started to pivot to arguably maybe not fast enough is that even if you're going to pay a high price today, it could be well worth it because of how fast these companies are growing I.e tech.


Joe Percoco:

And it took a bit of time for Buffett to get a memo. So now, a lot of, some of the people we really take inspiration from include Philippe Laffont at Coatue, who's one of our investors in Titan, he runs both public equity and the growth business, and tech.


Daniel Scrivner:

Very well [crosstalk 00:28:16].


Joe Percoco:

And of course, [crosstalk 00:28:16] is super well respected. But yeah, there's a long list of people that we just follow and track, that's a management team, what are they saying? Why are they saying it? We just have really interesting mental models.


Daniel Scrivner:

It's fascinating. Well, if you ever open that up, I want to be first in line to get access to that Slack channel.


Joe Percoco:

Done. We'll give you a beta access.


Daniel Scrivner:

Great. Okay, so I want to focus and talk about crypto. And I think to start, I would say generally people in our age group tend to be open-minded about crypto. But I think that the opinions individual by individual really fall across a really big spectrum. I still know people that I think are really smart that think it's a bubble. I personally don't.


Daniel Scrivner:

Just to start, I'd be curious for your take, Titan's take on just, you mentioned that idea earlier, why should everybody have an allocation to crypto? And what's the role that you see that playing?


Joe Percoco:

There's often a binary debate that was occurring in society, which is [inaudible 00:29:09] crypto so A, not even on a protocol basis, just like crypto assets, is the asset class a zero? And it's a bit of the wrong debate to be having. But smarter debate is that Voltaire, "Judge a person by their questions not their answers." The right question to ask here is, are there crypto-assets that deserve a weighting in your portfolio?


Joe Percoco:

And so notice, the precision and the question can include a 1% weight, a bet. And so, for us, there are crypto-assets that very much deserve a portion of one's portfolio. But the big debate from economic theory standpoint is just what percent of your portfolio does it deserve? It seems like the world is converging anywhere between 1% to 10%, is the 25th and 70th percentile. And then from there, it's like, "Okay, do you just buy bitcoin?" Which is the gold standard. Or the other protocols that also should make the cut?


Joe Percoco:

And so for us, we see crypto and a lot of the technologies there as long-term viable. Obviously, there's still many of them that need proof of concept. You need to take a look at their technologies, take a look at the team. But it's pretty clear that there could be a version of the world where crypto is very present. And then as a good capital allocator, going back to that judge and jury argument, it's just how much of your 100 poker chips do you allocate towards the possibility of crypto really being a thing here to stay? And so for us, it's like largely a summation of the mental model that we think about it.


Daniel Scrivner:

I think it's fascinating. And I think I love the reframing of that question. Because again, it also gives that agency to every investor to decide for themselves because I think that's the thing there too, is, you're totally right. In the investing world, everything seems to be framed as is it yes or is it no? Is it overvalued? Is it undervalued? Is it worth something? Is it worth nothing? It's very binary. And really, at the end of the day, it's much more of an individual conviction decision. And I think it should vary individual to individual.


Daniel Scrivner:

So I'm curious, then, can you talk a little bit about what strategies you're looking at? Because I think there's everything from you've hinted at it, just focusing on the blue chips. But there's also really interesting stuff happening in the defy space. There's really interesting new crypto protocols that are always launching, evolving, growing. So, how are you guys thinking about the asset class and how to make that something that investors can access?


Joe Percoco:

In terms of your precise question, how can investors access it? We all know you can go buy crypto assets on different platforms. What it seems like the primary problem to be solved is a lot of people are chit-chatting about crypto when they're at a dinner table or what have you. But no one yet has affirmed the answer on, "Okay, what should I do? How much should I put? Where should I put my assets?"


Joe Percoco:

Our approach, and it's fun to take someone as old school as Buffett and apply those same principles to a new age asset class like crypto, but the same principles apply. One should not deviate from these universal theorems, even though it's an exceptionally new and different thing. In reality, there still is a lot of fundamental research to be done on a per-protocol basis, with the overall outcome being that you have a concentrated basket of crypto assets, I.e, you've bet on a sub-component of the horses in the race, that could then give you outside returns.


Joe Percoco:

And the big caveat to what I'm saying, you could make a strong argument which is like look, buy the whole race, invest in every horse in a Kentucky Derby, and you're designed to win. Because whoever wins will just go so up and further to the right, we think it's possible to do better just because crypto is not as efficient as the stock market.


Joe Percoco:

And here's a preview for our four-step process. So with the ability to screen qualitatively and quantitatively, and then apply a fundamental layer where you can actually read the white paper, get to know the engineering teams, get to know the applications, get a sense for traction, and actually assess price, you can actually determine which are the better horses in the race to bet on. And so you can actually hopefully do better than just a Bitcoin weighted index. And so you'll see when we launch crypto in a few weeks, that it's not just 95% Bitcoin.


Daniel Scrivner:

I'm excited to see it. Can you give everyone... So it sounds like the launch is in a couple of weeks. Is there a specific date? And then can you just share for people that are listening and interested, where can they go to find out more about the crypto product?


Joe Percoco:

We're launching the world's first actively managed crypto products for retail investors in I think roughly three weeks, mid-July or so. We've just brought on a crypto investment analyst who's right now literally spending all of his day job doing exactly what I just described, who already did it before. We're formulating and putting the final, dotting the i's and crossing the t's on the exact portfolio and we're stoked to launch this in the coming weeks. It's really exciting. I've so many people reaching out to me, friends family, just saying, "What should I do with this whole crypto thing?" And I'm stoked to just say, literally go down with the Titan app.


Daniel Scrivner:

Well, it's a very different answer. I think you're totally right, because there's not many products like this. Outside of, there's Bitwise, which has stuff that's similar but again, to your whole amazing metaphor earlier of two menus, it still is very much like two menus, you have to be a qualified purchaser in order to get access to that, it's illiquid. And I guess that's one of the questions I'd be curious is what has been the hardest part of being able to ship this crypto product? Because it seems uniquely difficult.


Joe Percoco:

It is. Our engineering team is stellar. We weren't going to do anything crypto-related until later this year, early next. I think we determined in late April, we were going to launch the first actively managed crypto product and our engineering team is about to ship it in mid-July. This is just-


Daniel Scrivner:

It's incredible.


Joe Percoco:

I know. Just like Rockstar speed internally in the org, but most important for this exercise was ensuring... One of my biggest pet peeves is a lot of consumer FinTech just launches products. And I'm not going to say names, but putting confetti around options trading, there's no such thing on a balance sheet called intangible debt, which is debt your building that you're eventually going to have to pay.


Joe Percoco:

There are certain folks out there who have a massive amount of intangible debt because ultimately, these consumers are going to get really smart, and they're going to say, "Why the fuck were you marketing me these sorts of things, when I had no clue what was going on, and it wasn't the way to build wealth?"


Joe Percoco:

And so for us, what we thought really, really hard about was like, look, crypto is a volatile asset class. In particular, if you put yourselves in the shoes of a client, we have the biggest risk of turbulence being confused for the plane going down. And we deeply care. Our mission is to improve the compound growth rate of our generation. It's not to democratize tools. We have an outcome-focused mission, "Daniel should make more money in his bank account by being a Titan client, than he otherwise would have been elsewhere in the world."


Joe Percoco:

Crypto, even if we launched a perfect product, if we didn't nail the UX and the customer experience, we would risk Daniel trading this product when it's down. And so, again, to our mission, we need to crush it. We need to put ourselves in Daniel's shoes and say, "What will he experience? He's possibly a first-time crypto investor.


Joe Percoco:

All these things will have weird names, he will come into the mix, having all these different points of view on Litecoin, Etherium, and Bitcoin." So we need a way for him just to be like, "Wow, I got it. I'm invested in crypto, I feel amazing about it. It's the right allocation for me. If I'd any questions, there's a very seamless way. This took a lot of iteration in user research. So without it, we could have probably launched last month. Is the fact we're like, empathy to the moon is what's keeping us through mid-July.


Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, and I think that's fantastic. And I also, just to say it, I feel like a product like this that incorporates that cockpit OS or that experience of real-time updates. This, especially a crypto asset class, where I mean, even if you just look at the go pull up the Bitcoin chart, or any coin chart over the last two months, it's incredibly volatile. And it's had huge price swings. So it feels like that investor experience, and how much you've overweighted that will play a huge role here in making this successful.


Joe Percoco:

Do you own any crypto assets?


Daniel Scrivner:

I do. I've invested since 2015. And so I've-


Joe Percoco:

Love it.


Daniel Scrivner:

... experienced a lot of the turbulence.


Joe Percoco:

Good for you.


Daniel Scrivner:

But I'm a big believer in a long term. But I think my approach there is very different from others. And it sounds more aligned with yours, which is I'm not going to try to pretend that I know what this is going to be valued at or whether it's going to zero or whether it's going to be immensely valuable. I'm just going to make the bet that this is something interesting. I think this does have durable value. And so I'm going to invest in the asset class. And I'm a believer in that model.


Daniel Scrivner:

So, I want to shift now to something I was curious is, I know from my experience, as an investor, as founder entrepreneur, you have these unlocks or these sometimes they're aha moments, sometimes there's just you really notice a change in a perspective or a belief that you had over time. So I'm curious, I wanted to ask you, if you've had any aha or big unlocks on the investing side, and on the business founder entrepreneur side that you can share with guests? Super open-ended, pick anything there.


Joe Percoco:

The number one unlock, ask me again in five years, maybe I change my answer. Right now, I think the biggest unlock is realizing that and we say this internally, which is that the second most important product you ship is how everyone works together. And I could respond to your question saying the biggest unlock is the realization that most people underweight working on the company OS.


Joe Percoco:

And if you think about a company, at a molecular level, the biology of a company, what is the atom? And is this a high-performing atom? Or is this a mediocre atom? For instance, if you're a consumer product company, it could be like the interplay between your engineer, a UX designer, and a product manager. And how are they iterating moving fast to just delight customers? And how are they coming together? Who have you hired in those seats? How are they architected amongst the other atoms? How does this form a molecule?


Joe Percoco:

And over the last 18 months, I've really obsessed over the subject. How does Titan perform at an atomic level? And then how do you add up those atoms to a singular tribe that performs really well? And the reason why I said this is because I ask a lot of other entrepreneurs this question a lot. And it's the equivalent of saying to massively change the tone of their response, it's the equivalent of going up to someone and saying, "What do you do 10:00 pm in the gym? Are you shooting free throws, are you stretching? Do you do yoga?"


Joe Percoco:

And a lot of times, you're just going to give me shoulder shrugs. We don't really practice free throws at 10:00 pm in the gym as a company. And so I think it's really, really important. And I've just watched it unlock us to just crazy new highs internally, and it is something we're going to continue to compound on ourselves. So take the same principles from investing, I.e compounding, but apply it to one's business. And I think that's probably the biggest unlock.


Daniel Scrivner:

At a meta-level, I think that totally makes sense. And I think this idea of you want to really spend time on how you work together, how the company structured values, all of that really makes sense. And I agree that it's something that feels underweighted typically. Are there any tactics or things you can point to for someone listening, who's a founder, who's like, "Yes." What's something that they can maybe, we can plant in their brains that they can be thinking about, or think about employing at their company that's been effective for you?


Joe Percoco:

One of the most important is interviewing. How do you assess? There's this article on the internet that just went viral, which I think is actually spot on. It's like, what is this human here? And it's on the importance of just trying to figure out in a very limited amount of time, who is this human being, and should they be in your tribe with respect to your company?


Joe Percoco:

I was chatting yesterday with Eric who's the CEO at Opendoor about this subject, and he was sharing the same attitude, which is like, the skill of being able to assess who's a killer, who's going to run through walls is really hard. Because interviewing is usually a human-to-human talk through it, and so it biases towards people who are articulate and exceptionally communicative and gregarious succeeding. It doesn't necessarily solve for, for better or for worse, who is just going to carry the team on their back and stay relentlessly positive, you have to do references like blah, blah, blah.


Joe Percoco:

That's one really important tactic, and is in final round interviews, having a cultural focused session, where it's not fluff or bullshit culture stuff. It's the bar for the tribal culture. Is it met? And if that person has a thumbs down, this person should not be in even if they crush the role, even blah, blah, blah, stuff like that. I've realized, these tactics, there's no playbook about this subject.


Daniel Scrivner:

There's no playbook, but I love the frame that you used of who deserves a place in this tribe. We have values, we have standards, who deserves a spot within those, I think is fascinating.


Joe Percoco:

Yeah, it's something I continue to re-appreciate, which is just human beings are the most important asset we have. And architecting an org where they can do their best work, and you've already brought on the best people, it's probably my number one task for the next decade. It just won't stop.


Daniel Scrivner:

This has been a fascinating conversation. For anyone that's listening, that wants to follow you, wants to learn more about Titan, where can people find you online?


Joe Percoco:

Go to titanvest.com. T-I-T-A-N-


Daniel Scrivner:

And titanvest not invest?


Joe Percoco:

... vest. Yeah, we've recently just got titan.com. That was a fun deal to go get. But that's not live yet. As of two months from now, go to titan.com.


Daniel Scrivner:

Once the deal closes. There we go.


Joe Percoco:

Exactly. [inaudible 00:43:08] titanvest.com.


Daniel Scrivner:

Do you have a personal Twitter account? Anywhere people can follow you?


Joe Percoco:

I do. Yeah, @JoePercoco on Twitter.


Daniel Scrivner:

Amazing. Well, thank you so much. We're going to move on to the second part of this interview in just a second. So for anyone interested, move on to the second part of this episode.



[BONUS] Joe’s Habits, Influences, and Life Lessons – Joe Percoco of Titan


Daniel Scrivner:

Okay, Joe, welcome back again. I'm super excited to talk about habits, tools, and a bunch of just how you show up as your best self. So thanks again. So, first question, I always want to try to connect the dots between what we were talking about in our previous part of your interview and what we're talking about here.


Daniel Scrivner:

And I thought one really interesting angle to explore here was what have you learned and applied in your own life, in your own work from studying some of the world's greatest investors? And that can be everything from the importance of reading, the importance of time to yourself, I'm just curious what insight if you glean that you've applied?


Joe Percoco:

Most important one... You get a lot of inconsistent stuff and it's like, "Okay, I'm going to piece it together. Because these two things are the exact opposite." One of the few things that's remarkably consistent is mastering your most important friend, which is the little voice inside of you. And it's just crazy the number of people I speak to, CEOs running multi-billion-dollar companies, people who ran FAANG companies, and just how much effort they're spending to ensure that their relationship with themself is just fulfilling, content, calm, focused. And it seems just consistently a lifelong journey. And so for me, a lot of this stuff I've started to do over the last six to 12 months have been just related to that. And just really watering that relationship.


Daniel Scrivner:

Can you give any examples? I know, for some people that's journaling. I know for some people that's more solitude or meditation. What does that look like for you?


Joe Percoco:

I'm so bad at that stuff.


Daniel Scrivner:

I like that answer. That's great.


Joe Percoco:

I'm not even going to try to pretend. Maybe other guests do that, "Look, I meditate for 30 minutes at 6:30 in the morning. And then I have my avocado, toast, and coffee. And I've already journaled by then," because that is so not me.


Daniel Scrivner:

And it's still 6:00 am.


Joe Percoco:

And it's still 6:00 am and clock goes backwards, that is not me. And so, I can give a very real sense for like, "Look, all this stuff is exceptionally important. But it's often quite difficult just given the daily routines of life." And so for me, what I've tried to realize is just how do you foster good habits without having to make necessarily drastic changes. And so one of the most important things I do, I have an eight-minute walk to work.


Joe Percoco:

We have our office based here in SoHo, I live in the West Village, so I just walk down Prince street. And just literally walking to work, and just being grateful that I am on a meteor going around the sun. And I happen to be born on the one planet that's an oasis. And I'm going to die in a blink of an eye. And we should probably have a lot of fun with what we're doing. We should try to make a really big impact on this meteor before we gone.


Joe Percoco:

And other than that, not much else matters. And that's the attitude I walk into work every day. That to me is like my meditation, my mindfulness. I do other things we can chat about. But in short, it's very much a whatever mindfulness for dummies approach.


Daniel Scrivner:

I love that visual, just visualizing you walking down the street thinking about all those things every single day.


Joe Percoco:

Yeah, no joke, it actually happens.


Daniel Scrivner:

I want to talk next about standards of performance. And I think I was really curious because we spent a little bit of time in the last session talking about the bar that you have for people that you bring onto the team. And clearly, especially from your background, we talked about your experience at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey and the standards of performance there.


Daniel Scrivner:

So, feel free to answer this question in regards to Titan, in regards to you. But I'm curious for you, what are the non-negotiable standards of performance of just how you want to show up, how you want your team to show up?


Joe Percoco:

It can be summarized very simply to will skill and cultural fit, non-negotiable. Your will is just Olympian. You have a drive, to just put a crater in whatever you're working on. A lot of people use the term killer or hustle, drive, etc. That truly is for us just probably the most important bar. And what that goes to is just the idea of Y-intercept versus slope, which I train a lot of our internal people on this subject internally, which is all else equal, we would prefer someone who had a much lower Y-intercept with a much higher slope. And because that's like you're making a bet on time with them that with training and care, they're going to be next level at their job.


Joe Percoco:

I'll give a shout-out to, I was interviewing for people with five to seven years of design expertise, we ended up bringing a kid named Kyle right out of college, who beat out every other candidate hands down. If one were willing to look through the fact that he didn't have precisely the Y-intercept of experience, but his slope was incredible.


Joe Percoco:

The other things, skill, obviously, you can measure for one specific role. And then cultural fit is just the idea that a job is almost like a matchmaking role. A lot of people are really great. They might not necessarily be great for us. And so how do we ensure that puzzle piece fits together based on our cultural values? Because there's no necessarily a global maximum. This is the perfect company and everything they do. It's just a variety of local maximums and different flavors.


Joe Percoco:

And so that's a very modest one where I'm so honest, and finally, an interview saying like, "Hey, here's who we are, why don't you share a little bit who you are. And let's see if we found a match?" So those three things consistently show up across every person we bring on.


Daniel Scrivner:

Those are fantastic. And I love that framing of focusing on the intercept versus the slope. I've never heard it articulated that way. So you talked about and I love your frankness and your directness that you don't meditate, you don't journal every single day, but I'm sure there are things that you do every single day that help you show up as your best self.


Daniel Scrivner:

And it can be as simple as spending time in the morning looking through your day, how you manage your time, how you capture your thoughts, anything there that's worth sharing that you've really worked on [inaudible 00:50:02].


Joe Percoco:

I'm a voracious reader. I'm insatiably curious, and just in terms of the information I'm consuming. If I had any anxiety, it would be information anxiety. The more I know, the less I know. So I probably every week, we'll have at least two to four hours of conversations with people exceptional in their field that are just really wide-ranging. And I have a note-taking tool I use, and I'm just writing the whole time during this convo.


Joe Percoco:

So I have this repository, because my view is best-in-classes offline, podcasts, convos, books, people, you name it, this thing called best-in-class operating does not exist, you have to piece it together yourself. So in a way, that's a very journalistic function that I play every week, like a reporter. I'm here to find out what it is.


Daniel Scrivner:

So I love it.


Joe Percoco:

I recently recognized actually because of a journaling thing that my friend, another CEO made me do, I'm a naturally joyous person. And the things that give me joy, all have to do with movement and creativity. I bought a guitar, I love playing guitar, I play a lot of soccer. I'm Puerto Rican, love dancing. These are the sorts of things that just allow my brain or spirit to just go to a different place. And I can then look at Titan outside. But yeah, between these things, that's a full week.


Daniel Scrivner:

Sounds like a very full week.


Joe Percoco:

Yeah, those would be the top two, I think is just implicitly consuming information. I almost don't even need a calendar invite to consume it. It's already just like, "I will consume hours of information this week." The one tactic I can share, that's really been helpful, is thinking about one's time, like green light, yellow light, and red light. I know if you've heard this tactic before.


Daniel Scrivner:

No.


Joe Percoco:

Every Sunday, I look at my calendar, and there are only three things I need to be doing as a CEO. One, making sure capital is there. So that's like fundraising, and so forth. The second is determining where capital should be deployed, that's strategy. The third is ensuring that capital gets deployed where it should be deployed. And that's execution. Any task that doesn't fall into one of those three buckets is not green.


Joe Percoco:

When I look at my calendar, my calendar needs to be 90% green walking into any given week. It's so important or else one can just end up spending their time with all the other tasks. And one of the hardest things is obviously saying no. So, oftentimes, they say my role is a chief editing officer. Like the Latin root of decision is to cut. And so, I spend a big cutting exercise every week editing my own calendar.


Daniel Scrivner:

I love that. That was an analogy Jack used a lot, that square. Instead of calling people product managers, everyone was an editor and he was really big on that concept of and [inaudible 00:52:54] something similar. It's like sculpting and shaping in the importance of that, which I think is interesting. That is super fascinating.


Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, I haven't heard of that exercise. I've definitely know a lot of people that do calendar audits, but I love that framing of green light, yellow light, red light, looking at your calendar and the bar of 90% green going in any week, which I imagine is hard. And you're probably looking at your calendar often. And you're looking at all the things that you need to say no to.


Joe Percoco:

It's so hard. We do another thing internally, which is called T-shirt ROI assessing. So, ultimately, the way we run Titan, there's a 10-page memo on our 10-year vision. We then have it, okay, what's the three-year goal? And then from there, we create a one-year KPI called a BHAG credit to Jim Collins, Good to Great, you'd have a big hairy audacious goal, decompose that into a physics equation. And then from there, you have quarterly projects.


Joe Percoco:

And for the quarterly projects, how a high ROI, so return. And then how much investment do you need on this project? And assess them like a T-shirt. Is this an extra-large impact? Small effort? If so, that gets really high on the list. And so, it's a creative approach, as I'm sure a lot of people have an ROI-based methodology. I've learned that the T-shirt moniker adds a little bit more fun to the strategy planning exercise.


Daniel Scrivner:

Super fun. Moving on to the next question. I'm curious for books or figures that have had a profound impact on you. I know that obviously, you're always consuming information, could be books, maybe that's not always books, but any books or figures that have had a profound impact on you or just things that you find yourself recommending giving to others suggesting all the time?


Joe Percoco:

Coaches. I've been studying for the last year, the best coaches that the sporting world has ever produced. Reason being, in sports, the feedback cycles on whether you're great or good. It is just so fast. Usually, once a year, you will be determined if you're good versus great. Usually, it will take the lifetime of a company to figure that out, or maybe at least every few years.


Joe Percoco:

And so, what I've then been studying is coaches, you can walk into enterprises that were previously underperforming, who have just a track record of controllably taking an org to the next level, until it goes back to that thing we're discussing earlier, which is the company OS is one of the most important things I need to build.


Joe Percoco:

And so hence, one of the best things to study are people who can systematically create best-in-class OS's. So, you can get a lot of good nuggets from Eleven Rings Phil Jackson's book. A lot of it's long-winded, but there are a couple of nuggets in there. Bill Walsh, The Score Takes Care of Itself. That guy went to a [inaudible 00:55:37] 49ers organization and brought them five Super Bowls.


Joe Percoco:

Just reading through his tactical list of what he did, ranging from teaching the secretaries the exact script, they should say when they pick up the phone, to forcing his players to tuck in their shirt. I've studied everything I could on Pep Guardiola, who just definitionally has done exactly what I said, just goes into league and league. He's literally destroyed the EPL and given it a rebirth with his own philosophy.


Joe Percoco:

Obviously, Andy Grove's high output management consistently as probably the number one book I gift, that's like Warren Buffet. If you are at all in the business field, and you have not read high output management with a pen in your hand, annotating it, and writing notes, you need to immediately go do that this weekend.


Daniel Scrivner:

Those are fantastic examples. And I'll link to it in the show notes, it would take me a couple minutes to go and look it up. But on that vein, Nick Saban is someone I've studied a lot. And a couple of years ago, there was a really well done. It's probably a four-hour three-part or four-part podcast episode, where it was interviews with Nick Saban, interviews with these other coaches, interviews with players, it was like a true a 360-degree story of what it's like-


Joe Percoco:

I love this.


Daniel Scrivner:

Yes. I'll send this to you after this interview, and I'll add it to the show notes.


Joe Percoco:

Send me the show notes too.


Daniel Scrivner:

Yes, I will. But no, it's incredible. And I think he, like a few people, he hasn't necessarily gone into an organization and turned it around. But he's been able to I think on the flip side, there's that piece. I think another thing we're studying I'm sure you probably agree is people that have just been able to have a prolific track record where it's very clear that luck is out of the equation, and there's a system in scale.


Joe Percoco:

What is Tom Brady do?


Daniel Scrivner:

Yes.


Joe Percoco:

No real physical ability. What has he done to acquire such expertise? You could say [inaudible 00:57:23] check. But no, the competitor in me understands a large portion of this is just wanting to provide the best impact one can have. And a lot of it is in your control versus out of your control. It's just, do you have the will to go understand and study it and learn and iterate? So, often find sports literature, despite it being poorly written, if you're willing to look past it, you can often get some exceptional anecdotes for how you run companies.


Daniel Scrivner:

I agree. I want to ask one more question around that which is sports sounds like have had a big impact on your life, from doing sports early on to studying coaches and teams and using that as just a well of inspiration. I'm curious, from your experiences playing sports, being a part of teams growing up, what has that brought to your mind that has shaped how you show up at work, has shaped how you've built Titan? What is the OS pieces that are encoded deep in your brain, from your experience there?


Joe Percoco:

Do you mean like tactics or do you mean principles that come to mind?


Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, I think more principles. So I think more just like what... And I think there's everything from a focus on hard work, a focus on being a team. But it just seems to me that there's different principles in sports that some make it to business, some don't. So I'm curious what stuck in your brain.


Joe Percoco:

Titan has a very low degree of burnout. We have never lost a single person yet.


Daniel Scrivner:

It's fantastic, given that sprint that you talked about [crosstalk 00:58:48].


Joe Percoco:

Exactly. We're like a team that I truly mean it when I say it will take a decade to do X and then the next day we'll do Y. We're buckled up for a long period of time. One of the core principles behind that is you're trained to win and lose. And regardless, the thing that wakes you up in the morning every day is just the joy of being able to feel like you're in the right position on the field playing, having a blast, doing it for someone else. In sports, it's an audience. For us, it's our clients.


Joe Percoco:

And regardless of the scoreboard says win or lose, you go home, you get a good night's sleep and you come right back and you try your best the next day. And it's like that degree of humility and compounding that we bring that's ironically and pretty similar to the investing sphere.


Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, focused on process. It's like that's what matters. You just need to show up [crosstalk 00:59:41]


Joe Percoco:

Focus on you're own outcome. We have a very high degree of rigor with what we do. So it's like we're not complacent. And we continually raise the bar on ourself. And so there's all this good stuff. When I observe some other entities and such, I just think one could have more fun and more fulfillment, as you go through it, if you just came to the realization that hopefully, you find something you do for a long period of time, which unlocks your best piece of work.


Joe Percoco:

And so that's our goal as a leadership team is we're the coaches, we're in service to all the position players at Titan, including myself, how do we just craft the best environment for them to set records in being a history books?


Daniel Scrivner:

I think it's fascinating. That definitely, to me feels very colored by the world of sports in a great way.


Joe Percoco:

Very much so.


Daniel Scrivner:

So I'm excited to ask these two closing questions and to hear your answers. And the first is if you can share a favorite failure.


Joe Percoco:

Favorite failure is that I fail all the time. It's great. And in particular, look, I think failure is definitely glorified to a degree. The goal is that you don't just fail consistently, eventually, you provide successful impact to others. But to the degree you're able to royally fail, and then royally succeed, that's way better than just royally succeeding. It's like a great underdog story in a way.


Joe Percoco:

And so, it almost like my best work comes out after I failed, because now I'm underdog and like, boy, do I have something to prove when I'm the underdog. And I suppose, tying it together, like when we were rejected by the venture community, or when I've been rejected by every job. It's like, you're being told, "Hey, this is great, but I think you can do better. And let's chat once you reach the next level."


Joe Percoco:

And so, Titan is very much like a wartime company in that sense. And that's part of that DNA, which is, I set that tone, which is like, "Look, we just did great. But I know we can do better." And it's not that the org is failing at all, the org is doing exceptionally well. I think just that motivation that comes with failure is just like adrenaline 2.0.


Daniel Scrivner:

I love that answer. And just to go a little bit deeper on that, I know that you guys got rejected more times when you're raising your first round of capital, then Robinhood. Talk a little bit about the number of times what that experience was like, and if there was an unlock at the end of that.


Joe Percoco:

So, I want to make for any other entrepreneur listening on the show, let's be clear, if you get rejected 10 times in a row, you should go back to the drawing board, revise your pitch, or get more data before you keep doing it again. But the failure I'm describing is a glorified failure. In hindsight, I should have totally pivoted process.


Joe Percoco:

There's that Einstein quote, or someone has that quote, "If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, and you expect different results, you're an idiot," or something. I literally did that until there were no more people to speak to, I thank God or else, I'd have 1,000 rejections in a row.


Joe Percoco:

But yeah, just visualize, your alarm goes off, you wake up in the morning, you put on your clothes, do your hair, whatever you need to do. And you're like, "Today, I have a pitch." And you go to the pitch. "Today, I got rejected." And then you do that again. And you do that again. And you do it again.


Joe Percoco:

I almost like back, I'm like, "Why did I not pivot process?" I guess I had stubbornness mixed with courage mixed with rebelliousness that I've since learned and gotten more maturity on. But nevertheless, it's a fun anecdote for Titans beginnings. And one that I'm really grateful we had. We never rested on our laurels. I know what it's like to taste death. I know what it's like to count every dollar. We had 10 grand in the bank at one point in May 2018, debated shutting down the business. And just that taste just doesn't leave you, it's just always there.


Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. And it sounds like that engages the underdog part of you that then sounds like maybe you've gotten a little bit more mature about that. But that then boots up this part that's like, "I'm going to overcome this and figure this out."


Joe Percoco:

I asked in every final round interview still to this day, "Tell me about a time you're on a losing team." The guy ask it and not because I'm biased and like, "Yo, give me a list of your failures," more because pressure creates diamonds. And that's I know, pressure times will come at Titan, I want to see, do you become worse or better? And what is that like? How do you bring others together?


Joe Percoco:

Because yeah, we are in a 13-year bull market, whatever. And everything's going exceptionally well in the technology industry. And my view is the boats that can be the highest when the tide rises, they're the ones who are going to win and they're going to take so much market share. And we need to be one of those companies. So, it's almost like we're prepared for war, even though it's good times.


Daniel Scrivner:

I love it and you need to have that attitude, I think in the investment business. Okay, last question. What is your definition of success?


Joe Percoco:

Honestly, I realized I could probably have some cute fortune-cookie type thing. Again, I'm just thinking of getting this [inaudible 01:04:46], I'm a very raw, honest, and authentic person. To me, the things coming to mind, impacting others in whatever way one can. See that, whether it's a big way or a small way. Living fully, minimizing regrets, bam, you've done a great job, if you did that for a long period of time. Those are, to me, the variables that matter. I'm curious what yours are?


Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, that's a really great question. It's hilarious because I haven't really articulated my own. But I think for me, I think it really... The thing has been resonating in my mind, and maybe it's cute, maybe it's not, but is that I think part of the definition of success. So there's a bunch of things, obviously, there, I think, when your definition of success, you want it to be something that can include your family, your community, the people that you care about in life, because I focus, like you do a lot on having an impact in work, but life is much bigger than that.


Daniel Scrivner:

But I think the biggest piece, honestly, and the thing that I've always returned back to that gives me just a ton of hope is this idea that you can always improve, and every single day is a chance to come back and get better at every part of your life into the areas that you're struggling. And I think really the way that I try to think about life is it's a pursuit to become my best self.


Daniel Scrivner:

And if I can achieve that, that will unlock everything else. And the main mantra there is, it's all about struggling well because I think if you're doing... Yeah, I think any of us is maybe being a little bit disingenuous, if we're saying that, I think if you have big ambitions in life, there's going to be a lot of struggle.


Daniel Scrivner:

Struggle is going to show up daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. And I think there's two ways to think about it. And the two ways to think about it are struggle is something that means that you're off track. And I think the other is no, struggle is pointing the way to the ways that you need to improve yourself. And I've always just found a lot of inspiration from that perspective on life.


Joe Percoco:

For many different reasons, you can tell I agree. And really, I love that definition for sure.


Daniel Scrivner:

Well, this has been fantastic. Thank you again, so much for the time. I think what you're building at Titan is super different than what's out there in the business. Super compelling. I love the vision of this ultimately being the conduit for anyone that wants to manage other people's capital to be able to reach an audience, I think that is interested and excited and wants to use that to unlock. So, thank you so much for your time, Joe.


Joe Percoco:

Really appreciate it. Thanks a ton for having me. This was a lot of fun.




On Outlier Academy, Daniel Scrivner explores the tactics, routines, and habits of world-class performers working at the edge—in business, investing, entertainment, and more. In each episode, he decodes what they've mastered and what they've learned along the way. Start learning from the world’s best today. 

Explore all episodes of Outlier Academy, be the first to hear about new episodes, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.

Daniel Scrivner and Mighty Publishing LLC own the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of the Outlier Academy podcast, with all rights reserved, including Daniel’s right of publicity.


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