Wealth = Focus x Grit x Resilience
It changes your life witnessing the incredible accomplishments that hard work and smart planning yield over time.
Dad served in the US Military including Desert Shield and Desert Storm, taught at the Naval War College and retired as a contractor who worked on F-35 and other programs in his twilight years before passing on.
RIP Dad.
Mom owned a publishing company in Newport, Rhode Island before moving to NYC to become an executive at the NY Daily News. Watching her grow her company made me realize how hard employing people and competing in uncertain environments is.
My lessons continued at work in New York.
On Wall St I learned about people and the dynamics of money. Most importantly I learned that was the correct order of importance if you wanted to succeed anywhere: people first, then money.
I was responsible for analyzing the 'Revenue Quality' of private and public companies. With a small team we’d break apart each company’s revenue engine:
How they made money - the revenue engine includes all the strategy, tactics, logistics of revenue generation / expansion and retention.
This skillset (and the hard work of 3 partners) is what lead to the formation of Throne Capital - a long/short equity value hedge fund.
I did this in my late 20s! It felt like a dream. We had a full floor at 99 Wall Street.
Our team used Python NLP to read footnotes, comments and questions in investor presentations and quarterly filings to detect operator sentiment about financial trajectory and security. Then we conducted a machine reading of their financial statements to detect corresponding changes to free cash flow yield and other operating dynamics.
While the strategy continues to perform well Throne was dissolved in favor of establishing individual family offices so each partner could focus on their areas of interest (real estate, technology, etc...).
Real estate is a weak wealth storage device / poor asset class that has $200T more invested into it than should be. I think real estate and bonds will both see a large share of their monetary premium reallocated to bitcoin alongside tech-enabled companies leveraging AI & robotics.
As a first-generation family office our focus is growth.
Since our thesis involves a major redistribution of the world's wealth we are buying BTC as rapidly as possible. This involves building multiple "wealth engines" including portfolios of dividend paying stocks, partial ownership in e-commerce businesses and other recurring cash flowing enterprises + we make angel / VC investments targeting 30x to 100x returns to drive capital appreciation as well.
We convert the proceeds from these various wealth engines into bitcoin on a recurring basis (2x per month) and are constantly increasing our bitcoin treasury as a result.
We also make pre-seed, seed and early stage investments into transformative technology companies. Our first wave of these direct investments came in 2016.
While three companies in that round went to zero we sold an identify verification company to Facebook in 2018.
I learned from Mom and Dad and as a result of those lessons never stopped working while gaining access to better resources. Our family also prioritized learning. We were blessed with a growth mindset from an early age.
That’s why McDonagh Technologies, our family office, will never stop refining our wealth engines and the broader wealth system they power. We’re making investments into companies that are aiming to have a big impact on our quality of life, too. This way we “do well by doing good”.
To that end, earlier this month we closed our 3rd wave of VC investments - this time with six incredible companies:
Quantum Expeditions -- bitcoin miner
Qnetic -- kinetic energy storage (mechanical batteries)
Geoship -- affordable housing with ceramics
Future Cardia -- implanted heart & health telemetry monitor powered by AI
Lit Motors -- hardware / self-balancing electric vehicle
HAVN -- e-commerce / radio frequency protected clothing
Going to be post write-ups on each of these companies after I finish meeting with the leadership teams and building out our data rooms.
Moral of the story: don't settle - build the life you want with focus, grit and consistency. Expect massive failure along the way. Inside each loss you will find the seeds for future wins. Plant lots of seeds.
Focus directs your energy towards what matters, grit keeps you going when things get tough, and resilience helps you bounce back from setbacks.
Take care of people first and everything else falls into place!
👋 Thank you for reading Wealth Systems. I started this in November 2023 to share the systems, technology, and mindsets that I encountered on Wall Street.
💡The BIG IDEA is share practical knowledge so we can each build and optimize our own wealth engines and combine them into a wealth system.
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