Aut Viam Inveniam

The sale of Armada & a new partnership

You can’t disrupt an industry without disruptive technology. Not these days.

I’ve written this before, in the context of a deal we did to incorporate complex modeling and AI signals into our public market REIT investment models. The AI project is ongoing, and it’s just incredible that as fast as we move and as much as we learn, we seem to fall further and further behind. The smarter I get on this stuff the stupider I feel.

It’s not just the Dunning-Kruger effect, where beginners think they know everything and you’ve got to be an expert to know how little you know. It’s the pace of things. AI is moving fast. Technology is moving fast. We’ve hit the exponential part of the curve.

Technology is moving so fast these days. The market isn’t going to wait around for the rest of us to catch up. So what do you do? Because I want to disrupt this place. I need to disrupt this place. But you can’t disrupt an industry without disruptive technology.

What do you do? You find the right technology, and you find the right people. You keep looking until you find it. You find that magic partnership where 1+1=3. That’s what you do.

“Play Long-term Games with Long-term People. All returns in life come from compound interest in long-term games.” -Naval Ravikant

Of the various concepts I write about, my favorite is the idea of Long-Term People. I’ve written about here and here and here, and I am writing about it again today. The concept is that in business, every so often you come across people who make decisions with decades rather than days in mind. People who are positive-sum thinkers, who are ethical, who you trust, and who you are likely to work with again at some point and in some capacity in the future.

It’s not just Long-Term People you need. You also need to play Long-Term Games. Short-term games don’t compound. Long-Term Games make you and your partners rich. Short-term games make yourself rich, once.

You can shear a sheep for life, but you can only skin him once.

Inveniam is playing a Long-Term Game. And Inveniam is full of Long-Term People.

Patrick O’Meara thinks big. I mean, is it really a surprise that everyone loves this guy? Patrick O’Meara thinks big, but he also gets granular. He gets granular, but he also gets creative. He gets creative, but he also executes. Oh, and did I say he thinks big? Like, really big.

Inveniam has this office in Novi, Michigan, not far from where I live. Over the past year I’ve stopped by a half dozen times. And in the office there are three entire cubicles filled with books. Books that Patrick uses as gifts. Every single time I have visited the office I’ve left with armfuls of books.

It’s not just finance and technology books. There are philosophy books, and books on different religions, poetry books, books on mathematics, and history.

I tell my kids this all the time: I’ve never met anyone who is a massive success that doesn’t also read books*.

*So, are we counting audiobooks as reading books? Because that damn phone of mine has destroyed my already terrible attention span. So it is audiobooks, and substacks, and tweets for me. We are counting all that as reading books, right? Good, and thank you.

Here’s a thing about entrepreneurs, at least the real ones. The ones willing to suffer for it. We can spot each other a mile away. We can spot the fakers and the bandwagon-riders and the scammers, and we can spot the real ones. As the kids say: real recognize real.

I spotted Patrick O’Meara from a mile away.

The team at Inveniam is unreal. Every single person I have been working with is brilliant and motivated and a joy to work with. Long-Term People. Kerry Rudy, Matt Appel, Stephen McConville, Peter Gaffney, and even more people at Inveniam that I’ve gotten to know. Long-Term People, each and every one.

So, you can’t disrupt an industry without disruptive technology. And I’m looking for that partnership that can bring not just the technology, but also people that understand disruption, and how to implement it.

We are running global markets on technology that is certain to be replaced. Half of the market is still closing deals with wet signatures. The entire Commercial Real Estate market is trading at unverified NAVs, inconsistent access to liquidity, and an investor base that varies entirely based on arbitrary product structure choices.

We can see mass adoption of smart contract technology on the horizon. Tokenization has exceeded all proof-of-concept expectations. And we are on the verge of a generation transfer of management positions to a new generation that conducts business through the little screen in their pocket.

And where the only thing we know about the impact of AI is that it is going to impact everything. Everything.

Inveniam has disruptive technology. Inveniam makes it all work.

A single smart contract can deliver in code and automation what would have required contracts and escrow and manual processes - but it doesn’t work without the ability for non-technical parties to verify what’s actually in that code. Blockchains can store data and make opaque markets transparent - but what good is all that if the data can’t be trusted and verified.

With Inveniam’s technology, the digital infrastructure that we can imagine becomes practical. It becomes real. It becomes trustworthy.

You can’t disrupt an industry without disruptive technology. But you sure as hell can disrupt with this tech backing you up.

So I’ve buried the lede far enough. It is a real honor to announce that I have sold Armada ETFs to Inveniam, which kicks off a partnership between us to work together to modernize institutional access to private assets.

You can read the press release here.

This is my second exit as a founder, but this is no finish line. It is the starting line. It’s the start of something bigger. I am pretty far from satisfied. In fact, I’ve never been hungrier.

The name Inveniam is derived from the Latin phrase aut viam inveniam aut faciam, meaning “I will either find a way or make one.” And that’s what we plan to do together. We’ll find a way, or we’ll make one.

Because we can disrupt this industry. It’s a Long-Term Game, and we’ve got Long-Term People. And we’ve got disruptive technology.

And we’re just getting started. You ain’t seen nothing yet.