Dave Chong

The Portfolio Life

| The Builder's Journey | by Dave Chong

The Focus Myth

“Focus on one thing,” they say. “Don’t chase two rabbits.”

This is generally good advice for beginners. But for a systems builder, it is an arbitrary limit.

Elon runs Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and X. Jack Dorsey ran Twitter and Square. How? They do not do the “work.” They build the engines that do the work.

I currently oversee DJC AI (technology), IQPilot (SaaS), and my real estate investments. This is not because I am a genius. It is because I am ruthless about context switching protocols.

The Shared Kernel

I view my companies like different applications running on the same operating system (My OS). They share a common kernel:

  1. Talent Layer: I recruit from the same pool of high-agency individuals.
  2. Ops Layer: We use the exact same financial and reporting stack.
  3. Philosophy: The core principles (speed, leverage, truth) are identical.

Because the “back end” is standardized, spinning up a new “front end” (a new business) is much cheaper.

The CEO Day

I do not multi-task. Multi-tasking is for idiots. I mono-task in batches.

  • Mondays: Product & Engineering (Deep dive into code/roadmap).
  • Tuesdays: Sales & Marketing (Reviewing pipelines, content strategy).
  • Wednesdays: Operations & Finance (The boring but necessary plumbing).
  • Thursdays: External Meetings & Partnerships.
  • Fridays: Deep Work / Strategy / Writing.

If a real estate problem comes up on Monday, unless building is burning down, it waits until Wednesday. This compartmentalization preserves my cognitive bandwidth.

Killing the bottleneck

The danger of running multiple businesses is becoming the bottleneck for all of them. “Waiting for Dave’s approval.”

I fight this by pushing decision-making power down. I tell my leaders: “Do not ask me for permission. Ask me for forgiveness.”

If they make a $1,000 mistake, I pay for it. It’s tuition. If they make a $100,000 mistake, we have a problem. But usually, they make good decisions faster than I could.

The Synergies

The magic happens when the businesses feed each other. My real estate challenges give me ideas for my SaaS products. My SaaS team builds automation that helps my real estate team. My investment profits fund my AI experiments.

Ideally, it is not a scattershot of random projects. It is a flywheel.