Podcast Monday (10/30/2023)
Embrace the silence
This Week’s Favorites
Ho Nam on Art of Investing
At that age, I didn't appreciate how rare something is when something is exceeding your expectations. If something like that happens, you should pay more attention to it. You should get curious about it and try to understand what's going on.
It's not the $8 billion that you missed out on that is the huge miss in terms of getting out of something like Starbucks early. It is all of the lessons that you learn over multiple decades. You do not get many opportunities in life to build something big and substantial that has impact in the world…The lessons that you learn building these large businesses that we get to then apply to help the next generation of entrepreneurs and the next generation of companies. All of those lessons get lost if you declare victory and you exit. And then not only the lessons, then it's the relationships, again, the compounding value of these relationships and the networks that emerge from the alumni of these companies that we get involved with so deeply.
I like to explore and mess around and follow my curiosities and that's what we encourage our people to do. To follow their curiosities, to take a risk, stick your neck out, you're going to look like an idiot, you're going to look like a fool sometimes, but you've got to be willing to do it. And so many of our biggest hits were companies that we did not think they would be these huge businesses. But we thought, yes, there's something here. That's something interesting. It's worth going on…these things have a way of growing and evolving and getting much bigger than you might think. And we are perfectly happy pursuing little projects with little companies, with unproven entrepreneurs that show this grit and resilience and passion and commitment towards something interesting and we're willing to go with it.
Founders Fund is probably most notable for being high conviction investors. What that means specifically is we have a very high concentrated ownership and we love doubling, tripling, quadrupling down…We believe in a Power Law of a Power Law so we want the highest possible concentration of our capital into our best companies with our best founders.
Keith Rabois on StrictlyVC Download
In my career as both an entrepreneur and as an investor, it’s extremely rare to see a company accelerate growth while at the exact same time increasing its margins. Usually you have to sacrifice one for the other. So that’s very anomalous and when you’re a Power Law investor, when you see something you’ve never seen or rarely see, that’s when you know to double down.
[Traba] built a high performance culture that’s pretty differentiated from what I call the modern era of tech companies — let’s say post 2015. They have an extremely dedicated team that works extremely hard. They borrowed the Chinese expression of 9-9-6. It became popular to describe Chinese technology companies as working at least 9 to 9, 6 days a week. They’ve taken that and built the company from the ground up very intentionally from day one to replicate that model. The compounding advantages of velocity and speed and execution are really showing up in the metrics now.
My general philosophy at Founders Fund is I like to find things where people have superficial opinions or the consensus is just obviously broken. And that creates blind spots.
Chris Davis on Richer, Wiser, Happier Podcast with William Green
Tiger Woods, I think it was his first British Open, as I understand it. The weakest part of Tiger Woods’ game at that point was his coming out of the sand trap. He was not very good at that relative to the people that were the best at it. And they were playing the British Open at a course that was renowned for these bunkers that looked like they were created by a piece of artillery — deep, nasty bunkers. And so the press was really pushing Tiger on, have you been working on your sand game? And they were watching him in the practice rounds. And he said, no, I’m working on my drives and my low irons. And they said, why? And he said, because I don’t want to go in the sand and he played the entire British Open and didn’t go into a bunker once, which is an incredible sort of mental model to have. If you can identify your weaknesses, trying to reduce how severe they are. You don’t want weaknesses that are going to take you down but then trying to architect your life so you avoid them is the best of all.
Bryan Curtis on Making Media
I always think the best podcasting is heavily researched and thought about beforehand, which then allows you to be spontaneous in the moment, maybe seems spontaneous if you have a lot of notes down on your list. I don't like it when people get on there and make huge speeches that they clearly have written out.
But you can always tell when people have done the research and thought about it and let something percolate in their mind because then it's a lot easier to be funny in the moment and still hit the marks you need to hit in terms of giving people a really interesting discussion or take on the news of the day.
It almost comes down to what makes it easier to be candid. What is the rehearsal required to be candid in podcasting? And that's a very subtle thing because I think we all listen to the stuff, we're like, I like it when host #2 says something really strange and just turns the conversation in a weird way. But a lot of times, that comes with the fact that both people know everything they're supposed to be talking about. So you allow your cohost to do that.
I think it's the single most important thing about a podcast, especially a double act where you have 2 hosts. Do I like the relationship between these people? In a lot of ways, that becomes more important than even the topic they're talking about on a daily basis. And it's funny. We have a few here at The Ringer like Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald know each other forever.
David Shoemaker, my partner, and I've known each other since we're a 14-year-old freshman in high school. So in our case, we're certainly working on whatever our on-air relationship is, but it's really just a very, very long off-air relationship.
And that I think manifests itself in interesting ways, and that's what I always hope people like about it. You want to have the right topics. You want to have the right date. You want to be smart, all that stuff. But mostly, you just want to have a relationship that people will come back to.