Main Street Observation
Investment conferences have become more enticing than traditional vacations, especially when hosted by the folks behind Capital Camp. I get out of my normal routine, it’s intellectually stimulating, and I leave with at least one lasting friendship. It’s a breeding ground for creativity.
Last week I traveled to Columbia, MO for Main Street Summit.
and team curated a differentiated and eclectic lineup of speakers and pumped vulnerability into the air. Strangers shared intimate details about bankruptcy and postpartum depression.Five years ago I would have never spent thousands of dollars for no tangible payback. But Andrew Wilkinson outlines the rationale:
I started paying to be in the right room. I remember 10 years ago, I wasn’t doing super well, I was maybe doing $15-20K per month of revenue and I paid $10,000 to go to the TED conference. All my friends were like, “What the hell are you thinking? You’re spending all this money on this?” But when you go to TED, it’s like a secret club. If you get into TED, every single person that’s there is someone interesting. And at the very least, they’ve paid a lot of money to be there so they’re legit. And if you’re in the room, everyone goes, “Oh, they’re legit too.” So I was this twerp with this tiny little business and I’m talking to Al Gore and the founders of Google, all these amazing people. And just being in a room with those people, you naturally over the course of going consistently for years, you end up meeting all these amazing people and making connections, you end up doing business with them. And so just going to TED and probably spending $30k on tickets for three years. I think it ended up resulting in $10 or $20 million of revenue for my various businesses.
These events are out of the money call options and they are wildly mispriced.
Within the secret club there always seem to be conference celebrities. It’s inevitable when the nerdiest corner of the internet gathers in person.
This week Patrick O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Wilkinson, David Perell, David Senra, Jeremy Giffon, Eric Jorgenson, and Chris Powers all had reams of people lined up to ask them questions.
What do they all have in common? They podcast to build their businesses.
This Week’s Favorites:
Reece Duca on Tegus Converge
We don't manage outside money, we have always had concentrated investments--I'm talking about having maybe 70 or 80% of our assets in two, three, or four companies. We talk about clarity of purpose and simplicity and focus. And we think that the most important thing in the investment business is to keep everything absolutely as simple as you possibly can. We think complexity is the biggest barrier to high performance in the investment business. And so we design around complexity. And we also think that it is extremely hard to find exceptional companies. And that most companies aren't exceptional. And so whatever your strategy is, it has to be designed to--how do you distinguish between what is exceptional and what isn't exceptional?
If we had outside investors and we tell them we're going to have 70% of our money in two, three companies, that didn't interest them. I mean, some of them think you're crazy. And some of them would say that doesn't interest me. It has too much risk. Now, of course, we were thinking the opposite. We think that risk comes from not knowing your companies. We could de-risk it by knowing our companies better than anyone else would know them.
There's only a tiny number of exceptional companies. And you understand that there's some very specific things that permit exceptional companies to be sustainable decade after decade after decade. And many of them have to do with getting to the point where your customers are fanatically reliant on what you deliver to them.
What I think is important is, 1) Am I learning? and 2) Am I having fun? The IRR will take care of itself. Because if you're learning and having fun, you're gonna have an IRR.
Morgan Housel on ACQ2
I just think markets are a fascinating window into how the world works. It's such a fast feedback window into how people process greed, fear, and uncertainty.
"You're not advertising to a standing army. You're advertising to a moving parade."
—David Ogilvy
Jerry Seinfeld has the saying where he says, "Don't show me your new work. I want to see your best work. Don't assume that you just always need to come up with new stuff. Show me your best work." Psychology of Money was, again, out of desperation, not strategy. It was short chapters of what I thought was my best work that I had already written.
Among the top 10 richest men, there are accumulative 13 divorces, and seven of the top 10 have been divorced at least once…I think if you ask most people, would you want a very successful career and a lot of money, but it comes with one price tag, which means your family life is going to fall apart. Wife's going to leave you. Your kids aren't going to know you. Would you take that trade-off? It takes me 0.1 seconds to answer that question. Obviously, no. I think that we fall into that trap when we really idolize these people. It's great to idolize them for the skills that they have. It is wrong to idolize the life that they live. That's the quirk.
There's a quote that I love from Seinfeld again, where he quit the show, and it was on top of the world. The show was the biggest it had ever been and he said, we're done, we're out of here, we're going to pull the plug. He said, "The only way to know where the peak is is to experience the decline, and I have no interest in feeling that."
Bevin Prince on 1on1 with Jon Evans
I wanted to bring this sort of community to the community that I love so much. I was like, ‘We’re going to make it work!’ We bought a tent, we bought bikes, we got a small business loan, we popped up in Mayfaire and the bikes were six feet apart. Sometimes the best choices are made when you don’t really flesh it out completely…We’ve lost one tent in a tropical storm…We put it back together. We had to close for lightning, for storms. We’d have to take it up and down when things got really tough. But we refuse to give up. People keep showing up and I will not let this community down.
My superpower is showing up. That is how I got on One Tree Hill. That is how I became valedictorian at SCAD. That is how I started this business. That is how I’ve done everything in my life that I’m really grateful for—just showing up. You don’t need to have all the answers. You don’t need to know what you’re doing because nobody knows what they’re doing in life. You just got to show up and figure it out.
Founders #326 Anna Wintour
Her father would just write like one-word responses. Anna does the same thing on copy…David Ogilvy said something that I loved. He says, “I believe in the dogmatism of brevity.” He worked for this secret agent, right, during World War II, this guy named Stevenson. Stevenson winds up being one of Ian Fleming's inspirations for the character James Bond…David Ogilvy learned from Stevenson to become a master of the terse memo…when you send something to Stevenson, you would get a reply back in one of three ways: yes, no, or speak. And if he wrote speak on whatever you handed to him, that means you got to get up and go to his office and talk to him…It's interesting that all these people are British, Ogilvy, Churchill, Anna, they love the dogmatism of brevity. Maybe there's something there. But Churchill said something that's fantastic. He says, it is slothful not to compress your thoughts…And I love this idea whether it's constrained by document length or time because the constraints force you to get to the essence.
And then another thing that she had in common with Steve Jobs is she respected people that gave a damn. Passion is universally respected. If you were passionate about something, she would respect that. The thing that she couldn't stand was that if you didn't give a crap. This was explicitly stated by Ed Catmull, co-Founder of Pixar, “Steve Jobs never questioned me. For all his insistence, he respected passion. If I believed in something that strongly, he seemed to feel it couldn't be all wrong.” Literally, same words that are in this book, “If you were passionate about something, she respected that.”
Jony Ive was being interviewed, I think, by Vanity Fair, a few years after Steve Jobs died. Jony says, "I remember asking Steve about this. It could be perceived that in his critique of a piece of work that he was a little harsh. And we had just been putting our heart and soul into this." I asked him, “Hey, can you moderate the way you deliver this message? He said, Why?" And Jony said, "Because I care about the team." And Steve said this brutally, brilliant, insightful thing. He said, "No, Jony, you're just really vain. You just want people to like you. I'm surprised at you, Jony. I thought you held the work up as the most important. Not how you believed you were perceived by other people.”
Thanks for the kind words and mention. It means more than you know. And it was awesome to see you at Main Street last week, always wish we could chat for longer.