Shoutout to the Khosrowshahi family. Wealthy Iranian industrialists who had to flee during the revolution.
Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber: “We were all on the ground, terrified. That was when my mom said, ‘We’re leaving.’ I’ve never been back.”
Ali Khosrowshahi had founded the Minoo Industrial Company in 1959, a manufacturer of cookies, chocolates, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals.
Other family branches included Tolypers, a chemical company, and a construction company, the Khosrowshahi Brothers Company (KBC).
“My father felt that he wanted to keep our wealth in [Iran], so my parents lost the vast majority of what they had.”
Today there is Dara Khosrowshahi of Allen & Co, IAC, Expedia, and Uber.
His Uncle Hassan Khosrowshahi who built Future Shop, a computer and electronics retail chain in Canada. Sold to Best Buy for C$580 million.
Hassan's children Golnar and Behzad who used the family office to incubate investment businesses in music rights (Reservoir Media) and healthcare royalties (DRI).
Then there's Dara's cousin Amir Khosrowshahi: co-founder of Nervana Systems, a software company sold to Intel for $350 million
Farzad "Fuzzy" K. built spreadsheets to model CDOs at JP Morgan. His web-based spreadsheet startup was acquired by Google and turned into Google Sheets.
Kaveh K. is a partner at Allen & Co. Lots more relatives in the tech world.
“The network of our family has grown stronger now with so many younger cousins,” says Hadi, who organizes the family’s reunions, 100-person affairs with water balloon tosses and talent shows for attendees ranging in age from newborns to 90-year-olds.
“I saw my family losing everything, and you know what? We rebuilt a life.”
Profile of Jeff Vinik who took over the Magellan fund from Peter Lynch then left to run his own hedge fund.
(Money Magazine, 2000)
Lynch's first successor lasted two years. Vinik took over in '92 at age 33. Soul searching at Wendy's over whether to take the job that could "wreck his family life." He lasted four years.
"To Vinik, the essence of investing comes down to this: a company's earnings ultimately drive the price of its stock. The key, then, is to predict whether that company will beat Wall Street's consensus earnings expectations."
Some additional resources to @B3_MillerValue's recent profile
"I’m just trying to understand the present."
"supercharged his personal bet on AMZN during the financial crisis, loading up on call options as the stock plunged" barrons.com/amp/articles/h…
On Bitcoin
"It’s Economics 101. The supply grew 2.5% last year; it’s growing 2% this year. Is demand growing faster or slower than 2%? It’s that asymmetry between supply and demand that is leading to what’s going on."
Here is a profile from 2001, when Miller had just beaten the S&P ten years in a row.
Stocks were falling, Miller was buying:
"If you want to boil down everything we do, it's this: The guy with the lowest average cost wins."
In 1987, six college friends made $30 million with their new trading firm.
Today they're billionaires, having proven themselves on the trading floor, in poker rooms, on race tracks, even in startups.
"In the choice of fame and fortune, they chose fortune."
The story starts with Jeffrey Yass. He was born in 1958 and grew up in Queens. His father was an accountant and ran a small fintech company called Datatab.
When he received warrants he explained the instrument to his son and they studied the financial pages together.
Yass made first trade in high school (through his Dad), buying options on Alcoa!
"I'd see options in the newspaper and I would realize that mathematically they couldn't be right, that you could buy one and sell the other and the odds would be in your favor."
"Our quest is finding durable, brisk compounders. We find them in inefficient volatility. The separation between price volatility and business volatility is ridiculously important. We can exploit volatility [if business value is stable.] If both fluctuate it's very difficult."
"We had some extraordinary right-tail investors in very large markets. How is that even possible? Most of the time, these are very efficient markets. But there are always occasions, and you don't need many a year, where they go inefficient for a moment."