Thread by @borrowed_ideas

1/ I really enjoyed @GavinSBaker interview with @GnDsville. Many probably already read it, but I wanted to keep some excerpts on my timeline.

Everything below is quotes copied from the interview.

2/ I think a lot of the success I’ve had since then is due to a super lucky decision I made as a very, very young man. And that decision was to not walk away from tech. That may sound like a strange thing to say today, but in 2002, all the great investing minds of my generation..

3/ walked away from tech because they were listening to Buffett.

investing is a game of cumulative knowledge and compounding advantage. And the only reason I didn't listen to Buffett was because of my personal interest in science fiction. That was lucky.

4/ How can you look at Airbnb without doing Marriott? Netflix without Disney? Amazon without Walmart? Today, you really need to look at them together.

5/ Everybody looks up to Warren Buffett, but almost no one does what he says he does. Warren Buffett has said he doesn't do due diligence. This was a statement about Precision Castparts which is one of his largest acquisitions ever. And everybody just ignored that comment, but it

6/ was a profound comment. And what he meant by it was that he didn't need to do due diligence. He had been reading every 10-K published by Precision Castparts for decades. He didn't sit down and do some 60-day deep dive. He didn't need to because he had been doing due diligence

7/ on Precision Castparts for decades.

That idea is similar to my philosophy. If I need to do a deep dive, we are not going to invest. You can think of my investible universe as the companies where I don't need to do deep dives because I have been doing due diligence on them for

8/ many years.

I am not a believer in having an investment thesis.

I believe in investment hypotheses. A hypothesis is a falsifiable

9/ A thought pattern of bad investors goes like, "Oh, the market is wrong. The market is dumb. The market is being irrational." Don't say that. The market just is,
and your job is to outperform the market.

10/ A big mentor of mine, Steve Wymer, said there are only two things in investing: numbers and excuses. And if you don't have the first, nobody cares about the second.

11/ Public market investing is so exciting to me because it's the most meritocratic competition in the world. Anybody can compete, so definitionally it is the most competitive.

End/ Link to the full interview: www8.gsb.columbia.edu/valueinvesting…

All my twitter threads: mbi-deepdives.com/twitter-thread…