Thread by @NeckarValue

Re-listened to this podcast with @honam and @acquired - fantastic conversation touching on many interesting ideas.

"You should try to be the best [investment] professional possible, public or private it doesn't matter. It's just fundamentals investing."

open.spotify.com/episode/5kMcoV…

"We've all been doing public investing for decades."

Altos encourages employees to invest their own accounts to practice and constantly learn.

"You get to know these companies over many years and decades and you see these teams. ...

Once in a while something strange happens, whether
it's 2008 or the dotcom crash, that give you this amazing gift. And if you have a mental database of various companies, about different models and teams that you can really get to know."

The difference of investing vs. the business of investing

"Everybody wants Bernie Madoff without the fraud"

LPs want steady returns, repeatability, predictability, a scalable process, a "deal machine." It's "paint by the numbers vs. "painting a masterpiece."

Nothing wrong with that but it's important to understand how it can drive decisions (for example selling stock to show realized gains).

Why Twitter is great:

"The most valuable things is just meeting certain people and having offline conversations. Many of them are not institutions, they're individual investors."

"As an individual you have a lot of advantages over institutions. You could be extremely concentrated, long-term oriented, stomach a lot of volatility if you can handle your own emotions."

"I would learn more from those guys than I would learn from any VC or institutional manager. A fund manager's imperative is to protect the fund management business, not to get the best returns.

I'd like to talk to those people who care about only generating great returns."

Looking for hedgehog entrepreneurs who have found their mission (Walton, Buffett).

"We have a bias towards certain entrepreneurs, hedgehog vs. the fox. Nothing wrong with foxes and amazing serial entrepreneurs. They will make money over and over again."

"I call the great serial entrepreneurs amazing people who have not yet found their true life's calling."

"At this point in our lives, we're not looking for yet another deal. Show me an opportunity to build something really special with special people that have their mission."

Long-term perspective:

"I think about venture as the world's greatest discovery mechanism. Try to learn about businesses and people and every once in a while we uncover a very interesting opportunity and we'll develop that. ...

It's not about you caught this lightning in a bottle and now you're rich. Doesn't happen that way. You discover the opportunity, now you've got the next 10-20 year to figure out what to do with it. And if you don't show up for the next 10-20 years you're not gonna get paid big."

Culture and scale.

"Much harder to do a turnaround than to build it right from the beginning."

"Almost every single startup has a great culture in the beginning. Every little company has a great culture just to survive that infant mortality phase.

There's no place to hide, everybody is contributing and knows what is going on. But not every great culture at every little company turns out to be great as they grow. You have to pay a serious amount of attention."