00:05:02 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:05:02] S0: How long do they take to write? [00:05:03] S1: Some of them can take us a year. Some of them can take us four, five months. But the whole process to get a thesis that we like, sit down, think about it, articulate it, test it, share it, come back, work it, probably like a year, year and a half. [00:05:19] S0: I know you're fan of Buffett. You've been a shareholder for... [00:05:22] S1: All my life. [00:05:23] S0: Yeah. Since I was 13. That's crazy. [00:05:26] S1: Yeah. [00:05:26] S0: I saw one of your tweets. I think it was from like 2015. He was like, I think you were holding for like twenty five years or something like that at that So even more now. And I know you write all his shareholder letters Yes. Which I'm a huge fan of. Did that influence your decision to start writing these essays? Completely. [00:05:42] S1: So I bought my first share of Berkshire when I was 13 years old in Venezuela. It was November 1987. How? It was my [00:05:52] S0: Why would a 13 year old be interested in Berkshire? [00:05:55] S1: I don't know. I had read a few articles in Fortune Magazine about him, about American Express, about Coca Cola, about a certain brands, and I love the brands he he had in his portfolio. I didn't know anything about float or insurance. I I was not very familiar with that line of the business. [00:06:11] S0: I would hope not at 13.
00:06:11 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:06:11] S0: I would hope not at 13. [00:06:13] S1: And and back then, what you... What what he used to say was buy it and get it shipped mailed to you in physical form. Don't leave it in a broker house so people cannot margin against it. And there I was. I was 13. I had had my bar mitzvah in November '87. The crash had happened a month before, the October eighty seven crash. [00:06:33] S0: Yeah. [00:06:34] S1: Stock went down a lot, and I didn't collect enough money to buy one share, so I asked to ask my grandfather for a loan. Asked for a loan, which he charged me interest as a way to teach me, and bought one share and had it mailed in the mail, it showed up in Venezuela. Luckily, don't know how I didn't lose it. And and so since then, every year I got the annual letters by by by mail. Yeah. And I will read them and I will highlight them, and then I will go and learn. That made me have to buy the little book from the Wall Street Journal called Understanding Money and Markets because there were terms I didn't understand in the letter. And my self learning came from doing all of that since I was 13. [00:07:12] S0: Imagine what a 13 year old kid could do now with AI. Like, if he wanted to... He or she wanted to go through Buffett's letters and then Alex is this, like, thought partner and companion compared to you having to buy a book and
00:07:12 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:07:12] S0: Imagine what a 13 year old kid could do now with AI. Like, if he wanted to... He or she wanted to go through Buffett's letters and then Alex is this, like, thought partner and companion compared to you having to buy a book and [00:07:23] S1: hand look at, you know, the definition of things. Like, I I was thinking about it and I was saying, if I were to do it again at 13 now, with all of this, I will go to AI and tell them, write... Do me... Take those letters. Find me the Buffett partnership letters from before, which are very hard to find, but you can find them. Read them. Analyze them. Come back to me. Give me the... Like, it will be insane what you can do. Now, I think you will lose a little bit of the nuance because part of it, if you read them carefully enough and you... You've done it, you know that there's the pattern repeats. And what you learn from it is not the decisions he makes, it's how in any environment he repeats the same pattern of decision making process. And that's the most important thing that you get from reading it. I don't know if AI can [00:08:07] S0: give Wait, you yeah. Say say more about that.
00:08:07 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:08:07] S0: give Wait, you yeah. Say say more about that. [00:08:09] S1: So it doesn't matter if you were the nineteen seventies when there was a little bit of inflation or high inflation in America compared to standards. And he talked there about how he treated float and how float of insurance worked or in the era of zero interest rates on on on on... And then how he talked about float and the cost of float, it didn't matter what was the macroeconomic conditions of the world or the macroeconomic conditions of the interest rates. He used the same pattern every single time to define how to think about money. [00:08:40] S0: Why do you think that's so special that he used the same pattern? [00:08:43] S1: Because I think it's the discipline that he built. He just did find was amazing at taking all the noise away, canceling noise, and focusing on the three things that matter the most. And that only you can do if you study enough. What I learned... And I went to the annual meetings for a number of years, and I got to meet him and hang out with him afterwards and all of that for a number of years. To me, going there was not learning anything new. It was just seeing how he applied those principles to the new economic... Conditions that every year were around.
00:09:13 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:09:13] S0: I wanna tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. And one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the ramp data too. The median company running on ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. This is really special to me right now because... Have you spent any time with Daniel Ek in person? [00:10:22] S1: No.
00:10:23 · David Senra
[00:10:23] S0: Okay. He's one of, like, the wisest people I know. And I I just did the right... Like, a couple days after I filmed that episode with Rick Rubin, who, again, like, I've been making episodes on Rick Rubin forever. Like, I I grew up loving hip hop. So he he found a Def Jam in his dorm room, which is one of the most iconic hip hop record labels. And so, like, you know, for probably a decade and a half, was a fan of Rick Rubin from afar before I got to meet him. And then I had, like, probably, I don't know, a couple days, maybe a week later, I was having a drink with Daniel. And he goes, how was the, you know, how was it hanging out with Rick? And I was just like, what's what's fascinating to me is just like the aura is still there, but if you actually analyze Rick and his career, Rick Rubin and his career, just like, he had like... Basically, when he was 19 when he started Def Jam, and now I think he's 63, he had, like, four ideas. And these ideas are not fucking complicated. It's like the the adherence to the love of simplicity, reduction instead of production Yep. Always working with the very best people you possibly can, building the product for yourself first. He's just making... Literally, he is the patient zero. Yep. I'm just building stuff that I wanna see. And I was like, yeah. And that's it. And I was like, I... It's it's, you know, remarkable that those are, like, the components of that. And I was like, it doesn't seem that special because they're just so so simple ideas. He's like, yeah. But who adheres to the same four ideas for 40? Yeah. I was like, shit. That is what's special. It's very similar to what you just said