Acquired
02:18:36 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:18:36] S0: That's right. [02:18:36] S1: Warren Buffett implicitly endorsed Jack and Vanguard in the 1996 Berkshire annual shareholder letter where he wrote, the best way to own common stocks is through an index fund that charges minimal fees. Those following this path are sure to beat the net results delivered by the great majority of investment professionals from the horse's mouth himself. [02:18:59] S0: Now interestingly, if you had invested in Berkshire, it would have been a much, much better investment than just by the index. I mean, we've been sitting here talking about how the index beats 85% of managers on a a long term basis, especially because you don't have to, like, leave the bad manager when they become bad and then go find the good manager and incur all the costs involved in that. Berkshire was the exception. I was prepping for this episode with a good friend of the show from Worldly Partners, Arvind Navaratnam. He showed me this chart. From 1965 to 2025, if you had invested in the S and P five hundred, you would have kinda unbelievably a 10% compound annual growth rate. Wow. Pretty good. Like, the S and P since '65 has been amazing Yep. As a 10% annual growth rate with dividends reinvested. That's a 405 x return. [02:19:53] S1: Alright. Lay Warren and Charlie on me here. [02:19:55] S0: Berkshire was a 19% compound annual growth rate for a 39,000 x return. 04/2005 versus 39,000. [02:20:08] S1: And that's over sixty years.
02:20:08 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:20:08] S1: And that's over sixty years. [02:20:11] S0: That's over sixty years. So when you hear us saying, like, oh, well, it beats 80% or 85% of other managers over some time frame, Berkshire was the extreme exception. [02:20:23] S1: Extreme exception. [02:20:23] S0: And so to hear Warren saying, actually, what most people should do is buy low cost index funds like Vanguard. [02:20:31] S1: Goes it goes a long way. Well, there's more Warren and Berkshire to come on this episode. But, you know, to that point, though, like, I have always thought about Berkshire as the vanguard of private equity funds. Like, it is essentially a no fee private equity fund. You get to buy shares, and you don't pay fees and carry on it. [02:20:48] S0: Yep. It's concentrated, though. That's the that's the difference. [02:20:51] S1: Yeah. So it's a private equity fund. [02:20:53] S0: Right. But I'm saying that's the difference versus a Vanguard S and P [02:20:56] S1: Oh, yes. Yes. But, like, the spiritual and cultural resonance between Omaha and Malvern, Pennsylvania, where Vanguard is located, you know, are are strong. [02:21:07] S0: That's true. We haven't told listeners yet. This is in the middle of freaking nowhere. [02:21:09] S1: Yes. [02:21:10] S0: It's like two hour train ride from New York City. It's the opposite of the capital of finance. [02:21:15] S1: And, also, just so happens to be right up the street from where I grew up, which is amazing. [02:21:21] S0: Yeah. Weren't your grandparents some of the first Vanguard investors because they age nearby?
02:21:21 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:21:21] S0: Yeah. Weren't your grandparents some of the first Vanguard investors because they age nearby? [02:21:26] S1: I was gonna save this for the end of the episode. But Yeah. My grandparents were among the, like, very, very first fund holders in Vanguard. I I couldn't find the exact date, but I believe my grandparents must have become Vanguard clients either in the late seventies or early eighties when, like, nobody was a Vanguard client. [02:21:48] S0: Before the 100,000,000 Yep. Mark on the fund. [02:21:51] S1: I think it was just, you know, hey. Local company. Like, great. We'll go with this local company. Amazing. [02:21:56] S0: Southeast Pennsylvania showing up again. It was our Taylor Swift episode and this one. [02:22:00] S1: I mean, they set up Vanguard accounts for me, like, the day I was born. Wow. [02:22:04] S0: Okay. So getting back to the story here, we haven't yet talked about the financial crisis. You mentioned there's more Berkshire to come. [02:22:12] S1: Oh, yes. [02:22:12] S0: There's been, like, four other CEOs since since Jack. There's a big beat of the story here. [02:22:17] S1: Yeah. 2008 and the financial crisis really is Vanguard and all of indexing and passive's finest moment.
02:22:17 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:22:17] S1: Yeah. 2008 and the financial crisis really is Vanguard and all of indexing and passive's finest moment. [02:22:29] S0: Yeah. I think that's, I think that's probably right. But should we do our last sponsor first? Yep. Let's do it. Well, listeners, one of the big takeaways from this whole story that we have been telling is that Jack Bogle had the data. He showed over and over again that active fund managers on average don't beat the market after fees. The data was right there. The industry ignored it for decades because conventional wisdom sort of felt felt, in quotes, correct. [02:22:56] S1: Yep. And, you know, that same dynamic plays out in product development every single day. Teams ship features based on conviction, momentum, or just the highest paid person's opinion. And most of the time, nobody, like, goes back to check whether it actually made the product better or worse. The feature ships, everyone moves on, and you never really close the loop. [02:23:17] S0: So listeners, if you haven't guessed by now, Statsig is one of our sponsors this episode. This problem that we are describing gets way harder when AI is involved. LLMs are nondeterministic, meaning that the same prompt doesn't always produce the same output, and small changes to a user flow or a prompt can have surprisingly large downstream effects. And the real feedback signal that you need ends up coming from real users in production.
02:23:17 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:23:17] S0: So listeners, if you haven't guessed by now, Statsig is one of our sponsors this episode. This problem that we are describing gets way harder when AI is involved. LLMs are nondeterministic, meaning that the same prompt doesn't always produce the same output, and small changes to a user flow or a prompt can have surprisingly large downstream effects. And the real feedback signal that you need ends up coming from real users in production. [02:23:43] S1: Yep. And that's exactly what Statsig does. Statsig gives product teams experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics all in a single platform. So you can ship fast, roll out changes safely, and actually see what's moving the needle in real time. [02:23:58] S0: Yep. Bogle bet on data over intuition and built one of the largest financial institutions in history doing it. And if you wanna apply that same rigor to how you build a great product, go to statsig.com/acquired. That's statsig.com/acquired, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Alright, David. Bring us to 2008 and the great financial crisis.
02:23:58 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:23:58] S0: Yep. Bogle bet on data over intuition and built one of the largest financial institutions in history doing it. And if you wanna apply that same rigor to how you build a great product, go to statsig.com/acquired. That's statsig.com/acquired, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Alright, David. Bring us to 2008 and the great financial crisis. [02:24:23] S1: Yep. Indexing and Vanguard's big moment in the sun. It's kind of funny. During the financial crisis, passive index funds don't magically avoid getting whacked. Of course, they move exactly the same as the market and have huge losses in 2008, 2009, etcetera. What's more important though is what happens to everyone else. So, you know, like, Michael Burry and the big short aside, almost the entire professional active money management ecosystem gets crushed just as bad or worse. Like mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity, alternatives, you name it, carnage, devastation. [02:25:09] S0: No one is safe. Well, most money managers are not set up to have a 40% drawdown on everything in their portfolio. Their comp structures and their redemptions and their contracts all sort of break, and the business falls apart.