Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Ric Elias
[00:00:00] S1: Exactly. You described earlier for fun going through our decades and trying to label the decades a little bit with a word or two. You said for your 30s that courage was the word. It was an interesting word. And that for your 20s, it was confidence. Can you describe why courage? I found that so interesting. I actually want to answer confidence because confidence goes into courage. I think you need that. So look, I'm 20. I'm a sophomore in college. I don't know much English. I'm an accounting major, so I don't have to speak. I'm in a really cold place in Boston. I feel weird. I dress different. I speak different. I act different. I'm Puerto Rican. And actually, that was really good to feel that I'm working all sorts of jobs. I drive a limo. I do the things that people do in college. I'm like -- and for me, I graduated and I'm like, "Okay, what am I going to do? My dad was an OB/GYN, so I couldn't go back to his practice." I was like, okay, and I ended up in Japan. And I go to Japan, and I'm like, holy cow, there's no Internet, there's no anything. I struggled. I was lonely. I figured out a way to take a six-month assignment, stayed two years with General Electric at the time. And all of a sudden, I should just apply to Harvard Business School. They're not going to take me, but you know what, who knows? And that's the only place I applied. And all of a sudden, I forgot I applied, get a letter, it's like, dear member, class of '94. I'm like, "Holy cow, they let me in." So I'm whatever, 26, and I get to Harvard thinking, I'm definitely not going to make it. I'm going to be one of the 10% that fills the screen. I literally spent my first month, smarter, smarter, dumber, smarter, smarter. I'm just trying to figure out. And I realized like, you know what, everybody is the same. So I got confidence like I could compete in any level. I can compete in college. I can compete in Japan. I can be okay. I can figure it out. I have tools. And I got a lot of confidence and I finished business school, and everybody was going to McKinsey or investment banking. I'm like, you know what, I've always kind of listened to a different radio station than most. And I always knew I wanted to run a business, start a business. I wanted to be independent. I have a story of my grandpa. Someday, I'll tell you. But that was my vision, to be independent.
· Ric Elias, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
And I was like, "I'm going to learn." A professor told me, "If that's what you want, go and learn on someone else's nickel." And that's what I did, and that's when I met Dan. That's when I met Brenda, my wife. And at 30, which is the change of decades, that's when literally, I got married and basically, we started a business. So the 20s was the place where I was like, "Look, I belong anywhere. I'm not better than anybody, but I'm not worse than anybody." And to this day, I show up in all these meetings and I kind of laugh. I'm like, "How in the world did I end up in this room?" I'm sure sometimes, that happens to you, right? [00:00:00] S0: Daily.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Ric Elias
[00:00:00] S0: Daily. [00:00:00] S1: I start singing in my head, one of us is not like the others. It's just everybody is the same. No one above. No one below. So the 30s, a little bit of this is we struggle. We struggled in losing all these pregnancies. It was really, really hard on our marriage, and we were this close to quitting and going down the path of building our family in a different way. It took a lot of courage. And not quitting the business took a lot of courage. And borrowing money from my dad to live for a couple of years after we depleted the little we have took a lot of courage. And hustling our way every day for a long time, convincing people, I was like, holy cow, ignorance is a bliss and necessity is actually a really driving factor. So it wasn't until 40 that I would say, okay, we're going to be okay even if it's at a level that is not good enough. I built a lot of courage. I'm like, you know what, I'll go for anything, with a little luck and the right people around you, anything can happen. [00:00:00] S0: Can you tell me about your grandfather?
· Ric Elias
[00:00:00] S1: I never met my grandpa. He was my dad's dad. By all accounts, he was much older than my grandma. He's Lebanese, came to Puerto Rico on a boat when he was a little kid. There was an epidemic. The boat was going somewhere else, stopped in Puerto Rico, pushed everybody out of the boat. He ended up growing up partly in Puerto Rico, back in Lebanon, Christian Lebanese. And then he came back in his 20s to Puerto Rico and became one of the most successful people. The stories of my grandpa was 20 servants in the house, one of the big mansions, and he was -- basically had cornered the market for all vegetables, imported everything, set the price, stories of predatory pricing. Beautiful, these crazy stories of all the things he was, and I never met him. There's a lot of these are mythology, which I understand. But what was really interesting, I think in his 50s, he got Alzheimer's, really early Alzheimer's. And all of a sudden, the government realized he never paid his taxes or a lot of his taxes. I imagine he's like, look, that money belongs to me, not to the government. So they took everything away. So my dad in his teens went from the wealthiest 10 families to nothing. And to this day, my dad pays for anything cash. That was so riveting. So we will have these family dinners and big Hispanic Lebanese families, there's 30 people at the table, right? You're a little kid. And inevitably, the story will always go to my grandpa. And the stories were always this incredible guy who was bigger than whatever and then they always ended in a murmur. The shame of how the family ended, and I saw my grandma tell the stories and everybody. And I was a little kid, and I didn't realize this until much later. And it's interesting, the stories. And by the way, it may be a story I'm telling myself. That's okay. It helps me. It's amazing, the things that we carry in our lives. So I show up and I realized that a lot of what I've been trying to do, I'm super close to my dad, I'm super close to my mom, I just really wanted them to feel proud of our family. I wanted to do what my grandpa did but do it in a way that was ethical, and my family could be proud of, my grandpa through the work that I was doing. And I only realized this when I was with my dad and he goes, "You are just like your grandpa." I was like, "Holy sh*t. It picked me.
· Ric Elias, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
I didn't pick this." It's like, this is a random roulette. It just -- it's the gene pool of I got my grandpa's gene of being a merchant. [00:00:00] S0: Fast forward a number of years, and you and I were on a walk, and you said something to me, which was something to the effect of, be careful about the relentless pursuit of more. Thinking of that in contrast to the story you just told, maybe say a bit more about that idea. It hit me kind of hard.
· Ric Elias
[00:00:00] S1: Society sets us up on a trick. All of this is a mirage. Every time you get to a peak, you'll see higher peaks. There's nothing about a peak that matters. Sometimes, it's what were said about the journey in this and then the other is that inner peace. So it's sense of well-being that really matters. How many days of your life do you have a sense of calm and peacefulness and purpose and you're in a good place, you feel like your energy is in a good place? To me, that's what really matters. And the pursuit of more robs you from that. You can't take it with you. It becomes a responsibility the more you have. And I tell this to a lot of our employees when they're leaving. And I said, okay, great, you're ready to graduate, for you. But when they're replacing happy with happier, that's when they get in trouble. There's no such thing. I had a fun exchange. An employee came in and I was, "Hi, you're back, great." We have a bunch of boomerangs. It's silly how many boomerangs we have. And I'm like, "You're back." And I jokingly said, "Hey, the grass wasn't greener." He goes, "No, I like this brown." And that's true. Everything is a little brown. I've stopped pursuing more. That's why anything I do from here on out with my capital, the return on the capital, I don't invest any more on funds. I don't invest in anything. I don't want to compound capital. I know that sounds like opposite of what you're hearing. I want to use my capital to compound other things that matter to me. So I'm using my capital in Puerto Rico to do things that really matter to me. This whole notion of purpose, my original purpose is through my kids, it's through my friends, it's through my community, but then, I am incredibly privileged to broaden that purpose to things that are good for society. That's all that matters. Capital for capital what? You're never going to be Bezos or whoever else. That's a silly game.