Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: I'm, in the abstract, very interested in how I can create and control valuable scarce units of attention and then dole those things out to the people that we believe in. At a very high level, the reason we now have a magazine, which on its face I think everyone would've agreed was a stupid idea, or told me it was a stupid idea when we started it. Why are we doing these profiles that take months or quarters or years to write and require lots of investment? Why do them? Well, the reason is, I think it's just a beautiful way to shine the light beyond, like, podcasting on people that we admire, and to teach someone, to teach the world about a compelling founder or a compelling investor or artist or whatever. And the thing that I didn't realize with that was that because I'm not writing the profiles, our amazing team is writing them, it would actually be a double whammy that not only… when we started doing this, I went and read David Remnick, who's the editor, longtime editor for The New Yorker. And New Yorker profiles were always my favorite growing up, these incredibly detailed, amazing, well-written profiles. He wrote in the introduction to this – his compilation of his favorite New Yorker profiles. There's this line that says, "The best profiles over the last 100 years are defined by somebody doing a thing they're obsessed with and a writer that is as obsessed with the person as the person is with the thing." And I remember reading that paragraph and just thinking, "Wow, that's what I want to read." And so I went and I read a million profiles, and the very best one I read was in a publication called Tablet on Palmer Luckey from Anduril. And I reached out to the author, his name is Jeremy Stern, who's now the editor-in-chief at Colossus, and the rest of that story is sort of history. He joined, we've got other people that have joined or are joining to write these profiles. And it just felt like, wow, this is another way to do the thing we love to do, which is to find the person, become obsessed, learn everything about them, take great time and pain to write a definitive thing about them, and then share it with millions of people. And, you know the fact, the one that we wrote about, Josh Kushner and Thrive, was one of these bizarre "break the internet" moments when it just like, completely took over the internet for a while.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
And I remember reading it the first time, and I was, like, 45 minutes into reading it, and I was still reading about the Holocaust. And I don't think anyone else would take that risk in a profile of Josh and his family and his team, but it was so important to understanding the soil out of which his family and eventually he emerged. And Jeremy also, the writer, was the product of Holocaust survivors himself and knew a tremendous amount about Josh's family history because it was also his family's history. And I thought that was the coolest, most beautiful thing. I would never have written… you know, this project has become an excuse to first of all, find more talented people, the writers, that we can support, which is great. See the potential, you know? Same thing we've been talking about over and over again. So now team members become more people that we can do this supporting thing with, and for them to write things they're obsessed with and passionate about, and then for the rest of the world to benefit, for the people being profiled hopefully to benefit if we tell the honest stories, and we want to tell the hard parts and the interesting parts. And it's been successful beyond what I ever could've imagined. And I think it's important to note, when I started with the first idea, everyone said it was stupid… I mean, literally everybody said it was a stupid idea. When I started the podcast, everyone said it was a stupid idea. When we started Canvas, everyone said it... I think if people say something's a good idea, I always get a little nervous because if it sounds like a good idea, it just feels you're in a more competitive space, it's going to be harder. I think the key is stuff that sounds dumb but isn't. And I think that's what I would, you know, starting a magazine in 2025 I think falls in that category of, "Sounds dumb, magazines are dead or dying. " But the thing underneath it was this desire to have more ways to do the thing that we love to do, which is find people, learn about them, tell the world about them. I suspect it won't be long until that's much bigger than even the podcast, which itself is, you know, very, very big.
· David Senra, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: The surprising thing is I think you want that to be the case. [00:00:00] S0: What specifically? [00:00:00] S1: Colossus being bigger than the podcast. [00:00:00] S0: Of course. [00:00:00] S1: That's not an "of course" thing, you've got to unpack that. You've got to explain why you feel that way. I know you don't know how other people view you, but I get a lot of this because they know of our association. They're like, "This is the best business interviewer in the world and this is incredible. Like, why would he not want that to be the biggest thing?" [00:00:00] S0: I'm not saying… I want to keep doing that. [00:00:00] S1: I know you, I know that. [00:00:00] S0: For sure. I love it. [00:00:00] S1: But I think in your heart, if you had to choose, you'd be like, "No, I'd rather have the profiles be bigger." Cause you like, again this goes back to how we started the conversation. Like, I really do believe you would like to be the guy behind the guy.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: That's true, but the reason for me is almost so obvious that it's uninteresting, which is, well, if a bunch of other talented people are doing this and then creating these things, first of all, I'll have more of them, so I can enjoy them more. And I'll get to enjoy it just like everybody else. Like, I can't tell you how fun it is to get the first draft of one of these things in Slack. The things that make me the most giddy in my work are some new draft that they've created for Colossus and some new research reports on an investment created by my incredible team on that side, who, in many ways, are just doing the... it's turtles all the way down, like it's the same deep investigation, publishing, writing, clear thinking. When I get one of those two things in the morning, sometimes there's days where I have several of them, those are the best days. And so, selfishly, I would just love a world where I'm not needed at all because that means we're creating more of them. Obviously, I'm limited by my own bandwidth and time. I'll always do interviews. I hope it gets bigger and bigger and I don't want to fade into the sunset. But I hope this is much bigger, because that means I get to hire more incredible, talented people and hopefully put them on a career trajectory that's the best it could possibly be, and that's incredibly gratifying. I get to read more of these things. I get to do this thing that we love to do for more people and point the light that we're trying to cultivate on more and more talented people. That's unbelievably exciting. I hope it's not just writing. I hope it's a documentary. Who knows where it goes? I hope we start convening people in small situations where, "Meet this person. Meet this person." Like, that, to me, is the most fun thing in the world. And so, a world where it's no longer rate limited by my time and energy is much more exciting than a world where it's me. So yes, I would vastly prefer that all the rest dwarfs whatever I do, even though I hope what I do lasts forever and is big itself.
· David Senra, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: I don't remember the first time you brought up this idea to me. Now, it seems obvious in hindsight, right? Because people have been reading profiles- [00:00:00] S0: Yeah, now everyone's launching a magazine and it's going to be like podcasts. [00:00:00] S1: But not only that, like, specifically profiles. Where like, people have been reading, like you just mentioned it. I bought that book too that you told me about, about the New Yorker called... like, people have been... they're always interested in people. I remember reading, Larry Ellison loves to pick fights, and he thought it was, like, really good. And he didn't like the fact that Oracle... he had no media strategy for Oracle and he's like, "Oracle is just compared to other database companies and I don't like that. I want to be compared to the best companies in the world." [00:00:00] S0: Yeah. [00:00:00] S1: It's almost like this idea me and you bond over that we both learned from Jared Kushner, constant refinement of association. So he's like, "I don't want to be compared to Siebel or however you say it." Like these other... [00:00:00] S0: Sea Bass? From Dumb and Dumber, that's from Dumb and Dumber. [00:00:00] S1: Well, I don't know what it's called. [00:00:00] S0: Siebel? That's probably what you're thinking of. David, not an investor. A podcaster.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: Siebel? That's probably what you're thinking of. David, not an investor. A podcaster. [00:00:00] S1: There you go. Forever. All my vocab comes from the written word. So, you know, everybody makes fun of me because all my DMs are like "You mispronounced this word. It's very obvious, buddy." But his whole point is like, "I don't want to be associated with these people. I want Oracle be in the same vein as IBM or Microsoft." And so he's like, "The way I'm going to do that is I'm going to pick a fight with Bill Gates and Microsoft," and he does this huge fight. And originally, he thought that it was going to be, you know, Microsoft versus Oracle. And he's like, "But people are interested in personalities more than they're interested in companies or technologies." [00:00:00] S0: Of course. [00:00:00] S1: So it became billionaire A versus billionaire B. And it greatly elevated his profile, and then he said that Oracle and Oracle's products were risen, like, came along with the increase. [00:00:00] S0: Right. [00:00:00] S1: So, the reason I bring that up is because people are fascinated with profiles of other people. We are fundamentally more interested in other people and what they can teach us about ourselves than anything else. What were you thinking? Because that was something that existed forever. And who writes great profiles now? I don't even see any of them.