Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:11:14 · Alex Sacerdote
And we have this infrastructure layer s curve, which we think is 10% penetrated. And by the way, we think it's still one of the best ways to play AI, we'll talk about how that feeds back through. But if you think about it, 200 or I don't know how many, 800,000,000 people are using AI. They're just using AI one point o, which is like a search engine on steroids. But now with these new primitives where you have caught on your computer linking it in, then you build skills, and then they're gonna build true AI bots. Big corporations are gonna build much larger, but where are we in terms of the amount of people doing that? I mean, Sunder said it's 10 bps of the knowledge workers of the world. So Anthropic has something like 14 or 15,000,000 DAUs. Probably a small portion of those are truly doing AI the way you can do it. So that 10 BPS, it's classic s curve where these are the tinkerers, and then it's gonna go to the early adopters, then it's gonna go to the early mainstream. But you're gonna go from 10 bips to one to two or 3% to 5% to 15% in the next four years, and kind of a light switch this year went off in the enterprise where everybody realizes they need to do this now and do it fast. But it's still Internet one point o when it's like, you knew you needed a website in 1998, but it's like hard to build that website. But this is coming together fast. And so the enterprise AI or enterprise application AI market is less than 1% penetrated. And, you know, we talk about s curves. We call this an l curve, just straight up. We'll take this to the infrastructure. We're at 10 basis points of people really using AI, and there's not enough compute in the world. So Anthropic has half of what they need right now, and that's before this huge take up. Mark Andreessen said in the next four years, one thing he's sure of is there's not gonna be enough compute.
00:13:22 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:13:22] S0: I'm so curious when an investor like you who historically was a public markets investor, could hit buy and buy whatever you want, is now operating in lots of the most important private market companies. We can talk about Stripe or Databricks or OpenAI or Anthropic. How do you get the positions at the size that you want coming from the legacy of being able to just buy? How much of it is creativity just directly with the company? If it is directly with the company, so they have to it's a double opt in, they have to decide to let you in too. How do you do that? What have you learned about getting the allocation you want or the amount of equity you want in a private company given that that wasn't your original background?
00:14:01 · Alex Sacerdote
[00:14:01] S2: We got to know the company. One of our analysts knew people in the finance group there. We had a look at the $60,000,000,000 round and we didn't know the company as well. The gross margins were negative and frankly we hadn't seen coding explode the way it had. And one thing about public markets is you get to know companies over a long period of time and you can kind of invest on your own schedule. Then I got a chance to spend some time with Dario. I started to realize these guys, their management team is excellent. The focus, the dedication, they had almost no turnover, the quality of code, and then the business plan was really starting to play out. It's one thing to grow from 100 to a billion, but it's another to do nine. And then so we reached out to the company as much as we could. They took a meeting with us. We did a 90 page PowerPoint deck where we used Claude code to scour the internet for all the feedback we could about the coding market and what their products were good at, where they might need to improve. And we also did our whole overview of what the coding market would be. They welcomed us into this round and then we stayed close with the CFO. It's been great to build a relationship with them and I think we punched above our weight in terms of the allocation. So that one was a total home run. We are in this period where the unicorn market is bigger than most stock markets in Europe, maybe even combined. It's definitely bigger than Germany. It's definitely bigger than The UK. Even before we invested in privates, the first one was 2020. We have to know these companies and you really have to know them now because sometimes they're the biggest companies in the space and have huge impact. So we do two to 3,000 face to face meetings with management teams a year, and about 10 or 15% of those are with privates. And then we kind of focus in on the companies that we really want to learn about and find ways to meet with them, get involved in the rounds. Our first one was Stripe. We had a large investment at the time. This is 2017, '18, '19, and 2020. We own Adion which is a fantastic payments company And they're a next gen cloud payments company taking from Worldpay and the cloud modern payments was 5% of total $80,000,000,000,000 market or what have you. But you can invest in Adion unless you know Stripe like the back of your hand.
00:16:28 · Alex Sacerdote
So we did tremendous amounts of due diligence, talked to 200 customers in Adyen. But when we asked them about Adyen, we asked about Stripe and we realized this is Coke and Pepsi. We said, we gotta find a way to invest. And I finally got to meet the Carlson brothers in 2019. And so that was our first one. We weren't really known for privates. I've got a friend who's involved with a venture firm that has tremendous amounts. And I talked to him about it and I said, let me know if you ever wanna sell some. And then I get a call from him during COVID in April 2020. We knew a lot about Stripe. We didn't have the full financials, but we knew enough that at that valuation, I think it was 35,000,000,000. They disclosed we had over half 1,000,000,000,000 of TPV. And we knew that Adyen's take rate was 25 or 30 bps and we knew Stripes was 40 or 50. And we knew how many employees they had so we could kinda get at the profitability. It turned out the take rate was higher, it turned out they were being modest about their TPV, it was much higher than the five fifty, it was closer to the 1,000,000,000,000. We underwrote the thing under our assumptions and it was much better, and then we were able to upsize that from the seller to a 100,000,000 block. The VCs are gonna own and then most of them are gonna sell. They like it that we'll own and own in the public market, which we did with NewBank as well. Owned it for a long period of time in the public market as well.
00:18:01 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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00:19:37 · Alex Sacerdote
[00:19:37] S2: We have an investment framework. It's s curve, competitive advantage, and then underappreciated earnings power. And when you get the right part of the s curve, you get exponential unit growth. If you have a very strong business model, which in tech there's so many of those for so many different types of moats, your earnings don't grow linearly, they grow exponentially. And that's the last piece. Invest when there's underappreciated long term earnings power. And very often the earnings can grow from $1 to $10, and it happens way more than you think. And it allows you to buy some of the best companies in the world for extremely low PEs. When we were buying Nvidia in 2023, we were paying four times earnings. When we bought Tesla in 2019 for the car s curve, we were paying five times earnings. When we were owning Apple, we were paying four times earnings. When we bought Amazon for AWS, we were getting it for free. The world doesn't think exponentially and they're so focused on the next year, the next quarter, very few people believe you can accurately predict two, three, four years out. But if you follow and understand the s curve, you know the motes and you know how to model, you really can predict these great things. So let's go to the s curve. So the s curve is crucial because every technology follows this pattern where it comes out. The smartphones were out ten years before the iPhone. The internet was out twenty years before Netscape. AI has been out hidden inside of these companies, but it wasn't until ChatGPT took it public and ignited what it was. So electric vehicles, Tesla went public fifteen years before 2019 when it went vertical because there were so many barriers to adoption. The first smartphones, they were clunky. They didn't have touch screen. There wasn't a wireless data system, and then they were too expensive. They were 5 or $600. Steve Jobs got the price to 200. There was AT and T at a three g network. It was touchscreen. It was so easy. Your grandmother can do it. And he built an ecosystem and made it simple. So all the barriers to adoption were eliminated. And then you rocket when those barriers are removed, that's the tornado of demand that everybody in the world knows they need this right away. And so that's the flip that happens. It happened with electric vehicles. The price was too high. Elon got the price to 40,000.