Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:10:24 · Michael Moritz, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
They got out seventy two hours before war broke out. Seventy two hours later, they too would have perished. [00:10:32] S0: What do you take from that? What is the big lesson from that instinct? How does that instinct imprinted on you and on the people you back throughout your life and career written about? I'm not [00:10:43] S2: sure that it's all that relevant to the people I've encountered in this journey through life, but it certainly has had consequences for me, particularly in times like the ones that we are living through at the moment and the atmosphere that is prevalent to some extent in The US and also in Western Europe. I think the necessity for always feeling that you have a bolt hole, that you have some place to go if the fire gets too hot, that's the lesson that I took away from my family history. Glibly saying that you can never have enough passports. [00:11:20] S0: Do you feel that especially true now? Say a bit about the state of the world, how you perceive the state of the world.
00:11:26 · Michael Moritz
[00:11:26] S2: It's an uncomfortable place for minorities, The United States and Western Europe at large. It doesn't matter whether you're Asian or Muslim or black or Jewish. I understand the reasons, and I wanna be careful as well. I am not whining about antisemitism. I'm not complaining about it. I long ago came to terms with the fact that it's just a fact of life. It's been around for two thousand five hundred years. It's not gonna disappear in 2026 or 2030. It's always gonna be with us. And in fact, as we were talking about a few minutes ago, I think the fact that antisemitism was around and has been around and has been something I've been conscious of all my life or all my sentient life, it's made me stronger. But I think it's disquieting if you're living in a society where in America, I think my simplistic way of thinking about who feels safe is the contingent of Americans who feel safe are white Christians who own guns. Everybody else feels a degree of insecurity, whether you're pursued by ICE or you go to a house of prayer that has to be guarded by police to ensure that that's safe. And that exists in America, it exists in The United Kingdom, in France, in other countries around Europe where far right governments have come to the fore. And obviously everybody has read about the recent elections in Germany of a far right party in Saxony province. And I think in times of economic distress, where you have millions of people who've been tens of millions of people who feel they've been left behind. That feeling of despair can easily be whipped up into a horrendous stew by leaders with authoritarian impulses.
00:13:28 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:13:28] S0: That forced you to put on your optimistic or hopeful hat, and thinking about the future as it relates to this problem. [00:13:35] S2: Well, Victor Auburn was booted from office. He was riding high a couple of years ago. In some places, there clearly are pushes to the center, which would be, I think, very consoling for people and a return to some modicum of civility in the various societies in which people like us travel. So here in America, clearly the midterms in the next eighteen months after that are really gonna shape how we're gonna live in the next decade because there's been the imprint of one person on the last decade in America. Think in Britain, the person who's identified with the far right, Nigel Farage, may well have had his best day, and his best day may well be behind him. I think it's different in France with Marie Le Pen and the elections next year. It's different in Spain, and it's potentially different in Germany. [00:14:27] S0: Do you think that the Internet fundamentally changes the potential for civility and political moderation because it still rewards extremes and attention?
00:14:27 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:14:27] S0: Do you think that the Internet fundamentally changes the potential for civility and political moderation because it still rewards extremes and attention? [00:14:38] S2: I think the three letter answer is yes. I think it's been true of every form of new media from the beginning of the printing press. But obviously, the Internet and mobile telephony has made it far easier to spread false memes and innuendo. But it's a much larger, more amplified version of what occurred in Germany when radio took off during the nineteen thirties and where the radio waves were dominated by extreme propaganda and racist views and loud lies told frequently.
00:15:15 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:15:15] S0: Vanta automates compliance so your team can spend less time on security reviews and more time getting customers. Vanta cuts audit prep by 82% and gives you instant up to date proof of trust without all the manual work, so you can close deals faster and with less friction. Customers report a 526% return on investment, and more than 16,000 companies use Vanta, including Ramp, Harvey, and Snowflake. Get started with $1,000 off at vanta.com/invest. Ridgeline is the first end to end system of record with embedded AI for investment management firms running portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, compliance on one unified platform. Firms are moving off legacy technology and onto Ridgeline because of how far ahead Ridgeline's AI features are compared to anything else in investment management software. I've been hearing from a lot of investment managers about AI and they fall roughly into two camps, with some unsure where to even start and others convinced that they can build their own order management system over a weekend. The reality is that running an investment firm will always require governance, controls, and single a source of truth for your data. And no amount of AI enthusiasm changes that requirement. Ridgeline is built on exactly that foundation, which is why I believe that the firms that come out ahead in the AI era will be the ones running on Ridgeline's unified platform. If you're serious about your firm's AI strategy, Ridgeline should be part of that conversation, and you can request a demo at ridgeline.ai. Going back to your family's history, one of my favorite topics is this idea that you can learn so much about a person from what happens in their first twelve, thirteen, fourteen years, as you said. Carl Jung had this great idea of studying the unlived life of the parent. Another way of framing it would be, this is a little trite, but you should be like who your father was supposed to be. You should live the life that he was unable to or didn't quite. And that part of that imprinting is children observing their parents, but they're not going after the risks they're not taking, and maybe running in that direction is a great way to explore. Back to the point about where does one person end and the next begin, like, the break from the parents is really important.
00:17:25 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
I'm curious how you arrived at this method of yours, this first fourteen year interrogation method. When you first did it, how you do it, like what the method is, and why you find it just so impactful in understanding a new person.