Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: I was with Scott Wu from Cognition recently, who is well known to be one of these math champions. You as well talk about that environment. What was that competitive world like? What was it kind of - let people into that world because obviously it shaped you a lot.
· Jesse Zhang
[00:00:00] S1: It's kind of an interesting experience, I would say. I think when you look back now that we're all grown up, it is kind of a pretty intense way to grow up. But I look back on my childhood with very fond memories. You get a really nice community, a lot of people that are doing the same thing. I grew up in Colorado, in Boulder. Boulder's a pretty academic town, but there's not very many people that are super gunning for these contests. A lot of my friends just kind of grew up in not the places you would think - California, Texas, New York. And so it gives you some level of community of okay, yeah, there's a lot of other people out there that are doing the same things as you and you meet a lot of them and then now that we're all grown up, those relationships have lasted for a long time. But yeah, the environment is one where it's similar to company building, how well you're doing is fairly objective. There's a lot that has to go into it. There's a lot of preparation, a lot of having the feeling of it is a long term thing. But because your results are fairly objective, there's constant motivation to improve. I think that's quite nice. One of my big theses is that this audience of people or this sort of community of people, there's a lot of untapped potential there. And to actually turning them into people that do business or companies and things like that, a lot of them have historically gone into trading or academia. I mean those are perfectly awesome jobs. A lot of the folks here, this background is correlated to one where it's a little bit more risk averse and kind of just get your good grades and follow a track. And if you can kind of divert some of that talent into company building, I think there's just a lot that can be done.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Jesse Zhang
[00:00:00] S0: What are the parallels? What is it about the people or the training or the specific aptitude in the competitions that make you good at company building and others good at company building? This seems like an obvious true trend that there's enough sample size now of people that had this background that are doing extremely well in this environment. Maybe it's the best - if you could somehow index that group of people, you'd have fantastic performance right now. What is it? What are the parallels that make that true? [00:00:00] S1: One is the competitive nature that we just talked about. The other is just the problem solving. So I think one thing that I believe very strongly is that one of the best things you can do when you're building company or anything is just have pretty good introspection on where your strengths are. And at least for this group, it's more on the problem solving side. Just like, and the problem can be very vague. The problem could be how do I build a successful company? And you kind of break down the problem. You can think really critically and just from first principles. A lot of these markets, of course that's not the only way to build a company. Other people, I think some people just have very good intuition, especially on these PLG type things. But in general, I think just the problem solving capability, what these contests really teach you is you're just solving problems. And those problems of course are not real problems in real life. But the sort of thinking is the same.
· Jesse Zhang, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: One is the competitive nature that we just talked about. The other is just the problem solving. So I think one thing that I believe very strongly is that one of the best things you can do when you're building company or anything is just have pretty good introspection on where your strengths are. And at least for this group, it's more on the problem solving side. Just like, and the problem can be very vague. The problem could be how do I build a successful company? And you kind of break down the problem. You can think really critically and just from first principles. A lot of these markets, of course that's not the only way to build a company. Other people, I think some people just have very good intuition, especially on these PLG type things. But in general, I think just the problem solving capability, what these contests really teach you is you're just solving problems. And those problems of course are not real problems in real life. But the sort of thinking is the same. [00:00:00] S0: Does it feel more emotional now, company building, than it did in the contests? [00:00:00] S1: Emotional? I think I'm a bit older now, so it's not really that emotional. I started a company before this that was, I would say, way tougher than the current one. I think just mentally makes you feel a lot more calm and appreciative of when things are going well and timing matters a lot. I think when I first started, I graduated a year early to try to start it. And I would say we had a very fortunate outcome, but the whole journey was very bumpy.
· Jesse Zhang, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: Emotional? I think I'm a bit older now, so it's not really that emotional. I started a company before this that was, I would say, way tougher than the current one. I think just mentally makes you feel a lot more calm and appreciative of when things are going well and timing matters a lot. I think when I first started, I graduated a year early to try to start it. And I would say we had a very fortunate outcome, but the whole journey was very bumpy. [00:00:00] S0: What was it? What did it do?
· Jesse Zhang
[00:00:00] S1: So the company was called Loki. We basically built high performance video capture software for video games. So when people are playing games, you can really easily capture video clips and edit them and share them. The whole goal of the product is just get as many users as possible. And again, I think we exited at a very fortunate time. It was 2021. But throughout the journey at the beginning I didn't really know what we were building. And then trying a bunch of things and you're a new grad, you don't really have good intuition on what idea is good or not. So you just work really hard for three months and then you realize that obviously had no market. So that's tough. Then about a year and a half in, I had two of my good friends from school were my co-founders. They both got burnt out and then decided to leave. So it was just me after that trying to figure out what to do. And so that's, I think when you. I think that's way tougher than anything we're doing right now. It's the way you put it, an emotional thing. You don't really know if there is any future or not. There's a lot of pressure because you don't want the first thing you work on to be a failure, essentially. So I think that was much tougher from a psychological point of view. Nowadays, I think it's tough just a sheer amount of stuff to do. We're not getting much sleep. But in the grand scheme of things, you got to be really grateful, even be in this position to have enough work to do, to have enough interesting problems to have a team that you're really excited to work with every day.