00:00:00 · S0
[00:00:00] S0: Alright, friends. Today's episode is brought to you by Portrait, the AI research platform built by fundamental investors for fundamental investors. For founding Portrait, David Plon spent a decade as a buy side analyst at some of the world's leading investment firms, including our friends at Slate Path Capital and the Bowpost Group. Now even as some of the best resource firms in the world, David kept bumping into a reality that may resonate with many of you, never having enough time to research all the compelling ideas that crossed his desk. This tension inspired him to build Portrait, the research platform that delivers the equivalent of an army of capable analysts ready to help you focus on the most actionable ideas with unprecedented speed and depth. Portrait isn't about replacing judgment. It's about giving you back time for the work you actually love, developing novel ideas, building conviction through deep, creative, value added research. Portrait assesses the same qualitative attributes we value as investors to identify businesses that fit your specific mental models. Portrait also gives you custom research reports. It generates comprehensive primers and lays out bull bear cases in minutes rather than days or weeks. The system is trained to help you process pressing research questions, delivering final outputs at the caliber you would expect from a member of your team. So visit portraitresearch.com to start your free trial and see how David and his team can help add productivity and creativity into your team's process. On this show, we talk about the joys of compounding, not just as an investment phenomenon, but as a principle for your life. Now we're convinced that sleep is actually one of those high leverage, repeatable decisions that has the power to improve your physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. So if you care about trying to be the best version of yourself every day, how you're approaching your nights matters a lot. By now, you know we're huge fans of Eight Sleep. We've had the company's founder Mateo on the pod, and we and our families have been obsessed with their products for years. They just released the sixth generation of the Pod, a smart mattress cover that fits on any existing bed.
00:02:06 · S0, Paul Buser
The hub, which is the piece of hardware that runs the temperature system, is 50% smaller than the previous version and now fits under most bed frames. The thermal engine is 20% faster to your set temperature. The cover now embeds nine times the biometric sensors of Pod five, tracking heart rate at 99% accuracy versus a standard ECG. All of this is aided by their AI called Autopilot that learns your patterns and adjusts accordingly every night to give you the best possible sleep. Since I started using the Pod many years ago, my amount of deep sleep and REM have increased, improving my overall quality of sleep. The pod six now starts at just $1,999, which is the lowest starting price Eight Sleep has ever offered. But use code joys at 8sleep.com backslash j oys for up to $200 off the pod six. [00:02:57] S1: Hello, and welcome to Joys of Compounding. [00:02:59] S0: We're still on the same mission, to study greatness in order to help you find and compound your life's work as fast as possible for as long as possible. [00:03:07] S1: I'm Paul Buser. And I'm Rick Berman. We're your hosts. And each session, our teachers will be some of the world's most compelling people from across the vast range of human achievement.
00:03:07 · Paul Buser, S2
[00:03:07] S1: I'm Paul Buser. And I'm Rick Berman. We're your hosts. And each session, our teachers will be some of the world's most compelling people from across the vast range of human achievement. [00:03:17] S2: This show is brought to you by Pine Grove Studios in collaboration with Colossus. The hosts of the show, Rick Berman and Paul Buser, are the cofounders and co CEOs of Sata Grove Holdings and co CEOs of Sata Grove Management Company. All opinions expressed by any of Rick, Paul, or their podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinion either Sator Grove Holdings or Sator Grove Management Company. This podcast is intended for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as the basis for investment decisions. Sator Grove Holdings or clients of Sator Grove Management Company may maintain positions and securities discussed in this podcast.
00:03:45 · Paul Buser
[00:03:45] S1: Luca, it's great to be with you. Our obsession at Joys of Compounding and then our holding company, Sadler Grove, is finding people who are doing their life's work, who are crazy enough to actually structure it in a way that give it a shot to endure. I think a lot of people that we've come across maybe say they're doing their life's work, have some components of it, but I had the good fortune earlier this year to stop by and meet you here in Milan. We were here for a different subject, but what came across to me, and and it was the reason why I wanted to come back here and do this interview, was it's just so rare to know down to the core that what you and your cofounders have built is done in a way that actually is a shot to endure. One of these multi, multi decade compounders, I wanna unpack that today. I think there's a lot of components to that. You've been in the press a lot lately. It's amazing to see the coverage of Bending Spoons, but there are a few things that I think maybe the world doesn't understand fully or not enough around some of that structuring. Then very selfishly, for us, this is how we like to learn. I'd love to start with what is it you're actually aiming at? What are you trying to build at Bending Spoons? How did you structure this in a way that gave you a shot of doing that? It all started, at
00:05:04 · Luca Ferrari
[00:05:04] S3: least with Bending Spoons, have some failed entrepreneurial pursuits before that. But with Bending Spoons it started with the conviction that if we could become the best ideally, or at least among the very best operators of, in our case, digital businesses in the world, then we'd be pretty much guaranteed to be able to compound capital very efficiently for a very long time through acquisitions. And the reason is that if you can operate a business better than almost anybody else, if a business is better off as part of your group, in our case, once it's integrated into our platform, then it would be with the previous ownership, then you should be able to offer a price to those owners that's appealing and at the same time deliver high returns, cash returns. Can then take that extra cash and redeploy toward new acquisitions and rinse and repeat and that's compounding. On that thesis we have built in our company for the past thirteen years, interestingly, the let's say the capital allocation side of things, at least when it comes to acquisitions is the relatively easy part. Once you have that platform, once you are that outstanding operator. So most of our focus and efforts have gone into establishing ourselves as ideally, aspirationally, by far the best operator in the world.
00:06:26 · Paul Buser
[00:06:26] S1: Yeah, it's interesting thinking about what you're aiming at as being the best operating company in the world. Oftentimes, if you think about a public company, it could be you want the biggest revenue or biggest team or other metrics out there. If there's one thing that you could measure over the next twenty or thirty years, what maybe comes upstream from best operations, best people? What's the metric that you look at? Maybe not every quarter, but year to year, decade to decade that shows that you're succeeding in what you're aiming to do?