· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: I was at dinner last night with Rick and Zach, your main partners, and they made the good point where a lot of founders fuck up because they optimize for valuation. And Zach and Rick made the point, it's just like, "Well, if we're going to be working together for 20 years, this is a long-term partnership." [00:00:00] S1: Mm-hmm. [00:00:00] S0: This is not a bidding contest. It's just like, who can you work with? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: And who actually, to your point, not only do you get along with, you actually want to do life with, because we're all going to have more money we can spend anyways. So it's like, who do you get to spend your time with? Shouldn't that matter? And then the second part of that is, are they actually helping you on your mission and increasing the size of your ambition? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. No, listen, I 100% agree. I think it's about having the right partners. And so, I mentioned kind of growing up and in our family in the real estate business, my father and grandfather had partners for 50 years in some of their real estate deals. And so being a partner was almost higher than being family. It was like someone that you treat with the highest respect.
· Alexander Taubman, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. No, listen, I 100% agree. I think it's about having the right partners. And so, I mentioned kind of growing up and in our family in the real estate business, my father and grandfather had partners for 50 years in some of their real estate deals. And so being a partner was almost higher than being family. It was like someone that you treat with the highest respect. [00:00:00] S0: You guys are loyal guys. This is what I like about you. You know what I mean? You're fucking way too humble, and you're always going to be like that, so nothing I'm going to tell you today is going to change that. But there's an army of people trying to put more money into your company that would probably you'd get obscene terms. And it's just like, "Yeah, but I like these guys. These are already existing partners." My version of this is every fucking company comes and is like, "What you have with Ramp, we want that, and we'll pay double." And I'm like, "You think this is like a bidding thing?" It's like, these are some of my closest friends. They're the easiest people to work with. Fucking they backed me, and at the time, it was the biggest deal in business podcast, is the partnership we had. This is just because they had intuition that this is fucking valuable. You think I'm going to exchange and destroy that fucking relationship for money? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Come on.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Come on. [00:00:00] S1: Exactly. I agree. It's one of the things we're super grateful for. When we first met with Hemant about this, and he was our GC-led, our first round of outside capital, gave us our first 100 million bucks, basically, when... Remember, this was three or four years ago. That was a lot of money back then. And by the way, they've given us a lot more since then and been incredible partners. From day one, they got the thesis. They believed in us almost in a way before we even believed in ourselves. And that's such a gift that we'll always be grateful for. And I just want to keep working with these guys, our investors that we have. And obviously, we like bringing more people into the mix, and there's been some extraordinary people that have come in recently, like many great people that you know. And so we want to keep building that. I do think continuing to kind of expand our world a little bit is very valuable. Each time new people come in, they add a lot of value to our thinking and all that. But yes, it's about much more than capital. It's really about how do they help us execute, and the biggest way they help us execute is by believing in us and inspiring us to move faster and think bigger. [00:00:00] S0: Does Long Lake have to be public? [00:00:00] S1: It doesn't have to be public, no. [00:00:00] S0: But you think it will be? [00:00:00] S1: I think the maximally ambitious path is to be public. [00:00:00] S0: Why? Why is that maximally ambitious?
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Why? Why is that maximally ambitious? [00:00:00] S1: Because I think we'll have ultimately deeper and lower cost of capital, and just the public markets are the biggest stage in terms of deepest pools of capital. And I do believe, and one of the things about some of the great holding companies and people like Henry Singleton and others, and John Malone, they've all proven this over time, is that if you execute over a long period of time, you earn a currency that trades at a lower cost of capital, and then that allows you to do even more ambitious things. And so by getting access to that over time, we can think even way bigger. So I think there's some, potentially to scale our impact to even larger and larger businesses and industries, over time I think having that currency will be very valuable. [00:00:00] S0: What else did you learn from Singleton? You and I have talked about Teledyne a bunch. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. I mean, he's probably, like of all the holding companies, one of the people that's inspired us the most. And first of all, he was a math genius. He was on the Putnam team at MIT. He was in Office of Special Services. I mean, you sent me the book, I think- [00:00:00] S0: Yeah
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah [00:00:00] S1: ... "Just In Force," which is a great book. One thing that people don't understand is Singleton compounded his earnings per share at like over 40% a year for 20, 25 years. And Buffett always called him the best capital allocator in America and the best operator, and he was very kind of under the radar. The biggest learning from him, I think, is he used to say, "Stay flexible." His mantra was he didn't like detailed strategic plans. He preferred to stay flexible. [00:00:00] S0: He says, "I prefer to steer the boat a little bit every day." [00:00:00] S1: It's a great quote. He was subject to all these outside forces- [00:00:00] S0: Yes
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Yes [00:00:00] S1: ... and nobody's smart enough to predict them, so you just need to come in and steer the boat every day. And so I think that's part of our whole philosophy of staying open to different industries, the flexible capital allocation mantra of... For example, we never would have said when we started the company that we wanted to do travel. It just wasn't something I'd thought about. We eventually built a thesis on it, but that was because we had an open mind. And now we're doing, I think it's one of the most exciting deals we've ever done. I mean, it's like an unbelievable iconic business with a reputation for gold-plated customer excellence with one of the best AI opportunities to improve the service at a pretty reasonable multiple, actually, when you look at it. And had we not kept an open mind and stayed flexible about industries, we never would have looked at it. I think that's a very inspirational principle to us that we try to embody. [00:00:00] S0: What about John Malone? Anything from him?