Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David George
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah, if you know it was going to work in five years, you'd put all your money in. [00:00:00] S1: You'd put all your money into it. I happen to think it will take a little bit longer, part of that is informed by my experience with Waymo. I'd contrast maybe what Waymo does and increasingly Tesla and some others with what a robot needs to do, and it's very different. A car needs to basically stay in a lane, avoid anomalies, collisions, go a certain speed limit, find places to park... [00:00:00] S0: It's not simple- [00:00:00] S1: When I describe it that way, it's much more complicated than that, but simply put, that's what it has to do. I contrast that with what a robot has to do. What does a robot have to do in your home? [00:00:00] S0: A lot more degrees of freedom. [00:00:00] S1: Endless degrees of freedom. Make a cup of coffee, go do my laundry, but it took Waymo 10 years, and if you go back to the DARPA challenge, the whole industry, decades to get this point, two decades to get to this point roughly. So, my expectation is technology is advanced, obviously the generative AI techniques can be applied to robotics to help it go much faster, but I think it's going to take a long time. [00:00:00] S0: So, how do you invest in that?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David George
[00:00:00] S0: So, how do you invest in that? [00:00:00] S1: We have an early stage team that is studying all the robotics companies, we meet them all, we're learning a ton, we're waiting for them to find the team that they can do an early stage traditional seed or series A investment in, and then at the growth stage, ideally they find that and we can invest in it, or one of these companies that we're not investors in really starts to work. And we've debated what does it mean to work? I think we'll know it when we see it, there will be things that start happening and customers pulling their products that we will have not seen before. [00:00:00] S0: What's the lesson from Waymo there on what it means to start to work? What do you think in the history of Waymo was the point at which you would've said, okay, now something happened and that makes this more investable?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David George
[00:00:00] S0: What's the lesson from Waymo there on what it means to start to work? What do you think in the history of Waymo was the point at which you would've said, okay, now something happened and that makes this more investable? [00:00:00] S1: So, the interesting thing about Waymo for us... I'll tell you the history of our Waymo investment. We originally invested in 2020, they came to us to raise outside capital for the first time. So, it's just purely funded by Google over time, and they thought it would be helpful for employees for hiring all that stuff, outside counsel, all that, diversify the cap table to bring on some outside investors. So, some folks invested in it, we're the only VC firm that invested in it, we invested out of our first growth fund, and it was really fun because... And this was seeing the future. Taking the ride in 2019, it was doing some pretty amazing stuff. In retrospect, it could do unprotected lifts, it could avoid construction sites, and the thing it didn't know how to do actually was park. We got to a parking lot, and it stalled and we had to override and go drive up to the front, but you could see signs that it was going to be pretty interesting. But it wasn't on the road, we knew they were going to be conservative about rolling it out. So, Marc and Ben came to me and they said, "Hey, we got to do this Waymo investment," and I said, "No, I don't like this at all, this is crazy. It's going to take 10 years, the valuation that we come in at, it's going to be really high," and they said, "You know what?" [00:00:00] S0: Don't care.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David George
[00:00:00] S0: Don't care. [00:00:00] S1: Don't care. "This is autonomous driving. Are you kidding me? This is the mother of all markets. If they have the thing that can drive cars autonomously, it's going to be worth a ton, stop overthinking it." And my team, we had built all this analysis, and why it would take forever, and the economics were going to be strained. So, we compromised and we made a small investment in Waymo at the time, and I was excited to be a part of it, I just thought the returns would be stretched. Fast-forward five years later, at the end of 2024, they raised money again, and at the end of 2024, they had cars on the road. And it turned out, to your question, consumer preference slapped you in the face. Anyone who was in San Francisco who had the choice was taking a Waymo. But at that time we had the chance to invest more money and it was working, so we took that opportunity to write a much larger check and invest. By the way, one of the really interesting things about Waymo, so you said, "You're in San Francisco, you see it everywhere," how many cars do you think they have on the road in San Francisco? [00:00:00] S0: 10,000. [00:00:00] S1: They have 400. [00:00:00] S0: Wow. [00:00:00] S1: So, it turns out if your cars are driving optimal routes and fully utilized and not running into some of the problems that drivers have, it's pretty good. So, you can have a lot of coverage. There are something like 50,000 Lyft drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area and Waymo overtook them in market share.
· David George, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: So, it turns out if your cars are driving optimal routes and fully utilized and not running into some of the problems that drivers have, it's pretty good. So, you can have a lot of coverage. There are something like 50,000 Lyft drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area and Waymo overtook them in market share. [00:00:00] S0: It feels like the appropriate time to disclose that you and I went to college together. The reason I mention that is usually when we get together, we don't jump into talking about investing, we talk about other stuff, which makes me realize, I don't think I've ever actually asked you, what is your investment philosophy or strategy or style or taste? What is it and how did it develop? [00:00:00] S1: My style and taste is very much, if I were summarizing one line, I like to pay fair prices for great companies, and everyone would say they would like to do that. The art in that I think is recognizing where greatness may lie, where other people don't recognize that. [00:00:00] S0: Unpriced greatness?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David George
[00:00:00] S0: Unpriced greatness? [00:00:00] S1: No, it's priced, but not to the fullest extent. So, I've studied the history of technology companies and why they outperform and how they outperform, often in growth stage investing, it's always on the growth side. It's like, hey, the growth side is where you get things really right, I tell the team that, we can make a lot of mistakes on forecasting margins and business models and unit economics and all that stuff, but lots of people know how to do that analysis, that's out there, so where can you actually get edge? You can get edge from product insights, market insights, and people insights. So, how do we maximize our likelihood of doing that? On the people side, I'll start there because that's probably the hardest to do, and I've gotten it right a number of times and I think I have reasonably good taste in people, I really like a certain archetype of founder, I call them the technical terminator, I'm very close with Ali from Databricks, so Ali is the technical terminator. [00:00:00] S0: He's self-evident. [00:00:00] S1: It's self-evident. It wasn't self-evident all along, he actually wasn't even the CEO, he became the CEO later. [00:00:00] S0: But he started the open source project.