Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
01:17:57 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Micky Malka
[01:17:57] S0: Say a little bit more about the conviction one. I think of you as a pretty concentrated investor. Why even more? [01:18:03] S2: Because the impact you can have is limited by the amount of people that you can touch. And the more concentrated you are there, the more impact you can have and the more present you can be. And I think, for example, if we do a good job on understanding the grid and we do thesis driven work on what needs to happen there, how do we solve identity first and how do we do this? And we find the one or two or three things that matter the most on identity, we should do that and not do anything else. And then think about the second chapter of The Grid and then do the same. But you don't have to do 50 things to express that opinion. And I think that's where it gets diluted. It's not us, but I will even do less. [01:18:43] S0: What unexpected plot twist in the story turned out to be a great blessing?
01:18:43 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Micky Malka
[01:18:43] S0: What unexpected plot twist in the story turned out to be a great blessing? [01:18:49] S2: Oh my god. So many. For example, 2022, when everything started to blow up, the attention to this space died. Two thousand and twenty to twenty two was probably five years condensed into two because of COVID and lockdowns did so much to this space that accelerated everything. If we hadn't had air to breathe then and to take time to think, we would have made a 100 mistakes. So the plot of actually the market slowing down dramatically was one of the best blessings we had because we saw that FinTech was dying. And if we hadn't stopped, we wouldn't have seen it. We would have missed it and make a lot of mistakes. So you have to bless market cycles when they give you time to think And embrace it as a moment to think versus trying to say, Oh, momentum is gone. [01:19:42] S0: I remember a conversation we had then, I think it was the first time we ever met. And you said, I'm not an investor right now, I'm a risk manager. And it's such an interesting time. That was the beginning of now of this new foundation that you're building on. So cool to think back on. What makes you emotional in all of this? In a [01:19:58] S2: good way or bad way? [01:19:59] S0: I'm curious about both.
01:19:59 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Micky Malka
[01:19:59] S0: I'm curious about both. [01:20:01] S2: In a bad way, it's when somebody lies. I have no room for lying of any kind. My way of being, the way we're at home with our kids, we embrace mistakes. We embrace multiple mistakes, but never lying. Lying is the one thing that really just gets me emotional. I always start by trusting everybody 100%. And all you can do is lose the trust. There's people that are the opposite. They give zero trust and as I get to know you, you get to 100% or maybe 50%. I always start at a 100. And that part emotionally drains me, takes away my energy when there's lying. What gives me energy and when do I get emotional is when I see people around me having joy. When you see that they're doing what they're meant to be doing. When you see that they wake up and they are asking and they're learning and they're interacting and they're building what they wanna build, that gives me joy. And the younger they are, the more joy I get.
01:20:01 · Micky Malka, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[01:20:01] S2: In a bad way, it's when somebody lies. I have no room for lying of any kind. My way of being, the way we're at home with our kids, we embrace mistakes. We embrace multiple mistakes, but never lying. Lying is the one thing that really just gets me emotional. I always start by trusting everybody 100%. And all you can do is lose the trust. There's people that are the opposite. They give zero trust and as I get to know you, you get to 100% or maybe 50%. I always start at a 100. And that part emotionally drains me, takes away my energy when there's lying. What gives me energy and when do I get emotional is when I see people around me having joy. When you see that they're doing what they're meant to be doing. When you see that they wake up and they are asking and they're learning and they're interacting and they're building what they wanna build, that gives me joy. And the younger they are, the more joy I get. [01:21:04] S0: We had an interview on the platform of Steve Young, the quarterback recently, and he talked about this part of his life when he realized that he was part of the 49ers at the time, which was the first place he called it a platform he had ever been that allowed him to experiment with how good he could be and that supported him in that and taught him agency, which is basically what you're saying now. How do you do that? What are the literal things you do to create the environment for the young people here to have that experience of agency and what it might be like to find the thing they're meant to do. What are the things you do to promote that?
01:21:40 · Micky Malka
[01:21:40] S2: I incentivize all of them to try different stuff and try different experiments and go meet different people. We incentivize them to go deep in an area of any kind of area that they wanna go as long as they come back and share the knowledge. And if they can articulate it, then they're learning. The other thing you do is you put them in positions to allow them to experience that. Most people are afraid of sending somebody who's 25 or 26 to a meeting because they're afraid what they're gonna say. You cannot be afraid. You gotta do it. And if they make a mistake, own it. Use it as a teaching moment. So we've had many teaching moments. We had great stories here of all kinds. We had great outcomes, but we had teaching moments. And we always talk about the teaching moments. And we have a wall with all of the moments that are like that, where we stick these things and we leave them in prosperity so people learn from it. That's a great story, Mickey is gonna love me to say. When we started, he had this passion for this idea of this business in the early days, and we were just starting and he was so convinced and he was enamored. He put so much time. He gave him a million dollar check to this company to start and do all these things. And I was never convinced from day one. And I don't know, it's not about right or wrong. It was just... But you let them do. Your risk management is, can we afford that kind of bet? The answer is yes. That's a teaching moment. We'll see what it brings. Long story short, the company doesn't end up working, and we get a check back for 93¢. So we never cash the check, but we frame the check. And it's framing this wall as a reminder of a story that works like that. It's not dissimilar than Berkshire Hathaway, keeping the name of the two companies that he took bankrupt because that was his first business. It's just reminders of who you are like that. And so we embrace a lot of those.
01:23:35 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Micky Malka
[01:23:35] S0: What has you just most generally interested and excited about the world today? You see so many parts of it. You're thinking big about these changes, forced to zoom in on something. What gets you the most excited? [01:23:49] S2: I feel that there's so much still to be done and built that I get excited in so many different directions. But more importantly, I'll tell you, is when you travel the world. It's what gets you more excited. [01:24:03] S0: Amen. [01:24:04] S2: When you spend time and you meet people anywhere in the world, on any country, on any situation, on a vacation, on a work trip, on an airport, and you just meet these people, all of them trying to build. 99% of people in the world are good people. And you get to meet them and you see their energy and you get energized by that. I mean, I end up traveling a ton, not because I like to get out of here of Silicon Valley, but actually because the world is much bigger than Silicon Valley. And I get a lot more energy from outside that I bring back here when I'm home with my family, with my kids, and at work. And that is what gets me excited when I meet these young people. I was at the crypto conference in Singapore a couple weeks ago. It was my first time in a conference in ten years. I've never been to one in ten years. You know what got me excited? I heard over 35 languages being spoken in the booths. I counted them. That was so energizing. It's just a reminder that this is much bigger than one tends to... Than Gary Gensler, for example. [01:25:05] S0: Yeah.