YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Wilk

lines on the record: 68
first: 2025-03-09
most recent: 2025-03-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I think I make money at times when there's overextrapolation in any one area or one direction in the market where a narrative has taken hold of something and pushes it a little bit too far. That's a pretty powerful source of returns sometimes. But I can go back to my Spurs days and use some of the examples that I used previously just by saying that dismissing all small companies is kind of like saying every second round draft pick is terrible. And again, like I was saying before, on average, I would say second round picks are not as good as first round picks. And that probably is proven true from a statistical standpoint in terms of career contribution. But that doesn't mean it's every single one. And in San Antonio, our job was to find the higher quality ones that can make an impact to the organization. And it didn't really matter what the narrative was for the group, if that makes sense. And so in the same vein, I can kind of admit on average that smaller companies are lower quality than larger ones and public.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A team of people and do everything to make yourself kind of institutionally friendly or investable. And if I'm guilty of one thing, it is not trying to be investable to anybody for good or bad. And so that's a good actually segue into the disadvantages of doing it this way is that it takes longer. And it's a slower process. And I've had to turn down capital from people I didn't think were going to be a great fit and the type of partner that I'm looking for is rare. And it's just a flog, you know, intentionally in a good way. But I'm in no rush. And as I mentioned, I hope to be doing this for a really long time. And so far, I've found that there are much more, many more benefits to doing it my way than trying to kind of appease a certain industrial base, if that makes sense.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“IKEA has this amazing cultural principle that goes reach good results with small means. And that idea resonated with me in an incredible way. And I've kind of become since I started the firm, I've kind of become obsessed with cost control so much so that when this is all said and done, I would love to, you know, set some kind of record for revenue per employee or low operating cost as a percentage of AUM while still generating world-class returns over a long period of time. And I think that that's just become a really important part of what I'm doing. And there's a second part to that IKEA principle as well, which is expensive solutions to any problem are usually the result of mediocrity. And I actually view teething expenses low, having a maniacal focus on cost as a way to become actually anti-fragile. Whereas the sort of conventional wisdom around the industry is to beef up your service providers and your infrastructure and high”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ben with basically zero push on my part or any marketing efforts or hiring someone to help me in that regard. And that result in a structure where I believe my investors can kind of, number one, they understand what I'm doing and what I'm trying to accomplish, but they can also sort of stick through me through periods of volatility. And that's because there's a very strong understanding of, hey, what I do, but also they've made a decision that when I'm doing resonates with them and we can all kind of grow together and adopt this sort of long-term view together. I think that's a pretty powerful thing. And in the event that there are ups and downs, again, I don't have sort of a high cost structure to adjust or answer to. And it's more like making the business fairly anti-fragile. And I listened to the founders podcast a lot. It's an incredible perspective giver. I read some of the books, obviously, if you're familiar. And Guy did an episode on IKEA recently.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, probably a willingness to, or maybe even a necessity to accept capital, likely from partners who may not be aligned with you. And that was a real concern for me up front. And my structure is unique, I believe, because I spend the majority of my time focused on the investment and related work, such as investment research, managing the portfolio, studying businesses, kind of the old school reading and thinking and a lot of writing. When investments are made or as I gather, more information throughout that process, I then can be really open and transparent about my thought processes and try to attract like-minded people to the firm in terms of my partners or who are people who would ultimately like to allocate. And it becomes this really interesting kind of self-selecting, organic process whereby the people who have allocated capital to Greystone have found the firm on their own. And it's been with very”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of allows me to do a lot of things. Number one, to think and make investment decisions independently and avoid sort of marketing in the traditional sense as I'm being interviewed on a podcast right now. And also keep my costs very low. And I think that last point is really important because there are certainly exceptions, but there's a real tendency for emerging managers or even new funds to opt for a very high cost structure on day one. And sometimes that comes with a lot of asset, which is nice. But whether you run a small fund or large one, none of the infrastructure really improves your ability to allocate capital. And I think that's an important point because I'd argue that a more bloated cost structure, more expense structure, and a team of people, a nice office, et cetera, really makes your business more fragile to market an economic shock and bounce of volatility. And there's”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I wanted to do well and also have any sort of differentiation that my past and structure was going to be a lot different from what I was seeing out there. And I put some of that in my documents, as you correctly noted, bulk of which consists of being small, aligning capital with my partners, focusing on a differentiated area of investing, as we talked about and adopting a very long-term view, which are all things that I didn't really see through my study of the industry. That process has also helpful because My background is not a Wall Street related background. As I just mentioned, I come from the sports world. I have very little formal experience. And I kind of had to craft Greystone using sort of a handcrafted playball.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So I would say the decision, both the decision to do my own thing, like launch Greystone and the decision to kind of keep it as a one-man shop. We're left short of manual decisions and more much more organic in that they kind of made themselves. And I spend years prior to launching Greystone going through this really interesting process where I knew what I wanted to do. like to gather information prior to doing things. I spent a lot of time interviewing people in the industry and talking to people who manage money, whether it was fund managers or financial advisors or wealth managers. And I walked away from that process with a lot of interesting information. Most of it was not good. And I kind of walked away from that information gathering process a little bit disappointed in what I found. But the high level is that I knew that if I was going to do my own thing,”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over time, because there is a time in any business trajectory, the longer they survived, where eventually the culture will kind of take over from a sort of growth standpoint and from a standpoint of the things that really drive the business forward. And getting to know the people behind the company and getting to know the culture as well is a huge part of what I do. It's a very difficult. But if I can sort of combine all of those three things that I took from San Antonio, meaning looking in an area that others aren't, making sure the process is very labor intensive and uncovering aspects of the culture that maybe aren't available publicly. That's usually a really good situation for a mispricing.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Insight about how the earnings power of that company might unfold over time. And the last thing I'll say is I kind of meld that with a focus on the corporate culture. So the Spurs have one of the best organizational cultures of any professional sports team that I've ever seen. And it starts at the very top with, again, the principles that they believe in and it sort of bleached through the rest of the organization. They have an amazing mentality. No job is too big or small for anybody. Everybody sort of takes out the trash and you're going to buy into these principles that we've been operating on for a long time. And that takes shape in the hiring of people in the evaluating of talent in the decentralizing of employee decision making in the autonomy that you're granted and many other things. And one of my favorite parts of getting to know a business, if I can, is trying to discern how favorable the corporate culture is and how that will help the business grow.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But also because they're just smaller companies and there aren't usually video interviews of the CEOs or significant information on the websites about the product or service or people to speak to about their experience with the company. And so the work done from a due diligence perspective is very labor intensive. And I feel that way about a lot of the things that I do at Greystone, not only them being differentiated, but there's also a sort of manual process involved to get to know the companies, to get to know the management themes, to rely on my own research and work that I'm doing and have a willingness to kind of go to areas that others aren't that are outside the publicly available documents or financials. And when you combine those two things, doing what others aren't doing or being differentiated and incorporating kind of a manual labor intensive process, it created an advantage where I can walk away from researching a business, which kind of a differentiation.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An industrial perspective. I'm the professional that tries to find the high quality businesses in a group of maybe lower quality ones if you are to share that view. And so that would be the first thing that I took from them is just the idea that if you do something differentiated like focusing on sort of undiscovered, underfollowed businesses, that can usually lead to some good things if you know where to look and how to value a business. And the second part of that would be making your efforts kind of labor intensive. If you are to sort of skirt the conventional scouting wisdom in San Antonio by looking in areas where others aren't, the same wisdom can be applied to investing. And the issue with that is it's much more difficult. So a lot of times with small companies, both the businesses themselves and the management team, there's less information available to analyze the companies, partly because they're less eyeballs on it and the market hasn't really caught up to speed with those businesses.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking right. And from a scouting standpoint, that was a really big focus of the organization. And that mentality resulted in them finding some really great players toward the back end of the draft, Mona Genobli being the most prominent example. And if you kind of translate that mentality from my best well perspective to an investment perspective, the area of small companies is kind of ripe within efficiencies, an area where there are much less eyeballs on these businesses. It's a place where larger funds can't necessarily operate. If you manage a certain amount of money. And so it comes with these sort of embedded discounts in these companies and the inefficiencies that I think are right to be taken advantage of. And unfortunately, the sort of narrative for small companies, which we can get into, has been that they are just as a group lower quality than larger businesses on whole. And as an average, that might be true. But again, given my job in San Antonio was to be the person to sort of wade into this group of players and find undervalued talent, I view my job as very similar from”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the first thing that I took from there would be the discovery of undervalued or mispriced talent. So my job at San Antonio was to find undervalued place. I learned a lot. I was basically trained how to do that, and I learned a lot from the people above me in terms of where to look to do that. And Lisbon had a very unique advantage because prior to the time I got there, they had been doing this for decades. And given that the team was good every single year and made the playoffs, they never had the chance to draft a player in the top part of the first round because they were a good team. And as a result, they had to try to eke out whatever advantage they could from a scouting perspective by finding good players that could contribute in the second round of the draft. And they did that by being one of the first teams to start scouting players overseas. And I learned a lot from this experience, meaning that you could create a significant advantage for yourself by doing something very different from what everybody else is doing. And their entire philosophy as an organization was to either be first at doing something, whether it was the use of analytics or bolstering their kind of sports science capabilities or kind of looking left when everybody was.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a profession and a practice where there's no end game. And so I kind of view my role and my job as a professional learner, but also just trying to get a little bit better every single day. And I'll be trying to improve my craft and kind of what I'm doing as long as my brain works and hopefully be doing this kind of on a multi-decade time horizon, which is the like of time that I've kind of put in my documents as far as how I want to operate Greystone and the way that I think about, again, structuring the business and also the types of investment that we make. So it became a very applicable and useful thing that I also have, again, in my documents on my bookshelf and that something that I really just try to kind of live my life by and structure my business by, if that makes sense.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's this really interesting chart on the internet that kind of shows the trajectory of that, which happened obviously toward the second half of his age. So it's kind of, I learned that quote from a sports basketball context initially, but it really set the tone for what I do on a daily basis. And just, again, trying to improve a little bit every single day. And the founding of Greystone was also very much based on a set of principles that I deem true about investing and a set of principles on how I'd like to operate the business moving forward. And that idea of developing things that you stick to every single day, drew ups and downs, through thick and thin was something that I took from the Spurs and the code itself is something I shamefully stole as well. The biggest difference between, I guess, a basketball context or that quote in general and what I'm doing is that the stone eventually breaks in that saying and the kind of metaphor is over. But investing, one of the things I love about investing is that it's kind of a lifelong.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An excellent sort of metaphor for analogy for in the sports world because it involves practicing and getting a little bit better at your craft every day and just trying to improve a little bit by the time you go to sleep versus when you woke up. And honestly, I can think of no better formula for analogy for compounding as well. So it relates very much to investing and from an investment perspective. The idea behind that is kind of like no one day move the needle. Speaking from my own perspective, studying businesses and industries and doing portfolio management related work and trying to sort of expand or deepen my circle of competence isn't going to change necessarily that much on one specific day. But a bunch of those days added up over a long period of time, weak to something pretty significant. And there's sort of a well-known data point about Buffett who amassed the majority of his wealth after the age of 50.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Yeah. So the concept of pounding the rock, which is kind of the shorthand for that boat or saying, is the sort of bedrock philosophy of the San Antonio Spurs, which is where I started my career working as a scout and basketball operations employee. And one of the first things that they showed me when I went to the facility to interview and the day I arrived for my first day was that exact quote and they have it above an actual rock and pledgehammer that's in a glass cage located in the practice facility. And it's one of the things that it's one of the sort of challenging principles of the organization ever since Coach Pop started to work in there in the late 80s. And it's the thing that they use to sort of guide their day-to-day activities. And the concept is obviously that small bits of incremental progress can lead to outsized returns over time.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT