YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Wyden

lines on the record: 42
first: 2022-09-22
most recent: 2022-09-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The best offense is a great defense. Being able to use defensive tactics to play offense and being able to recognize when things are structurally offsides, being able to wear my defense hat more often, lay out all the scope of possibilities. It's really easy to say that now having lived through these years, but thinking about a company and saying, well, they own it here, it trades this, could it trade this in the future? Could the liquidity go away? That's been a lesson that we've learned the hard way and constantly want to build upon, which is knowing how we can change and having backup plans.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sticking with it. Both my parents come from backgrounds of fighting mentality and gritting it out. One of the things I think really differentiates me as a person and my investment strategy is just grit. We joke around and say, you know, people tried to kill me 24,000 times. And I still found a way to survive. That's a testament to the fact that I've been really good at admitting mistakes and looking inward. And I think it's this concept of accepting your mistakes and doubling down in true grit. And I think both of my parents are exemplary role models for those qualities.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overstaying our welcome and fiat and resizing the position post spin to us was really when you own a business that is perceived as low quality. It's very different. When you own a security that everybody else has a view on, that's a very different thing than owning a security that no one has a view on and just letting it play out. In general, what Fiat told us is, A, it's very dangerous to own cyclical companies and it's also very dangerous to own something where it's super controversial and everyone has a view on and it can take many, many years to figure that out. Those were the lessons from that experience.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My uncle, he just had such an independent life. He was jumping from deal to deal and had the ability to wear different hats, whether it was real estate or VC or stocks. His ability to find. I would say three. I would say Joel Greenblatt and Buffett. This combination of understanding why things are cheap and what I would call structural mispricings. And then this concept of understanding the ability to own great businesses. Understanding the stock dynamics, structural mispricings, and then also understanding the power of owning an amazing business. And I think that's buffet.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't like it where an executive keeps punting. I'm very data-driven and granular. And when someone says, oh, we need this and we need that and we need this and we need that. I'm like, okay, can you give me the percentages? Can you tell me how much you need? They all just punt and say we need all of them to work. Forecasting and understanding the drivers of your own business, I think, is incredibly important when we look at our portfolio, we look at each individual stock and we say, what's the IRR from here? What's the IRR from here? We might not be able to tell you how long each one's going to take and what's the cadence of the IRR. We are able to get analytical with each individual investment. When you ask people how they think about forecasting or doing their business and they just say, well, we need all of these things and they can't handicap one or the other and the ingredients, that's super frustrating for me.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hate intellectual dishonesty. I joke around internally, we call it form over function, where someone knows they're losing an argument and they accuse you of being hostile or delivering the message wrong. That's just because they know they're going to lose. I really hate that.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I get my son out of his crib every morning and getting him ready and getting all the stuff done since he's been born. It's the best way to start the day.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a gearhead. I love cars. I've just been an enthusiast my entire life. I had a car detailing business. I know how to drive manual transmission. I love taking my son out and driving stick shift and feeling the wind at your back. I've always been a car guy, you know, whether it's detailing them or building remote control cars or driving on the highway. I really do like driving. I'm a big time car enthusiast.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of a two part question. What have the investors we've gotten and what are the investors we should have? The vast majority of our investors are largely high net worth individuals that we've met and largely inbound. We've gotten a lot of financial practitioners, private equity guys, hedge fund guys, people that see the ingenuity of thought and see the work that we're doing. I think the challenge for the institutional allocator is it's volatile. Most of the institutions are non-taxable. So this idea of owning things for the long term and trading off volatility for after-tax return I think is less relevant for them. They've got current funding needs looking at a public equity strategy with a five or ten year view I think is challenging. The right investor is someone that is tax conscious with a long-term view that understands that finding these orphan securities and waiting for them to germinate can't take time.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“24 months, but what I can tell you is that there will be meaningful mean reversion in small cap stocks. What has happened over the last 11 years where money is getting sucked out, money is going to go in. Our strategies go in and out of vogue, but we don't change what we're doing. I think this is an amazing time to be doing what we're doing. I feel like I'm a buyer of every single thing that I own right now. We've stress tested our companies. I think they're all worth more. I don't really have a view on the macro if it goes down more or not, but I don't think any of our company's business models are in question. If anything, I think the CEOs and the company's ability to compound earnings has been empowered. And I'm a buyer of all of them.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From 1927 to 2010, which were the years prior to the launch of these strategies, that's growth and value, outperformed large by about 400 basis points. Since we started our strategies in 2011, the S&P or large cap indices have outperformed the small cap indices by 500 or 600 basis points. What that tells me is you've got 84 years of data telling you that small outperforms large. And then over the last 11 years, we've been doing this large as outperforms small, which means is this a good time to do what I'm doing? Of course it is because capital has been getting sucked out. There's a lot of indexing going on. There's a lot of structural inefficiencies. Everything needs to be mean reverting. The availability of private capital is going to be less readily available. So companies are going to go public earlier, which means the quality of the indices are going to improve, which means people are going to buy small caps more. I can't tell you whether it's six months or 12 months or”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the opportunities that look like today? I know as an operator, you're obviously nervous about the macroeconomic environment, but our team is also incredibly excited about the opportunities that creates. In your shoes, is this the best time for your strategy?”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One reason or another. And in general, the common thread is we want to partner with CEOs that have a lot of skin in the game. They care reputationally. They're invested for the long term. We can interact with them. I never want to be in the business of telling a CEO how to manage their business. All I want to do is help them structure their thoughts and help them communicate the holistic message so the investors can give them the cost of capital to operationalize what they're doing. It's taken almost 12 years to get here, but now we have a portfolio of companies that are owner operated high ROIC with low cyclicality. Does that mean that we aren't going to be engaged shareholders? You don't go from being activism to sitting in a treehouse all day, but I think we found the best parts of activism and put it in a bucket for people that actually want our advice.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, great question. If you go up and down the portfolio, there's immediately this aversion to cyclicality. Cyclical businesses are businesses that can dilute you at the bottom. We really want businesses that have real predictability, great recession-proof-for-recession-resistant characteristics par obviously services, the quick service restaurant. I'd make arguments that people would actually want to buy more software in a downturn because they want to lower their costs. That's a secular growth industry in a business that's arguably counter-cyclical. API group, they're doing fire sprinklers and fire detection services. You can't open your office building if the fire sprinkler isn't working. That's a statutory business. RCI hospitality. We like businesses, high recurring revenue, high gross margin, high predictability, recession proof or resistant on the non-technology side. We want businesses that have a high predictability of free cash flow, again, not necessarily cyclical, great ROIC characteristics. There are orphan for”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to find these owner operators, and we're not trying to get people to change the way they manage their business. We're trying to help operators and CEOs package their company in a way where they can get the right cost of capital and accelerate it. I don't want to tell someone how to run their restaurant software business or their fire safety business. I want to help these guys figure out a way to package it so people who are less lazy than me can figure out how to value this thing.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd like to say we haven't done a complete turnaround. As you know, every great entrepreneur needs to look internally and see what they can do better. The second version of ADW has created a heightened focus on some of the things we were doing well and elimination of the things that we were doing less well. By and large, we've exited activism. Does that mean if we are in a situation where something unforeseen happens that we won't protect our shareholders' interests? People change, but they don't change that much. We will always take a defensive position. I will never make an investment again solely under the auspices of activism. I don't ever see that happening. I look at companies where the reason why you own it is for activism, and I've found that that strategy, even when you win, distracts you materially from your other investments. There is a psychological cost to that, not just financial. The point is that I don't want to get out where”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good segue into the transformation of your firm in par might have been a way to kick that off. Tell us about the focus now. I've heard you say this before. It's like the private equity model in the public markets. And what are you guys investing in today?”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How quickly it would take the market to understand the value of par. The takeaway from all this, the major lesson in par and all of this is that terminal value matters. Ultimately, when you have a business with a high terminal value that's growing, it creates a lot of room for execution errors.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The activism took a little bit longer than I would have thought, but that was by and large on track. On the technical debt side, did I think that growth was going to have to get slowed down as much as it did? Maybe not. The thing that I got wrong the most is in technology investors need everything to be perfect. And as a value guy, I've always said it's so cheap if it's 85% right, you'll get 85% of the multiple or the value. And I think in technology, that's not the case. People want everything perfect. When you think about what we do, our business model is scratching at inventory. We want to find the Porsche that's sitting in the garage and we want to go and replace the tires and give it a car wash. And then we're going to drive it really, really hard. That's our business model. That was our business model owning Ferrari inside of Fiat. That was our model with Par. It's like we're never going to be able to buy a best-in-class software business at zero EV or whatever it is today at five times revenue. One of the things that I misjudged is”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About that, as somebody who's got to know everything, tell us something you got wrong. No process is perfect, it's impossible to map from 10 to 50 perfectly. Give us an example of something you got wrong, maybe on par”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got this thesis. The stock's for 10. It's worth 50, and that's where the framework with it under these principles. And then it's, okay, let me test the framework. If PAR is going to trade at 10 times revenue, then revenue needs to be this. Then I need to make sure the products are good. People can't rip them out. I found the original CFO of PAR who took the company public in 1982 and sent me a digital copy of the prospectus. I don't think that SEC even had it on file. That's what we do.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spending time on par. It's in upstate New York. The CEO has a terrible history of capital allocation and it's a liquid and it's small. If I can actually get a variant view on the company on their products, I know I'm going to be the only person doing that. Our process is very organic. In general, we like to look at companies in the context of Porter's Five Forces. What are the bargaining power of the suppliers? What are the bargaining power of the competitors? What is the technological differentiation in terms of moat around the business? How easy is it for people to get into it? Ultimately, we're trying to create this top line funnel, which is, is this interesting? Is it cheap? And what's going to get it uncheap? Which is the part that most people don't understand, which is this thing trades for $10. We think it's worth $50. How are we going to get from $10 to $50? Ultimately, in the beginning, it was activism, and then it was, how is the rest of the world going to figure it out without me shaking people to death? It was understanding that it's...”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know what I'm good at, and I know what I'm not good at. I'm never going to beat Tiger Global or Koto or anyone on Apple because they're going to have yippet data and they're going to have robots and AI and credit cards and all of this stuff that's just going to make it functionally impossible for me to beat them. Going back to this Joel Greenblatt thing, this is just who I am. I have always been a student of history. I've always wanted to understand why things happen the way they do and what I can learn from history. I want as much data as I can have. I need more data. I always need more data. I need to know more. I always feel uncomfortable knowing less than the other guy. So let's start with that. That's just who I am as a human being. Then when you riff onto getting into the stock market, well, I'm never going to win on Apple. I'm never going to win on Amazon. These people are going to have better data than me. So where can I beat people in this business? I can beat people on things that no one's spending time on. When you think about that, you look at par, for example.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and much credit to him to recognizing all of what you said and having the humility to deal with you at that time. And the reason I highlight that story was the length that you would go to in order to get a meeting to exert your will, but do in a way to bring everybody along. And part of that is your research process. I know I've told many people this. You discover nuggets on our organization before even I do at times, employee stuff, customers. Tell us a little about your research process, which as a CEO of a company you're researching, I don't really have a window into how you do it, but tell us a little bit about that process and what drives this incredible fact finding. I always joke when I got to par, you knew more about me than I knew about me. What drives this? What is the process?”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd written a bunch of letters. They wouldn't want to talk to me. You agreed to become CEO on an interim basis. We were basically a year and a half in. Basically what happened was I had to storm the castle. I ran everybody out of town. And the only guy was left was Seth Neet Singh, who had the energy and the craziness and the determination to execute on what could be possible. It's very hard for someone that has so much pride and ego. And you got to submerge these things. I think it was hard for John Salmon to go and sit face to face with someone who wrote a public letter saying you have a PhD in value destruction, but actions speak louder than words. He took the meeting. He took the notes and he empowered you to execute on what needed to get done. And here we are.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tell every employee apart, we work for our shareholders, and in the end, it's their capital we're using to pay our salaries, deliver our returns, waste money on whatever we decide to waste money on. So it's funny to ask you this question, but one of my remembrable experiences, the one that I think is illustrative of your process, maybe is the right way to bucket it, is the second time I met you, I wonder if you could tell that story because it was the first time you met the founder of PAR who at least owned about 30% of the company at the time. That was an aha moment to me thinking about who you were, how you went about your process, but also what differentiated you from the rest. I had recently joined the Board of Par. There was a board meeting in connection with our annual shareholder meeting in Verona, New York, which if you look on a map, it's sort of the middle of nowhere. It's not easy to get to. The directors walk in and there's Adam Wyden in the front row when we asked you, why are you here? He said, the only way I can get a meeting. You guys won't take my meeting. So I got to come here and show the shareholder meeting where you have to meet me. And I always thought that was amazing.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like, okay, I got two choices. I can sell my stock, do nothing, or I can basically do what I do best, or what I'm more or less retired from now, which is sound the alarm bells, write these letters, and basically wake people up and say, look, you've got these great assets. The company trades at a huge discount to liquidation, but every single day you don't restructure and do all these things, you're eating away at NAV. It was clear to us that the business had an enormous amount of upside. There was 40 years of legacy stuff that needed to get unwound. Everything has more or less played out.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Knew Bloomberg. I understood how much value Vertical SaaS added because I was using it and it was saving me all this money. What initially drew me in was the fact that I was getting at value prices. That's the value guy in me. And so I was like, all right, if everything goes to Hell in a hand basket, I still think we make money on this when I was buying it at $8 or whatever. I got to know you a little bit. I did all the primary work that we did. I was basically riffing on all the data. Great hardware relationships. Company been around a long time. They had had five guys, they had RBs. They were talking to Dairy Queen. They had all these customers. And I said, these guys have all these really big customers. And everyone, including people in and around the company, are saying that they've basically been starving this software asset for capital. That brought me to this idea, which is you have this business that's”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he had written a letter. And I remember he had pitched it many years ago. And I always like it when small companies are doing big things. It's like walk shark tank. Mark Cuban says, well, who are your customers? You're like, oh, you got so-and-so. And I was like, wow, there's this little company. They're in upstate New York. They're selling hardware to McDonald's. They're selling to all these really great tier one customers for some of the parts net net. It was totally in transition. You had all these board members who had just signed off. And it was family owned. What was interesting to me was you had a company that was heavily family owned, had a great brand, and arguably was worth more dead than alive. But there was this idea that the software asset brink was basically the linchpin for a vertical software company. It was clear to me as I studied software. Par was really our first software investment. It was this idea that new capital IQ.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Parr was definitely at the early part of the journey. In 18 and 19, people say, oh, you had an activist letter out on every single one of our companies. And we basically did. To us, that was probably endemic of the fact that everything was cheap, but it was almost cheap for a reason. Parr is kind of the one bastion where it was cheap for a reason, but the emotional and time investment there was worth it. What I mean by that is you could do all the activism you want on select interior concepts or on fiat, but ultimately these were businesses that were going to have a hard time getting their cost of capital right. They needed M&A. They needed all these things. These were businesses that it was going to take many, many years to figure out the business quality. And the company might not even succeed on it. Parr was one of the few companies in that era where you can categorically say the juice was worth the squeeze. How did I find out about it? Travis at Voss, we had had a relationship.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably a good segue. I suspect Parr was early in that journey of transition. If you could talk a bit about how you stumbled across PAR and what led you to that, and then we'll talk a little bit about some of our own interactions, which haven't always been friendly, a little bit contentious, but I think also highlight your success as an investor.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Times and the business grows, we're still going to be right. We are really focused on finding companies where we can buy more of them when they go down. It's less about total amount of capital and more about what we've learned.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By and large, what we've tried to do is, A, find people that are financially aligned with us, but not to the extent where you can get in, but you can't get out. I wouldn't say it's his liquidity driven. What we have found is that knowing when to buy things is super obvious, knowing when to sell isn't. And so if you're not going to get the sell methodology perfect, then you got to be in a situation where time is your friend. When you look at our portfolio today, many things are down, but I think by and large, they're all buys because the story is as good or better and you're being compensated on the other side to use API group as an example. If we thought that API group was worth 20 times EBITDA because Pi and Barker sold it 25 times and Science sold for 20 times and we owned it at 10 times or 8 times or whatever. If it's now trading at six or seven times, if we're right on the underwriting, then maybe we don't get back to 20 times because of interest rates or whatever. But if it trades at split the difference 15.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before you made this structural change to higher quality from the net nets, was it performance driven or was it truly an evolution of more AUM? You need higher things that could compound for a long time.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are aligned with you financially on all levels and also aligned on the ingenuity of thought and the ability to see ideas on their merit. That's brought us to more of the second evolution, which is finding really great companies that we don't have to sell with management teams that are really financially aligned with us. When you look at our portfolio today, obviously par you're there API group with Martin Franklin, amazing success, large insider ownership, great track record, RCI hospitality, founder owner, CEO, GFL, founder owner, CEO, Playboy, more or less founder owner, CEO. When you look at the evolution of ADW, we've made two critical modulations, I would say, for the better. We want to own more liquid companies, not be a slave to it. But by and large, own companies where if we're wrong on the timing, we're not wrong on the investment. Partner with people for the long term and have it be worth the money.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to get people to understand your way of thinking, there was a large opportunity cost to that. I would separate the ADW evolution in two parts. The first seven years, we obviously had meaningful returns, but we had some growing pains on some level in 2018 and 19. Part of that was we had outgrown in some cases some of our activist strategies. I also found that it was easier to own companies that grew. You didn't have to get the entry and the exit right. In a lot of cases, some of the companies we were doing were buying them at very low multiples, but you kind of had to get the entry and the exit right. And for us, there was this gravitational pull towards higher quality companies. We got into two controlled companies where management obviously was not really aligned with us in terms of they owned over 50% and the communication, the capital allocation, whatnot. A lot of what we took away from that was it's easier to engage with man.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've always had a micro cap bend in the early days. We had some great wins. You take the opportunities that are available to you at the time. So as you know, coming out of the Great Financial Crisis, there were companies trading below cash. There were companies trading at one-time ZBITO. We bought this company Lorex Technologies. It was one of our first investments in 2011. We bought it at like 25 cents. And I think it ended up getting sold a year and a half later for like a buck 40 or 20 or something like that. And in that situation, it was a company that had been recently recapitalized. And the guy who was running it, his brother had died and it had been neglected and he turned it around and they had great experience in electronics distribution. And they turned it around. It was generating lots of cash and they ended up selling it. At that time, when we started, we were focusing on companies that were net net or very cheap on current cash flow as companies were cheap for a reason. And so in a lot of cases, we ended up doing some activism. And I'd say, by and large, we were successful at it. But what I found is that it was very exhausting.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fund was a little under $500,000. I lived at home, kept costs low and distractions low. And I finished year one at about $8 or $9 million. And that was enough to keep a base level of cost. I came back to New York the rest is history.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had graduated Columbia Business School. I was at a crossroads. I'm like, I can go and work for some big manager and I wouldn't be able to manage my own money. The types of things that I had had success with in recent years, I wouldn't really be able to operationalize. And so I spoke to a lot of my mentors. A bunch of them basically said, you're most of the way there. And the things that you don't know, I'm probably not going to be able to teach you. The chagrin of my grandparents and my parents and everyone, I basically said the market is still historically cheap. I really enjoy managing my own money and having the ability to be financially independent, effectively build a track.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blood had done was around some of the parts. We started screening for these companies, and that's contemporaneous with the great financial crisis. Some of the companies we found during the Great Financial Crisis were generational opportunities. I had basically gotten the opportunity to institutionalize in my own way the types of things that we're looking for, then get a tidal wave event where I can actually invest my capital and use the framework to define these things. And then coming out of it.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wharton undergrad. I've been investing and investing in things that I understood, things that my grandmother told me about, things that my uncle told me about, and someone I was working with had introduced me to Joel Greenblatt. Joel Greenblatt was on the composite in my fraternity at Penn. And of course, I was so oblivious to it. But this concept of orphan securities really resonated to me. I was always a value buyer. I always liked the idea of buying stuff on eBay, discount merchandise, and this concept of understanding an opportunity existed and it was structural, whether it was a spinoff or a post reorg or the company didn't have research coverage, but ultimately this idea that you could basically create a framework for finding these things. And again, this was contemporaneous with financial technology. The ability to go and screen for companies with high insider ownership, high return on invested capital, companies that are going through some sort of structural change. If their gross margins are changing, a lot of the work that Joel Green”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adam, thanks for joining us. You've got an interesting story, and while you're young, you've got a long history as a business person, an investor. Take us way back. How did this journey start? Thank you, Savnit. I appreciate you taking the time to do this. I obviously had an interest in business at a very early age. My grandmother was the head of her stock club. She taught me compounded interest in her checkbook before I could add from very early on there was this idea that investing in great people and great ideas early and being patient with it can create enormous financial flexibility. I was always very entrepreneurial, the idea that you could open a business, whether it was the car detailing business I had in high school or the remote control cars that I figured out. You could buy them at the hobby store or online and then go and build them and spec them and paint the case and sell it for three or four X on eBay. I invested throughout high school and in college it really blossomed after I graduated.”
2022-09-22 · Capital Allocators · Adam Wyden - ADW Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.37) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source