YouSaid · the spoken record

Brad Gerstner

lines on the record: 100
first: 2023-11-17
most recent: 2023-11-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Twitter space, Twitter spaces, I think is some of the most interesting dialogue that's happening anywhere in media today. And so again, I think there's a spot moment in time where there's some fair criticisms. And I think Elon himself has said we've made some mistakes. But I'm just saying the consensus view. That, you know, and I've heard it every time this guy starts a business.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Elon wants this platform to be something totally different. He thinks there's an opportunity for this to really live at the intersection, you know, to harness the power of our collective brain and provide a great AI, build on the back of Twitter to open up the public square to discussion. So when you think about it as a business, when I look at Elon building reusable rockets, electric cars, changing the world, you might say this was not the highest and best use of his time or energy. But having had that conversation with him, he's deeply passionate about it. He believes in it. I would never bet against the guy.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you do work on Twitter, you can tailor your feed in a way that will be more productive for you, right? I imagine with AI, they'll tailor the feed in a way that it can be more productive to you. They don't want to alienate users. In fact, the user volume or the user and engagement studies that I'm seeing are higher, not lower over the course of the past four or five months. But I agree with you and stipulate that a lot of the advertisers that were there have left. I think that Elon is trying to get them back, but more importantly,”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really want to hear your thoughts on this. Well, I mean, I want to take two angles on that. I want to talk about, respond to that, and then give you the business angle. You know, the truth of the matter is the public square has been a pretty brutal place for 250 years of American history. Whether you're standing in the halls of Congress or you're in the public square, people always said things that people disagreed with. And that's the beauty of this country, right?”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about the things that they're now doing on Twitter. Everything from virtual and fully encrypted private messaging calls, fully hosted videos, short form videos, long form videos, subscription business that empowers content creators to share in the upside of those subscriptions. There's payments coming. I mean, like, this is, and now we have X.ai where, you know, he launched Grok last week. It's rumored that 20 people working for about three months have produced a very credible AI. Remember, Elon was also the founder of open AI. Okay, so to underestimate him, he's the first to raise his hand. He said, I overpaid for the asset. I did it because I wanted to protect free speech. You can quibble about that one way or the other. It's a longer debate. But what I would say”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He let go 80% of the people at Twitter. And I know everybody on the East Coast flipped their lids. How can he do this? Mean spirited, you know, et cetera. But the cultures at a lot of these places in Silicon Valley were broken. They were bloated and they were entitled. What I've seen out of Twitter is a 10X increase in product velocity.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, call me outside of consensus on this. You know, I know it's not popular today, but I'm in Camp Elon. I think Twitter was pretty broken before. I think, you know, what we've learned about Twitter was they may have had a lot of advertisers, but I'm not sure how well it was actually working for users. You know, I'm on Twitter. I find it probably my most valuable source of information. Bloomberg's right up there, Barry. But I would say that my newsfeed in Twitter is extraordinary. And Elon came in there. Think about this.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Software businesses that's going to have over 30 free cash flow margins has a massive market, all this AI stuff that we're talking about the entire database market. Do you know in the year 2000 the database market was worth a trillion dollars? It's the single largest market in all of software. And it should be. Think what is the primitive to everyone.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so remember we have different funds. So we're investing out of our six venture capital fund. We just had our first close on our seventh venture capital fund. So in those funds where we invest in those very early rounds in Snowflake, yes, you know, our journey with Snowflake started a decade ago. So for those investors, we've returned capital. And Altimeter's Fund one will probably be in the top five all-time returns for Silicon Valley because of the likes of Snowflake and Mongo and other great names that we had in that portfolio. In our hedge fund, right, where we're focused on annual returns, just like you, we start every year and we say, okay, what's going to power a 20% risk adjusted return in this portfolio? And so, yes, we still own Snowflake because we see it compounding on the top line in this 30 plus percent range and it's still expanding margins. So this is one of those unique and rare.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, a series B You know, a company maybe somewhere between 50 and 200 million dollars in that first round of funny. Snowflake, which was one of our Hall of Fame moments, we invested in that first round. It was pre-revenue. They had about 10 beta customers of the product. It was about $170 million valuation. And we would invest in every subsequent round and I think own 17% of the company when they went public.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Carved out are brand and our niche is we still wear the black t-shirts. We're in Silicon Valley. We have the sensibilities of venture capitalists, right? I've started the companies. I've stood in their shoes. I've hired. I've fired. I've done all the challenging stuff. But I also am very familiar with New York, with CNBC, with IPOs, with scaling to the public markets. So we usually take the handoff right when they discover product market fit.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, great question. You know, so when I started these companies, I started literally on the back of a napkin. So that would, you know, we would call that seed stage in the parlance. That's where you're asking your friends and your family for money. You're trying to establish product market fit. Altimeter generally doesn't invest in seed stage companies or early series A companies because those companies are what we call in the business pre-product market fit. You have an idea. You're trying to build a product. There are world-class partners of ours in Silicon Valley. You know, I think of like a Mike Spizer at Sutter Hill, a Martine Casado and Andrees and, you know, Gurley when he was at benchmark. But now Chathan or Eric Vishria or my friends at Sequoia. That's what they do. The firms are built purpose built. Founders fund to do those early stage gestations where we've really”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kicking out tech companies. Correct. So we were shorting the components of those indexes that we thought had gotten too bold up as safety trades in 2022. You had a reversion to the mean this year. And so I know I think in this business, I've been doing this for a long time, probably 20 years now in the public markets. Technology by its very essence is about disruption. If you ever think you can go to sleep on a technology company, it's a sure way to get carried out on a stretcher. It requires agility. It requires intensity. That's why I think being in Silicon Valley, investing and talking every day with venture capital companies, founders, et cetera, is a huge competitive advantage to us because we see the disruption coming years in advance.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at the SP this year, the SP is up 15 16% through today. If you take technology companies out of the SP, the S&P's down on you down for you, no doubt. The Russell 2000 is down on the year. Just down.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the start of the year, we're shorting some of the companies that we thought were COVID beneficiaries that wouldn't be sustainable. And we've seen those companies go down.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that's right. I mean, there's a reason they've gone up, Barry, right? Remember, I said NVIDIA, the expectation was they're going to have negative 6% data center growth and that we're going to have anemic growth in their earnings for the year. Instead, it's exploded higher, the multiple today for NVIDIA, or at least at 400 bucks where the stock was last week. The multiple was somewhere around 25 times next year's consensus earnings. We started the year at 40 times. The multiple is compressed. Meta is still trading below 20 times earnings. That's below Levi's. That's below Coca-Cola. Companies that are growing at a fraction of the rate with nowhere close to the incremental EBITDA margins produced by a company like Meta. Meta has going to have a big role to play in AI. So it has all of these growth vectors these other companies don't have. So yes, I do think those big companies are a place to play, but we also in our hedge fund.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of one system and into OpenAI and worry about whether OpenAI is using this data to train models or anything else, you can't do that. You have privacy and governance requirements, HIPAA requirements, whatever they are. If you're these big enterprises. So instead, the data has gravity. It stays put and you bring the compute to the data. You bring the AI workloads to the data. You bring the predictive modeling workloads to the data. The data science workloads to them. And that's what Snowflake's doing in space.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're 60% today. And if you look at what we owned, excuse me, we owned NVIDIA. We own Meta. We owned Uber. Those are three of the top four performing Nasdaq 100 companies, I think, this year. We also own companies like Snowflake. So remember, data and data infrastructure. That is the number one primitive to AI. There is no AI without data. And 10,000 or so customers, the biggest companies in the world like Apple, JP Morgan, et cetera, have entrusted their mission-critical data with Snowflake. Now, a lot of people, in fact, I heard Kramer say on CNBC yesterday, well, Snowflake's not really an AI company. You know, I love public commentary like that because that allows me to generate alpha. The truth of the matter is that Snowflake has seen record increases in their data science and AI workloads because no enterprise wants to port all their data.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too many dollars that went into bonds right before bonds collapsed. Too many dollars that went into cyclicals that were trading at 25 times earnings, despite the fact that they had 5 or 7% growth. And everybody had vacated the scene on technology. Remember, in December of last year, NVIDIA is trading at $125 a share. And the consensus sell-side expectation for data center growth this year was negative 6%. So don't give me this craziness about efficient markets. In the short run, markets are voting machines. They're not weighing machines. And the consensus estimates were radically wrong at the end of last year. We loaded the boat. We shrugged off the Mike Wilson hard landing consensus bet that everybody had on at the start of the year. We were 93% net long at the start of the year.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, as you know, 2022 was a tech recession. It was a challenging year for all of us who are investing in tech. And yet we bounce back in 2023 with one of our best years in the history of the firm. And what we recognized in the fall of 22, in fact we had our investor day for all of our LPs. And our Investor Day was in October on the age of AI, before ChatGPT entered the public consciousness. And what we were already hearing throughout 2022 was the voracious appetite people had for NVIDIA GPUs. We were hearing about the moves that Microsoft was making. So we repositioned our portfolio at the end of 22, recognizing that there had been too many dollars that went into safety trades.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their bottom line margins will expand. Their top lines will reaccelerate. And so it's not just going to be the gold rush for venture, though venture will do just fine. I think it will be a great time for Venture as well. But I do think that the incumbents here are going to compete very vigorously.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second primitive is massive amounts of compute. Those things take scale and they take money, massive amounts of money, tens of billions of dollars in order to build the infrastructure to do what ChatGPT is doing. So this is not your typical venture domain where you put 5 million bucks in and you wake up in 10 years and they've disrupted Google or Microsoft. The incumbents are not asleep at the Switch. Satcha knew 15 years ago answers not 10 blue links. He is in front of this. He was prescient with open AI, co-pilot in the enterprise is the fastest adopted product in the history of Microsoft. So I think 80% of the benefits of AI over the course of the next three to four years are going to inure to the benefit of the incumbents, to the larger platforms that are already public today whose businesses will get better.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, and listen, I've also said I think what is different. So if you say, well, Brad, are you excited about AI and venture capital, you know, given this new super cycle and these are going to be the disruptors against the incumbents? And that was true. If you think back to 2000, Amazon was the disruptor to Walmart or to Macy's. If you think about it mobile, the iPhone was the disruptor to your BlackBerry, to Nakia, or to the Palm Pilots of the world or in cloud. Snowflake was the disruptor to Teradata and to Oracle, etc. But when you think about AI, what are the primitives to AI? The first primitive is massive amounts of data.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said, Dad, you know, it's funny, all my friends at school think ChatGPT is just good for writing essays. He goes, I now use it for everything. When people say stuff like that, when I go to the Javit Center, they all raise their hands, when I'm speaking to groups of founders and they all tell me they're using as a replacement. When I watch the Open AI Dev Day yesterday And I realized the pace of innovation is faster than any innovation I ever saw with the internet, faster than any innovation I ever saw with mobile, faster than any innovation I ever saw with the cloud. So whatever it is today, which it already is eye-poppingly good, whatever it is today, you have no idea how good this is going to be in three to five years.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And on the other side of this chasm, knowing they have to compete with meta AI, with ChatGPT, with copilot, with Claude at Anthropic, with whatever the post AI to series going to be at Apple. Do you think they're going to be able to replicate the same dominant monopoly in this new world that they were over here? Now, I know your answer as an investor. You would say, well, Brad, it's possible, but I'd apply a high discount rate to that. And that's the truth. And yet, if you look at it today, it shouldn't be like when I say this, it's not attacking Google. It seems to me to be a statement of the obvious that, you know, we are 10 years from now, we're not going to be using a card catalog called 10 Blue Links to find information. My son came in the other day, 15 years old. His name's Lincoln.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I needed to know the I said to Paul, you use Google and I'll use ChatGPT. I got the answer instantaneously. It took him three or four minutes of hunting and pecking around. It was full of ads about 401k providers and everything else. And the reality is this is a better tool simply because it made us more productive in the moment. Google is an extraordinary business. A healthy Google is good for Silicon Valley. The challenge is they are facing a massive innovator's dilemma. The organizing philosophy principle for the internet for 20 plus years has been internet search and it's changing. So I said to somebody the other day, they said, yeah, but Google's got AI. They've got Barred. They've got this and that. I said, I will stipulate they'll be successful in AI. But do you think they can cross the cat?”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the end of the day, you know, a lot of the information on Google you could have also found in a card catalog in a library, but you would have to drive there. You would have to open the card catalog. You would have to go find the periodicals. You would have to find the books. You would have to read them yourself. So really when you think about, I describe Google, it's the largest card catalog in the history of the world, right? It's 10 blue links, but it's an infinite number of blue links. But you have to open the blue link. You have to read the information yourself. And so I did this experiment the other day. I was lucky enough to be having dinner in Omaha with Paul Reeder. And Paul and I were flying back to New York.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enterprise, and then look at consumers. I was speaking at the Javit Center, 2,000 people in the audience. I asked how many of you have used ChatGPT in the last two days as a replacement to Google, half the hands in the room went up. That is the first time in 20 years there's been a challenge to Google search monopoly. And Google search monopoly represents over 100% of the profits of the business. So this is one of the most fascinating times I've seen in my 25-year career, and we're just getting started.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you think about what AI is already doing for the enterprise, we're seeing 30 to 50 percent productivity improvements in engineers. There's never been a technology in the history of technology. There's never been a tool that increases productivity almost instantaneously by 30 to 50 percent. Call centers are now 50% more productive. So you're seeing margins explode as people are able to run their call centers more effectively. Sales centers are more productive. So you want to know why meta doesn't have to Kager its employee headcount at 40% anymore. You want to know why Dara reported for Uber that again their number of employees was down quarter over quarter. I wrote this letter a year ago, time to get fit. It was an open letter I published to Meta. You know, Mark would go on to write his letter Year of Efficiency. This is what we're seeing. The power of AI is unleashing incredible potential within the”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, you know, I've had the true luxury of investing into what we call four super cycles. You know, I think Satcha calls them platform disruptions. Internet, mobile, cloud, and now AI. And I've said in several places, I think that the platform disruption around augmented intelligence is going to be bigger than the internet itself. Now, follow me on this.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was running Bing at the time And he was buying this as a search business into the search platform. And I said, I had dinner with him the other night. And I said, do you remember the conversation we had when you bought Faircast? And he said, yes, what I said was, we'll never beat Google with 10 Blue Links. We have to get to answers. Think about that. 15 years before ChatGPT started producing answers. Satcha knew that that's where they had to get to if they were going to leapfrog Google. Such a fascinating one.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was my first AI investment. 2005. We back it. He was at the University of Washington. He had an idea for being able to build predictive analytics into the future movement of airline ticket pricing using early AI techniques. And we would go on to sell that business to Microsoft in 2008. Now, here's the interesting part of the story. The person who bought Faircast in 2008 for Microsoft was Sacha Nadella.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The third company I star is room 77 that Google bought. Faircast was an investment, a Series B investment we made in 2005, I believe. In fact, we backed the head of artificial intelligence. Listen to this, Barry. 2005. We backed the head of artificial intelligence”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advisors were calling me saying, Don't leave your firm. The world's ending. This is a terrible time. But what I had was having started three other companies on the back of a napkin, I knew what it felt like to be in a windowless office on the back of a napkin by yourself. And I just said to him, the horse has left the barn. Like I'm doing this. And I'll have whatever. We bought it at, I think it was $10 a share. We would own it when it was over $2,000 a share.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I was feeling pretty good about things. I said, you know, now I've been thinking about starting my own firm. Now's the time. I had soft circled a couple hundred million dollars from some endowments. These are folks who said we'll give you money. We think you're good at this. We want to help you launch your own firm. And explicitly what I was going to do is move to Silicon Valley and start a crossover firm by a founder. So I had started three companies. This was somebody who was venture first, public market second. And I thought that was a really unique wedge into the venture community and public investing. But of course, I didn't know the world was going to melt down in 2008. So by August, the world started melting down. Remember, I've got a three-month old child and September rolls around every morning CNBC. It's gapping down 5%, 6%.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you always have to contextualize those moments in your life. So I had started a third company called Room 77 that we had end up selling to Google. I had just gotten married in the fall of 2007. I had my first child in June of 2008. And I told my very pregnant wife at the time, we didn't have a lot of money that I was going to leave this secure job. Now, the first half of 2008, I was doing pretty well in the fund. I think I was up 20 or 25%. Right.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started plotting stocks. I started thinking about public market investing. I started doing some of my own public market investing. And you have to understand what this felt like. For a kid on the outside looking in who never had money for the first time to buy a stock, to make some money, to sell a stock. And so I would say I had an appetite for the public markets. When Paul met me, I was modeling companies like Priceline in my spare time and investing out of my, you know, probably Fidelity account at the time. And Paul said, hey, I think you would be good in this hedge fund business. And I said, Paul, I don't know anything about managing a public portfolio. But the deal we made with each other, I actually said to him, I'll come work for free. I said, you just have to agree to have lunch with me every day. If I love the business, I'll probably start my own because by this time I had started and sold a couple companies and I knew I was an entrepreneur. And, you know.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mentioned my grandfather. He sacrificed everything. So it was a surprise when he passed away that we learned that he left $100,000, $25,000 to each of the four grandchildren. And I vowed on that day that I'm going to multiply this money. This guy sacrificed everything. I'm not wasting it. And, you know, so in law school, I went and got my Series 7 and 63.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the truth of the matter is, if you think about Warren Buffett's hedge fund, Seth Claran's hedge fund, Paul Reeder's hedge fund, they never quarantine themselves to just public investments. They just made great investments. Sometimes they were private, sometimes they were public. And so I was really a believer that this was going to be the future of venture capital, that companies were going to scale faster, that there was going to be a lot of information flow that you could extract out of venture into the public markets and vice versa. I had an appetite for both the public markets and the venture markets. So I went to Paul, who was the founder of Par Capital, and I said, hey, how about if I build your technology practice? I'll run a public sleeve and I'll also run a venture sleeve in technology. Paul was crazy enough to invite me on board.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now that chronology makes more sense to them. This was an early online travel company that we started We would not only eventually, so that was 1999. I was still in business school helping them incubate it. I became co-CO of the business and we sold our stake in the business to Barry Diller in 2001. The internet had crashed, but our business was working really well. It was fortuitous. And on that successful launch deal, they were able then to go raise General Catalyst 1. I learned a tremendous amount from them. They're both still dear friends. But one of the things I learned in that first startup, I had two guys, two investors who were not traditional venture capitalists. One was Seth Clarman, the founder of Bao Post, and the other one was Paul Reeder, the founder of Par Capital. These guys would be bucketed as hedge fund guys”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, in fact, I think they were still investing money off their balance sheet called FC Capital Fialco Cutler Capital. Gotcha. Okay. All right.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at the time, there was no general catalyst. It was 1999. The internet was going wild. There were some established venture capital firms in Boston, Matrix, Charles River, Greylock, Highlands, et cetera, Bain. But there are these two enterprising young guys, David Fialco and Joel Cutler, forces of nature. And they wanted to start a venture firm. And so we knew we had to put together a launch deal in order to launch this venture capital firm. I help them put together that launch deal”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Harvard Business School, it was a transformative time. 1999-2000, the internet was blowing up and that would change really everything.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I took the job. I got there. I think it paid $60,000 a year. And I realized how poor I was. And I had grown up poor. And I didn't want to spend the rest of my life begging for money. So the truth is I thought to myself, if I could get into one of these fancy business schools, I'll go there. I'll figure out how to make a million bucks, and I'll come back and I'll run for governor. And that was 25 years ago.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The matter is, I was lucky enough when I came back from studying overseas to work for an incredible statesman, Indiana Senator Dick Luger. 1990, 91. He and Sam Nunn were denuclearizing the world with the Sam Nunn bill. This was post the fall of the wall, the end of the court. Or it was exciting times. And I just hit it off with this incredible man. And so when I graduated from law school, he pings me one day and he said, hey, I would like for you to accept an appointment as Deputy Secretary of State.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just voracious curiosity about the world of politics and economies and trying to make sense out of it. But because my dad went broke, I have three siblings, so there are four of us. His father, so my grandfather, he came to the grandkids. He sacrificed everything. This was a self-taught man. I remember his bookshelf. It had physics textbooks and biology textbooks. And he would just read them. He couldn't afford to go to college. And so he came to the grandkids and he said, you can't be entrepreneurs. You have to become professionals. Law school, medical school, become an architect. But we got to get the family back on track. Right. And so really to honor his wish, I went to law school. As it turns out, it's incredible training in just how to think analytically.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you're highlighting a random background, and we'll come back to this. I do think when I look for analysts today, I look for interesting backgrounds. You know, all of these things, I would say the thing that connects them.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I learned so much from Pete. But Pete was one of these guys, he didn't spend a lot of time analyzing. The way an entrepreneur does it is they A B test. They're prone to action. So Pete would say, jump in the car with me, and we'd go to a competitor's lot, and he'd be measuring, you know, the dimensions on the new RVs out from the competitors on their lot. He's like, we don't need to waste money on expensive architects. We can just do this ourselves. Run a better, lower cost operation. He knew about competitive modes. Like I say, Pete knew about Michael Porter's Five Forces, all the stuff you learn at Harvard Business School, but he learned it by A-B testing it in the real world. And so pleasure to work for him. And yeah, he went on to, that became the biggest RV company in the world.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was a tough times in America, you know, growing up where I did in Northwest Indiana, you know, when I got to high school, I realized my dad's business didn't make it. I had to find my way out of this town. I was going to have to pay for college. So I had a job. And, you know, Elkhart, Indiana happens to be the RV capital of the world. And there was a gentleman I got introduced to named Pete Legal. Pete Legal had built an RV company called Cobra, sold it or partnered with private equity, had a bad experience, left that, and said, I'm going to do it over again. And he had a little startup RV company called Forest River. Pete's an absolute force in nature. And, you know, so when he asked me if I'd come be his right-hand guy, I had no idea what that meant, but I knew I'd learn a lot. So I worked there the summers of my junior and senior year, and then I'd worked throughout the year a bit.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the show. And, you know, I grew up in rural Indiana. I'm 52 years old, so it was 19, you know, early 80s. My dad was first generation college, became an entrepreneur, started an auto parts manufacturing business. He chose a challenging time. There were double-digit interest rates in America, double-digit inflation, the Japanese were attacking our auto industry. And as you remember, that part of the world was known as the Rust Belt.”
2023-11-17 · Masters in Business · Brad Gerstner on Tech Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source