YouSaid · the spoken record

Charlie Songhurst

lines on the record: 70
first: 2025-06-27
most recent: 2025-06-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Oh my god, there are so many. There are so, so many examples. I think it's probably the current one of often my enthusiasm has been greater than my competence. And it's the people that bet on the enthusiasm more than the competence. I'm internally grateful to them.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing to do with the companies that are actually working on it, it's to do with sort of the pickaxes being termed from wood to iron, making their work far more efficient. But Nvidia will probably capture some value of that but probably won't capture the greatest of value. Same if you were to write a sort of history of early computing in the 90s and 2000s. It'd be interesting to write it from the importance of the evolution of Intel chips and modem speeds as the primary drivers as opposed to the narrative history of the growth of these great companies.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see because you had to spend so much on some microsystem servers and sort of physical equipment that you just had poor IRR across the whole industry. Then AWS and Azure come along and critically as a startup you don't know your own future demand curve because you don't know whether you're going to get product market fit. So you either had to buy too many servers in which case you waste capital or too few in which case you couldn't meet demand whereas with AWS and Azure they've effectively taken that risk out of the equation and you can almost know that your cost base only scales with your success. Is the entire industry just sitting in that? I kind of in an intuitive feel it probably is. Better luck and good. Maybe we get an AI boom in the next couple of years. Maybe that would be written about as that bike us in ML. Maybe it's actually NVIDIA's Ampere chips and the emergence of sort of five and seven nanometer nodes just drive improvements in throughput that drives ML up.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you sometimes wonder how much timing matters. Was a site like Pinterest always going to exist within a year that you could download a page of images on the internet in under 100 milliseconds? Was that the sort of temporal inevitability of a product like that? And is it the same for most products? Was GPS and mobile phone, did that make an Uber-like thing inevitable in around 2009-2010? One of the great unknowns is the Temple 1. And then I think the other sort of great unknown is how much of value is actually created for the top layers of the stack by the bottom layers that don't capture it. So are we all just the beneficiaries? Is Angel investing pure the beneficiary of the emergence of AWS and Azure? Because I can tell a story whereby Ainge investing just didn't exist because it was negative.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, after we finish this, I'll think of tons, but I'm sort of failing to think of anything in the moment. I think there's one I would pick. It would be one of the things that's sort of fascinating in sort of the history of tech is how much startups are temple inevitabilities. So as a phrase someone said to me, what's the difference between a heretic and a prophet in tech? The heretic gets burnt at the stake. The prophet becomes famous about two years.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, one of the ones that I think is always fascinated to me is just how geographically to spell it networks. Often you get these very sort of tight communities, in some ways the valley, in some ways sort of New York, say the hedge fund community. And sometimes the most obvious insights are just from going between one to the other and just seeing the difference in worldviews in stark belief from each other. And so I sort of think about that constantly. One of the ones that's most powerful is just thinking, imagine thinking about the same problem, not from a US perspective, but from, say, a Finnish perspective or an Albanian perspective. And suddenly topics look very, very different. And there's a danger of defaulting to the sort of, because the US is sort of the world hegemon, to defaulting to that mindset. And that's not always the best, most predictive view.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, 100%. And I think, Attrick, you could overlay amazing people in a unique configuration. You get an information photo that is both accretive to you. It pulls you up, but is also a unique lens in the world. And from unique lenses, you get unique opportunities.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very simply, if you think back to sort of 30 years ago, your basic problem is lack of information. So you sort of read about capital markets investors in the 90s and they're leading SEC firings, leading sell cycle reports, they're trying to get time of management. But it's a fundamental lack of information problem. Now you look at the massive growth of available information, and I think it becomes much more of a filtering problem. And in some ways, the best way to filter is”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going into entrepreneurship, and that talent has to pull out of somewhere. Now, I think again, from a sort of societal viewpoint, I think they talent to people in things that can scale their products to millions of people is higher utility than putting them in effect by a high-end artisan profession like consulting the law where their output doesn't scale.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is completely Matt's IP, which was very interesting to think where talented people go as a framework. And so if you go back and go the other way and say, what can you learn from investing when you look at history? It's interesting to think he's an underestimated cause of the decline of some institution. Not all the stuff people think about when they wrote about it, but just that very talented people who are young chose to go a different direction. So there was a time when you're a young man and you can choose, do I go and do an administration of a Roman province or do I join the early Christian church? Possibly the talent started to flow towards the church and away from Roman institutions and that actually caused a weakening. That is a generalized framework of where exceptional challenges to go is super interesting. So one thought that occurs in our world is perhaps the sort of investment banks and consulting firms and law firms of tomorrow will be much less good than their precursors 20, 30 years ago because so many towns.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost an even mix between US, UK, continental Europe would account for 90% with the main 10 scattered between Asia, Africa, Latin America, with a particular hub in Singapore. Because an incubator called entrepreneurs first that I invest with a great deal.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that may be an underpriced benefit of Europe. I think the other much more cheerful and practical one is there are countries whose institutions weren't developed enough to build a Google. Arguably, that's every other country apart from the US. But I think it is certainly true of very small European countries because they just don't have the complexity of legal system. They don't obviously have a means of company going public. They don't have the institutional norms or the depth of financing or everything like that. But now I see so many companies come out of Europe that a Delaware corporations, LLCs that have, say, West Coast U investors, their legal documents by Wilson Sancini or some other US firm. And you have this amazing mix of sort of Soviet quality education, which is very high in math and logic, post-Soviet GDP per head, which basically means your capital goes very far when higher labor force, but with US high trust.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is amazing that if you look at the top 10, maybe even the top 20 by now, companies in the world by market cap, they're exclusively US and China. This is an absolutely fascinating status and says so much about the last 30 years. There's a very sort of dark line of thought which says one of the best things about Europe is that you probably have a less geopolitical risk than any other place. There's something about the horrors of Somme and Verdun and Stalingrad that makes it sort of unimaginable for Germany and France to have a conflict whereas I think it is much more imaginable to have China, India, US. Those some countries have conflict. So in some ways one of the things you have in Europe is a sort of absence of systemic risk of wipeout. Because if you look at what really destroys investing returns, it's geopolitical conflict. If you look at the collapse of European wealth in World War I, World War II, it's just absolutely epic.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About finance, where it's demarcated by nation state, even though it's a pure electron good. And so anything that's just pure numbers in the sky should actually be globally scalable, but it isn't because of the existing finance regulatory environment and the existing historical paths sort of banks when they were physical institutions. That makes me think this globalization of finance has the potential for multiple trillion dollar market cap companies over the next decades.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say it's probably entrepreneurs in markets that are non-obvious. And I don't mean because their end market is non-obvious. It's people addressing global problems, but in some secondary city in Romania, because capital markets at that stage are just not efficient enough to find them. There's a famous company UiPath, I think, now worth about $10 billion that came out of Romania and sort of visit Power Domatic example of that. I think if you were to say, where is there a core option, it's probably something in crypto. It may exist or it may not exist. I think one of the great questions is, is everything in that space now out of Ista exciting or ICO spit and Amazon stage? That's a very, very hard question to answer in foresight, irritatingly obvious in hindsight. But it does seem there's a probability mass of something being very big there because there's something.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think certainly up to 2017, crypto had that. It was such a strange topic, the association with things like Mt. Gox and Ford and things just made it slightly sketchy. And then the abstraction, the lack of physical reality of it, I think makes it unintuitive people. You can't touch it, can't feel it. It sort of numbers in the sky. Things like that just don't have psychological appeal and that absence of psychological appeal is a source of alpha.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forestry, and there's two very interesting attributes to forestry. One is it's so bawling no one ever bothers to seize it. So if you look at people that were in a country on the wrong side of a war and occupied by an invading power over the last thousand years, things like houses and artworks were confiscated, things that businesses were nationalized. No one ever thought about forestry. It just sort of threw it under the radar.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With preservation of value, with this sort of very trust minimized, sort of slightly dark, slightly almost gothic view of humanity and sort of Bitcoin as a sort of place greater safety. Whereas Ethereum is much more sort of visionary about DeFi changing stuff, much more software, much more network effects, much less consciousness of trust and store value. And you start to see this sort of bickling between those two cultures. And it's fascinating how you've got to sort of shilling points of shilling points. Not only are they shilling points at the economic level, but also shilling points for investor personality types that go into them. What's interesting is if they continue to do that, they probably diverge far enough that there's no longer, in fact, any competition between them because they've diverged so much culture and aspirations, they're no longer direct competitors. One of the things that sort of interest me is how is wealth preserved over time? And if you look at one of the best orders of value, it was”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a Bitcoin that's viable is age in a way that I don't see for any other element of tech. Younger people find digital money more intuitive, older people find it less so. There may also be something subtle there about the strength of the nation state. Then US investors find it less intuitive than non-US investors because they think of the US government say banning crypto like FDR confiscated gold. And so they think of it as unlikely. Whereas if they're from a country like Belgium, it's less obvious that your government really has the capability to do something like ban crypto. So all these strange variables like the size of the country you're in and the government capability affect your conception of its viability. And then it's also interesting within crypto itself that you have these two major platforms, Bitcoin and Ethereum, and they sort of attract different investor types. So Bitcoin's got the sort of association almost with Austrian monetary policy, with sort of gold.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crypto is super interesting because it's so unanalogous to anything that's come before it. So one of the interesting things with investing is people get a dopamine effect from things they've made money on before. And so they like to invest in similar things, or at least things that their friends have made money on before, so they think there will be a dopamine hit foot. So if you look at DEX in startups from 2016, you would be amazed how often the Uber of or Airbnb of appear as sort of marketing toys to sort of almost say you're going to get the dopamine effect investing in a business that is similar to these existing successes. Once every so often, you get something that just sort of has no epistemological priors. There's just nothing like it before. And I think crypto has that. And then what's so interesting about crypto is it has such strong psychological tests. So the biggest variable I've seen amongst people I know of whether they believe something.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sadly out of insight on it, but I think you're intuitively right in predicting the outcome. I think one of the things that's going to be very interesting is I do think there's a sort of U-shaped curve where for companies, you either have to be remote or you have to be centralized. The bit that's going to be absolutely nightmish is if you have a hybrid mix because what that'll lead to is everyone at headquarters will have a political advantage over everyone that works remotely. And so you'll end up promoting people who chose to move to headquarters rather than work remotely. So you'll end up promoting them more politically aware, which is probably the most toxic criteria you could have for long-term productivity of the firm.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“E commerce startups, every e commerce startup, the numbers have gone insane to the point where you almost start wondering whether they've made a mistake because it can't be that good. You can't get that fast in acceleration. But no, it really is that fast an acceleration. And my guess is the emotional experience of retail will just be less appealing than it was. And so even in a world of reopening, my guess is you get this continued elevation of e-commerce. And then once people have shifted from doing some activity like going to a bar to playing some video game competitively, probably a bigger percentage of that will stick and seems obvious because this has lasted long enough that you get habit formation. It's certainly longer than the 30 days that that's formally meant to take. Then there's a much more subtle impact, which is you've definitely had a globalization of investing. One of the things that I never made any sense to me was investors that define themselves by geography. So they were in Berlin and invested.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see two main effects. One is this sort of tech acceleration. You've got this shift in behaviors that would have happened only over the long term from demographics. As a sociologist at Microsoft who once said, look, there's a thing called the War of 1975, which is people born before that just never had computers at school. And so they'll never have the same intuitive behaviors as people born after that. And it's sort of reminded me of the Einstein or maybe it's Einstein comment of science advances one funeral at a time. And so in some ways, the natural movement of progress is as generations of people get older. Video gaming is a classic example of this. It was seen as something only for kids until those kids grew older and kept on doing it. I think COVID has changed that because what you've had is 70 and 80-year-olds get on and use Zoom and use digital apps in a way that was much more kin to 25 year olds. That's a permanent one-off shift. And you always see it in the numbers.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Antelope, they just feel the antelope once it sits down and they just swoop in and win deals that they saw other good investors go for. So three wildly different strategies, all three I've seen work superbly. And so no cookie cutter solution.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Success is very idiosyncratic, rather like entrepreneurs. It's sort of finding the fit for their style. So I know one investor at Siege is a fantastic investor and just has an absolute essence of getting to the nub of the character of an entrepreneur. Just the descriptions, the articulation, the strength, the weaknesses, you would have thought you should spend 300 hours doing a psychological profile. It's sort of like those TV shows where you have someone profile the seal killer in like 30 seconds. It's almost sort of a gift like that. Then there's another investor at the same stage who almost ignores the personality of the founder and is all about the structural economics of the business, the market power, that ability to capture value. And both those styles work beautifully. And then I've seen a third type almost doesn't think about the underlying company. What they actually watch is other investors and sort of like a pack of lions, they don't try and kill.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This sort of weird software stuff. And so the interesting trend about that is does that create biases and oversights? So maybe because VC sort of in the 2010, 2013, 2014, network effect consumer businesses were so good, maybe too much capital went into those in the subsequent years, I think of Lightshen, scooters and things like that because there wasn't enough Darwinian survival of people that focused on unit economics. Those partners had diminished in their political power within the VC organization versus the partners that bet more on a network effect on the product. Then there's actually a chapter in Dawkins' sort of selfish gene on hawks and doves and evolutionary stable populations of different behavioral strategies. And maybe that also replicates in investors. And of course as an investing type succeeds, so it attracts more capital and more disciples and therefore there's more people looking for it and therefore the alpha is more diminished.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think this is the thing where if you think about the invest in career, most people join a place where they fit. And so they join an organization that gets them. So you do have this sort of birds of a feather flock together. So you tend to find that you get a set of people that either like the gritty and the real and the physical and the tangible. Look at, say, the overlap between stock investors looking at things like mining companies and shipping companies. And then you get people that like the abstract and the ethyl and the sort of conceptual think of Atlassian stripe companies of that ill. Then I once saw this tweet about bad investors that they love owning things with names like American asbestos. And it made me chuckle because it seemed that there was some sort of truth to that. It felt grittier and truer and more real and more like just better to own something that's a steel mill plant in Pittsburgh than it is to own a tableau or some company.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very hard to have Manhattan without sewers, but they don't sound exciting, right? If you were to sun or you'll move them, human living standards would drop exponentially. And so those base technologies that sort of double entry camping in the sort of 14th century under the Medicis or whoever, those things really matter as sort of system-wide improvements to the thing. And sometimes the joy of those can be missed.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To whom would be the sort of counter question? I think to sort of the average person, probably 350 of them, obviously they're not pulling to the founder. And they're never bullying to me. I find things like accounting software deeply interesting because it's an intellectual puzzle. You're solving someone's problem. And I also think the utilitarian output to the world is way underestimated of these things. If you were to think what was the precursor technology to Manhattan, sewers.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it would more work in the sort of Excite Lycos, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves, imagine someone sent you something about Google when it was a small company. You'd say, oh, it's just another search engine. In some ways, you almost need the opposite. You need a case for why it was so unobvious. If you look at early Facebook, there's all these comments, but surely MySpace has already won this market. I think the exceptions are just so exceptional you can't formulate rules for them. I think it's the next tier down where there's probably more repeatable behavior.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And therefore, you just get less by the entrepreneurs, therefore, the transfer of the entrepreneur succeeding is significantly higher.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll go for if you pick two axes, one axis is boredom and the other is complexity. You want highly boring and highly complex because everything the universe is a supply and demand curve and you just get insufficient supply of entrepreneurs in the highly boring but highly complex space and therefore you get elevated returns. So if you go through the quadrants you've sort of got the whole simple side, balling and simple and complex and simple. It's just too hard to get differentiation without enough complexity. That's when you get commoditization. If you go for interesting and complex you get brilliant entrepreneurs. This is a problem say with space tech as an area of innovation. Every single person involved with space is basically a brilliant genius who's passionate about their work and loves it. And so very, very strong competitive dynamics. On the other hand, if you hang out in audit software, counting software, you're sitting in an area that's complex but no one wants to boast they do it at a dinner party. And what you might call the sort of spiritual awards of the industry are lower.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their last five latitude, longitude locations in real space, or their last five Google search terms, or their last five credit card purchases, you could basically get the same level of accuracy on that person's predicted behavior, which means there's a sort of false milage of an oasis, which is this can be valid in the data, and it turns out to be a mirage because there's so many other ways to get to that answer. And so half the time what you're looking for is sort of the exact opposite. It's where it appears there should be value capture, but there won't be.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most extreme is obviously network effects of to get these in marketplaces. You get them in thing with the classics Metcalf law. You get some examples where Pointo Company earlier today, you combine data from other companies to generate insight. So each time you get a new customer, you improve the product for all the existing customers because you get a bigger data set to work on. Strangely, I think spotting them has less use than spotting the fallacies. If we go to data, there's an amazing sort of the last gasp of a company whose unit in economics don't work is the values in the data. And 99% of the times that isn't true. And the idea is that you've got unique data set that's going to be incredibly valuable maybe for advertisers, maybe for other customers, maybe for enterprises because of the insights to be generated. But it actually turns out most data sets will get you the same insight and people. There was once a company, I don't know, it's true for the best principles, but they said it, if you gave the last five browsing sites that someone had been to, or”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tragedies of the economy over the last four years is there are so many companies where 110% of the economic energy passed over to consumer surplus. So you just had massive increases in living standards, sort of accidental Wikipedias. So there's very strange examples like LCD televisions. Everyone switched from cathode tube to LCD in the early 2000s. That's an increase in human utility, but no TV companies made money because the market was too competitive. Same with things like improvements in consumer modems, routers, switches. You don't see 200 billion market cap without a companies like Intel, but we all benefit from far faster speeds than we did 20 years ago. And so what you're looking for as an investor is high utilitarian outcome and the ability to capture it.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet Google's add or revenue are proof per person is much lower. So potentially the utilitarian output of Google is 10x, maybe even 20x, the economic value derived from that. Whereas imagine if you looked at something like Oracle, you would actually find the utilitarian benefits, the economic lengths of a much higher percentage of the utilitarian benefits. Like there's more value capture as a percentage of the total sort of common wheel created, the total common utility. But I think even when you're talking to a company at seed, you can sort of start to have that conversation over how big a problem were you solving, how many people are you solving that for, or how much money have those institutions got to spend in your product, if it's in the enterprise, and then if that's the utility created, that's part one, how big is that? And then two is what are the competitive dynamics in this marketplace? So how much of that utility will you capture and how much will just be given to your customers as consumer surplus? And one of the sort of interesting, wonderful”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Revenue growth drivers as opposed to sort of trending it down over time as an automatic default. So there's sort of certain things where I think the industrial protocols actually just mislead you. Conversely, I think the counterpoint to that, which is the sort of two product driven mistake, is when you look for network effects everywhere and you sort of assume they exist and actually you're just getting into a standard competitive market. trying to turn that to startup investing I think a very good rule of thumb is to think it's very hard to extract economic lens to get revenue without solving someone's problem so go right back to a sort of Jeremy Bentham utilitarianism why are you making people happier how much happier are you making them and what percent of that can you extract as economic surplus and what percent goes to them so an interesting one is you pick on google there's lots of charts saying people would pay thousands and thousands of dollars for search”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just go a little bit further on the thoughts of Anne, which is, I think, one of the things that's very interesting is the way you model companies in Excel with the DCF. There's a sort of set of cultural norms, like trending down the growth rate to a terminal value over time that obviously would collect for industrial era companies, the sort of companies that a KKR would buy. If you were sort of modeling Nabisco and barbarians at the gate, it's obviously like conceptual approach. Maybe that's just not right for network effect businesses, because instead literally how do you model and Excel the concept of in year six something becomes a standard and therefore gets sustained or accelerating growth. There was a sort of joke in the 80s of you'd never get fired for buying IBM. Well, maybe in 2006 it suddenly became you never got fired for buying salesforce.com. How do you model in that as a concept, suddenly kicking in to revenue growth? Maybe what you should actually be doing is writing a sort of 3,000 word essay on”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To saying, well, when you look at this in a spreadsheet, it just doesn't work. And I think one interesting thing in general in the search for alpha is where do you get into intuitions that are hard to make because there's no natural person to think of it? There's a public company called Zelo, XE Arlo, which is a small business accountant company. And it's headquartered in New Zealand, listed on the ASX. Its biggest market is accounting software in the UK. But the people that fundamentally understand accounting software would be people that had followed into it, which is a West Coast stock Nasdaq listed.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is the ERWIC iPhone, and I was doing some investigations Microsoft at the time, and there was always easier to talk about competitors than to talk about yourself because your SI code to say something you shouldn't. So you always try and spear the conversation onto talking about Apple or Google or something. And one of the things you realized is there was a bunch of investors that sort of thought Apple was overvalued when it was sort of 100, 200 billion market cap because they took the TAM of Nokia and said, even if they take all Nokia's market share, this business can't be big because phones only sell whatever it was back then. And they couldn't intuit the increase in price and power that you were going to get from turning the phone into a computer. And the West Coast BC community immediately intuited that. And then you see the same in this sort of almost comic battle of a Teza as a stock. The Apple one we can say is a win on the West Coast. The Tezza story isn't fully written yet. But again, it's this difference between a culture that looks this product is so amazing it will redefine economics of a category and invest.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Possibly with an actual dressed by the East and West Coast, but more by the nature of investing and maybe what people do as analysts between the age of 21 and 23. So if you spend your time between 21 and 23 building Excel models, you tend to think more about numbers. And so you tend to have a much better intuition for margin economics. And so where is East Coast off tonight over the West in the way they look at businesses? they collect to identify businesses with shaky unity economics but faster revenue growth and good product market fit and they're like look you have product market fit but only because you're giving away $100 for 90. So of course you've got good product market fit i'll give the some counterpoint where west coast investors do very well is where you have a product leap that doesn't get evinced in the numbers immediately but is such a sort of tactile and visceral experience when you use it you have to make an imaginative leap to turn that into numbers and there are two”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is another person's negative alpha? East Coast investing has this sort of sense of I need to beat the other person. I need to get a deal. And that has led to sort of lower trust between participants. And the West Coast, and maybe it's sort of part of California hippie culture tradition coming in, has this very high sense of trust. And if you look at sort of the convertible note, if you look at letting a founder make decisions below supervision, these things only emerge in a very high trust culture. And I'm not sure you can build trillion dollar market cap companies without that high trust culture. I think if you don't have it, you end up building something worth a billion dollars and then arguing over how to sell it or how to optimize it. And you don't get that sort of machine quiet aspiration that you see in all the trillion market cap companies, all of which are on the West Coast. And then I think there's some interesting little sort of cultural.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's a sort of multi part explanation for that. One part, I think, is the absence of existing status hierarchies on the West Coast meant there was less of an opportunity cost in sort of not joining Goldman. And you can almost do a counter history and say maybe all this story about DARPA and the valley and all of that is much less important than people think. Maybe you just have a new country formed of 70 to 100 million people without an existing status hierarchy. It would obviously grum onto the new tech, to the new industry, the new tech, the industry was obviously going to be tech. And so it was obvious that a sort of new country, which is really what the West Coast has been since sort of World War II, when you look at just the population numbers, the West Coast would obviously win as one part of it. I think the second part is differences in the nature of trust and zero sumness, partly because financial markets are in the traditional sense zero sum, one person stock alpha.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It goes back to just getting the impression that they want to spend time with you. Do they actually want to spend every day with you as a founder? Because these companies are small. It's not like you're quoted by a big company and the hiring VP, you may be going to spend an hour a month with, you're going to spend a lot of time with founder. So there has to be a natural desire to do this. And then third, I think there's just a sort of sense of being in a sort of gang that's going to succeed, a sense of we happy for you, to quote sort of Shakespeare, of just I want to be with this because this is going to be something that changes the world and it's going to be an adventure and fun. And that cliche, the journey will be the award, will be true and the economic outcome will be a reward. And when I look back to impact we'll have a reward. And if you get that trip tech, you'll close them.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's one of the greatest sects of his age, but you see this actually happen. Whereas if you're hiring that person in Kiev and their other option is working in outsourced IT for Deutsche Bank, it's a much, much easier win. So in some ways, what you want to find is where are the incredibly qualified people in weekly competitive labor markets? And that is a much easier filter than actually being good at the coating and a much more powerful one. You're much better being a heavyweight box that's not a good fighting lightweight boxers than you are getting good as a heavyweight boxer. And it's the same. You're better going and competing in a market where the other occlusures are lightweight because they're boring industrial firms with tenure-based commotions. So that's one. And then two, it's some combination of sort of painting a vision that people want to be part of, understanding what they themselves are motivated. So it goes back to those sort of early questions. They're motivated by working with great people. Are they motivated by utilitarian impact? Are they more motivated by things like money and power?”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give a sort of basic cynical answer and then a sort of more aspirational answer. The cynical one is just be in a labor market at a low competition. You really don't want to be sitting there in San Francisco trying to close your candidate when John Cullison's trying to close the candidate as the alternative because John's going to win.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super high. And the biggest mistake I see is when they're panicked to hire someone because they need sort of a job done. And so they just go for the earliest person. And then psychology, the pernicious mistake is the change in hiring rate based on the amount of capital available to the startup. So what you notice if you graft it is hiring is not consistent about a quarter by quarter basis. It bulges after each capital raise for you, seed, a, b. And then it's attenuated almost to nothing in the six months before the next capital A's. So the sort of entrepreneur is like the proverbial sailor coming into port who spends all their money and then doesn't have any months afterwards, but it's in hiring. And if you think about that, that's absolutely...”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People just sort of underestimate the power of the math here and don't focus on biased entrepreneurs often have of going for speed and the desire to move fast. And partly this has sort of come out of startup culture because of the sort of synergies of network effect businesses where speed optinoid does matter. But 99% of startups don't have strong network effects. 80% don't have them at all. Maybe 19% only have weak network effects. And in those quality matters far more and so going slower, spending an enormous amount of time picking exceptional people that are deeply synergetic, it's exceptional in and of themselves and then have deep and meaningful synergies with the other team members creates this thing which is a sort of algebraic functional labor output. And I almost think that's how you have to think in a first year. How do I find amazing standard people that are also synergetic? And so my net labor output of the firm is”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was way underestimated precisely because in an early company people replicate themselves. So because people tend to hire not so much in their own image but with their own set of biases, all the initial people you hire will influence all the other hires. And so you can either get this sort of upwards iterating culture of excellence, or you can get this downwards iterating culture of excellence. So those first view hires are utterly critical. And I think people way underestimate just the sort of the maths of the return, which is it seems excessive to say spend 100 hours hiring a person. But if you're only hiring 10 people, that person is 10% of the output of your company for the next seven years if they stay. But then if they hire as well, they may actually contribute to 10% of the productivity of the company for the first decade, both by their own labors in the early years, but also in terms of the way they themselves recruit. So I think...”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just surviving long enough feels like a good strategy. There was some general somewhere that said, it's not that good soldiers become veterans. It's that lucky soldiers become veterans, but veterans are good soldiers, meaning just the luck of surviving the first few hours put you up an experience curve. And I see entrepreneurs transform in those first 36 months of leadership and management. And half of it is just stay alive till you get good.”
2025-06-27 · Invest Like the Best · Charlie Songhurst – Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source