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Cristiano Souza

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54

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2025-03-14

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2025-03-14

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1

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1. “Start, they still wear me at everything that I do today when I'm looking at a business that really matter. The first was understanding of that company had established a dominant position in the market where they operate, which we call market power, which basically allows that company to generate high returns on capital, right? The second one is the ability of the business to reinvest at capital at high rates of return. And the third one, which is probably the more subtle and the hardest one to find, is that this company had to be managed by people that we could trust and that we thought behave like real long-term owners. So basically we were trying to answer these questions. We could find companies with those characteristics across a number of different industries, all the way from a car rental company to a beer company to a bank. As long as we could identify”

   2025-03-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP706: The Founder's Mindset w/ Cristiano Souza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “Has been over the course of the last 12 months where there's this great experiment going on right now that is actually working, but you never know. So in that environment, the only thing that we could really count on was the businesses that we were investing in, was the ability of that business to reinvest capital high rates of return. When times are good and to protect itself from the vicissitude to exhaust the market, when times are bad. Resiliency and risk management were probably far more relevant variables in our decision-making process than thinking about growth, for example. There wasn't really any bias or any predetermined bias to any industry that we should be paying attention to. It was so bottom up. It was all about sort of curating each company and understanding the quality of that business. And there were three things that from the...”

   2025-03-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP706: The Founder's Mindset w/ Cristiano Souza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “It's interesting because for the most part or the course of the last 30 years, if you're an equity investor in the US, even further than that 40 years, you had the wins at your back. Everything was sort of conspiring in favor of equity markets. The environment that we were sort of growing up in Brazil was the exact opposite. We basically had a huge win against our sales. We had just come out in 1993 from probably 10 years of hyperinflation six or seven different currencies that were trying to try to stabilize the economy that didn't work. And then finally, there was one economic plan that ended up creating the currency that is still valid in Brazil today, the real, that actually worked. But at the time, nobody knew if that thing was going to work or not. I think the analogy that I make is Brazil in 1994 was probably very similar to what Argentina.”

   2025-03-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP706: The Founder's Mindset w/ Cristiano Souza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “Brazil is far more industrialized than most other emerging markets even back then. It had gone through a very heavy industrialization phase in the 70s. So there's a large internal domestic market, but most importantly, just like anywhere else in the world, there were company builders. There were people who decided that they wanted to start a business or that they wanted to run a business. The truth is, whenever we can find great businesses to invest in, then it doesn't really matter that much what's happening around us. And it's interesting because when you're living in that place and you grew up there like I did, you kind of don't think about the environment that much, right? You don't think about the peculiarities of the place where you are compared to other places. You're just there. And within that environment, you know where you're looking for and you're looking for these great companies.”

   2025-03-14 · We Study Billionaires · TIP706: The Founder's Mindset w/ Cristiano Souza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT