YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Sundheim

lines on the record: 80
first: 2026-02-24
most recent: 2026-02-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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

“With my wife right now, I was a pretty bad boyfriend in college, and that like I was busy doing other things and I was not very attentive. I was not somebody that you'd want to like necessarily marry. And we broke up and I remember I sat down with her and I said like, you know, we went to get a drink and just to like catch up as friends. And I said, I got a job at Bear Stearns. And I just remember, like, she just started crying. I was fine, but it wasn't like I was Goldman Sachs knocking down my door to get me to go. I didn't really work for the first three years of college. She just started like crying like tears of joy. And I was like, wow, like this person who I really didn't properly appreciate how much they cared for me and how devoted they were and like how much they were rooting for me. To me, it wasn't an act that was kind. It was just a gesture that I was like, I was kind of taken back for. And immediately I walked out and I was like, I'm going to marry that girl and I'm going to be.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Real passion, a strong competitive streak, desire to win, deeply engaged in the business, somebody who knows the details when you talk to them, somebody who people want to work for. And that could be because they like the person personally, or it could be because they don't necessarily love the person day to day, like Elon Musk, I'm sure, in the factory is not like all giggles, but people are like, I'm going to learn more by working with this person. Buffett always says like the business is more important than the leader. I kind of disagree with that. I think if you look over 30 years, sure. But over any period of time, like businesses are just people. And if you have amazing people, they make great decisions and bring great people. And my investing timeframe is like five to ten years max. And I think people are more important than that time frame, especially in technology businesses.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alley history. Sometimes it's just like listening to what's happened in history and like how many horrible leaders there are. It's like Charlie Munger say, like, tell me where I'm going to die so I never go there. Learning about bad things so you don't go there to meet it's interesting whether it's like communism or fascism. It's just like all of these things are still possible and relevant in modern day understanding how things have played out in the past and it tends to repeat itself like communism starts but like communism without decay”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say they say something and they say it like religiously, you should believe them. Like when Putin talks about the glory days of the Soviet Union, he may not have the capabilities always, but like as soon as he did, he acted on it. And so every time she makes a speech that's of any importance in China, he emphasizes Taiwan. And so we can pretend this is going to happen in some time that's not relevant, but it's so important and AI just raises the stakes so much that it would affect everybody.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I hope happens is that we replicate the supply chain over time in the US and we work something out with China where they see a path to integrating Taiwan. I think that if we replicate the supply chain, the risk is that we're probably less likely to defend Taiwan, in which case China will attack Taiwan anyway. Bad for Taiwan, fine for the US, China achieves its objectives. I would like to see the world avoid depression and that's going to require like, I think some understanding of we need 10 to 20 years to replicate this supply chain over that period of time. China will not screw up the world economy by being very aggressive with Taiwan. And then eventually there's a path where China feels comfortable that they will be able to reintegrate with Taiwan. Usually when dictates”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economy, but there is no scenario I can think of where everybody's happy. China's happy, Taiwan's happy, and the US is happy. Somebody's going to be unhappy, either because the economy collapses or because their sovereignty is handed over.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very straightforward in that Taiwan produces 90 something percent of the most advanced semiconductors. And everything we use is semiconductors. It's almost as if you went back 50 years, if there's only one country that produced oil. Oil was that important. We went to war over oil, even though you could get it all over the world. Taiwan produces vast majority leading semiconductors. And that is what powers everything. And that supply chain is fragile. Like it's not like it's easy to replicate. It's easy to destroy. If that supply chain were to get screwed up or disremediated, we would have like an incredibly bad economy on the order of depression type economy. Probably a lot of people in government understand this. I've heard Scott Besson talk about it. I think people understand it. There are some scenarios that are, okay.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that troubles me the most, frankly, is I think we are on a collision course with China over semiconductors. I think there are ways to get out of that, but none of them are easy to the extent that we don't figure that out. We're going to have something akin to the Great Depression”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to say Europe in that Europe is economically stagnated, so I'm not sure anyone should pay attention to it other than if you are a pure fundamental stockpicker, it's an easier market. I think there's really interesting things happening in Asia just as globally as politics change, like you saw what happened in Japan and for the first time Japan's probably going to become a military power at some point in the future again. And that has all kinds of implications. I think there's a lot going on within defense. I think there's obviously AI. geographically Europe is always the most inefficient. I think Japan and Korea are probably pretty inefficient as well a lot of retail investors, some really great companies. Japan and Korea were not well positioned for the last 20 years because it was just like digital companies. But when it comes to like actually hard assets and good engineering, Germany, Korea, and Japan have a lot of companies that have excellent fitness.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many amazing businesses, very few monopolies, and when they are a monopoly, usually what happens is they tend to get lazy and the returns aren't as good.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the best businesses are usually low cost producers of something that's very durable. And I think people underestimate the ability to provide a given product or service sustainably at low cost and where there's a positive feedback loop of like low cost drives more volume, which drives low cost. And I think I could say like a bunch of businesses, which are really great, like Moody's or S&P, those are great businesses when you're wrong. But something where the cost advantage is so substantial and so impenetrable, like SpaceX with launch or Costco with groceries, to me, it's like the only way to win in most businesses is to provide a great product at a low cost businesses that do that at scale and build the motor around it are amazing. Amazon's e-commerce business is amazing.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI art created by people reflects emotion and oftentimes like what's happening in the moment in the world when they're making that piece of art or what's happening in their life.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always had more of a leaning towards humanities than STEM, which is unusual in certainly tech and somewhat finance. That is why I perhaps look at my job as more art than science. The science is very simple. DCF, I could learn how to do 25 years ago and it doesn't change. The humanity side interests me, and art is certainly one aspect of that. And I am particularly interested in aesthetics. I like design. I like architecture. I like art. To me, it's just beauty. You good at the beach and like watch the waves. That's beauty. Like there's beauty in the world and like art is one example of beauty. There's usually a story behind it and there's people behind art. Art is important because it is created by people. And I think the bull case in art would be as everything else is automated and in infinite supply because it's being created by”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably managing a smaller percentage almost regardless of how well I did. I've always had a mindset of like I want to grow. I want to get better. I want to achieve new things. And I kind of felt like there wasn't that much more for me to achieve in Viking. And I was 40. I started to fund relatively late in life. I kind of recognized that at some point you just wouldn't have the energy to go do something like starting a fund is obviously a big endeavor. I felt like I had the energy and so everything kind of came together.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What might create value in industrials or healthcare. So to me, if you love investing, my time at Viking was amazing because I was able to get exposure to every industry almost. By 2016, I was managing just over half of Viking's capital, somewhere 55 something percent of Vikings capital. And I'd start out in 2002 being an analyst with no portfolio. I'd gone from no portfolio to a portfolio to eventually CIO to managing more than half the firm's capital, which was an abnormal percentage historically for Viking. Viking is usually more diversified. It was pretty clear to me that from a business perspective, it was not in Andres' best interest to have one person manage more than half the capital. I don't think that would be even good for LPs. And so I kind of recognize that I had pretty much achieved what I could achieve at Viking over time.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started out as a bank center. That's what I did for the first couple years. I still had a value bent. I think most investors who love investing start out with a deep value bent. If you want to read about great investors historically, most of them were deep value investors, Ben Graham, Buffett. I was working for somebody named Tom Purcell, who's an amazing investor. I realized that Tom was an awesome mentor, but I realized that Tom was very well equipped to generate returns in financial services for Viking. And so if I wanted to grow my career, I had to move it to other areas. Gradually I took on other sectors, like starting with healthcare, industrial, TMT, and the nature of those companies was different than banks. That was a learning process. It was just like years of covering different companies in different industries. The deeper you got into like what created value in TMT was different than...”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, no, no. They're like, you sure. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody knows. They're like, we basically thought you were going to come back and tell us if they were going to miss earnings. I didn't want to do healthcare, so I didn't work there. But I now had this write-up that could go around to different hedge funds. And most of them already knew about it because they would short it after the write-up. And that's how I got my job”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't even know if they were a client. The stock just got halved. I went back into the interview to present the case study. At this point, they were just like, what did you do? And I was like, look, you told me to look at this. I thought it was a fraud. They were like, did you tell anyone that”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Post being like, this is really interesting. Has anyone double checked these numbers? There's people like commenting. Next day, stock starts to crater, stocks down like 20, 30 percent. I started getting calls from people working at mutual funds who own the stock because even though it was anonymous online, I had told friends of mine, hedge funds, I'm like, you should look at this stock and short it. I think it's a fraud. And they had told other people. And so I started getting calls at Bear Stearns, like people at T-Row Price and Fidelity. You were going to get an investment bank. Last thing you're trying to do was supposed to posting about companies that are fraud.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't incontrovertible proof, but it was pretty close just by building up all the unit economics as they said they were, comparing them to the unit level economics that you could actually decipher by going through their financial statements. And it was clear I did a write-up that was about six pages long. It was good. It was well done before I went back to do the follow-up interview where I presented my case study. I was like, I think I'm on to something here. Let me post it online first and I'll get some feedback. I wasn't allowed to trade stocks because I was working at an investment bank. So I wasn't short the stock. I wasn't long the stock. Value Investors Club has done anonymously with a tag name. So I posted online within a few hours the stock started to go down. I was like, that's cool. People are noticing there's a couple comments online. The market closed a few hours later. Whatever. I'm watching online. There's some more.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To interview at. It was a spinoff of SAC that did healthcare. And they said to me, we want you to do a case study for the interview. The company is called Orthodontic Centers of America. So for me, this was not like a task. It was like something I was really excited to do because I had never had my work given to somebody who was a professional. I went home and I spent maybe like hours and hours going through the financial filings and trying to build a model. I was pretty good at accounting. I really tried to get deep into the financial statements. And I really liked nothing reconciled. Nothing made sense. It hit me that what they were doing was the simplest form of accounting fraud, which is just capitalizing expenses that should have been expensed in a big way. There are other things too, but that was the most egregious. I was able to effectively prove that.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2002. I was working at a private equity group within Bear Stearns. I always had an interest in stocks, but the only way to really get exposure to investment ideas written up by hedge fund managers or investment managers was this site called Value Investors Club. We had to send an idea. I applied and like every week you'd have tens of ideas posted by people anonymously. You could read them. I would just consume everything. So it was like long ideas, short ideas. Every week they paid $5,000 to the best idea. I just got inspired by all the stuff I was reading and decided to try to find some of my own ideas. After maybe six, 12 months, I had a portfolio of things I'd written up on Value Investors Club. And I decided I wanted to go work in a hedge fund. First thing hedge funds ask you to do is talk about investment idea. And so I had all these investment ideas. One of the hedge funds.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what I've devoted my life to, right? And so any devote your life to, you want to be great at or at least having an impact that is tangible and measurable. I could be a family office right now. And there's plenty of positive things about being a family office. The drawback is like you're not in the arena. And I'm very collaborative with other investors. It's not like I'm sharp elbowed. But being out there like being able to prove that we can be great and not just me, like our firm can be great is invigorating. I think I'd be kind of bored if I was just like investing my own money.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can kind of arbitrage that. But I think there's other businesses within asset management that have value. I definitely do not ever aspire to having hundreds of employees or something like that. And that's kind of what you need to do to have an enterprise value.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's something I've started to think about more recently. I think the answer is no. Money to me is a scorecard. I want to have the best score. It is a really great positive externality of being a good investor. And maybe I will just be so intellectually interested by the idea of being a CEO that I want that go from being 10% of my job to 30 to 40 percent of my job. And that's how you create enterprise value. I'm just not there right now. And I want to deliver amazing returns. That'll be financially more than compensatory. Maybe one day, but I don't think hedge funds are a good business. Objectively, our business is horrible. It's amazing cash flows has no terminal value. I told this to my companies I invest in. I'm like, you have no cash flows and tons of terminal value. I have tons of cash flows and no terminal value. So we're good together.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person in person, I know that being a founder is lonely, going through all kinds of issues. And so being around other founders almost universally, the feedback I get is that founders like to be around other founders because there's the only people that can sympathize and understand everything that they go through. And so by having a bunch of them together in a chat, it's helpful to us from a business perspective, but I think it's also just group therapy would be too strong of a word, but I think it's like nice for them to know that these other people are part of this community, that they're in and that they want to reach out to these people, they can and they hear these people's perspective. And some of these people are world leading experts in areas like AI that are going to be impactful to companies that are not experts in AI. So just getting that input, I think, is really helpful. We have a network of a lot of companies, a lot of industries, being able to share the insights, not just my insights.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you're investing in the company privately, there is obviously a financial aspect to it that's the driver. But there's also a relationship part of it, like in that you are signing up to hopefully help that person grow their business, be with them through ups and downs. And when you're doing the initial investment, you spend a lot of time together. But then I find that it's very easy for me to go months without communicating with the CEO on the private side if nothing's happening. I don't like that. If we have something that we can offer people and they can just opt in, they can read the stuff I write or not read the stuff I write, it is a way to broadcast, communicate with people that I want to be in touch with and I want to know us better as a firm, know me better as a person, know us better as a firm. I find now, even if I haven't spoken to a CEO in like three months and I call them, it's almost like they feel like they talk to me every day. It's the same way like when you meet someone on Zoom during COVID, you don't really never met that.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a few things to consider. Like, I know these people the best. And so I've just dealt with them through so many different things in life. And I have a lot of confidence in their confidence. So to me, there's a lot of people that I love in life for different reasons and are wonderful people and, you know, would be loyal, but they have to be really competent to do the job. This is a very intense shot. The bar is extremely high, and the people that I've hired that are friends of mine forever, I'm just confident cleared that bar by a lot. But when you are able to find people that you know for a long time and liked you before you had any money or any signs you'd ever have any money, that is a different kind of relationship for me at this point. I don't know. Are they nice to me because they think I can do something for them? They're a group people in my life that have always been there and that they will be close to me for the rest of my life.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any kind of short term event, and you start to think about what is a business worth, what are the long-term cash flows, what are the porter's five forces attributes of the company. That's when the competitive set gets pretty thin. And frankly, the more people focus on the short term, the more opportunity there is to arbitrage that and have a medium-term view. I don't think anyone knows what's going to happen past three years for most companies and for the economy as a whole, it's hard to predict. And so I don't consider myself to be an investor that just buys and holds things for five or ten years, but we do focus entirely on what is a company worth. And a quarter may or may not impact what we think the long-term value is. The majority of the time, the moves you see in the short term exaggerate the true change in intrinsic value of the company.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's just the people transacting in the market or the nature of the institutions transacting in the markets. If you go back 10, 20 years ago, mutual funds, long short hedge funds, they were a big part of the market. Now it is a lot of passives, a lot of retail investors, people who are making investment decisions, they're not based upon long-term considerations of intrinsic value, quants, even multi-manager long short funds while they are focused on fundamentals by necessity, they are short-term oriented. If you're focused on trying to get an edge in the short term, that is extremely efficient. And it's a game I just don't play. You have firms which are incredibly sophisticated using amazing quantitative methods to go through alternative data. There's absolutely no edge there. Once you go beyond”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a bad business. You really have to be intellectually stimulated by it. Most people in the market are just not fundamentally based, period. And even if they are fundamentally based, they're not interested in shorting or they pretend like they're shorting and they kind of short indices or whatever. Very few people are doing it. There are tons of people investing in things that are just based on stories, like because of social media and because of Robin Hood. There's just endless amounts of shorts if you have duration and if you take a fundamental view.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The cost curve, I think that in a relatively short amount of time, months, few years, they are going to be dramatically cheaper than any other form of delivering broadband.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The initial prognosis was just always that they were going to be a low cost provider of launch. I think the success of Starship, I wouldn't say like we're fully there, but I think we're pretty much there to prove full reusability and scale like, okay, there's more to come. Starship is a game changer, which we knew about fairly early on, but didn't know if it would work. And what that means very simply is that the cost of launching everything goes down dramatically. 97, whatever percent and the engineering that they've done with the satellites to harness solar power and be able to deliver really high speed bandwidth has surprised me to the upside. And there's a lot of software that goes into that too, just given these networks of satellites are all communicating. The ramification of that, I think, is that the telecom market globally is now the TAM. They've come so far.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At some multiple of revenue with very little cash burn at that point. I didn't know what was going to come. I just knew that the ski was very good. If they had achieved that, then like, who knows what they could do in the future?”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scale in EVs is going to be important, which is why Tesla is one of the reasons why Tesla is one. You know, the IPO, it was great. It looked like a great investment. But ultimately, I don't know what our ultimate return was on Rivian, but it wasn't what we planned for when we made the investment. The bad ones tend to be more obvious faster. The great private tech investments, I think, are sometimes slower to prove how great they are because you have these amazing founders who are just constantly making decisions which take the business in one direction or another and ultimately the compounding of those decisions takes time but leads to create outcomes. SpaceX was pretty obvious to me that the launch business at a minimum was going to be a very good business and what they had achieved I thought was just like from an engineering perspective insane so to me if I could buy a company that had achieved the most amazing engineering feat I'd ever seen.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thesis was that EVs were going to dominate the auto market and that EVs were entirely different kind of automobile in that they were software. And it was the equivalent of like the iPhone versus Motorola Nokia. The same way Motorola Nokia were not able to move into smartphones because that was like hardware, not software. There'd be few companies that would be able to do this successfully. Ultimately, autos are a bad business. It could be software autos, hardware autos. It's a bad business. And it's a really tough business to scale, very capital intensive. The manufacturing didn't go as smoothly as it could have. And the cost of delays in manufacturing when you're ramping up and burning a lot of cash are quite significant. The technology, I think, was always good and not getting up the manufacturing curve very quickly meant you didn't get to scale fast enough. And I really believe that.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're about to encounter. So, with that kind of profound change, like we're going from the smartest animals on the planet, we were never the fastest or the strongest. Just we're smarter than other animals. We were no longer going to be the most intelligent beings on the planet. And so what are the implications of that? I'm not really sure. I think that there's a lot of negative externalities in that I don't think humans, as much as people like Dario, who I respect a lot might say like, well, we're just going to give everybody a check and everybody just kind of live off universal basic income. I just don't think humans are wired to just collect a check and go around and like play sports all day. Humans are wired to create relationships, to create value, to work, to coordinate with other humans and achieving things. And I just, I don't think you're in a great society if it's just a bunch of people living off of checks.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A most optimistic in economic growth. And I think it has to be the case that if you believe in scaling laws and you believe in AI, that economic growth will be very powerful. I mean, this is the ultimate productivity tool. And what productivity does is allows you to grow while having disinflation, which is like nirvana for markets. So I'm very bullish on that. And then there's implications that flow from that, which are more macro, which is something we don't do. But that can cure deficits, do a lot of great things. Like economic growth does a lot of great things for everybody from hedge fund managers and CEOs to people in lower level jobs. If a country is not growing, it's hard to have a better standard of living. That's my more optimistic take. The part of me is more uncertain is that I think that we, as humanity, we've never encountered something.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For better or worse, I've always from the first day I got the job had a lot of confidence what I was doing. I never accepted and said like, I'm just better than everyone else. That was never it. But when it came down to looking at a company and making a decision, I felt confident in it. And when I felt confident in the analysis, I generally am pretty balanced. Is it possible for somebody to have a very volatile personality but train themselves to deal with the ups and downs of markets? I think the answer is yes. I think there are some hedge fund managers that have been like truly generationally great. And you hear the stories early on. They were just like throwing things at people on the trading floor and yelling and like ultimately they ended up being great. But you have to be able to not let that emotion influence your trading.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't harbor any ill will. I mean, look, the active redeeming is like, to some extent we deserved it. I mean, obviously I appreciate it much more when people stayed. I always start out these dinners, even when it was the worst time. I say like, ask me anything, criticize me. It is my job to deliver for you if I don't do it. It's on me. I ultimately think that when you screw up in business, capital follows returns. And when you deliver poor returns, capital will leave. We had a lot of great investors that stuck through it.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Believe in it. We really went about managing the firm differently. And so that was a pretty pivotal moment just looking in the eyes of all the investors and feeling pretty horrible in every way. There is something invigorating about turnaround. When you're going through something like GameStop and like there's the world's collapsing and there's nothing you can do, it's like that's a very uncomfortable position. Even if things are really bad when you have a plan and you believe in that plan, it changes the perspective entirely. And I really did believe in the plan and I believe in the team. And so all of a sudden I felt like, okay, everybody else may doubt us, but I believe it. And we are now the start of a mission to dramatically improve our returns, improve our firm, and earn back our reputation as being great investors.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To go out there and speak to our investors, I had a message I wanted to convey. Message was that we were going to do things differently. The stock selection, all of that was going to be the same, but the portfolio construction was going to be done in a way that was much less risk-prone. The analogy I gave was like, we're going to hit singles and doubles. It might take us longer to get back to the high watermark because singles and doubles are not fireworks. But we feel like what we've gone through in 21-22 was tough enough that even if the right positive MPV thing would be to just keep taking a ton of risk and obviously usually the best time to take a ton of risk is when you've lost all the money. Emotionally, I would not be able to go through this again. So we just said, look, we're going to run the business differently. We very much understand if this is like not what you signed up for here, although I think at that point people were not like, yeah, they signed up for like them to take on more risk. I think most of them were happy to hear it, even if they didn't.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are different moments that like emotionally just hit you in different ways, like news articles and friends calling you saying, are you going out of business or a lot of that? And obviously those things are painful and something I had never had to deal with before. I've never tried to be a public figure. And all of a sudden it became very public. The most important moment was we do semi-annual investor dinners with our LPs. That's our primary form of communication. We were at least periodically, but we do these semi-annual dinners where over a period of four nights we meet with all of our LPs. It was June of 22, beginning of June of 22. Trough of our drawdown was at the end of May of 2022. And these dinners were scheduled for like June 3rd of Jeremy, the president of our firm. He said to me, he said, like, we can't do these dinners. Like, you know, this is going to be a blood bath. To me, it was like really clear. I said, no, we have to do these dinners. And this is the most important time.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was looking inwardly at the team, making sure that we were all on the same page. What we were trying to achieve, and that no matter how many people outside might doubt us, we were going to do it, or at least we're going to try very, very hard.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I thought to myself, am I really going to be the guy who quits the first time? I think the analogies that people gave was like one day at a time, it's like Bill Ackman was like, look, every day try to do something makes things a little bit better. Because it's not like something that when you have that kind of a drawdown, if I hit the ball out of the park for like three months, like investors would be like, he's just volatile and crazy. If I slowly and methodically did it, some people would just give up because they'd say this was just too crazy. We don't believe in him. So it's impossible to disprove the negative narrative in the short term. It takes a lot of time, years. And so acknowledging that this was not going to be something that you changed overnight. People's perception of you as investor, people's perception of D1 as an attractive place to invest capital. That was not going to change overnight no matter what I did.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why are there two other people who are going through the same thing you had? I found it helpful to go back and read and listen to Ken Griffin's interviews in 2008 and the people that I respected. But it's lonely. It's a matter of testing your resilience. First of all, we never came close to going into business. That was just nonsense. But I never was going to quit. Even though we had made some mistakes, I deeply believe that we were still good at what we do and that we had something to offer the world. We could be excellent again. I was confident in that, but GameStop, it was the beginning of a change in the market structure on the retail side. So I knew we had to adapt to that. I didn't know exactly how that would play out. By that point, by 2021, 2022, I've been doing the job for 20 years. I'd never really had severe adversity, probably because at some point, like Andreas was just like he was just a very quick to risk manager, but I never really had that.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's incredibly difficult. I never want to come across as too exaggerative about my experience because there's people who go through a lot worse things in life. But as an investor, I'd say that was about as bad as it gets. We went from being top of the world. Everyone thinks you walk on water to being like everyone thinks we're going to go to business. I don't think I have an enormous ego, but I have a lot of pride in what I do. And I don't need to be celebrated, but I also really did not like having our firm and our performance tracked for the mud. Granted, it deserved to be treated that way because performance was very bad. It also is a bit lonely in that during GameStop, there was probably...”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's hard to tell your kids, don't do this or don't do that because it's going to be irrelevant. That's a podcast recently with a Google researcher who left and he said like, oh, I don't even tell my daughter to study. It's just like, go out and have a good time. I think that's like a very destructive way of going through life. You should go through life thinking that you want to achieve things and that you're interested in things and you're curious. Same way as if this doesn't exist. And if it turns out that whatever job you envision having no longer exists, then you'll have to adjust.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is going to be better than you, I think it's like a very self defeating mindset. So do I think that it is likely that at some point in the future everything that we do is arbitraged away by AI for sure. I mean, I think that that would be naive of me to say no. Do I think that's happening anytime the next couple years? I don't, but it's almost like what do you tell someone to focus on? Like, first of all, unless someone is really interested in something, they're not going to be good at it. So it might be the case being a plumber or being an electrician is the most moted job in the world, but if you don't want to.”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Elon Musk says, I think a line he's used is it's better to go through life being optimists and be proved wrong than a pessimist and be proved right. To be young and to be interested in something and be dissuaded because”
2026-02-24 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source