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Erik Brooks

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64
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2026-06-01
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2026-06-01
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  1. “To pick business models that are durable, the nature of what the business model is is not dependent on things that you could see changing quickly. Giant air quotes, based on where we are today, given AI, the pace at which the game is changing in a lot of different areas has fundamentally changed. That's the big difference. In your 20 years alongside Andrew and Royce, What did you see evolve in the business? The organization and the investment philosophy grew as we added more people in a healthy way, thinking about media as technology-enabled content enabled us to expand into business services, establishing a knowledge set and a way of growing your partnership. One of the best parts about”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Content. In the beginning, analog media was print, radio, TV. As the digitization of content started to work its way through the economy, there were other business models that had media-like characteristics that were showing up in other places. Healthcare or business services. The way I think about picking sectors or finding opportunities is trying to look at the business model, the nature of the customer set, through the lens of we don't want to invest in a business that has an expiration date. Something's changed, some things don't. Customer service, that is a forever thing. It doesn't matter what business model you're in. Technology changes. Finding business models and trying to stay at the forefront of the thinking of where is this going and what's the velocity with which it's happening has given us the ability.”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Work and take on that risk ourselves. It was media and communications for a long time. Invest in businesses that you understand the underlying business models and strategies in a wrapper of what are the business model characteristics that we're looking for. Say stable, predictable, recurring revenues, high barriers to competition, being disciplined about that filtered the noise out of the system. For a long time, that space, media, communications, was very stable. Then things change in the last decade. How do you think about investing in a sector when outside influences change the dynamics of what looked like a very stable business that may not be going forward? I've lived through a variety of evolutions in media in particular, but let's think about media as technology enabled.”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I wouldn't tell you I felt like I found my thing until I joined Abrey. The investment strategy made sense to me over the next decade or so I got to see and participate and learn in the execution of an investment strategy, which is develop the strategy. You need the people processes and systems in order to do it well. They had in the early days really established that and were disciplined in executing it. What was that strategy, Dabri? It was sector specialization at its very beginning. Andrew and Royce were the two senior partners at Bang Consulting running their media practice. Their strategy when they left was we know more about these businesses from a consulting perspective than anybody else. Let's use that knowledge and expertise rather than getting paid a consulting fee to put capital.”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Betting on people, making decisions to partner with people. That was the beginning of the next 20 years. Going into Abri with the lens of you want to be around the right people, you'd experienced value investing, certain type of risk reward alongside of Seth, the privatization of Eastern Europe, a wildly different type of volatility within a risk-reward, and then something different that Royce had started at Abry. I'm curious how you thought at that part of your life about what investment strategy or type of investing most resonated for you. Different people have different skill sets. One of the superpowers you can give to your friends and your kids is the recognition of what are you great at with the combination of what do you love to do? It's hard to find those things.”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “That six, seven year period of time. Timing in life is everything. I was having lunch with him in New York one day. I was having him listen to me go through my thought process of what I was thinking of doing, what I possibly was considering coming back or staying in the middle of that conversation. You looked at me and said, would you be interested in coming back to Boston and joining me at Abre? That was the lightning bolt. I looked at him and I said, yes. That sounds great. I would like to do that. His response was wonderful. Let me come back with a proposal, salary, and a title, a compensation package. I said yes. I don't care. This is not a decision about how much my salary is or what my title is or what the carry is. I'm with you. I'm all in with you because you're one of the smartest people of the highest integrity I've ever met. Those have been my best decisions.”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “That meant that somebody that was connected in a certain way had an idea that they wanted to own that company. They did not want somebody getting in the way of that. What I would do is thoughtfully pack my bags in the morning, go back to Moscow. Discretion is a better part of valor. You have to pick your battles. When it blew up, you viscerally feel like you spent all these years working for something. You have a young child. You're not seeing them or your wife. I knew that that part of the world was going to come back. My value investing DNA had incredible confidence in the magnitude of the opportunity. But I didn't know if it was going to come back in a couple of years or a couple of generations to my good fortune, I had met Roy Syodkov, who's one of the founders of Abry, right before I went to business school. Royce had become a real mentor to me over.”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “In fact, it was the circumstances, but that is inherent in the risk of putting capital to work in a place where you can make seven or eight times your money. Having developed a net worth over that period of time and then seeing that go back to zero with a two-year-old daughter spending three weeks a month sleeping in places that didn't have hot water in my clothes, definitely not the four seasons or the amount. This is rough. Lots of stories about going to show up at an auction to buy a company, getting a call in the middle of the night, we think it'd be better if you didn't come to the auction tomorrow. No, hi, this is Peter. How you're doing, it was literally don't come tomorrow. Those kinds of experiences frame your worldview on what it's like to do business in that part of the world. What did it mean when someone said, don't come to the auction tomorrow?”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “at the company they were running. Their job was not to be profitable. Their job was to deliver sugar or toilets or whatever it happened to be on time. That was an incredible experience. It was an awakening for me to understand the relationship of risk and return. It was the first time in my life that I was putting capital to work, felt responsible for doing so, lived through a period of time where things went nowhere but up. It was buy a dollar for 10 cents, watch it go to 80 cents over a period of four or five years. When that happens, as a young man, you think you're a genius. You think you're the one who has invented fire. Then all of a sudden, when the emerging market tsunami washes across that part of the world and your 70 cents on the dollar goes to four cents on the dollar, you recognize that it was not your genius.”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Mid to late 90s ran around Ukraine and Kazakhstan and Russia and the Baltics, participating in the privatizations of what was happening over there in that part of the world. That was a lesson in humility, risk, experiencing a completely different worldview. You can imagine picking somebody up and planting them in Dinepa Petrosk or Nizhny Novgorod in 1996 trying to convince people that you should buy their companies. It was a magnificent, exciting, terrifying period of time where I had the opportunity to work with David Swenson, Julian Robertson, and Andrew Golden, who were investors in our fund at the time. Then also meet with people that had spent five seconds of their life thinking about how to make money.”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Of the same class in the same day. Econ 101, the first version of that would happen at 9 o'clock in the morning. Then there was another 2 o'clock session of the same class, which I would then show up to just to make sure that there wasn't something that I was missing in the class that might have been overkill. It was good imprinting on how to make sure that you understand that you've got to do everything you possibly can to make it work. What happened from there? I had a fantastic experience at Brown graduated, moved to New York City, worked at DLJ, then got a job at Apex Partners, came back to Harvard Business School, worked for Seth Clarmin at the Bowpost Group while I was there, which was a transformative experience. I was injected with the DNA of value investing and thinking about risk in that way. After graduating from business school, I spent some time in Eastern Europe.”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “of reality when it was time for me to go to college. Growing up in that environment, I thought everything happened automatically. You go to a great school, you get great grades, you work hard, and everything just happens. I tried to make my parents proud, as we all try and do, applied to every Ivy League school. It was my parents' dream in life for their firstborn son to go to an Ivy League college. When I got rejection letters from every single one of those schools, you can imagine over a 48-hour period of time opening envelopes, that was not a great couple of days in the Brooks family. It was a real wake-up call for me that things don't just happen automatically. I went to another school, spent my entire experience there doing nothing other than trying to get the best grades that I possibly could. So much so that I would literally go to two.”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Try Alex for yourself at the link in our show notes, try Alex. admired leadership dot com. Please enjoy my conversation with Eric Brooks, so fun to do this with you. Indeed, I've been looking forward to it. Why don't you give me a little bit of a hint of growing up and the path that led you to where you are today? I wish I had a more exciting story. My background was magnificently Norman Rockwell. It was two parents that loved each other and a sister, a great school, friends. Those kinds of childhoods give you the benefit of stability and security, confidence in yourself, very formative and important and lucky as you grow up. As you move through that, though, you don't learn the hard stuff. You don't come out with a lot of scars. You don't come out with a lot of lessons learned. You come out confident and strong feeling good, which that would be wonderful. I did have sort of a cold shower.”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “would be sitting in a management meeting if I'm asking a management team questions there is this heaviness that exists you try and break through but just naturally exists where the management team okay here come the private equity folks and the private equity folks walk in like okay here's the management team the weight exists you break through that and try and connect even in the best scenarios My asking questions is a little bit of an interrogation Asked in the nicest, most open way, it's still definitionally a bit of an interrogation. When Foddy would run the management meetings, it was a conversation. It was Foddy saying to the head of sales, when I ran business services for IBM in the Middle East and Africa, I noticed in some countries it was important for you to show up with multiple products. In other countries, they really wanted you to specialize.”

    2026-06-01 · Capital Allocators · Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source