YouSaid · the spoken record

Graham Duncan

lines on the record: 153
first: 2025-02-04
most recent: 2025-02-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Maybe there are 10 to 20 to 30. I assume there are a bunch who are just managing their own money. And I know a number of those. I bet I'm missing a couple. What's the distinction? The distinction is A shift to thinking of it as becoming source maybe of your own style of investing is how I think about it and not those portfolio managers will have had influences before them that leave their mark, but coming into their own and not playing the game the way other people have played it, but like truly playing it in their idiosyncratic way. Think of an example beyond Tepper's such a good one because it's in the public domain and I don't actually know him, so I'm not violating any confidentiality.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was doing such a good job of it. And it was still hard. But the fact that in that world, there's this idea of I want to be in the room when AGI happens. And there are like, I don't know, five to ten places that are in the hunt for that. And they're paranoid, they'll be in the wrong room. It's such an interesting perspective. Maybe that's not the right frame, but the fact that that's a dominant frame totally strikes me.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, love the game. Humility. Borderground paranoia that you're missing the thing that's now happening so that you maintain extreme high open-mindedness. Like I feel like there's a form where when sewn works, you've got all these listing posts of people who are on the edge of a thing. I thought this year Eric Steinberger, Daniel Gross's interviewer of Eric Steinberger was super interesting because Eric is neck deep in the AI world. From my perception maybe the blue chip end of the pool and how he makes sense of reality is so different than mine. Daniel was trying to act as a translational layer between”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I do think in general that the financial markets, if you've made a lot of money and you're starting to get your ego and identity is starting to solidify and you're not, the markets are such a good feedback mechanism to make you constantly learn. And so if you're going to choose one profession to grow old in to maintain intellectual and cognitive flexibility and responsiveness rather than hardening, I feel like financial markets are pretty good because you'll just lose all your money. If you get to ideological or start drinking your own Kool-Aid. And so I feel like Tepper and Director Miller are both good examples of they're forced to constantly engage with new ideas, young people, and move with that chapter in the markets. And so there's something in that.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, macro, of course, because Drucke Miller also comes to mind and Soros in his day had a long duration. Like, there's something about macro where you're opportunistic enough to shift to the style of what's making money in that period. So you could do long short. You could do distress, but you don't, you're not a hammer looking. Provide some duration.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actionable investment ideas and to hold the line on not having panels. I feel like that's one of the things that distinguishes it. But I, at various points, wanted to bring in people like Patrick Carlson or other tech people where there wasn't really an actionable idea, but I just give myself a small budget of those on a given conference. And then this year, my friend Boykin Curry came up with the idea of this lightning round where we did a series of five minute talks that I thought really complemented the longer format quite well. And I think we'll double down on that next year.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, it is that it's a casting exercise. It's so compact this year we had 32 speakers. There was 32 choices that I did together with Paulino Lopez and a number of other friends on the host committee. And then one of the East Rock team, Brian Waterhouse, did Next Wave, which is how I started with Sone 10 years ago. I see it as the person a credible threat at saying something interesting. If I saw them on the agenda and I already knew who they were-ish, is that when I'm going to go take a call or not? And I try to have none of those breaks if I can. And then a little bit like what we were talking about on the retreats, if I were sitting next to them, what I feel engaged. And in terms of making it my own, Doug Hirsch, who started it, who is Source, Big Insight was to make it all.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so all those elements came together. And then the final one was I was kind of debating whether to have a ton of investors in it and pass the hat to the community or just kind of keep it simple and either just fund it myself. And I ended up finding a friend who's a partner at Sequoia, Brian Schreier, who he and his wife have a real interest in hospitality and have done other projects kind of like this. met Joel, met Jane were extremely excited about it.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Values it, and I feel like there's a good chance it'll be a very long term thing for that reason. And so I guess the other element in Santa Barbara is the housing is so expensive. And so a couple years ago when I started this project, I knew that the toughest thing if I was going to recruit somebody from outside Santa Barbara was going to be the housing and the biggest carrot I could provide somebody would be a great housing setup. I also wanted the feel of the restaurant to be of somebody of that neighborhood, not somebody who's commuting an hour in, but to serve somebody else, but somebody who's grounded in that community. So I had bought what at the time was the cheapest house in Montecito and redid it. It's right near a great public school and it's a three-minute walk to the restaurant. And so I was able to get them. The reason I'm so lucky here and the reason I know why it's a good setup for him, he's going to live in this house. His kids are going to go to the school. He's going to walk to the restaurant.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an excellence, the fear coexists with this excellence and judgment. And then our general manager I'd known for a while, she grew up in the business. Her parents ran a restaurant in Santa Barbara. Her name is Jane. And she's an Enagram eight. And I have a working theory that eights and sixes do really well together. The eights provide stability. The sixes are loyal, but also skeptical in a great way and alive in their decision making. So I ended up thinking, like I introduced the two of them sometime, Joel did not want to be the general manager. He knew in his old restaurant at one point he'd had to act as general manager and he hated it. It's a little bit like if you've had a failure, it's actually better sometimes because somebody prices themselves correctly. He prices the value of the”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And is the loyal skeptic, or the, if you were going to have a headline, it would be winter is coming. So there's this underlying fear to it.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chefs are artists, they're only going to last three to five years. So you actually want the stability of the general manager in having it be an experience first in the food second. And I wrestled for a while with that trade-off and ultimately decided I didn't want that trade-off. And I was going to try to, we'll see whether it works. Try to have it both ways. But this particular chef, I had interviewed him early in the process and he was so, Joel was so knowledgeable and wise about the business without being cynical. It was like this knife edge of, I interviewed so many chefs who were burned out, particularly probably a post-COVID experience. They had gotten slightly cynical and victimized feeling about the profession and how restaurants fared during COVID. And Joel didn't have that. And then I was looking, so he's an Enneagram six, which my wife is.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, that it just feels different and it doesn't feel like a neighborhood place. And I wanted this to feel like a neighborhood place. I kept looking for either someone younger this was going to be their first breakout restaurant or someone for whom it made sense that they would actually be in the restaurant. And I interviewed a ton of chefs and one of the co-founders of BlackRock, Keith Anderson, owns a restaurant called Community Table in Lichfield County. And I was speaking to him about it. I was speaking to him on a reference on a chef that had worked at community table back when he started it. And that chef, Joel Veelhand, ultimately we hired. And I'm super excited he's moving to Santa Barbara in July. And then we're going to open the restaurant. But there's a dynamic between the general manager and the chef that is very delicate because one runs the front of the house and one runs the back of the house. And one theme that people who've owned restaurants have is”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most often not be in the original location. And so I had several potential licensing deals with very fancy chefs because everybody seemed to agree once I had this lease that this was an amazing lease. But I realized there's something about when you're in a restaurant and the chef is there versus.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Find a chef. And the other thought I had was that the percentage mind share that Che Penise has in Berkeley, like if I lived in Berkeley, being able to walk to Che Penise and having that one woman in a house totally disproportionately impacts that whole place's sense of itself. Like there's such leverage to a really good culinary and more than culinary, just neighborhood experience. I aspired to bring that in some way to Santa Barbara and Montecito. And this restaurant spot came up and ended up taking about a year to get the lease. It ended up being a sublease, but a long one. And then I started trying to figure out what distinguished different chefs. And I interviewed a ton of chefs. And the reality is that for a chef to get leverage, they need to open multiple locations and then.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had heard Danny Meyer say on maybe a podcast with Tim that there are some spaces, restaurant spaces, potential restaurant spaces, that if you gave them to him for free, he wouldn't start a restaurant there. That totally clicked because I'd been keeping an eye out kind of opportunistically in Santa Barbara and specifically in Montecito for a restaurant spot. it constantly felt like I was forcing it And so a spot came up that has such good feng shui. It's like your car kind of wants to go there. It's the center of this particular part of town. And I instantly knew, oh, if that were available, I would be drawn to go there myself all the time. Of course, I knew nothing about restaurants, but I figured it was a casting exercise, just like most other things. So I was like, okay, so I need to.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An outsider, they always feel like they're visitors. And so one way I made the decision was this feels like home, I don't want to leave. And whatever I do next, I want to use this as the base and travel from here. And so that is ultimately how I made the decision. And it feels like it's worn well. I miss the team. I miss the clients. I miss being in New York and the flow of it. But then I almost feel slightly smug saying this out loud. But on a 100-point scale, my life satisfaction is like a 98 or 99. I'm saying this in that spirit of recognizing how fragile it is, how quickly it could change.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kid, which I learned about from an Israeli friend of mine who grew up in Puerto Rico and his Indian girlfriend said, you're a third culture kid, which is such a great mix. Guess the concept is it's when you grew up in a place that's not your family's home culture. A lot of military brats are like this and a lot of immigrants are like this where you never quite feel like somewhere's home. And I had grown up. My parents were hippies, started a nonprofit in Kentucky, and I grew up in Kentucky, and I was homeschooled. And we were so different from everybody else. It was like I was going up in a foreign country. And in retrospect, it felt incoherent to me. I had no alternative basis other than the fact that we seemed very different. I moved to New Hampshire when I was 14, and that immediately felt much more coherent. My dad had grown up in Boston. My mom grew up in Santa Barbara. And on the West Coast. And when we moved in January 2020 to Santa Barbara, it has felt like home in a way that I thought I was a third culture kid. One of the things about third culture kids is they nowhere ever feels like home. They always feel”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who worked for us were getting confused. This is no longer coherent. So I decided, you know what? At the highest level, what I'm really good at is finding somebody who's better than I am at doing a thing. And I realized Adam's better at running EastRock than I am. Like, I'm not that great a manager of people. I love coaching people. I love having a sense of abundance. I love setting people free. I'm not that good a manager of people. If anything, not being that good a manager, people is in part why I have to be so good at hiring because I don't have the attention span or the desire to stay in their business if they're not doing the thing they should do. And so I decided, you know what? I found somebody who's better than I am at running EastRock and he should take it and make it his own and turn it into the next era. And I always thought that there's this concept of third culture.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In January 2020, I had moved to Santa Barbara right before COVID. And I realized that there was enough of a difference in management style between partner Adam and myself, that it was incoherent to have me trying to input my claim to source from the West Coast. He's an amazing investor. He has such a different style than me when we were in the same office, it worked. When I was on the West Coast,”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It affects my mood when I'm in this space. Obviously, light and ceilings and all that art, all that kind of stuff. But one of the things about the East Rock office that I was focused on is I... Like one thing that people with capital should do more is provide physical space for up-and-comers. It's such an easy arb. And Richard Rainwater did that, I think, very stern-like camped maybe in Dan Stern, a reservoir of space as he was starting Starwood. There was holding a physical space and covering the overhead of that. That's what a certain set of people are lacking. You want to pay their overhead and collect them. And ideally, they find things to do together and you find things to do with them. So we have a cafe at Eastrock with a great chef for some of the same reasons you do it here. Like it creates more of a restaurant or not quite a club, but just a vibe of”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One tiny crimp in that hose and all sorts of weird shit happens. And if it's clean, if everybody in a system says, yeah, this guy's source and I want to live in this reality, it has such a healthy vibe to it.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very coherent is my sense. He's a great investor, and people in Eastrock and the clients are living within Adam Shapiro world. I'm helping an entrepreneur right now who I think is at risk of not fully owning source. It's something that Enneagram 3s and 9s in particular, I think are subject to where you can be so adaptable and pragmatic that you write yourself out of the narrative because it's like at the end of the day, I'll take care of my own needs. I'm going to take care of everybody else's needs and I'll do anything to make this thing work. And so there's a very fine line of being flexible and adaptable, but allowing your own creative voice, what's coming through you, the reason you started the thing in the first place. And it's why, I mean, so many things do not work. At the end of the day, you need to be comfortable with the power dynamic of who is sourcing.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It built a big business. So if I were replaying that, there were moments at which, in retrospect, I was frustrated with him as source. Back then, I saw it as I'm producing the Richard Medley show, but the moments when I didn't want to produce the Richard Medley show, I wanted to produce the Graham show, they were frustrating and he and I had conflict in a way that was extra. Like, no, I'm not sorcerer. This is the Richard Show. At the end of the day, everyone, including me, needs to understand that the buck stops with him and he started it. And over time, we tried to grow it off of him. But knowing source is super powerful of like, am I source? I think in some ways at Eastrock, I didn't fully own source at times as an example. And my partner, Adam Shapiro, has become, you know, I kind of handed his horse off to him.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, a huge percentage of them are source related. Like knowing when you are source and when you're not is such a valuable thing. So the first business I started with a professor of mine out of Yale, Richard Medley, he was source on that. But I was running the business. He wasn't really a business guy. I was the beneficiary of his poor judgment about people, which extended to me. So he let this 21-year-old run this thing in this completely massive imposter syndrome at the time had 30 people working for me. Wow.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's still what's going on here. It's what's going on here in this new setup. And can I or anybody else describe it in a way that's useful to you truly understanding the structure of what's going on here? If you have humility about it and realize the things you can't see, then if you read the right thing or hear the right person talking at the exact right moment, there's such leverage to that moment. Weight skin has this language of fire walking somebody else's mistakes. Can you burn in someone else's mistakes or not? And it's really hard to do because it's obviously not visceral to you the way it was to them, but are there ways to inform your own compass in this whatever period, whatever rite of passage you're going through that makes you better at it or somehow improves your ability to do it? I just think there's extra leverage around those.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And having it be dynamic over time, of course, to accommodate the shifting system. There's a quant fund I'm obsessed with, the culture, and I probably shouldn't get into the specifics of it, but they have a very dynamic comp system in a way that gives rise to the culture. And so I think there are ways to be creative about How equity changes over time, how carry changes over time that allows Meritocracy and for a change, and people tend to do the same self-expression hitting the comp system and how value will change over time, I think, is a fertile area as you're setting up something new.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would in a marriage because if they're truly your business partner, I think David Senra picked out that amazing Zell quote, a partner is somebody who shares the same level of risk that you do. I thought that was so profound. That was such a good catch of his. Like, that is a partner. You're in this new thing. And if it goes down, like it has real world implications for your family, for where your kids are going to go to school, where you're going to live. And yet, I think most of the time those systems benefit from at the end of the day, the buck stops one person and they are going to make a call and everybody needs to be okay with that.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't want somebody who they think they should have 40%. You gave them 10%. Like it's just in the water all the time. And if they wanted 40%, actually maybe they actually wanted 50%. And if you could hold it for a couple years and then they go off and do their own thing, that's great. But that can screw up the energy of the system. It's also like why in those settings if your partner has experienced failure in some form or done it themselves and knows how hard it is, it's pricing it correctly. Because if they think it's easy, then they should go do it. And if they think it's too hard, they're probably not going to join you. So it has to be like right in that sweet spot. And I'm thinking this in personality terms, depending on how you're wired, how they're wired. You need to understand how those two are going to go together just like.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it plays a big role, of course. And it's back to the source point. You want them senior enough that you find them credible and they find you credible and you've had enough time together, but then depending on the construct, hopefully want them game for at the end of the day being on your ship. And the challenge becomes if actually they wanted to do their own thing or actually they think they should be the PM or they should be co-PM or all of those, you're capturing somebody who's extremely talented.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“a fund with that liquidity term before they actually like quarterly liquidity in all these ways they're faster twitch than you are and you sold them on your strategy the expectations you have with your team with your investors have to be so pristine and so well managed or you don't protect the climate and the skull”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your own chipstack is smaller and you're sitting there, and the guy sitting next to you in his body language and in his questions is conveying anxiety and fear. Those are very contagious emotions. You want to be very pristine, particularly early on as you're holding the ambiguity and asserting, trying to assert reality about the energy of the people around you and whether they believe in you because you need some skepticism in there, of course. You don't want to go off a cliff because you're sizing something too big or in some other way you haven't taken input, but you're managing your own psychology. And I think one of the best ways to do that is manage the inputs. And so it could mean turning down an investor where the check size is really good, but they're actually kind of an asshole and they're going to call you weekly and they signed up for your liquidity terms, but they've never signed up for.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's related to the idea in the investment world, but maybe it applies to founders too. Like the main asset is your future decisions. And so when you're moving from the container you were in before and the way reality was defined into this new ambiguous setting if in the transition you are now sitting next to somebody I use the example in the piece of often younger hedge fund managers will hire a more seasoned CFO, but the CFO is taking risk that almost by definition if they're a CFO and grew up in the accounting profession is more risk than they actually feel comfortable taking. And so their risk aversion and slight skepticism about you, the portfolio manager can enter your confidence when your fund is down 10%. You're less senior.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thread the needle on its real enough. I'm going to find the thing that's real enough to me that I'm willing to put a stake in while at the same time having a sense of humor about it.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“on Monday morning. Hopefully you have an office. If you don't have an office, you're sitting at a Starbucks and you're like a lack of, right? You've moved from order to chaos There's no order, the only order comes from you asserting reality. And if you haven't done it before, you can feel fake. It can feel disorienting. You can have vertigo. It can be like, oh my God, what did I just do? So what is it? It's getting comfortable with that level of uncertainty. And there's also this subtle thing where I'm actually working with somebody right now who's literally doing this very masterfully. You have to pretend it's more certain than it is because you're pretending makes it so. But there's something slightly intellectually dishonest about that. And it's particularly hard for hedge fund managers because many of them are kind of default skeptical. They're likely to see the downside and the risk and the calling bullshit on things. And so if you're in that mode and yet your own thing feels like bullshit to you, it's not going to work.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your ability to transition between containers gets really compromised because either you've grown up in one container or your willingness to put up with somebody else's frame of reality diminishes. And so I think the ambiguity that I was referring to when somebody's starting something new is just that act of defining the reality is a creative act. But while you're doing it, it feels super slippery and amorphous. And it's like, I don't know if I'm going to get the investors. I don't know if I'm going to get the team. You're like holding so many 33% probability things at once that it's very taxing. And if you haven't run something yourself before, you're not used to having everything be up for grabs. And I feel like the act of starting something new, you're sitting there.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're reading an article is about a subject you know about, and you're like, Oh my god, the reporter doesn't know what they're talking about, and then you turn the page, and then you assume the next article accurately captures reality. I've been thinking, I have that and most people have that about moving from one container to another. You're like, oh, this one is so idiosyncratic based on the source and the way the leader defined reality on the way in. Oh, I'm going to go to this next one, but that won't be the case of the next one. It'll be, quote, normal. No, every single one is so weird and idiosyncratic. And the older you get,”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a guy who has a quote, Blake in the guy's name. The job of the leader is to define reality on the way in and thank them on the way out, which I think is so profound because it speaks to how each container is a different reality. And I've been thinking lately how you've heard of Gellman Amnesia”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need somebody who knows what it's like to lose money and cares in their bones about never selling puts or never doing something that could take you out of the game because people do weird shit. And so part of the trust is a conservatism of like, yeah, I'll let some things go. You want the agent to view the money as though it's theirs and there's a price for that, which is ideally they've got enough money that they've already found a way to relate to money that way or they're just innately conservative. That's why I was trying to capture.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many people actually are not good at making money through other people, they need they can do the analysis themselves, but they actually can't. It's like the stage of a portfolio manager's development where if they've been a stock picker and then they move to being a portfolio manager and they need to own a stock that actually is their analyst's favorite idea and they aren't as deep on it as the analyst. That's a really big moment of transition and a lot of people cannot make that transition. It's the equivalent transition, I feel like in the family office CIO where I think the ideal is just agnosticism on enough self-awareness to know where you have comparative advantage, but also an ability to interview other people. And appreciate them for who they are and what they're doing without any need to make it your own somehow.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To that part about identity if you're the principle you need an agent who can make money through other people and not care, be kind of indifferent about whether it's, quote, yours or somebody else's. It's just net of fees. How much money did you make? And I feel like I observed that a lot of people allocate money to underlying GPs, they actually would prefer to be the underlying GP from a power and identity and experience perspective. You, the principal, should just want to make money. Like it's not all the identity claims about who did what or whatever”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit so that it doesn't feel exploitative. And sometimes I would get it wrong, of course, but I feel like that part of pricing Talent, like how much money and with what constraints on the activity? Like, what are your decision rights? And how often are we going to check back in? And then I think there's a way to do it if you're the, I guess in this sense, the principal, there's a way to do it where you're Even though you formally have these rights, you're doing it with a very light touch. You can make the experience feel like a much more open field depending on the tone of the people who you've struck the deal with.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's part of the pricing, right? You think of somebody like Musk, the terms of Musk's X.ai fundraise, I presume, are egregious, quote-unquote, from an investor's perspective. They have no control. They have no transparency, whatever, right? So that's the market pricing, the fact that he's highly credible, part of pricing the talent. What you're pricing is the degree of autonomy, transparency, and the fees and the duration of the capital, all those things are like, okay, what feels reasonable given where this person is in life, what their track record is, your assessment of their competence and all of that. The way I ended up doing is if I were them at this stage with this track record, with this set of relationships, would I feel like this is a fair deal or do I feel exploited? And if I would feel exploited, I'd try to dial it back.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I share this and noticed this recently in visiting somewhere else where I helped recruit a lot of people. You're sharing the before and after reality with somebody and you're on the same journey in this camaraderie-like way. So I've seen them go from nothing to, I think they managed like 10 billion today. And to their credit, they've consistently invested in crypto and put real money to work at multiple bottoms because of their long-term belief in it and the quality of their decision making. I had kind of a front row seat to that, and that's been really fun.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This endowment person who they were interviewing as CFO. And she and I had this amazing deep conversation and I realized, oh my God, she's an Enneagram one. And I said to them, to Fred and Matt, like, I think she's an amazing hire. She's going to bring institutional credibility into the inside of the firm. The shadow side, the one catch is she's going to have this slight vibe of you're trying to get away with something. Particularly Fred, she's going to have this vibe of like you kind of getting away with something. Why are you being that way? And if you take that personally, you're going to end up firing her. But if you don't, she's going to be amazing. And Matt recently sent me, I think that email recapping that she's ended up becoming their CFO. She's amazing. She totally built their firm. She's their third partner. And because I was there with her before, it's like...”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Matt Wong was at Sequoia at the time, and he came in. And then I was like, you know what? Actually, I'm going to follow him. And so I became kind of his wingman. And it turned out in retrospect he and Fred Ersim were debating whether to work together and that they had gone on this trip partly to figure that out. I ended up having a road trip. I drove the two of them to the airport and we spent a bunch of time together. And I was just struck by I experienced them both as commercial actors that I would back feel agnostic. I would bet on them individually and as partners regardless of what they were pursuing. And I ended up interviewing CFOs for them. I like to interview team members for people because I can often add value that way and I understand how they're approaching everything and I learn a lot about it. And I happen to have just read the description of Enneagram one on the morning that I interviewed”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or people who are so Chicago improv that they're switching what they're doing and chasing the next thing. And so it can be kind of aesthetically distracting when there's a new thing because the people who've gotten in there first are kind of scrappy but also fly by night in this way. And crypto is like that. And so I went to this conference and I experienced a lot of the people as not like that line from succession. They are not serious people. And then I came across this woman who was running crypto for Facebook at the time. I was in a room of like 300 people and I just followed her because I noticed that the”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had left Microsoft and he was trying to figure out what to do next. And I remember counseling him at the time. He said he really appreciated that I wasn't trying to fit him into existing concepts, but I was just trying to figure out what was best for him. His appreciation of my doing that kind of made it object to me, and I tried to do it with other people. hedge fund gathering we had and had touted bitcoin back when it was probably six months before we ended up buying it but we bought a small amount at 300 a coin and then it proceeded to go up quite a bit and so i was trying to figure out what to do with the position whether it was real how to think about it and so i went to a crypto conference and i've noticed this thing i don't know if ai is like this now or not but when you have a new field it tends to attract the people who are available to be in that new field and that's often unemployed people”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the result just takes care of itself. Came up with this back when I first started EastRock as a way to evaluate hedge fund managers, I felt like often if we had like 30 people in a room pitching investment ideas, the room knew who the best people were. I'd go in with a thesis on this guy's the best on special situations. This is the best tech long short guy. And then some percentage of the time La Rue agreed with me. But then over the course of several days of talking like different people would emerge if you read the room correctly, the room kind of knows where the pockets of quality are most of the time.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes, sometimes not. But what I do, it's just very visceral. It's like if I get stuck sitting next to this person, am I neutral, psyched, or bummed?”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source