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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“Yeah, it's creating talent density. And then to your point, it like creates a gravitational force of its own and people end up doing business with each other.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You had built, yeah. And I would host these events and people would come to the event and then you'd see, oh, one guy who runs a large investment firm in San Francisco had come to one and he said, oh, he sent me a note afterward saying, Graham, you've restored my faith in humanity, which was like such a high compliment. He's like referring to the fact that it's like being at a really good wedding, you're like, oh my God, I like all these people. Like there's not a bad seat in the house and I would do business with all these people. There's a level of trust or integrity or something.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, I guess an example. The group of people around the Colossum brothers, I feel like, is very distinctive. It's kind of nerdy. And also. Yes, right. It's very specific aesthetic. And Patrick's got these public policy interests and Tyler Cowan and that whole crew, it's a very specific aesthetic. And by signaling it out to the world, they attract more of it.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, your ego needs to be able to take somebody else having the successes and failures around it, I think. Because if not, then if you want to be pretty involved or you have identity because I made a bunch of money and blah, blah, blah, and I want to keep making money and blah, blah, blah. And now I want you to do it for me. Anybody commercial who's sitting in the front seat now has somebody telling him how to drive in the back seat. And unless the person in the back seat is extremely skilled, it's going to screw up the incentives of the whole thing.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that's why, like setting up, figuring out why they are available, people screw up and they think it's like, oh, it's just a role. I'm going to hire for it. No, it's not. It's like it's up one level or by definition if the person's good. It needs to be a tricky setup.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pool, if you could make it feel like it's their money, either lend them money or they put half their net worth and you lever it some way to make it feel as though they're doing it.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think giving a bunch of money to a kid, if you're running a family office, you need to do it in a way that there's room for them to screw up. And there's something around, like the people who I think would be good at managing family office have taken risk with their own capital and other people's capital before. And I think ideally don't have identity. They have identity as being a money maker, but not as a specific thing. And their EQ and social intelligence is high enough that when they're talking with other people, like rainwater is the gold standard on this, they're okay expressing a bet through other people. I feel like that's a distinct skill set. And so retired hedge funds managers who were pretty high EQ are probably a pretty good”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one thing is, I think I think it's because it's the skill set. The skill set at the highest level Managing risk and being pragmatic and commercial, I think. And so in general, those people tend to be older.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This language, I often think of it as who is the source, and are they owning it Mean you see it a lot in succession. One of the arguments in this literature is that handing off source is extremely subtle and hard to do. Where else do you see it in the dynamics between co-founders? Is there resentment on the part of the co-founder who's not source toward source because they don't want to be in that role? I feel like I see that a lot. 80% of the time that's held in check, but then conditions can change and then it's not held in check anymore. They can go through a difficult period or extreme success can also lead to it.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. Kind of up one level looking to back people and fit their circumstance. And they were going to do the thing anyway. Yeah.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the chick needs to peck through the eggshell and develop the strength through the pecking in order to make it once you're outside. If you break the shell for them, they will die. If you mess with the origin in any subtle way, it can affect the entire trajectory of the thing in ways you wouldn't think.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You gotta be really careful about that first risk and who's taking it and why they're taking it. I remember meeting with a quant fund and when I pulled the thread on the origin story, there was something about the energetic of the guy running the quant fund, which was that he was really into it as a job, not his thing. It's like, that's so weird. And then I pulled the thread and it emerged that had happened to him. He'd been sitting at a fancy firm and a friend of his had said, let's do this thing. And the source dynamics were screwed up from the start. And this guy, Peter Koenig, has this argument that all organizational dysfunction can be traced back to disagreements about who is source or the actual source playing small or not fully owning being source of the thing. And that totally fit my sample of hedge funds where our friend Diana Chapman has this analogy.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing that people do, I've noticed this if you seed somebody, I was talking with a guy, I won't use the name of the fun, but he was at a very prestigious fund and somebody called him and offered him, it was a big seed, call it $200 million. My hypothesis, I remember talking to him, my hypothesis was if the guy hadn't called and given him the 200 million, he wouldn't have come up with it on his own. It's a very subtle, I forget we've talked before about source dynamics like work with source.com is a collection of information on this concept that I'm obsessed with, but it's like the argument is this guy, Peter Koenig, and he had looked at all these startups in Europe several hundred and found that even when there were co-founders, there was really one person who took the first risk, even if that was calling the other co-founder, and that”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ever selection, and the moment you have to. I remember we were so careful about this, and my partners who now run East Rock continue to be careful about this. If you have all the mentality of I need to put assets out, it completely screws up the dynamic. I wouldn't trust myself if I had. Yes, if I had two billion dollars that's burning a hole in my pocket and I need to seed”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's my price? And that should change over time. I remember there was a guy running a regional office for a really large hedge fund and thinking that if we had been able to spring him, he would have raised $500 million to a billion. And we ideally would have seeded him, but quite possibly he wouldn't have needed it. But then he ended up running, call it a $10 billion plus fund. I was thinking, oh, that's a very interesting spread. Outside this container, the market as a whole would price him at $500 million to a billion. He's running a $12 billion plus fund. The founder of that firm who made that decision, that guy's arb. That's the bet. And it ended up being the correct bet. I didn't necessarily see it at the time. I was thinking, whoa, that's a huge spread. And if he went outside, it would be so much smaller.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The core motivation is I want to create a new job for myself. And I think that's not a great way to start a new thing. These would be slightly bigger than that, I think. And then at the highest level, what it is, what they're wanting is to be priced by the market in a hedge fund context or probably applies to startups too, of just what will VC's price me plus this opportunity at from a seed round or series A valuation? Like I think of it as it's like a price of exercise like a guy who runs an enormous fund I was talking with recently and he's kind of debating whether stay at this enormous fund and the question he's really asking is if I launch my own fund, am I raising a billion or am I raising five billion? And it's a great question. And I think there's kind of an answer to that based on, okay, how long have you been there? Do you have a standalone track record?”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A founder. You're not a founder yet. The founder thing is totally in this category and it's so deceptive to my ear because I've just spent more time on it in the last couple years. And the Silicon Valley version of it is so distinctive of founder capital F. So there's a version of it where someone is just frustrated with their current construct.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My job sucks. There is a category of it's like my friends have all started funds or they've all started whatever the thing is or all starting. You get this in Silicon Valley right now.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is it's very easy to be define almost everything you're thinking of doing in reaction to your current container. The genesis in part, I think, of Josh Waitzkin's cave process is that's not a healthy way to start a new thing. You can't do it in reaction. You can do it somewhat in reaction to the old thing because that informs your map of reality and what you want to change. But if it's all reactive, there's something kind of, it's like the psychologist divide things into approach motivation and avoidance motivation. It ends up being too much avoidance motivation somehow. There's like this negativity baked into the DNA of the thing if you allow too much of that. So I feel like that's one thing. It's easy to be too cute about that. You don't want to overweight that when someone's talking, but I feel like over time, they need to get to the point where they're articulating a proactive vision, not just.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been on so many counseling calls with people thinking of leaving at any one time. I have five to twenty conversations going with somebody who's thinking of leaving a thing. And the level of fear about how the source, the primary person of their existing platform is going to relate to them is so consistent and so high and correct.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sponsor him and promote him too much, you create an incentive for everybody else to do that. So I really like hair on a former situation, specifically where I know the former PM and I have a feel for why they might be a little sociopathic about it. Enough, I see what you're doing”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and then you can just help from the people he had seated, there was a consistency to his taste, which was in seating there's massive adverse selection, of course. In general, somebody who has pulled out enough money from the market should have enough money to put themselves into business. So you have to understand why you're so lucky that you're either catching them. I generally like catching people super young. It's like a company going IPO. There's just not that much information yet about them. And so it makes sense there'd be inefficiency. But then other times, another pattern I liked a lot was someone's former boss damning them, either with faint praise or not even with faint praise. It's a huge structural inefficiency because if you're the guy running the platform and your star guy leaves”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was working at a fund of funds and Dan Stern, who you may have met, who used to run reservoir, the way these mutual friends described him and then his activity, which was so people-focused within investments, I was like, oh, that's my own orientation towards this. Oh, there's a path here of being an effective investor by selecting people, having very high situational awareness on how to set up the right platform for them. That I thought, you know what, I've never met him, but I could just tell based on the friends we had in common and then how effective he'd been that, oh, that's a thing. I want to be that.”
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 didn't look back because it was so embodied. And it was also a recognition that I have enough overlap with them that I can do this. Like it's not completely random. But then that feels like a viable path. It's not that reliable question, actually. Like a lot of people will either fake it or they don't recognize those moments. It's kind of a subtle thing to catch. But Tim Galway, the inner game of tennis guy, here's this line desire wants what it wants. I think it's so profound. From schools, parents, peers cover up what the desire actually wants. And getting in tune with it is so powerful. And hopefully that happens to somebody in their 20s or 30s from a career perspective when it does click, you can hear it in their voice, you can hear it in the way they create language to capture the things. They've seen.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read that in the telecom. I was like, oh shit, I totally had that. I had that twice. I had that, I was in eighth grade and I was rowing. It was like the sixth time I went rowing in this senior and junior, a guy and a woman who were tall and he was handsome and she was beautiful and they just had such presence and mastery of rowing both won national championships. And I was in eighth grade at the time. I was like, oh, all I have to do is row four hours a day and I can be that? Done.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For most people, it would be very boring. So I like looking at their picture. I feel like someone's self-selected photo is so crazily high signal if somebody chose that photo to represent themselves, they are saying there's something of my essence that I want to have be my essence in this photo. And then matching it up with my impression of what life has done to them, what they've done to life in the photo, and then matching against the resume, I can literally do that. What's the thing you do that other people kind of make fun of you for? I feel a little embarrassed that I can do that somehow. It feels like, oh, weirdly tactical and kind of boring. But on some level, I just enjoy seeing that dance of what somebody wanted and then what the world wanted from them. And then other places other than what are you compulsive about that question of have you felt a moment of ignorance?”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like if you're talking to a 22 year old that had been on the playing field less time, and so they don't know what they actually want, they're socialized in Keegan's language. There are all these things they're subject to that they can't see. And so partly the hero's journey or pick your metaphor is about listening to what the world wants from you and what you actually want and then looking for that intersection. The questions I ask sometimes, what are you compulsive about, like I noticed for myself, like I could surf LinkedIn, I don't know what my appetite would be. I could probably do it for three or four hours.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One aspect is that Have that analogy of a river with two banks, and one is order and the other is chaos. And you kind of start off your career closer to order. And sometimes you swim closer to chaos over time. It's like a developmentally appropriate stage of being an intern and learning a craft and apprenticing and all that stuff where you're not really often that in touch with what you actually want. You're just playing the game the way other people have defined it.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've found the person when I thought there was no one enough times that I'm always like I have hope. I could go through so many examples of like, are you kidding me this person exists and they're that obsessed with this crazy thing? And then I think one key thing that people miss on hiring is you need to understand why it makes sense for the candidate, why the candidate should choose this container in this setup and be rating it like 100 out of 100 if possible. Realistically, it won't be that. I see people make a mistake. It's like I'm hiring like a left hemisphere approach. It's like I'm hiring this person to do this thing. It's like they're treating it as a machine, but it's so much more complicated than that. If you want the person to thrive and have the energy and then be rooting for them, you need to understand why from their perspective this is the right thing for them at this stage of their life with this set of skills.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To figure out the person in some new field trying to figure out how it's like what's going on here. I can't get over how profound a frame that is. It applies obviously at any level to the point where it's so abstract it may not be useful. But I have this like, I guess there's hope in there, like optimism that I will find somebody, the kind of Yuri and Boyd's thing of what's the I definitely had that”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And make it as pure an expression of this is genuinely what I would do with every single dollar if it were my money. I feel like there's such leverage to that. So I would fit it to the risk appetite and the trust level with another principle. But as I've said before, I think I'm pretty lazy and it's a curse and a gift. And the gift side of it is like I have no desire to work for work's sake. Like zero”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, for that chapter of my life, it was pretty amazing and ideal and fit. I really felt like Stuart provided a playing field with no constraints, but you had to earn the right to go anywhere. And so I feel like if I were doing it again, I could picture murdering again, finding somebody being purely opportunistic and fitting the current opportunity set to the risk tolerance of the principle. And then I could picture trying to seed somebody with a billion dollars if I had that level of confidence in them and if I felt like the principal could have that level of confidence because it's the same aesthetic or the same map of reality. But I just feel like if you can eliminate the optics and the desire to look like you've added value as the agent”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More Chicago Improv. I was at first attracted to Harvard nerds. Over time, I came to appreciate, Charlie Munger calls it the knack or called it the knack. I remember early on in working with Ted Sidees, we were in a meeting with a former Milken credit trader of some sort. And we were sitting at a restaurant in Santa Monica. And he turned it to me at one point. He put his hand on my arm and said, money's like water. All you have to do is learn to turn on the faucet, see? And that was like in some sort of David Mammett movie or something. But he's right. There is this Wu Wei not forcing it, working with, there's a coach I like who I follow online named Joe Hudson, and he had this line of where does the water want to flow downhill? Working with, not forcing it, like working with what already wants to happen that I feel like is in there, lack of stuckness.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great story that Tina Fay has about the only things she learned from Lauren Michaels, not the only thing. One important thing she learned at Saturday Night Live that she brought to Thirty Rock was that you need in the writing room, you need the optimal mix of Harvard nerds and Chicago improv. And I thought that was so profound when applied to investment managers because I had experienced a lot of both types. And I would say the Chicago Improv is pure plasticity, pure flexibility. They will do anything for a laugh to a fault. And the Harvard nerds in her language were planning everything out very high order, very high stability, but not able to improv as much. Over time, my taste evolved to accommodate”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experience the satisfaction of being right. And that's the primary goal. And that works some high percentage of the time, but then it can be disastrous, of course, because your ego and your portfolio can get caught up with that goal instead of just making money.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The term originates Adam used it at Goldman. Other people at Goldman, I'd heard it from, and it connotes all the cliches, moneymaker. I think what's in there is one way I've ended up defining it is it's the ability and the intent to create more value than you capture. So that would be a kind of abundant version of it. I feel like there are people who are signaling that they're in a repeat iteration game and they're not going to grab every penny on this transaction because they know that there's a sense of proportion about it somehow. Goldman has that phrase long-term greedy. It's like, I want to make money, but I'm going to do it with the knowledge that we're going to see each other again. And that sense of I'd rather make money than be right is another core tenant of it where there are people who seem to me to be in the game in order to”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cases where I give them feedback on things and the way he took the view, I was like, Oh my God, you're such a quiet ego. So focused on being commercial first and ego second. So we ended up being a day one investor in there. It's had its ups and downs, but I continue to really believe in him as a commercial actor and as a leader of his firm as well.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there was this moment where Dan was ready to go do his own thing. He had enough of his own money. And I aspired to earn the right to a dialogue with him and help him in his hiring because we were in touch with so many analysts at any one time. I felt like I was able to calibrate on his taste in analysts and who would be at the right seniority and then help him with that hiring process. And I think forget of his initial, I don't know, I'm going to say I could get these numbers wrong of his initial 12, maybe four of them were from Patrick and me. And I got to know him very well during that process and saw how he had this very optimal grip, like he has no defensiveness whatsoever. If you tell him a new piece of information about him or a process or a person, there's like no ego in it. He'll just drop it with no hesitation.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much carrier are they going to have the subsequent year? And there have been a number of cases where I'm kind of tracking did the founder of the thing hit the bid correctly this year or not. And if they didn't.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So Danson was leaving Viking. I interviewed over the years all these people that worked for Dan, and they were always in such awe of him as a portfolio manager and as a, I felt like it was them at the expert or professional level relating to him as a master is how I interpreted it at the time. I remember one guy saying, Dan would be planning how to get in and get out of a stock six months in advance of buying it. He was planning out the whole arc of, he was very focused on liquidity and it was this mix of fundamentals and understanding market structure. We had a number of friends in common. And when he left, I feel like there's often within a hedge fund container, there's this dynamic where the founder of the hedge fund is pricing the up-and-comers each year. And it partly is expressed in terms of”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the seating, I feel like the process is can we set the table in a way on terms that the market will agree with, but it's unclear whether the manager would have gotten those terms without us. So that could be lock up of capital, that could be fee, that could be something else. I always tried to hold myself to the standard of I would invest in this manager even if I didn't have seed economics. I would just do it smaller. I would just take less risk and I wouldn't wear any reputational risk. I feel like that's one key distinction between just looking for seed deals, but holding yourself to the same bar of like, I just size it smaller and I wouldn't shape it. And so that kept us, I think, out of a fair amount of trouble.”
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 was downstream of an understanding I felt that Short and I had of the goal is to make money and not lose too much And it sounds so simple, but it's actually, of course, because principal agent dynamics looks super complicated. And I didn't feel like I had comparative advantage in picking stocks or doing any number of other styles of investment. And so for me, that was my comparative advantage. I think now that Adam is running the platform, he has a different comparative advantage and it'll morph over time.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's like this whole thing is that life is absurd. This whole capitalism is a construct. We're playing this game somehow, but it's the humor is embedded in the light grip, I feel like, in those situations. You're conveying to somebody else. We're going to do the best we can here and who the hell knows what's going to happen.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of subtly conveying to you it's not up for grabs, it's not debatable. They're not looking for your input on it. And so you're asking, is that the way Stuart was relating to this situation? Yeah, he had like a light grip on, I remember telling him at one point J.P. Borgen, it was at the bottom in 08, and people were buying gold and really ready for physical gold. And he cracked a joke about, yeah, I can just see myself, Graham, you're going to buy me a bunch of gold and then I'm going to be dragging this bag along the street with my brother-in-law. And what are you going to drive the car? Give me a fucking break.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I came, I guess. I mean, it was literal, I rode a lot in high school and a bit in college. And when you're holding the oar, there's a tendency to really grip it, in which case your forearm tightens up and you're kind of muscling it versus there's a version where your grip is, it's like paradoxical, it's both solid but also loose. And if you catch a crab, it's called catching a crab where the ore goes under the water, the blade goes under the water, and you can get thrown into the water if you're not careful. In that case, you need to be able to let go of the ore, otherwise you're going in the water. So there's this tight but loose grip that I started noticing that when I speak to certain people, if someone's ideological about the thing they're discussing,”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes There's something about that vibe of like we're doing this together and we're grownups and we're taking risk and I know shit could go bad. But I think to your earlier question, like the principle has to set this condition where it's okay for the agent to make mistakes. And there's a lightness to it because otherwise the agent, depending on their own risk tolerance, may not take enough risk, but difference of like managing your own money versus managing the optics of something can get so huge based on like one word from the principle.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was totally like what I imagine a sealed team captain is just going down. Like he's so turn it on. Turn it on and just cracking jokes left and right. And like no No identity as billionaire or as rich guy, just pure, this is a game, we're playing a game. It just got interesting.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And you know me pretty well, but not that well. And then all of a sudden your stock goes down to like what was it, the highest, but it went down to three bucks. So close to going bankrupt. And all of a sudden, all your money is with this kid that you don't know that well. And there's this scene I talked about in one of my essays where, and so he and his leadership team at Lenar is going around trying to raise money at the bottom. And he comes and he notices that Adam and I are kind of depressed. We're down like 12% at the time. But we had anticipated some elements of the Great Financial Crisis and thought we'd be flatter up and we weren't. And so we were sad and mopy. And he said to us, you guys, what the hell do you think? Like, I knew we're at risk of losing money. You don't see me moping around. And there's something about his physicality. He was like,”
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 convinced Adam Shapiro to leave Goldman and we started this new venture and had exactly a year to do stuff before the great financial crisis hit. And so picture your hymn, Stuart, and it's the beginning. 08 is happening. And you have hired these two kids.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing was the time horizon. Like, he just from the beginning had a very long time horizon. And then he's just a very skilled manager of people who's listening to Randall Stepman, was famously Jamie Diamond's coach. And he has this theme of they studied all the best leaders and they found there's this quality of the people working for the leader as feeling like the leader's rooting for them. I knew exactly what he meant because I could feel it. That's exactly the vibe Stuart had been giving me and eventually my second partner as well. That feeling of, yeah, I'm rooting for you first and foremost, like let's do this. In retrospect, it was kind of crazy, right? Because I started it in 05, the initial vehicle, which was just a fund of hedge funds. And then Stuart gave me the rest of his capital outside of Lennar in...”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source