YouSaid · the spoken record

Henry Ellenbogen

lines on the record: 123
first: 2025-12-16
most recent: 2025-12-16
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

“But you got to go do this now as an adult because you're making a real adult decision. And I tell this story to my two sons because I think it was very important but also kind because it taught me that if you're going to go make major decisions, you have to be thoughtful about them. People will support you, but you have to be able to be responsible for the consequences.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I was 19. And I came to her and I said, Mom, I want to go to Washington, DC and be chief of staff for Congressman Deutsch. And she said, wow, you really want to do that. And I said, yes. And I said, in order to do that, I can't take another leave of Astence from Harvard. They don't let you do that. I have to drop out. She was not on the Bill Gates or I guess Future Zuckerberg belief in the world. It was not her ethos. But she was really accepting. She was very thoughtful and listened to me. And she said, Henry, if that's what you really want to do, it sounds like very thoughtful. It's a very adult decision. And if you're going to go do that, I'm always here for you. I love you. I'll always be your mother. You come to me with anything. But what it practically means is you need to be responsible for paying for your education because you say you want to go back there. I'm going to take your word.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I have to say it's my mom. My parents got divorced when I was young, and my mom raised me. I learned so much from her. The thing my mom did for me that when hindsight was so wise and proved to be so kind was I took a leave of absence from Harvard to go work on a campaign for a state representative running for U.S. House of Representatives. And she was totally supportive of that. And then he was expected to lose. And in a long story, I became his campaign manager and ended up winning.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Draymond and Clay were just coming up. The energy of those people was amazing. And they transformed the game, right? They changed the three-point shot. And then, of course, when you see greatness like that, you got to go learn from it. And of course, I've gone and understand the way Steve Kerr is and how he cares about competitiveness, but he cares about mindfulness. He cares about fun. If you're going to be a new warrior, he's going to go visit you in your hometown to truly understand who you are as a person. I mean, that to me is great. And that to me is part of what being durable is.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly how I think about the Warriors. Steve Kerr, I think, is amazing. John Wooden. Amazing. I think John Wooden is the greatest coach of all time. They think about what John Wooden wanted from his players. He wanted them to be great people. He didn't necessarily believe they all had the same modes. I mean, Karim Abdul Jabbar and Bill Walton may be the two greatest college basketball players of all time in their eras, but definitely in the top five, totally different people. And he accepted that, but he wanted them to be great, not only as basketball players, but as people. He was measuring UCLA against that. And frankly, of course the output of that is the success they had. And to me, that was the Lakers with Magic Johnson. You watch those guys play basketball and they just were having fun. And they were elevating the game. I remember going and seeing the Warriors when Steph.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about we want to see Max win. And even the investors, I don't think about us competing against investors. I mean, there's so many investors who I respect. And honestly, if they're doing their craft well and their high quality people, we want to see them win. That is so core to the way we deal with people and the way we hold ourselves accountable”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're rooting for them. Now, of course, if we're going to play against them, we're going to be competitive on that day and we're going to win. But we want to actually have fun. We believe everyone can win. And I think that's durable. That's really important to me. When we invest in people, that's the kind of person we want to invest in. When we do, we're public market investors that are core. If we have to, and we did, because we think it's right for our clients, have to go sell a firm, which we did because we believe from a risk reward standpoint, we have to go do it. We're going to go do it. I always say it's not our money. It's our investors' money. We got to be fiduciary first. But when we did that, we want to see Max win. And we never stopped talking to Max. In fact, I think he would tell you some of the things in our relationship where he learned from me more than I learned from him was the period of time where we didn't own his stock because we don't think about it as a stock.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we want to have fun and we actually root for everyone. The reason I say this is I'm a huge sports fan. I love studying sports. To me, there's two types of competitive greatness. And they both work. There's Michael Jordan, who was such a fierce competitor that essentially if you didn't rise to his level, he drove you out of there. And it works. And those bulls showed up with a chip on their shoulder every game. And it was amazing. And they were great. And then there are the people who play basketball and they say, this game is great. We want to have fun and we want to elevate the game. And we want to win. And the people who compete with us, we think they're great.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not as a policeman, but actually as someone who basically said, I think people realize this more today than they did a couple years ago. A lot of times when you prioritize and you focus on what really matters, agility comes in and come in and you accomplish more. And when you try to do too much, essentially investment has no cost. A lot of times it's lazy and it's not sharp.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I probably, because I use the Netflix example when they were fully formed and they were a dismant company, I also think that putting discipline into a company when your corporate culture has already formed, I don't want to use the word stasis, but at a certain scale, it's hard to change. It's not good. To run a company well, you have to be in the AND business, not the or business. You have to drive growth measured by market share in the short term. You have to drive innovation or allocate capital well to position yourself better for the future. And you have to basically drive profitability. Partially profitability allows you to invest, but profitability actually forces you to drive efficiency and discipline through the organization and make sharp decisions on capital. And what I always tell people about this is you should think about your CFO's function.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, align external and internal investments and actually get his entire senior team aligned on what they needed to do, but also realigned on incentives. So I point out to people, I believe to build a great company, you have to balance growth, profitability, and innovation. I talked earlier about if you're a growth company, you don't have to trade on a PE, but you have to show that path back to the conversation with Duolingo and TOS and a firm in that transition. And you're better off doing it sooner rather than later. And two, if you got to go realign your internal team, well, actually realigning people to the right mark is actually really helpful. And the people who want to re-up, re-ups, and the people who do it get handsomely rewarded, and the people who don't obviously can move on. And I think that's really, really good culturally.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the classic example of a market leading company embracing a transition, they obviously ended up winning. We did that pipe at four and a half billion dollars. Look at the market cap of Netflix today. Yeah, it was a little messy, but it worked out well. So what does the public market do? I think, first of all, it sent a signal to Netflix that actually you're under a real transition here. And maybe your assumptions on your financial model are you need to have a wider fan of scenarios. Two, if you work at Netflix, you could say, well, you had the pain of seeing your stock go from 280 to $70. By the way, people think that was a great investment. I always point out to people a year later it was in the 50s, right? So a year later, did it look like a great investment? But I think what it does, you have to do this properly. You have to be resilient. You have to have a culture.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Model where you got to write big checks to people like Discovery and Disney to acquire content plus the stuff he hadn't launched any original but you're investing in original programming and if you run this scenario that I'm doing on the potential subscriber losses in this transition you're going to run out of cash or at least the market's going to think you're going to run out of cash and your stock is going to go down a lot more than $70. Therese credit, he said, I have not thought about this as much as I should. Let's talk tomorrow. I'll get the CFO on the phone. You go through your scenario. We'll go through ours. And I can learn. At the end of the day, when he showed at our data, he's like, look, I don't agree with your scenario on subs, but yours is not out of the realm of reasonable thought process. And he ended up raising a pipe. We put, when I was at T-Ro in half of it, and I did that. And then TCV, Jay Hogue did the other half.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was going to have Netflix as Flickster. He had to go back because he violated customer trust and churn spiked. And then the other thing that happened was in that period of time, he was buying back stock at $280 and the stock went to $70. And I remember this really well. When I was a T-Ro, I led a pipe to recapitalize Netflix and Reed's a great entrepreneur for a lot of reasons. And I remember calling him on a Saturday saying, hey, Reed, Look, I could be reading this wrong, but there is a scenario here where the market's right and you have to raise money. And he said, Henry, what are you even talking about? And I said, Reed, I'm a huge admirer of what you're doing. I believe in what you're doing. I believe it's offensive. But I also believe it's a tough financial transition. You got to go from a variable cost business model where the studios rent you DVDs on a usage basis to a fixed cost business.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“DVD mail business. Two reads credit, he realized that streaming was the future, and he wanted to tackle this offensively. Like any transition, it's a little messy. First of all, he tried to split the company. He announced”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get it. I actually think it's very thoughtful. Here's the good news about life. We're going to actually run an experiment. We're going to actually know the answer. I'm not saying that's wrong. Here's what I think. First of all, I don't think it's for everyone, but I believe the path to building a compounder or even what some people would say a generational company through the public markets is proven if you understand how to do it actually very clear what you do. Let's go back to the compounder studies and then I'll give you an example for two. When you look at these compounders that were 6x companies in 10 years, the 40 of them, the average one of them has a period of time where the stock goes down 50%. And it doesn't go down 50% only when the market is down 20%. They go down 50% when they go through transition. So I'll give you an example for my career. Netflix started.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe Elon is correct in SpaceX never has to go public. That's really only happened in the last five years. Some people correctly pointed out this might be an incredible path for certain companies. And by the way, I think there's some truth in it in the ideal situation. You're not beholden to short cycle performance. So you can basically drive growth, innovation, and at the right point in time profitability and discipline in your business, but you can do it on a timeframe that lines up with your individual business or your own competitive reality and not have to deal with the public markets.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone thought we were crazy. We invested in Twitter at a billion dollars. I was severely publicly critiqued. Now people look back at that and it's just like, wow, the idea that you would have a billion dollar private company, that's not even newsworthy anymore. What has changed, obviously, in the private markets is that you can be a growth company that loses money and that continues or be marginally profitable and not only be valued at a billion dollars, you can be valued at $100 billion. And there's even a view, and I think it's thoughtful, I'm not criticizing it, there's even a view that you can be an indefinite private company, SpaceX or something, like SpaceX.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is controversial. This is why I love what we do. Because, first of all, the world keeps on adapting. And when I first started investing in private companies, it was highly controversial that any late stage private company would be valued at above a billion dollars. We talked about workday earlier when we led the investment round at workday to.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good job of at some point in time while the initial team was at its high performance and so at plenty of runway started to prove that other people could participate in the investing process. That's something that we started to do internally with how we approach the private markets. We got it over time flush that out.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be able to own meaningful positions and companies to really be able to trade if there's quarterly volatility such that we can buy more when things are attractive. Everything that if we're only going to do maybe five, I think since 2023 we've done 14 new private investments. So we're back to doing five a year. If we're only going to go do five and we're going to start relatively small, a lot of times we start by investing $10 or $20 million. It's going to make an impact. for our investors, right? We got to be a performance driven organization and for our entrepreneurs. We got to be able to do exactly what we've done for Louise. We have to be able to do for Dylan, what I think we're doing for Dylan. We have to be able to support Canva and bending spoons in the next generation of those. So we got to go do that with that said, I do believe that these investment firms that have persisted actually have done.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right? That's hard. The other thing that's hard about it is when I went and looked at these firms, I do think there is a level of growth you have to pursue. Durable is a performance driven organization. We break every tie in pursuit of investment excellence. We haven't really market ourselves or try to get new investments since 2022. Why is that? Well, I think we're performing really, really well, but I just believe markets are pretty full. And we're along only firm. We're not going to short. We're not going to really try to time markets. But if you're going to be our investor over time and we're going to do well by you, we should probably take more of your capital when on balance the entry point is lower than higher. We're going to break everything. We're going to really understand if we're going to do less what it means to be able on the public side.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're truly going to be an apprentice in their way. And then even when you become an analyst the first three years, you're probably doing real analytical work, but probably you're early in your journey. But we don't want to hire you. We don't want to promote you unless we think you can actually one day lead the investment organization and drive the firm. And the reason I feel that's so important is we just don't have that many slots.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Won't mention the names of those who didn't make it because the thing about not making it is a little bit like Investment memos when we invest in great people who are trying to build companies, a lot of them do great things and they just don't make it. In success, there's a lot of good fortune. I think what I learned was if you don't architect the system on day one for success, then you end up with a lot of conflicts that sometimes undermine what you could have accomplished. We try really, really hard or durable not to make compromises. If we go hire someone on the investment team, We want to go hire someone who one day could be a senior partner or one day go basically manage the capital base or if we were to ever launch a new product, go launch that product. We're looking for people who can be as good as I am or Nookas or Corey's or Catherine. We want great people for sure you usually start in our parlance as an associate. You're going to start supporting someone.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do but I think what's special about our culture, and I always tell this to people before they join we tend to hire young people and develop them, but if you've been anywhere else, you don't believe this. People think when we get together and we do KPIs or do three or look backs, or we'll do a session sometimes where we'll look at reinitiations in the portfolio, things we sold before, and then we bought back. And a lot of times if we did that, why'd we sell it in the first place? Maybe we got it wrong. We don't do any of this in the spirit of You made a mistake. This is an environment where you should critique yourself negatively. It's like, no, we should be intellectually honest, just like we want our executives to be. We want to be clinical in what we did. But then we want to do in the spirit to try to learn from it and get better or put our data out there so we can learn from our colleagues who might have a valuable perspective to make us better. And if we can take the”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now we don't do them. Why don't we do them? Because actually we're a group of people who likes learning from each other and like sharing insights. And the activity we're going to get together for three days is going to be we're going to basically do look backs. We're going to look at reviews. We're going to go study in industry. We're going to go talk to a CEO. And then we're going to all learn from something such that we can all make each other better.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone can learn from it, but also lend their lens because it's not great, bad. A lot of times it's subtle. This thing was good. This thing was mixed. People can have their lens. And then we get together twice a year and we have off sites. You can probably tell we have a lot of fun at durable, but our off sites don't look like other people's off sites. We used to do team building activities.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We got together on Fridays, and by the way, we do it in the office, we have lunches and investment team, and we talk about insights. You don't prepare for this meeting, but this would be, hey, I had an interesting conversation with a CEO or maybe this week. I'm sure we'll talk about it. I listened to OpenAI DevDay, and this is what I thought was interesting. Or maybe I thought about this. Does anyone think about this? So we're trying to look for lateral insights to learn for each other. And then for sure, we do investment reviews where we do deep dive on stocks. Multiple people look at this. I learned this from, you had Kelly on the firm Lone Pine, really. I learned that from Steve. I'm sure Lone Pine still does it. We do KPIs. We call KPIS operating reviews where we go through the whole portfolio and every colleague reports to everyone else how they did. And we do that it's not to basically be a session while you're great or I got it wrong. It's more like, here's clinically what happened.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These people who believe we want to have great people, we have to attract great people, we have to allow great people to become great and provide the environment. But I also believe we have to have the right amount of process that enables true excellence and creativity. We, I think from an hour's perspective, probably do less or at the same amount as other investment firms, but I think the impact is really high. I'll give you a simple example. We do the same investment meeting everyone else does on Mondays, but we do an additional meeting where we go through ideas that we're looking at and we gate them together. We're going to go spend more time on an investment. Everyone's in the room when we decide to go do it. So people start to learn what is it that's a good use of their time, what's not a good use of a time. And if it is, if we're going to go look at something and I got to go.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I'll give you the measurement and then I'll give you how it really works. When we do 360 reviews at Durable, we actually ask everyone to give feedback on what their colleagues did to make it better. It's important. We're a really pleasant culture and we have high quality people, but it's not a nook help me this year and she's a nice person. It's if you're following DoorDash, it's that a nook, help me understand DoorDash because of her knowledge about Agenta Commerce on Shopify really helped me or when we did an investment review as an investment team she took a special interest and she followed up with me or she went to a meeting that was important and gave me her perspective we asked people to basically point to specific investments that they have the second thing we do is I want to”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the relationships and the way governance work, but also understand truly being a minority investor in the public markets.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you realize you're right. You got to believe in it. And sometimes you got to realize you're wrong. All this is underlied, obviously, by a level of desire to be excellent in what you do, but make your colleagues better. This is unique to durable. And we're just different here. So when people think about being excellent at durable, they have to think about being excellent in what they do and they have to be excellent at making their colleagues better. It's got to be both. We're an and culture. Then obviously we talked about why what we do is different, our ability to invest in dueling, go as a private company and still own it today, our ability to invest in Figma when it's a $30 million company and the same person follows a date. We have to have people who are both good at analyzing private companies that are early stage growth companies and then understand scalable growth companies and understand the subtleties and the nuances of private markets.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great investments both in the public-private markets. We were private investors in DoorDash, Sweet Green, Corpy Parker, some of the leading companies of the day. Anyway, what do we look for? We look for deep intellectual curiosity. If you don't want to constantly learn, that's just not who we are. We want people who really want to learn. We want people who compete but want to compete as a team sport. We have a lot of athletes. We have a lot of people who work their way through school financially. We want people who are resilient ourselves. All of us have periods of time where we get things wrong. And then if you're going to pass our style of investing in a world where the market has such volatility, even on good companies like Collier's, you have to live with the fact that sometimes your performance isn't going to be good. Sometimes you got to be resilient.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But all jokes aside, we really believe that you have to be an expert in what you do, develop into it. There's a whole matrix we have about the development of security analysis excellence. And how is the journey? We do our reviews based on it. I tell people, look, on this sheet, this is a journey. I'm probably the most experienced security analyst at the firm, and I still have a journey to go here. I got to get better. And then we also believe at the same time that the youngest person in the room on our investment team actually can have the most valuable perspective. So we have an investment team of 12 people. And in my career, a lot of times the best insight comes from the most junior person who's looking at something with a fresh set of eyes. Early in a nook's career, when I was looking at consumer companies, she really helped understand a millennial mindset. And then we did a lot of work against it. And I think that led to some.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a host of other people who came out of liberal arts, not rigorous. I had to work at a bank and an investment firm or anytime I'd interview with people, I have to tell people since I was five, which is basically what you have to do nowadays investment firms or banks. You got to tell people that ever since the age of five, I wanted to do exactly what you're doing.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went on a listening tour and I went to see firms that had a period of greatness and some of them didn't get it done. And then some of them actually accomplished that goal. I learned a lot in that part of it is how we have structured durables incentives and the whole ethos we have internally. But it was really a reinforcement of this goal about people. You spend time with our team. When you look at the senior people durable, Anuk day, one of my partners, incredibly talented women, she started working with me at 26. She had never worked in the investment business before. She had finished her master's at Oxford and she was working at a nonprofit. Corey Scholl, he started working with me either 21 or 22 right out of William and Mary.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the major goals I had when we started durable was to actually build an investment firm that would be better the day I left and the initial partners left than when we were the best while we were there. So I thought really hard about that.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This closed system. What I believed at the time, which obviously proved to be true, was that this TMT bubble that had burned so And no one wanted to think anything good could come out of at the time. He had laid the seeds of the end of the durability of that industry. Because even though people lost so much money on telecom infrastructure and laying the seeds of broadband, what broadband was enabling eventually was things like YouTube and Netflix, which would break down this whole comp, this closed system that was run like an oligopoly. That's what my memoirized was. The riskiest thing is to own the durable asset. And the safest thing to do is go by the next standard.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A business. And that was what the whole industry was. But the whole thing, if you really thought about it at a systematic level, was predicated on a closed system, which is so obvious today. The closed system was predicated on I'm only going to show you the product or the TV show that you most want to watch when I can make the most money, when you want to do it. Even in a world of linear TV, even though the most people watched TV on Sunday night, the worst shows showed up on Sunday night because people had spent their money on the weekend and they were going back to work and they weren't going to go shopping and go out. And the best shows showed up on Thursday night, friends, the Cosby Show. And in the movie business, obviously there was windowing. I was like, okay, so the best business is cable networks. That's why we have this fight over content distribution. And then it's all predicated on.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard about it. And I started to realize that the best businesses inside of all of them had been the cable networks. If you read about media back then, the entrepreneurs that became the most famous were the ones that launched cable networks. John Hendricks, Ted Turner, Bob Johnson. By the way, John Malone basically backed almost all these people and put the most investors. So John Malone was at the center of all this for 20 years, cable networks grew 20% with 20 ROEs. So they were compounders. And that's how you had all these entrepreneurs that had become billionaires. And that's how you had media companies that really fought over a balance of content and distribution so they could all get their fair share of these economics. And then when you went and you looked at a bunch of the other industry, it was like an average RO.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tend to want to do this. I always believe that if you really understand something, you can make it super precise. And where we are with robotics and less so with AI, our internal memos are probably too long because frankly there's too much unknown. And so we can't be concise. I was very lucky in media. And it's something we try to do adorable with people because I was an outsider to the media industry. I think I brought fresh perspective to it. When I was assigned to be a media analyst, this is so hard to believe. But the companies that were viewed as the darlings of balancing durability in terms of competitive modes and having strong growth were companies like Comcast, Time Warner, Disney, Viacom. I did a bunch of work on the companies individually. And then I started to really think.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something to add to the conversation that a lot of these executives hadn't seen before as operators and frankly many of their board members had come of age in a period of time where money was free and frankly probably hadn't been involved as many durable companies as we had been involved in. So the answer is I think probably we're more back to learning and normal interaction than we are having a perspective that we're dying to explain to people.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have a very unique human capital culture. But if you're going to communicate to people this strength in the market, it doesn't mean you need to get to your long-term margin targets at 30%, but you have to show progress towards it. With other companies, we restricted the stock. We spent more time with them. We helped them understand what this means. We even helped a bunch of them think about how to communicate what they were going to do in this path of this transition to their investors. That to me is different than where we are in 2025 because I felt we had real expertise there.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Louisa Duelingo, with Max at a firm. And all of them were a little different. As an example with Luis, I had dinner with him and the CFO. And his CFO is very talented just like he is. And I just presented them the data knowing them. I knew they would have a lot of questions on it. And they asked a lot of good questions. The other thing I said to them is, look, Luis, when we invest in your company, one of the things I always ask people is we'll articulate what we're looking for in you, but what are you looking for in us? And one of the things he said is, I'm going to be a first time CEO. And my sense is you're going to see things based on your experience that maybe I don't see because this is new to me. And I said the reason I wanted to have dinner with you is not because I have all the answers, but I have a strong view that you're dominant in what you do. AI is amazing for you. AI was just getting started.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In your path towards it. And then what doesn't work? Well, a company that doesn't earn financial returns and to show no progress. And the other one that doesn't work, which we don't do a lot of, was go buy a low-quality return business at a high price, but leverage really cheap debt. So I felt strongly because we had seen cycles before and because we truly had expertise and also because we really are companies that we invest in a long-term partner. We want to invest in companies that are private and still own them with their public. We want to help the most transition. I thought we had expertise and a perspective that many people had not gone in before. And so to reference what this meant was we had these conversations with a number of our companies that were in this situation. And so we had some version of this conversation with Aman at Toe.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To go buy more of the Duel Lingos in 22. When we do this work is that if you're a small company, you don't have to be gap profitable. And you don't even have to have an ROI that is above your cost of capital. But you do have to show progress”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you didn't have to. And if you go back to the conversation we had when we eventually studied compounding, we went back and we ran that study in periods, we looked at the public markets and we asked ourselves a simple question. In the world of positive real rates, which is the entire history of the US equity market, except for that short period of time, which I don't know where I will see again, there's on average about 40 compounders. And during the period of time of free money, there was 120. So it was three times easier to do it. And then we asked ourselves a simple question, what patterns only exist when money's free? So not surprisingly, everyone would imagine the pattern of driving growth and profitability is perennial and actually works regardless whether money is free or not. The other thing that was really interesting, which was really important to us and gave us confidence.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You are being paid to borrow, which basically means it was logical for venture capitalists to value companies and not care about profitability at all. It was logical for companies in the public markets to buy low quality businesses that could never own their cost of capital but use cheap debt to go do it. It was logical why if you sat on companies' boards, you really wouldn't ask hard questions.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I felt in 2022 we truly had expertise to add to the conversation. And that was we at the highest level, and by the way, I don't say we versus us, we all. Every CEO I talk to, every investor I talk to, and even Durable, who is a fundamental investment firm that really values stuff on cash flow and never felt money was going to be free forever had made simplifying assumptions based on almost a decade of free money. If anyone who has been taught how to value companies understands at the end of the day, all companies have to be valued on free cash flow and organic growth. At the time, we got to a point where 30% of all Treasury bills in the world actually had negative yields. And relative to inflation.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tend to excuse it, of course. If it deviates a little bit for 12 straight quarters, actually it's staring you in the face. That's why we're such a big believer in investment memos.”
2025-12-16 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Ellenbogen - Man Versus Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.452] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source