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Jeremy Giffon

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2024-07-23
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2024-07-23
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  1. “Because I think it's easy to just be like this pre ascribed thing and be good at it, and that'll be good. But no, actually, we need people who are just one of one doing weird stuff. That's what moves us forward.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “That's how progress is made, and you actually need to set that up structurally such that it's allowed and a society can tolerate having a lot of uncorrelated weird people around, which is actually really hard to do. Like it's hard to have social cohesion when you have weirdos running around. And I think that what he was saying was just that it's really important I can see the struggle in you between business and the arts basically. And if you're going to do business, don't get lost in chasing money or status or vanity or whatever and do it for intellectual or inherently satisfying reasons. Don't forget about the other stuff. Society is going to be better off if you do everything that interests you. And even if it means you're a worse investor, but you're like a more interesting, unique person, not only will that be better for you, it's also necessary for society. And I take that to heart a lot.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Very fortunate a ton of people have taken unreasonable bets on me at a very young age with very little experience. So it's hard to pick one. But the one that comes to mind is at a teacher in high school named Paul who taught me history and philosophy when I graduated he gave me a book. He gave me a book called On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. Had a note written in it and he basically said this book is going to be very important for you and I really hope you take it to heart. In high school I was working at the startup full time, but I was also very interested in philosophy and the academy and writing and literature and all this stuff and I couldn't really figure out why and I had to like read on Liberty a bunch and I think what he was getting at was that couple chapters in there were a Mill basically argues that the reason classical liberalism is so important is because you need to just have people doing weird things and just being themselves.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Part of like the last six months, I've just talked to tons of co founders separately and asked them about one another. And one in ten are like, yeah, he's the best, couldn't have done it without him, no regrets. But all the others, the most common answer is gave him way too much equity. It was important in the beginning, but now he doesn't do anything. And they'll say that about one another. And it's amazing how much there's resentment between them, especially around equity or whatever. And I think that's amazing. I think it's a Paul Graham thing, but the suicide versus homicide for why startups die is very real. And we've certainly been on the other side of resolving co-founder conflicts and buying co-founders out. And it's very common that two co-founders will come to an investor and be like, we want to get rid of the third person. And that can be very expensive. They're good deals to do, but they can be very expensive to the co-founders. And those are probably all just hard conversations that they've been avoiding or some original founding sin that they didn't really.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “On the other person at all, you want everything to be really up front because that little resentment, I think it festers and grows. And I think people don't really think about that. I think people will ink a lot of deals, especially with co-founders or whatever, where they kind of agree to it and it works good enough, but they both don't feel 100% perfect about it.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “This is something that I learned from Chris Andrew, who have been in business together 15 years, have a very successful partnership. And the thing that they attribute it to principally is never allowing any form of resentment to creep in against the other person. And I think it's just profoundly right. It can be the smallest thing, never covering an expense for the other person or accepting gifts or anything. I think any little thing that can get into a relationship where, hey, I did this for you. I need to do this for me. I think that really starts to erode things. And so as I've been thinking about what to do next, I've been spending a lot of time talking with people about partnering on things. And I think what's most important to me is really going into something with no resentment, which doesn't mean things have to be like equal or whatever. It's just there's really got to be no ill will. And I think this is important in deals too. You don't want to pull one over.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Have to stick your head in the sand about it now means that there's alpha there. Do I think it's incredibly important and make or break? Obviously not. I mean, any population difference is not applicable to anyone individual, but I do think these things are interesting. To pay attention to that thing, I think can tell you all sorts of things and allows you to get a better sense of someone. You just have to be really open-minded because where you start to get in trouble is where you look at any of it as good or bad. You want to keep your ethical judgments really limited and most things you just look at as truly neutral. And I think that allows you to be far more open to looking at these odd signs. So you can notice that everyone's the firstborn child and not immediately jump to firstborn child or better or something. It's just something that you notice the way that you notice a flower or tree or something.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think that there's a lot of alpha in looking at things that society says doesn't matter. And it's not to say that these things are actually that important. In fact, they might not even be that important. But because they're so doggedly looked at, as you cannot look at this, it's not important. I think there's alpha there. I'd encourage you the next time you're at a dinner, ask who there is firstborn amongst their siblings. If you want to look up U.S. presidents and eye color relative to general population, it's not what you would think. Height matters a lot. There's all these things about people. Theodore Dorno has this great line in one of the intros to his books where he says every sentence in his writing is equidistant from the point. Every sentence is just as important to the point about how every choice someone makes is reflective of their life philosophy. Everything about someone tells you something, even these inherited attributes. And so I think the fact that it's basically you have”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Wealthy PM when you're in your 40s or 50s and you get funded, and venture capital used to be like, you know, suit and a tie, business plans, spinning out of Fairchild or wherever. And I think there's a lot of interesting stuff to be done there. And it's a very fun challenge. And I think equally is rewarding as being a precede investor. Or maybe more because I think the capacity I always think like one way of looking at venture is whether you're counterfactually useful. Would the company exist if it weren't for you? And I think generally the answer is no. But I think there's more opportunity for the counterfactual to be different in manager selection because it's such a esoteric dark art. Also just anything that's an esoteric dark art I'm drawn to.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I get that now. And that was very interesting because I was like, okay, that's unintuitive to me. That is not how I imagine this would all work. And so I think you can just scale the leverage points like that infinitely. I'm very interested in these people. We've described it like the guy who finds the guy who finds the guy. If you get tired of picking companies, you can pick a person to pick the company. Call me a big Archimedes fan or something. But I find something very elegant about minimum effort from maximum return. And I think picking managers is really up there. It's its own art. It's kind of like precede investing. It's kind of like stock picking. It's this weird mix. It's kind of a dark art. It reminds me of venture capital 15 plus years ago where there's a very small group of people. The market rates are terrible. It's this very obscure arcane thing. It's fairly unoriginal. It's just like venture capital. You spin out of a huge hedge fund as.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “For me, I'm always interested in the point of maximum leverage. I mean, what got me involved in investing was at the startup that I was at, worked hard on it for four plus years. And then the guy who put 25 grand in in the first week made more money than I did. You know, it was quite a lesson to learn as a 19 year old. I was like, oh, okay, like, I guess it is capitalism, not laborism.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, I mean, there's a classic cliche, and I'll give the PSA that I always give if you're a Canadian, raise money in America. Do not fall for the trap of raising from Canadians. And Canada's gotten better. It's not as good as I would have hoped given the Shopify and the large outcomes that have been there. There's the old thing of Canada. You raise money from a bunch of people who ask why you aren't profitable as a startup. And England is the same. And there's a great story about the founder of DeepMind talking about how no one in Europe would have funded DeepMind and he had to seek out Peter Thiel. I'm surprised by how much of a cultural difference there is. And I think Americans take it for granted. It's always very funny to hear Americans talk about how they're going to lose immigrants to other places or whatever. It's not even close. There's nowhere that even comes close. And I think these are deep cultural things that if you've never been in another culture, even as Canada, which is by far the most similar country, it's very hard.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I'm always pleased to see all the dumb frauds or stupid companies or whatever that happened in America because that's like the flip side of the American optimism. It's this blase. Yeah, let's do it. It's going to work out. Yeah. People are way more generous with equity.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, so it's really interesting. I'm from Victoria, which is beneath the American border. It's next to Seattle, and Canada is a very American place for the most part. And so I didn't actually think there was going to be that big of a difference. And I spent a lot of time in San Francisco, and I've lived in New York for a long time. It is really shocking, though. There is a certain optimism amongst Americans that is totally unmatched. And I think the rest of the world, Canada being this weird split between Commonwealth and European thinking and then American thinking, I think American thinking does have this incredibly unbridled optimism that leads to just this generosity growing the pie abundance mindset that you just do not get anywhere else. My experience in Canada is very much that everyone feels like they got theirs. And it was really hard to get and they're really scared of losing it. And I think that's probably also the case in Europe as well.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, and I think he cited the Beatles as his role model there. There's an inhuman quality to walking away on top as well. That's probably very difficult to do. I'm not sure that I will be able to do it if I get to that situation.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think there's really a lot to be studied there, even though it's already been studied a ton. Just hanging it up on top, that's also hugely important. Way more people should do that. I think the Beatles would be significantly diminished if they were still touring.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I just still think it's amazing. It was a five year run, two albums a year. And that was it. Most artists today put out an album every two or three years just as a phenomenon. Maybe the Beatles as musicians are not underrated, but as earthly phenomenon is very underrated. This idea that you could just in this five-year run basically go on a perfect streak, permanently change things, and then that's that these amazing little bursts. There's really something to be said about just doing something really well for a short period of time, accomplishing something. And then that's that you've changed it. There's also lots to learn from the Beatles. They were all better together than they were individually. And there's just something about just what can happen when you get the right mixture of people doing the right thing. I also think it's really underrated that they basically change genres every album. I think that also never happens.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “You just pick up on all these things. Kanye West is a great quote that everything is the same. He was referring to music being the same as fashion. But I think that every decision someone makes about everything tells you basically just as much as any other decision. So I love to meet people. I love to meet people in their homes. I love to go and just see how they live and stuff. And I think you learn all kinds of soft, nuanced things that are really useful and interesting. And some business people that I really look up to, I've talked to for hours, but I've never wanted to talk to you about business. But I think I've learned a ton about business because you just learn about the world. And so, yeah, I think exposure is really useful and important. And exposing yourself to people and their situations and stuff, you learn a ton from. You should always be asking your friends, what should I do? They got to know you. It just can't be general.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Every living hero or mentor, a person I've looked up to, I've met and in some cases built a relationship with, which is crazy. But I would also say that it's more doable than you think. And it's interesting, this mentorship thing. I think mentorship is another thing that only people who don't have mentors talk about mentorship as such. I've never once referred to someone as a mentor, but I've plenty of older people who give me great advice. But again, that advice is either I'm either asking very specific advice to someone. You can totally give advice to someone about a specific situation that you know well. I mean, that's very useful. And then in terms of meeting them, I think in person is really important because”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Running really high margin businesses ArcTaboo because I think there's a sense that distributing capital signals something negative about the nature of your business or like makes out a lifestyle business or something. And so I think a lot of people really are retisant to take a lot of money out of their business, even if it can't. Sometimes businesses are growing and are great businesses, but they just don't need capital reinvestment. So I think that is one very strong feature of a holding company is there's always someone going, hey, that's not the best use of that capital. It should go over here. It's amazing. I've seen VCBAC founders go on to do bootstrap businesses or whatever, and the dividend check is amazing. It's this novel concept, and it's cool. We've talked a lot about the difference in successful Bootstrap founders versus successful venture founders. And there's something about having a lot of cash flow that's really underrated.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “That's often what you need. If you do need venture at all, you need one or two million dollars to get you a couple years, then you're off to the races. But yeah, I think it's just one of these very default things. It's easy to do. You get prestige for it. Obviously, you can talk about how much money you've raised as a proxy for success and all this stuff. But I also don't think founders really understand the cost of raising a venture if you don't have to. It can really hurt you financially. And lifestyle-wise. And it's funny too, because really the companies that venture capitalists want to fund are also ones that should exclusively only take venture, like the huge $10 billion outcomes are generally not ones that could have got off the ground without capital. And so I actually think the incentives are fairly aligned, but there's just a lot of capital to deploy and people see it as default path.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Notes more. There's a classic example of this in the valley of one company that did actually do a convertible note and then they just return the money. And then the company went on to be a billion dollar business and the founder owned the whole thing and he didn't do anything illegal. He made everyone really angry because he violated a huge taboo. But if I recall, he was a foreign guy and I think he didn't know or didn't care about the cultural norms and he just read the contract to the letter and it took it as a loan and gave the money back and never hit any of the conversion clauses and got the business off the ground. And I'm surprised people don't do that more, honestly, because”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And to be honest, I don't really have any problem with that. Raising a few million dollars, especially from non-institutional, I wouldn't even consider that venture funding. It's some kind of weird hybrid thing. But once you start going institutional, that's when you really can't backtrack. And that's when I think people make a lot of mistakes. I really admire the businesses that bootstrap for a long time and then do a mega round like Elassian or GitHub or something. I just think you should be very intentional about it. If you're like, you know, we've scaled this thing and we really have this burning need for $20 million. And if we had $20 million, we could do this specific thing and it would really help our business. Great. You should raise venture. But most people don't have that. They're on the treadmill. Obviously their investors want to put more money into the company. And so I think that it's just become this weird default path when it's actually this very niche product that serves a very specific form of business. I always find it funny that people don't abuse convertible.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So most businesses, you could bootstrap the business by selling a customer and getting them to prepay. Basically every business you can do that in. And even the best venture funded founders I know have done that. But that's hard and it's easy to go get a couple million bucks and then you get an office, you pay yourself a salary.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Venture capitalist started to fund high CapEx businesses with very low probability of success that if they did succeed would have humongous outcomes. And your average software company does not hit any of those marks. And so I think if you're going to raise venture, you should really have a very good reason. There are clearly businesses out there that are perfectly designed for venture capital. But most people, I think, raise venture because of one of two reasons, at least initially. One is because they don't know what else to do and it's the default path for starting a business. The other is it's just easier.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah, but you have to be good at it. I think about it like a relationship. In abstract, it's always better to have the hard conversation. But if you execute the hard conversation poorly, it can make things worse. So yes, but you got to have some finesse to being able to actually do that and then resolve something from it.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, I got this from doing the landmark for him. And the idea, which is on the theme of extremely simple but very hard, is that if you tell anyone there's one call they should make, everyone immediately knows what that call is. And people will go 40, 50 years without ever making it. And sometimes the call five minutes, ten minutes. And everyone knows, if you're hearing this, and if that thing that you immediately thought of and then felt bad about feeling about or tried to push out of your head, that's the call. And doing that has massive returns. I had to do it in the landmark form because it requires altered setting to be able to coax yourself to do it.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Deluding yourself and wasting your time. And I'm just as guilty of this as anyone, but I think you just got to figure out what you like and do it. And then back fill specific problems.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Lack of conviction that we all have. So it's this idea of I actually don't want to know what I want to do with my life or my day. So I'm going to optimize my performance abstractly. Maybe if I wake up at 5 a.m. and I do all this stuff, then I will set the stage to perform it my best for this mystical X that I'm going to figure out. It's useful if you're like going full tilt at a business and you're like, how do I be less tired? Fine and go learn about sleep optimizing or something. But it's really weird to like optimize your sleep first. And it's tragic because it feels like, especially, I don't know, amongst my peers, there's this big tendency of everyone is sharpening their sword for the battle that's never going to come. Yeah, I'm going to improve my performance. I'm going to be ready to perform. When it comes, when it happens, I'm going to be ready. But the thing never comes. And so I just think it's this really nefarious way of.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “And I think that's so profoundly true that really if you catch yourself asking these, like, how do I start a company or something, you know you're not serious. You're just forcrastinating. You just want to consume information that feels productive or useful. Advice is just such a racket for that reason. And it's addictive. Don't get me wrong. I've read tons of self-help books. I've read lots of business books. I've consumed hundreds of hours of podcasts. It's a really compelling sham because it makes you feel productive and it does the classic shell game, which is it takes one thing that you can justify as feeling productive, but it's actually just entertainment, coats entertainment, this educational or productive sense. And then, yeah, the preparation point is in the same vein. Like there's this really weird hyperfixation on routines and performance and things. And I think these are really weird things to think about in the abstract. And I think it's indicative of just a general, very low.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “A very tactical and specific question. If someone reaches out to you and says, I don't know, the podcast example would be, but for an investment, it would be like, I have this company doing this transaction between these two states. I know you've done this before. What is the right way to think about tax planning here? That's a useful advice question. Most advice questions, they're like, how do I become an investor or whatever? They're just fundamentally unserious questions that what you're asking for is give me something that I can go, oh, okay, that'll make me feel good for a second. Then I can just go back to doing whatever I was doing. And that's all productivity advice. Like there's a great little parable about 12-year-old comes up to Mozart and asks him, how do I start writing symphonies? And Mozart goes, well, go to music college and work through it and study the greats. And then you can write a symphony and the 12-year-old goes, yeah, but you were writing symphonies when you were 12. And Mozart says, why didn't go around asking people how to write symphonies?”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Well, first of all, an advice. I think the only honest thing that you can say about advice is there is no general advice. I think giving general advice is a complete charlatan move is just terrible. When you give advice, you are just extrapolating some general rule from your own experiences, which asking, create some general rule about the world from your own life. That's kind of what you're asking with advice. That's a problem. Like if anything, you should just ask people what they did and then maybe ask them to explain what they were thinking at the time. Then you can do your own inference if you want. A second thing with advice is all advice cancels out. So you can find counter examples to every single piece of advice. Someone's done something. Someone's been very successful doing the opposite. So that's another knock against advice. And then the third problem with advice is that it's fundamentally unserious. So the only real sincere and serious advice asking is”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Yeah, they were right. And they were providing this service. The service that they were providing was the LP does not have the personal confidence to own Berkshire on their own. So they actually need to pay a huge premium for someone else to give them the confidence to own Berkshire. And it's just like a tax that they pay for not having the conviction to do it themselves. And I think that's great. That's solving problems for people. So God bless them.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Too. Peter Thiel has a great line about how the trade of the twenty tens was just buying fame. If you wanted to be the best performing hedge fund manager in the world or whatever, you just hold Fang and that's it. Something like an 8X or something like that over that period. But no one did that because it's boring and you don't get paid for that. And so people don't actually want best returns. They want to feel clever and do some like weird little thing that makes them feel interesting or different or something. But sometimes you just got to do the obvious thing and just be really strong on it. You know, I always admire those managers who have been paid two and twenty for like 40 years to just own Berkshire. I kind of think that's awesome because it's.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Don't really even scratch the itch of a good investor. A good investor is after superior returns. There's something just very odd about indexing your own abilities of a holding company, about saying, oh, I'm just going to crew all these mediocre assets that'll like sum up some cash flow amount. I just think that's strange. And also owning businesses is not that exciting. And again, the same problem there. There's a fixed amount. constellation literally has all of them in one excel spreadsheet. There's a fixed amount of these companies. And so the prices have gone up. And it's just strange. So I'm always skeptical of these weird kids playing soccer swarming around these little weird pockets of alternative assets. Probably the stuff that's actually interesting is stuff that no one's talking about trading electricity futures or giving loans to charter schools, weird stuff like that. All of a sudden, HVAC becomes really popular or airplane leasing got really popular for a while. People love the contrarian thing.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “One to do it, but it was still very low status and strange when we did it. And now I literally talked to two or three people a week who want to start profitable holding companies. I think it's the rolling fund of higher rate era, even very liquid founders want to buy these cash flowing assets. And I just think that's very strange because”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “And I would totally change my mind on this. But as far as I know, there isn't. And so if that's the case, then it's basically just this cage match to get into these few assets. If you're good at that or you're willing or happy to play that game, then great. But I think that's not how most people look at it. And I don't know. It just seems like there is seemingly a finite amount of good companies. And so I'm very sympathetic to venture investors who really have a cynical understanding of it's all about just getting in these deals and it's not about investing or spotting things or whatever. It's just about selling your money for a little bit cheaper or a little bit better than the next guy to get into the handful of deals. So I'm always puzzled about that. I think probably holding companies are about to get very overrated. It's very popular when we started doing it at tiny. Everyone looked at us like we were so weird. Obviously constellation was the big first.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “I don't know if it's the most overpriced, but venture capital always makes me scratch my head because I haven't seen any good explanation or data for that matter for why the amount of exceptional companies is going to increase that are created per year is going to increase over time.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “What are you talking about? Like the next time you go by a soft drink, try and explain to me how you choose one over the other. If someone brings me on their plane or has me to their big house or whatever, that works. That totally works. And so those things become very useful. You can see very quickly how there's a shock and awe there that works really well and how those seemingly exorbitant or gauche assets can become quite like accretive quickly. I think that's totally real.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Supercoin operated, and I think that's amazing because at least you can do something about it. And then probably the other thing is nice real estate, boats, all that kind of stuff. Again, human nature hasn't changed. It's like people who deny that advertising works. It's like, well, it obviously works on everyone. Otherwise, it wouldn't be this huge. So many people like ads don't work on me. It's like, well, yeah, of course they work.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “In contrast to somewhere like Canada or England or whatever, where there's like old families and class and things that matter more, I think the fact that everything's for sale is pretty”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Lots of things having money is underpriced. I've come to see this firsthand. I think people who say that money only solves very specific set of problems or whatever have just not been around people who can use money creatively to solve problems. Like, yes, of course, it doesn't really solve your psychic or spiritual issues, but it can help a lot in ways that are very underrated. I think people are just really cagey about this. And so they don't really appreciate it. But it's astonishing. It's never direct being able to donate to people's foundations and then getting access to the smartest thinkers or going on marriage retreats or marriage counseling that's with the best person in the world. There's a lot of things available to those with money. And in America, especially everything is for sale, I actually think it's one of the great merits of America, which is that if you have enough money, for the most part, you're a welcome in.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I know someone who has a very successful podcast who their spouse doesn't want to talk about the fact that they're a podcaster, even though they get paid a ton of money, they're incredibly influential and prestigious, and that's got to be a huge opportunity anytime you get some weird disconnect like that.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “To have a Twitter account or a podcast or whatever, and I mean, it's even funny with you the amount of prestige and notoriety that you get from the show, I think would still really surprise people who probably have deep in their brain somewhere a negative view of podcasting and podcasters. And I'm always really excited by those disjoints where it actually is getting you, it is the future. And that generally just means that you're like in the future on something. Everything will catch up to this and it will become normal and high status and everyone will do it. But right now it's this weird disjoint thing where like you get access to the best people in the world and it provides real alpha and large opportunities, but people still think it's kind of weird that you're a podcaster.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Of it. I think it is really underrated and still fairly unrecognized. And it's because the monetization is still very unsophisticated. Podcasts will not monetize off ad reads in the future. It's very much the celebrity holding a Coca-Cola from 40 years ago. The way that it will happen, and we're already seeing is that companies will have, in the same way that they'd have a technical co-founder, they'll have an audience co-founder. And all that person will do is organically sell that product or service to their audience over the long term in an authentic way. The company really has to be intertwined with the creator or the person with the audience. That's going to be how people buy things. I mean, especially for commodity products, which most products are, including most investing as a commodity. It's just selling money. And so in any situation where it's a commodity, you're going to go with the person.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “It's underrated from a social mobility point of view, I think it's underrated from a commerce point of view. Social presence was a huge factor in building Tiny, and that became quite a big business. I think we're going to see this interesting trend where like right now, maybe the way you monetize an audience, you sell 30% of your audience a $10 t-shirt. I think now we're moving into a stage where maybe you sell 5% something off or $100. I don't see why it wouldn't move towards an area where you just sell one person in your audience something for $100 million. And I think that could totally happen. And I think we'll kind of come to see that even in private equity and things, there will be $100 million plus deals that are just through social audiences because some business owner likes you and has heard you talk over and over and will sell you their business in a way that allows you to make a ton of money. And then you don't have to sell anything to anyone else in the audience. The distribution is incredibly underrated. The serenity”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Just having an audience is incredibly underpriced. I mean, you know this better than anyone. I am always shocked by the serendipity of what happens online. And my friend David Prell has been beating me over the head on this for years and I should have listened to him earlier. I think the thing that I didn't really didn't understand is you don't need to have a very big audience. So quality and quantity really apply for audiences. And I cannot believe the people that you meet. I have this line posting is the last great American meritocracy. The American dream lives in posting. And I think that's true. I really do. I think the last true and total meritocracy, you can post your way into any room in the world if your takes are interesting and people think what you have to say is compelling you, you can be on an anonymous account. I mean, you've had anonymous accounts on the show before and you can just go anywhere and you really don't need anything other than a smartphone. And so I think.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Suck you into the org chart, make you report to someone, do something like that, and you really got to fight. But that's the way in which you can get ahead because I think what people really failed to understand is that all that matters, it's whether the decision maker likes you in a company. Everything else is completely unrelated. And you can see this because people who do get work get fired and people that don't do good work but are liked don't. So if you're looking to get ahead and curry favor in an organization, yes, stay off the org chart or report to multiple people. It's funny how often there will be things maybe you're outranked at the company, but you get invited on the principal's plane or you get invited to the birthday party or whatever. And all these things, you want to be known as this untouchable person just through soft power. There's huge else in this because it's not at all how most people think about organizations, but it's a way that I've pretty reliably seen very young people rise very quickly at places.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Really knows what you do. No one's entirely clear on who you work for. And you got to fight. It is the nature of any bureaucracy to try and.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yeah, so I've given this advice to a lot of people now, and it's worked really well, so I'm pretty confident in it. This is only Machiavellian advice, which is if you want to like really succeed relentlessly at an organization. And this probably applies to small or basically organizations where you're within arm's reach of the principal. You have to stay off the org chart. Whatever you do stay off the org chart because there will always be a temptation of the principle to make you report to someone and you cannot do that. And if you do get forced to report to someone, then you always want to report to two or more people. Because the thing is you always want to be, the way that you can get ahead in these organizations, especially if say you're younger, you're under credentialed or whatever, relative to other people, is you want no one to really know what you're doing, but they all know that you're very favored by the principle. So you're this guy that is kept around and everyone knows that the principal likes you.”

    2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source