YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeremy Giffon

lines on the record: 130
first: 2024-07-23
most recent: 2024-07-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, I think you're exactly right about that because there's way less stability in one, too. And I've seen lots of boys flame out 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
“Answers generally know because one sets you on this path to be an entrepreneur or whatever and the other sets you on this path to be like a number two. And I don't think people think very clearly about 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
“The boy. The boy is weird because on one hand he is this lowly person, but on the other hand he's held in a high regard in the organization. Whereas the guy, the billionaire will also have a guy who is number two. And that's very different. Like the number two is extremely important, but the number two, there's this weird dynamic where like it's understood that the number two, that is his station in life. Maybe he's rich and makes a lot of money or whatever, but he is going to be that number two forever. And the boy is this person that is, it's almost an omission from the billionaire or whatever, saying, like, maybe you can be like me. And so maybe you're the next me. And I just think it's an interesting dichotomy that also a lot of people confuse because I also see a lot of people classic mistake is you want to be like someone so you go work for them, which is a classic mistake and it's always wrong that you have to say would this person at my age be working for someone else?”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I realized a while ago that a lot of my friends had had really breakout career trajectories, they basically became the boy for like billionaire. I am making Roman illusion here, which is you're not really, I guess normally a chief of staff, but generally it's more than that. It's some deep mentor thing. The way it usually goes is you find your way into one of these guys' networks and they basically do make a deal with you where it's like you just be my assistant for two years and then you have all my resources and backing. And it's actually very similar to Knights and Feudalism or something like that. It's kind of whose banner are you going to fly under? I noticed a strange phenomenon where like a lot of my friends who couldn't afford business class plane tickets had flown private a bunch because they're in the court of the king and they just move around in his convoy and I think it's like a really great career path. It might be like the only good job worth taking out of college if you want to be entrepreneurial.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think they like the money because I think the ones who don't like the money disappear right off into the sunset. And there's lots of those guys, but you don't hear about them because they disappear. I think Buffett loves the money. He doesn't love spending it. Just think about Buffett famously never sold a share at Berkshire. That's insane. Everyone's like, oh, I want to be the next Buffett. It's like, okay, so you want to make a lot of money, most of which will come in your extreme old age, and then you never want to spend any of it. That's crazy. Buffett has clearly found the right thing for him that he loves, but that's really unique and strange. I think everyone's pretty money motivated, whether it's as a score or as a means to an end. I think the ones who are means to an end will just quit.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And over and over, and at some point, they don't just say, Well, I want to make a lot of money. Well, if you're a good investor, you're going to make a lot of money. So what's going on there? And I think that's a hugely powerful question. And most people don't even know the answer. So it can be this fun co-discovery thing that you can go on.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My absolute favorite interview question is just asking people what they want over and over and over until they break down. It's probably the most reliable way to actually figure out, is this person, if you're truly trying to put the right person in the right job and it's different if you're trying to sell them or whatever, but if you're just trying to get a really good fit, I would be suspicious of anyone who isn't vice driven at some level. And so you want to find out like, what are you after? You have to money. It's amazing how many investors you'll interview who will not admit to being money driven, which like clearly they are. Unless you're the investor who really just likes the puzzle solving, you could also be a professional Stoku player or something and you just happen to think that options trading is more interesting or something, those do exist, but even then, if you really just puzzles, you should probably just be in the academy. I always find it deeply suspicious when you're interviewing, like, you know, especially for someone who's doing like qualitative business analysis or something. And you ask them, what do you like? Why do you want to do this?”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does the idea of having to outwork everyone excite you or fill you with dread? And I think for half the people, they love that Arnold Schwarzenegger as a class example of a guy who's just thrilled to be able to outwork people. And then for the other half, it's terrifying because it's just going to require so much effort and there's not a clear edge or whatever. And another way that I like to ask this in interview questions is you're standing outside of really popular nightclub in whatever global city and how do you get in. There's a wide variety of ways you can bribe the bouncer, you can make friends with a bunch of girls online. You can sneak in the side door. I would the day before I would find a mutual friend with the owner, the investor of the club, and meet them for coffee. That's how I would do it because that's what's most comfortable to me. But I think it's a really clean way of understanding how people think about problems and also what they're averse to and what they're really attracted to in terms of challenges.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, this one, I think you see everywhere, which is there's people out there who see linear progressions and just get excited. If I apply more effort to this input, then I know I'm going to get more output than anyone else. So they'll look at like a competitive situation or something and get really excited about it because they know that as long as they can work harder than everyone else, they're going to have, it's like a very sure thing that they're going to have a higher level of success. Whereas the clever person or the wits person is all about wading around and waiting for the non-competitive thing, seeing the non-obvious thing, and then striking. And they're very different. And I think you can see this all the time. I think generally most investors are more on the clever side of things than most operators are more on the kind of the rep side of things. But obviously they cross over. And at the top, people are generally both. But yeah, I would describe it 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
“Yeah, I would describe maybe relentlessly resourceful to my understanding is more about being proactive. And this is more like the reactive frame. I think really what that means is just a tremendous amount of will or desire. And I think that this is maybe the flip side of having the will to succeed versus the will not to die, which I think are closely related, but are not the same 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
“Maybe the best way to describe it is does this person make me sleep easy at night? So there's a real distinction between, say, you're like investing in a company with a CEO or you're hiring a CEO for a business. There is a distinction between skills and sleeping easy at night. I've had plenty of situations where maybe there was someone more skilled, but someone else just makes you feel like you can rest easy. And I think that's part of this hard to kill. They're just going to handle it. They're going to figure it out. They're used to things going wrong. They're not going to freak out. There's just a calmness. So I think it's really about downside protection more than anything in an investing context.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite business picture is there's just this picture of the bottom of Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy at night and all the buildings. I think everything below the park lost power. But there's this one building that's totally lit up and it's Goldman. And they just built their building with generators and stuff. It's amazing that they built the building, you know, however long before and we're like, we're not going down. Like Goldman Sachs does not die. And I think that's probably some kind of deep entrenched thing in their DNA. You would ask, you can see other banks in that picture, why weren't they built with generators? What culture went into one bank doing that and the other's not doing 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
“Yes and no. I mean, I think every group is basically just made in the image of its founder, and so it would come back to the founder. I would be very confident that a hard to kill founder would create a hard to kill organization, even if the founder stepped away from the business.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, it was just I got super depressed. I was chronically depressed for a while, and the real moment was like when I really started scaring myself. And I think that's that level of maybe I'm not really in control here. And I think now I just have this feeling after that, having come through that, that it's like I can handle that. Nothing's really going to phase me that much. Like, I think it's a sense of being brought to your limits in some sense and coming back from that, it converges into another dichotomy that I like, which is easier, hard to kill. I don't think they're synonymous, but I think there is some similarity between being like post fall and being hard to kill, which is just another one that is not necessarily related. None of these are related to background or life circumstance or anything. It's just inherent attributes. And I think hard to kill is just someone who's above all just has a certain sense of will and is just going to be difficult. And someone is easy to kill, I think, as someone who's very fragile and doesn't take much to go wrong for them, the things to really go catastrophically.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I know plenty of very successful people who are pre fall. And so I think it would be a mistake to say that you wouldn't want to partner invest in those people. But I do think it's useful in the sense that there's a little bit of a ticking time bomb if something is going to befall that person. They might react in unpredictable ways. And I think you see that all the time. There's tons of data around investors and divorces and personal circumstances for CEOs and stuff. And I think that's in the tails. That's where it becomes more relevant.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This might be a weird answer, but I just think you can see in someone's eyes right away. You can just tell maybe it's the lost of innocence or something, like just how much have you seen. And I actually think it probably gets worse the more you ask someone about it because then there's this weird thing about wanting to perform or say, oh, that was really hard or whatever. It's just a sense.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use the word fall because it's capitulation. So it's actually not really related to how hard the thing is. You could maybe go through an extreme hardship and not be beaten down. But I literally think of it as like maybe even literally been brought to your knees and just this moment of life is out of my control, the some regard. It's more about the reaction, what you come to recognize is true about the nature of reality from that than what the actual thing 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
“Pre and post fall is really, I guess, a perversion of Christian idea, which is has someone really been brought to their knees by life, you can see it immediately. And I find it's entirely uncorrelated to who they are or what they grew up with or what they do in life or whatever. It just seems random. And you can just see in someone's eyes whether they've really been humbled deeply by life or they haven't. The reason that I find it useful is it gives you a sense of the capacity that that person has for suffering or pain. I find it to be a very good indicator of if something bad happens to this person, how are they going to react extreme example would be someone with multiple combat deployments probably not going to get too disturbed by something going wrong. Whereas maybe someone who's never had anything go wrong in their life, it's really going to disrupt 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
“That you're going to see the value in it eventually, and we'll be here. And that's a really great negotiating position 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
“Why not? There's no rules against that. And so these are the kinds of things with negotiating where you can just get really creative as long as you're willing to just be a little weird and just be a little vulnerable. And then the other thing is comes back to patience again. Very often you make an offer and someone goes for the other offer and you know there's something wrong with it. Like this would happen all the time at Tiny. We'd make an offer that wasn't the highest offer. They'd go with the highest offer and I would very glibly say I'll see you in six months and they would never believe me. And 80% of the time they'd come back and they'd realize that actually money isn't the most important thing in a transaction where you have a lot of counterparty risk. Actually you want a person who can actually get a deal done. And I don't blame them. I think that's something you have to see for yourself. I don't really think you can educate someone into that. It's like saying money doesn't buy you happiness. No one has ever not tried to accrue money after hearing that. But just the confidence of like, okay, like we know what we're selling. We're pretty sure.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or zone South isn't going to let them buy a Ferrari, or it's uncouth in his neighborhood or whatever. In the LOI, $25 million and a 488.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Verbally, I mean, most people negotiate themselves verbally or mentally, where I could never offer that, I could never say this, or they don't think outside of the box. There are no terms really that you can't bend or change or whatever. And so I think it's really just about very rarely will people get an offer and actually be like, I'm so insulted, I'm never talking to you again. Like doesn't really happen. And so I think a lot of it's just coming down to just being able to make the offer that other people don't or can't. And that's not to say that you always need to be cheap. You can also make the offer on the upside in ways that are weird. A classic scenario is a business owner who selling his business and he's got different offers and we found out that he's really into Ferraris. It was basically implied that he's going to sell this business for 30, 40 million dollars. So it's obviously not a problem of affording it. But what we realized was that like his wife is not going to let him buy a Ferrari.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forcing is an interesting question. We were like doggedly anti recruiter for a long time because we tried a bunch of them and they were all terrible. But then we learned that actually Buffett found Adget Jane, the guy who runs the insurance company through a recruiter. Just like anything, you can find good recruiters. Obviously, having a large social presence makes it really easy. So Twitter accounts and audiences remain incredibly underrated and underpriced. And it's pretty straightforward. If you have a good deal, you can find capital. If you have a good opportunity, people will pick up the phone. And so I actually don't find sourcing to be that difficult, especially with this framework of what's a company that's done this exact thing before and let's go talk to someone there. So that would be on the sourcing piece, on the negotiation piece, there's lots of tactical tricks. I think generally the biggest thing when negotiation is getting out of your own head. Most people just negotiating against themselves, whether like”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“than want the riches, which comes back I think it's just hard. It's hard to do for psychological reasons. I really like the saying the only enduring edge is psychological edge because human nature has yet to really change. And I think that's entirely right. It's just attrition or just being willing to be low status or be weird or set up incentive structures in such a long-term way that you can actually operate differently. But in exchange for doing that, you're going to look really strange or not make as much money in the short term or whatever. It's all pretty simple, but it's difficult.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's really hard. It's just really hard. And part of the difficulty is how simple it is. It's boring. Every value investor gets at some point in their career where they think I should be like Buffett and buy an insurance company. And they've all done it, and none of them have made it work. And you know why? It's because the guy who runs Berkshire Insurance is a genius, prodigy, and it's just that simple. It's one of the most, if not the only reliably profitable insurance operations in history. And so, yeah, it is simple. Buy an insurance company and use the float. That is hard because you need to find a guy who's really good at insurance. And that's exactly the same with all of this. It's all simple. There's no tricks. It's just really difficult. And to go back to desire, most people don't want that. If the difficulty is being really bored all the time or doing the same thing over and over and over or whatever, most people do not want that. They actually would rather not be bored or not do the same thing over and 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
“Yes, a small smidgen of them are doing difficult technological work, but generally, no, you're basically a construction worker, which there's nothing wrong with that, but don't kid yourself. You're just building things that have already been built before and there's like a known way and there's codes and infrastructure and blueprints and you follow and implement those things. And so you don't need to get too romantic about it. Again, it's always different for outliers, but for the median business, I don't think it's some great intellectual edge or some world-class talent or whatever is required. I think it's just solving problems reliably and diligently.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business, especially recently in the culture, for being a lot more difficult than it is. I used to always harass my computer science friends that they're just bricklayers.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of these debates around talent and hard work and all these kinds of things, there are people talking past one another because I think there are companies that need the best in the world. But by definition, almost every company does not need the best in the world, any layer. What you need is someone who has that specific skill set. Andrew's insight, which was correct and worked brilliantly, is you just find someone who's done it before at a bigger scale and you get them to do it again. And that works great. And it's so anathema to the valley philosophy around it, which I'm also very sympathetic to. It reminds me to manage your selection. It's like you either get top tier or you're unable to get top tier and you've got a bet on emerging. That would be the whole Stanford spot talent young thing. And that works too. And I think there's a real skill set there. But if you can get just the person who's done it before, then great. I think people really romanticize.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In your zone, per se, because I think people who are truly locked in are just like, great, that's not what I want to do, but good for you. I think it's probably possible to get to a place where everyone is quarterbacks and you're always like, oh, that's cool, but I don't want to be that. So I'm doing what I like. Good for you. I think that's very possible, but it's really difficult.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About, oh, you'd have known very much of it, or it was a fake company or whatever. And that's how you can tell that you're still not 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
“Another cut at that same thing is as you get closer to doing the work that you're called to, you get less envious of people, or rather the things that make you envious are fewer. It's a very common thing that I see of top school, super ambitious kids to have to put down everything around them as bad to justify what they're doing. And I think that's really a terrible way to live. And what you see with someone who's really found their calling is they're just not envious. And I can still tell it exists for me. Example is if I see an NFL quarterback, I'm not envious of him. It's not like, oh, you know, that could have been me. Or even worse, I'm not going, oh, well, you know, he sucks. He's late in the draft or whatever. It just doesn't even cross my mind. I don't even think about the quarterback. Good for him. Great. Still, if some 20-year-old sells their company for $600 million, I still get all those thoughts.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same number who are incredible or prodigious at tennis would be incredible and prodigious at spreadsheets, and they should probably just jump right into banking or something like that. But we just don't do that. I think everyone has something they're not lazy about, but it's hard to find that. Laziness like depression, like all these other things, I really do think is a deep indicator from within you that you're not doing something right with your own life. And you should heed these warnings and listen to them and not cry and push them away.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much easier for those who do find their fit in sports to get it early and push it hard. Or say that you're a great investment banker, a lot of things are going to have to go right for you to even start investment banking to find out if you like it. But I imagine if you gave a lot of toddlers spreadsheets.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's insane. And then the pinnacle of his career, he starts smoking meth, it's nuts. Then you hear from Djokovic, who's going to be one of the greatest of all time, if not the greatest of all time, or federer for that matter. And they're both just, yeah, like really like playing tennis. It's super fun. Djokovic has this line that is dear to my brain, which is I just like hitting the tennis ball. And I think that there's something so funny and kind of tragic there because in a more just universe, some would say that it should make sense that if you kill yourself for the work, you become the best. But that's not actually the case. For the ones who it's easy for, they do the very best work and become the greatest. And so I think it's really a win-win parento improvement, but it's really difficult. I think the reason you see it in sports, by the way, is because sports is one of the very few things that we test on children super early. So I think if we tested way more things on children, you would find this in all areas of life. But because sports are a thing that young children do, 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
“There's a couple of good heuristics here that have been helpful. One is a question from our friend David Sanro, which is, what could you not be paid a billion dollars to stop doing? I think there's a lot of people who would very happily take a large check to never do what they do again. But generally, there's something for everyone. I mean, for me, it's figuring out people. I'm super curious. I think I'm an incredibly curious person. And the curiosity mostly manifests through people. And I really like to meet and try and understand the world through talking to different people. I really don't think I would take a check to stop doing that because I sincerely don't know what would get me out of bed in the morning. But there's a lot of other things that I would happily take a check not to do. And it's not lazy. Lazy is the wrong word. I think the classic case here that I like 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
“Yeah, they don't really get you out of your seat. And so I think it's something that more people should do and it's not that difficult, all things considered, especially if you have a low burn rate. And it's really worth it because it's trip, but the low status things become high status. And people I know who are working on the most interesting things just wandered off in a weird direction. But it's painful. It's a very painful process. I think you have to realize a lot of things about yourself that you're not so motivated by this or you're not the person you thought you were. And maybe you won't have the life that you thought you wanted. If you really viscerally embody those, it's a really painful and hard to deal with.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a big sabbatical fan. I've taken multi-year sabbaticals before. I'm on month six of one right now. And I think that almost everyone does not spend enough time thinking about how they want to spend their time. A lot of this comes from just do things, just execute. And I think that's really important. And I'm certainly weak in the other direction. But thinking very deliberately about what you want to do and how I think it's very underrated. And society makes it difficult. you're very low status when you're not doing anything and there can be financial constraints or whatever we've been talking about different things that we're interested in and things that we want to build in the future and things like that and that's really come as a result of just taking a year off or taking expense off in this case and just letting the world soak in and come to see what gives you energy what's exciting what's not and i think the only way that i've found to be able to do that is yes a lot of introspection but also just sitting back and letting things come to you and see what feels right”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like I've made a lot of progress. What's led me here to this conversation is I just am a big sabbatical fan. You're probably getting a theme throughout the podcast of just generally not doing anything.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You no longer live in Trebeka. You don't have the same friends. You don't have the same apartment, and all that is terrifying to you. So the fear of loss. There's some great tragic loss to the world about you not being that thing that you feel called to. And so, yeah, I think it's a really difficult puzzle. And it really just comes back to most people don't really know what they want or are in denial about what they ultimately want.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They should, or they're very scared of the consequences of acting like someone who doesn't, and then they really get into this mess. But I mean, yeah, it's a real puzzle. People with tons of options will spend their whole life working jobs they hate. It's really strange and it's really tragic and it's really bad for the world because you're not going to do great work. I once was talking to like a therapist performance coach who would tell people what he thought their true calling was. had had a few highly accomplished people tell me that it was the most devastating thing they'd ever done in their life. I was puzzled by that. His name was Jack Skeen. And I asked him, why do people describe this as devastating? And he goes, well, if I tell someone who's a very successful investor that they need to be a third grade teacher, do you think that would be devastating if it weren't true? Well, no, of course not. You just think you wasted your time and money. It's devastating because you know on some level it is true, but you know that becoming a third grade teacher now means”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is the single most important question in the world, probably, because I think it's extremely puzzling that world where a lot of people can cover their bases in terms of food and shelter, they still spend the grand majority of their life doing things that they don't like doing. I think it's a deep and troubling puzzle that I don't really have the answer to. I think a lot of it comes back to not really understanding what your true desires are and having fear around losing things, being stronger than desiring what you actually want. I basically think most people wish that they like things that they don't actually like. For example, even in my own case, I think a lot of people wish they wanted to make more money than they thought they actually did. Or they wanted status more, or it was important to them where they live or what clothes they wear, whatever. And I think a lot of people don't actually want those things that much, but they feel like.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good investment, we would suddenly start moving extremely quickly and get really excited and go from working far less than eight hours a day to working 14, 15, 16 hours a day. And because it was just like this great thing that you had to do. And then going back to just waiting around.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go back to underwriting, we hired, I don't know, dozens and dozens of CEOs, and really the main thing that mattered the most was when you leave the conversation, do you feel energized or not? Because everything else is downstream of that. If you hire someone that drains you, even if they're really good, you're not going to interact with them. You're not going to have a good relationship. It's just not going to work. It's one of those situations where you have to be brutally realistic with yourself. You can't be like, oh, I wish I was the sort of person that liked this person because they're really good. But it's like, yeah, you're not. So even if they would be a good fit, it's not going to work for you. And that applies to investments too. I think good investments get you really excited. We would go long stretches. Sometimes we do no deals or one deal or whatever.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Buffett and some other folks, I think, have done that, but it's so difficult. I find you don't really need to think about all this stuff. If your default frame is just not to do anything and you have to be compelled out of your seat. Because if you are, then you're going to have this visceral hurdle rate, which is this worth my time. And if you're excited about it, then you do it. And if you're not, you don't. And I find that you can really avoid doing bad deals that way.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tiny did two years, which was incredibly hard. I can't fathom six years. I mean, six years we're doing nothing. You literally just do nothing.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just comes back to being lazy and not doing hard things, which is I want every business to be the last. But they have to be so good that it's do you want to make millions and millions of dollars for very little work? Okay, sure. Another favorite question for managers is how long have you gone without deploying money? The best I've ever heard is six years, which 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
“Not going to lose your money, then it's not risky. You want it simplistic. That's really simplistic. I think it's served us 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
“Used to get asked the question a lot. My answer was always is it roughly as good or better as the last deal? That was our entire hurdle underwriting. If it was worse, then we go, we can do a better deal than this. And if it was better, then we get excited about it. This is something that Chris Andrew came up with. You always want your deal to be the last investment you ever do. Very often we'd buy a company and we'd be like, all right, we can just hang it up now because this company's going to take us through to retirement. And so you don't really think about benchmarks and returns and stuff when you're thinking in that mode because there is no better asset than a great business that has operating leverage and pricing power. And if you got that, you just have a machine that prints money. And if it has a moat, then you have a machine that prints money for a long time. And so obviously that's going to be ray better than the stock market or whatever. And in terms of risk, we were probably just too unsophisticated to think about risk, or certainly I was. Risk, and this is just another munger line, but I think it's true, is just loss of capital. And so if 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
“Be really easy to sell to the team. You should be able to pitch it in a few sentences. It just makes sense. It's hard. It's really hard to do this. We'd catch ourselves all the time. We'd be on week three of debating this company. Oh, should we buy this? The best thing we could do is go, we've been debating this for three weeks, Ergo, we should not buy it. It's not obvious. It doesn't smack us in the face. And this comes back to incentives again, which is you have to have the ability incentivized to be able to say no if you're being forced to deploy capital or whatever, you trick yourself into doing these deals. But the good ones, you just like, yep, I get it. Let's do it. This makes a lot of sense. I think part of that is just having the abundance mindset of being like, if things are too hard, just let them go. It's fine.”
2024-07-23 · Invest Like the Best · Jeremy Giffon - Special Situations in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, Replay] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're worried they're going to look unprepared or whatever. And I think that tracks because fundamentally the more quantitative the analysis is, the more of a commodity it is. And so what really gives you an edge, in my opinion, is experience on the qualitative. It's going to be that very simple line of questioning that actually gives you an advantage. And it's really the sign of an amateur to be really caught up in why did the margin change from this quarter to that quarter because they think that oh, if you can just understand all there is to know about this business, then you can have an edge on it. Ironically, I think makes you miss the main thing. And so it's just asking a really simple questions, like why is the product good? All these very basic things. And that allows you to move really fast. A great investment should just smack you in the face. Probably the best thing we ever took from Charlie was the two hard box. A good investment is just 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