YouSaid · the spoken record

Jim Falbe

lines on the record: 85
first: 2023-06-08
most recent: 2023-06-08
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

“If you want to go do this, that's great, but we just can't do it here. We felt there's this tremendous opportunity. So five previous people at Vulcan who are all co-founders of this thing principles that really believed that we think we can do something that's going to add value for that next generation of value investors. So really interesting story, just kind of going back to how life has this weird way of working out. My mom, after she worked at Carl Carcher Enterprises, she moved on to do corporate cash management and she ended up working at this firm called Winrich Capital Management. Unfortunately, after she passed away, kind of lost touch with the people there. I tried to find the Winrich capital management people saying, hey, maybe they could help me understand what I need to do and prepare like you're asking so that I can do this at a high level. After had made the decision to leave Vulcan and was actually listening to your show, Ted, at that point, I was like, man, I really wish I could find those Winridge Capital Management guys and heard a podcast that you were doing with a guy named Paul Black.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the AI system that we built was adding so much value, and we really had vision of where we wanted to go with it, we kind of got to the point where if we kept going, we risked upsetting the investment mandates we already had. So we've got this really great $20 billion Apple cart. Now are we really going to push that over, top all the apples out just because we're chasing some shiny object and made the decision that if we're going to do this, it probably needs to be independent of Core Vulcan. And CT was gracious enough. The team was gracious enough to say, well, let's have another debate about do we want to do affiliated managers with internal people. The firm was really kind of split 50-50. There were people like, oh, we got to do ZI stuff and other people like, I don't know if it's worth it. And ultimately, they made the correct decision for them, which is to do the best we can for our clients. We need to stay focused. So they still have the AI system that we built, but they said we want to go this far and we just don't think we can go any further. We love you. We support you. We're for you.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we have to go back in time, I think, four or five years into my tenure at Vulcan. Vulcan had the opportunity to build out this affiliated manager program. So we had several different groups who had a track record, but they weren't very large, and they were looking for somebody to handle their back office operations. Maybe some of the business front office, and then really client development. And we had a debate, is this something we want to do? Because we actually had three groups. We're like, man, we could really do something here because Vulcan did not have a lot of external service providers. We had built our entire back office ourselves. And we thought we could really leverage this with other affiliated managers. But after an extensive discussion, CT follows the Greek maxim of not thyself. And I think he knew himself pretty well. He thought, if we do this, I'm going to be very involved. And if my ultimate goal is to produce the best possible returns that I can for our clients, I want to stay focused. And so we made the decision at that time to not do affiliated management.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone just thought, well, everyone was at home. They're spending a lot more money because everyone's redoing their house right now, but that's not actually the case. If you look at the units, what's happened is just this pricing differential that they've been able to get. Units have actually been in decline for like the last 18 months, but they're doing so much better because pricing is better. And we're like, wow, this is now a great company where you've got a consolidated industry with pricing power. We would never have found it had we just gone off the way we think about the industry, but the machine didn't have that preconceived notion. It was looking at the reality today. That's where it's really helpful for us on idea generation.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they actually make the skins of doors that you would buy at Home Depot or Lowe's. And obviously contractors or large construction companies will buy them in NAS. But historically, that industry has just earned their cost of capital. That's a return. That's it. So we weren't really that interested in it, but the machine said, hey, no, listen, you got to take a look. And when we did, what happened, Mason, I actually got a new CEO about two years ago. He came in and there was this pricing study done where he found that customers actually expected doors to cost a lot more than they do. So he was like, all right, well, he raised prices across the board 25% and said, take it or leave it. What happened is his biggest competitor, Jeldwin, three days later, followed suit, raised their prices. Between the two of them, they own 80% of the market. All of us are thinking, oh, this is just a door business that earns their cost of capital. Well, no, actually what's happened, the market has consolidated. And now they actually have pricing power. But if you look at what's happened on their returns in the past two, three years.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're looking for dual sided network effects. We're looking for IP. We're looking for some form of government granted license. And then also, just as important on the negative side, there are things that we're trying to avoid. So if you've gotten a Wells notice from the SEC or you have asbestos exposure, et cetera, over time, we're able to build up this type of dictionary where anytime you've identified one of these two, three, four word combinations you put in the machine, it can then identify it forever going forward. We create this and now this thing, which understands the difference between a good company and a bad company, can go out, look across the entire globe and help us find things. And so it's really helpful. One in niches that you otherwise might not play in or you might overlook. It's very helpful in geographies that you simply wouldn't get to, or it's helpful in areas where you might have a preconception that something is bad or wrong, but it's changed. I said an example of this a week ago, there's this company called Masonite.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Machine learning models are intelligent enough that they can also do textual analysis, they can look at unstructured data. And a big part of our job is understanding what makes up competitive advantages. So we were able to use natural language processing to create or look for these certain concepts. So you think about like Oracle and they're kind of a monopoly in their core database market. They're never going to come out and say, oh, we're a monopoly. They don't even like to use the word dominant. Saffrakat says, oh, we like the term popular. Like, okay, that's nice. But if you read through their documents, there are two, three, four word combinations that would imply the existence of this market structure. And in natural language processing parlance, a two, three, four word combination is called an ingram. So it's a big gram, trigram, quadrogram. And in essence, what you're doing is you're looking for these word combinations that imply the existence of some other concept. And so for us, yes, we're looking for economies of scale.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company would be things like the trend line of the intrinsic value per share over time, or maybe your share count over time, other things like that are very indicative. Now, the nice thing about machine learning relative to a stock screener, which is where your mind instantly goes when you think about this, is stock screeners, one, only look at quantity.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest area where it's really been helpful is idea generation. So we had this treasure trove of data going back 15 years on what makes a truly great business, what makes a terrible business. And we were able to train a model based on both qualitative inputs and quantitative inputs to look for these truly great businesses. And what I mean by a quantitative input is it's what's called a feature. And so if you don't understand machine learning, you're new to it, feature engineering is it's saying, hey, a single point of data isn't that important, but if you can look at a combination of these single points of data, it's more important. So for instance, from a financial standpoint, I don't care about margins in 2022, but I do care about margins over time. So if I'm looking at the trend line of margins over time, that's a feature. If I look at return on tangible assets over time, that's a feature. If I look at return on invested capital over time, that's a feature. And so we had about 300 of these, you know, the most predictive of a great company.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About when you go through the Moody's manuals, you'd look at every single business, but some of them he didn't look at that long. And so there isn't a Moody's manual on Brazil that I'm aware of. And then we had our repository of our great ideas, which we called the MVP list. And one of the things we were able to do is we built a really rough, automated valuation mechanism where we could monitor the value of those businesses over time relative to their stock price based on analysts updating their inputs. So we come up with a valuation on a company and we'd figure out, well, hey, listen, if we were to use the analyst inputs, how would we kind of get to that valuation? And then we could automate that. And so it made it a lot easier to manage this large database of 300, 400 companies and kind of knowing where to focus our attention and where to focus our time.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital IQ has done a pretty good job of pulling in both assets, financial data, and then there are clean versions of financial data. So if you're evaluating a business and you say, hey, listen, the most important thing is I want to look at certain financial metrics, so free cash flow conversion or return on tangible assets or return on invested capital. And I really want to look at it over time, or I want to look at margins over time. Well, yes, before you value a business, if you're going to do valuation on it, you're going to want to do that by hand to make sure you're getting every number right. But if what you really care about is trends, what you really care about is these ratios, just automate it. Even if it's off a little bit, as long as it's off consistently across every company, you're still comparing apples to apples. We know that we have a really great company, you're going to be earning certain returns on tangible assets and returns on invested capital and the incremental returns. So just being able to automate all of that data for a past, call it 15 years on every single business and then being able to look at that on one page helps you quickly weed out the really terrible businesses. More above it, we used to talk.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hey, Kevin, you want to risk getting fired? He's like, sure, why not? We just reached out to IBM completely ignorant. We got on the phone with them. We're like, hey, we want Watson. Do you think we could get Watson and try to apply it to our use case in finance? And they're like, yeah, sure. We'd love to do that with you. Tell us about the developers and programmers you have on staff and give us some examples of some of the projects that you've done previously. And I was like, yeah, hold on one second. I'll tell you, can you define for me what a developer is? And they're like, we don't think you're ready for Watson. They connected us with one of their outsourced consultants ended up with us doing kind of a full AI effort at Vulcan where we had eight people at the peak and we're spending a lot of money, but just added a ton of value.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Faster. And so I did actually get through Brazil pretty quick, and he was happy with the result and fast forward a little bit of time. I actually started automating more and more of Vulcan's process. And so about two years in, I had actually automated almost everything that could be automated on the research side. CT was happy. The other members of the research team were happy and our productivity was a lot higher. Same time, I love to read what I learned this week by 13D research. I was just on this big kick that AI was going to just disrupt everything. There's no industry that's safe. You're all going to lose your jobs. AI is going to replace any intellectual worker. And so reading this, I keep thinking. I'm like, man, there's going to be some multi-billion dollar shop out there that's going to take this, run with it, disrupt the industry, and make a lot of money. I'm staring at my window one day and I was like, you know what? We're a multi-billion dollar shop. Why couldn't we do this? And so walked back across the room, picked up the phone, called our IT guy, Kevin Overlauer, and say,”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where the values truly were that integral to everything that we did. We did the same thing at Zoro. We said, you know, we are going to take the time, find our personal values, and really make that core to who we want to be. Ultimately, at the end of the day, if we're just trying to make money, that's not going to drive us. But what is going to drive us is if we have values that we think make the world a better place and we want to see those values multiply. Had the opportunity to do some great things, learned a lot. But the key thing that led to me doing something different was early, early days. Actually, it was like my second week there. I think CT came into my office. He's like, Jim, I want you to look at every single company in Brazil. I want you to see if there's anything there of quality that'd be interesting to us. And, you know, I'm just starting. I'm like, I don't want to look at Brazil. I want to look at these small caps in the US or UK or something. I don't want to look at Brazil. So what's a faster way that I can do this? And I'm like, I got to figure something out. And so we had, you know, the capital IQ plugin in Excel. And I'm like, I wonder if there's a way to take Vulcan's model and maybe automate it a little bit. And I could do this a lot faster.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the performance was just out of this world at that point in time. And he actually stopped it because we have to make sure that our systems and everything are ready and capable of being at a $15 or $20 billion level. If we keep going, the wheels are going to fall off. We then rebuilt all of our systems, hired enough people to make sure that the wheels would not fall off before we then opened it back up. So that's a lesson we've really taken with us. The other big thing I took away, which I incredibly respect, was a lot of companies have values, but I think most of the time they're just platitudes and people do it because they feel like they're supposed to. But at Vulcan CT and the other founding partners, including Bruce, really took the time to say, what are the personal things that have driven us over our life? And if we can take our personal values that are core to who we are, put them into the business, and truly let that be the thing that drives us. It's going to make us a much more valuable place. And I really enjoyed being somebody. I mean, again, I was a humanitarian worker, but I don't think I've been anywhere else in my life.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a lot that happened at Vulcan. So I'd say the big lessons of being at a First and foremost, one of the things I really respect about CT that he did right was he always built a firm and prepared for the best case scenario. So I think a lot of people, they're like, I'll prepare for worst case scenario. You need to be prepared if something bad happens. And the flip is also true. Sometimes in our life, we have that moment of true opportunity. And if we aren't prepared to seize it, it will pass us by. And so CT said, before I launch, I want Vulcan to be prepared to manage $10 billion. So he raised outside capital. He built all of the infrastructure, had everything at that institutional level. And lo and behold, that opportunity happened. We went from a billion to 10 billion, and we pumped the brakes. We hit 10 billion. We had a retreat. And CT said, you know what? We are not taking any more money. And it took us, I think, to like 12 or 13 before it actually stopped. We were bringing in $100 million a week in AUM.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was there for eight years when I signed on to Vulcan. It was a $1 billion boutique. They were large enough that I was very confident they'd be able to pay the bills. There'd be some stability. But also small enough to still be able to really perform. And that was important to me. I didn't want to go someplace that was large. I wanted to be at a boutique where it was performance, performance performance. Little did I know what I was signing up for, but from a billion dollars to $20 billion over the eight years and thrown into the deep end, when I showed up, I was remember number six of our investment team. And CT gave me a vote from day one. Very thankful to have an early level of responsibility.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think coming into Vulcan, I was more of a special situations guy and I really wanted to make the same evolution that Warren Buffett himself had made, which is how do I really find these high quality businesses that can compound for long periods of time and really looked up to CT Fitzpatrick, who runs Vulcan because that's what they do, very much quality investors for the long term. Very fortunate ended up working out because when Notre Dame connected me to Vulcan, I actually got an interview. They took me out to this nice Italian restaurant in Chicago after the entrees were served. We started talking stocks. And it turned out that one of the companies I had bought while I was in Jordan called Bolt Technologies, actually make these underwater sonar guns to detect mineral deposits or oil deposits at the bottom of the ocean was something that Vulcan had sourced for their small cap program. They brought me down for the interview in the rest is history.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manager selection, you can teach us about the culture, the geography, the people, everything about the region, and maybe we can put something together. And so we did a huge project on the Middle East. And I think we evaluated 50 managers. And for me, I was going to get exposure to so many different investment managers just to get to know what they do, who they are, et cetera, and kind of build that network. They knew I ultimately wanted to go on and do equity research, not do manager selection. Vulcan value partners was trying to solicit Notre Dame's business. And they were looking to hire an analyst. And when they came through, Notre Dame said, hey, we've got just the guy. He did some great work for us and we'd love to introduce you guys.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both from an intellectual but also from a spiritual perspective. I had been trying very hard to network with all these people in the investment industry, and suddenly now that I knew Rick, I had Wasta. I had influence. When I called someone, they weren't so interested in calling me back, but when Rick's like, hey, I've got this guy. He'd love to talk with you. Would you be willing to speak for them? And suddenly, you know, Notre Dame's endowment, there's some money there. People were like, yes, I actually ended up doing an internship with Notre Dame at the investment office. The reason it was a good fit, they were very early in the 1990s into private equity. They were also early into the aughts in emerging markets. And when I was there right after 2010, they were looking to pivot into the frontier markets. And the area where they did not have competency was in the MENA GCC region, so the Middle East, North Africa, Levant, and the Gulf. And obviously I'd been there for five years, did investing. They said, listen, we'll teach you how to do it.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I decided I just need to go to business school. So I started studying for the GMAT. So I'm studying on these micro buses late at night. And actually, there was this closet that I would go into at the office with no air conditioning in the middle of the desert in Jordan. I ended up doing pretty good on the test and wanted to go to Columbia because that's what Warren Buffett did, but ended up not being able to go to Columbia. And the university, which was willing to take a chance on me, was Notre Dame. At the time, I did not know how well regarded their investment office was. So just very much serendipity or dumb luck show up there and got connected with Scott Malpass, who ran the investment office. And he introduced me to his deputy named Rick Berman. And Paul Buser, who they now run a firm called Seder Grove. But Rick actually spent the first part of his career trafing around Africa doing humanitarian work. And we really connected because we saw the world very similar.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was thinking about coming back and trying to do this professionally. I said, Well, there are three things I want to do. One, I didn't get an undergraduate finance education, so I'd like to get an MBA to make sure that I don't miss anything in that foundation. Two, I'd like to do the CFA program because I think it's the highest stamp of approval you can get. And then three, I'd love to try to apprentice or have an internship or a job at a world-class firm for a few years just to prove that I'm doing this at the highest level.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Curiosity, but must a faithful disciple of Warren and Charlie realized the emotional makeup may be a more important part. The financial crisis hit right after and ended up making a lot of money for a lot of people through that. I was on the phone saying, hey, now is the time to buy these really high quality businesses. Coming out of that, my wife and several other members of our team, they sat me down and they said, you know, Jim, you're a decent English teacher. You're doing okay with this humanitarian work, but you are adding so much more value to our life over here. Why don't you consider doing this investing thing professionally? So I was like, oh, you know, okay, I guess I'm in these classes telling people you only live once, live for your dream. Maybe I should take them up on that. And so that led to the journey to come back to the States.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we joke that the man who came home with my wife was different than the one that she married. By the time I got back, I started investing for myself. And fast forward nine, ten months, I was managing money for a few other family members, some parents of friends, and a couple other people on our team. And I'm up late at night reading 10Ks, 10Qs, et cetera, started out very much like anyone else where, you know, if I can buy what Warren Buffett buys for less than he does and I can sell it for more than he does, I'll probably do okay. That quickly translated into, huh, wonder if I could do the same thing in less efficient parts of the market. Let me go try to find some businesses that produce free cash flow, good returns on invested capital, have these durable competitive modes that I understand and can reinvest in themselves. And was able to do that. I'm like, okay, I've got the intellectual makeup to do this. I've got the...”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like anyone else, and very quickly was captivated by his wit and his wisdom, not just in investing, but life. Again and again, when he says, he's like, if you only read one book on investing, it needs to be the intelligent investor by Benjamin Graham. He's the best investor on earth. He tells me to read that I should. So I promise I'm not making this up. I actually took the intelligent investor on my honeymoon.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I met my wife, and she actually attended Baylor University at the same time that I did. And we somehow ran in the same friend group, but we never met. And so while we're overseas working on this same project in Jordan, was very lucky, married way above my pay grade, and now we've got four kids. I was very happy eating rice and peanut butter, doing the whole humanitarian thing. But as I'm thinking about getting married, thinking about having a family gets very important. I'm now thinking about retirement, paying for college. I need to think about investments, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, it's funny the way life works, but my mother-in-law, she happened to have a book on a shelf when I was staying at her house one time called Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel. Read it, got very excited about index funds and allocating to this asset class when it's down and rebalancing. I'd also heard a lot about Warren Buffett. So I thought, well, I should at least look him up. I Googled him.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted to give back. I wanted to do something that was service oriented. I think both my parents ended up passing away when I was early, so my mom died and then my dad died 10 years after that. But it just left me with this feeling that life is fleeting and you never know what's going to happen tomorrow. And so, yeah, I could try to prepare and make money or do other things. But really, what do I want to be remembered for and what do I want to know that I've done? I just want to go and try to be a part of the solution and part of the answer. I mean, there's definitely a spiritual aspect to it that's important to me, but I think it was just really this drive of wanting to give back and wanting to serve.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who I know and building connections, et cetera, not just trying to perform. And so really learned how to network coming back was a very powerful kind of differentiator where I'm like, okay, who I know is really important and I want to focus on that.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teach English for absolutely nothing. The second thing I learned growing up as an American, most of us are really taught this idea of meritocracy. If you're this great phenom at basketball, you're going to get recruited. You're going to get noticed. And eventually you kind of get in the system. I think a lot of us believe that the same thing is true in normal intellectual pursuits and any kind of typical job, right? If I go to school, I get a 4.0, I put in the hours. Someone's going to find me. I'm going to get a great opportunity. And being in the Middle East, they have this term in Arabic called Wasta. And the direct translation is influence. But what it really means is who you know is everything. They get their job based on their uncle or their sister or their father gets them a position. And seeing this just so rampant, I realized I was like, you know, if this is here in the Middle East, this has to exist in the States as well. Maybe it's important for me to focus on.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'd say two things. One, I learned what a terrible business looks like. So trying to run this computer training center, right? We're trying to offer first world services at third world prices. And so the only way that worked is if we could get volunteer free labor from college students who are willing to come over either for a summer or for a year.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I actually did humanitarian work. Funny enough, went overseas and lived in the country of Jordan. We actually put together an English and computer training center. We were educating about 1,500 students per year at the peak. And so Went did that for five years and wouldn't trade it for anything.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just trying to earn a commission from people. It just wasn't the environment I was excited about, the way people talk to their clients, and then the way people talked about their clients once they hung up the phone. So when I went to college, kind of did a 180, I'm going to go and serve humanity directly and just don't want anything to do with the finance industry.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sad part of my story is that my mom actually passed away early when I was 13, so lost that guide. And the interesting thing, this is just a weird kind of ignorance thing, but I, growing up, assumed that women did money management and all of my mom's friends who were actually the stockbrokers that would pitch her ideas. They were all men. So I thought, well, if you're going to go into an investment industry, if you're a man, you need to be a stockbroker. And if you're a woman, you need to be a money manager. When I got to be 16, my dad sent me back to spend a summer with some of these people who'd worked with my mom. I quickly realized that that was not for me. I did not want to pitch stock ideas that I knew almost nothing about.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who does that with their 10 year old kid? But my mom was obviously a pioneer of sorts and you have to be a little different to do that. So definitely my first window. And it's funny that we actually write cover calls now.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for me, it's actually my mom. She worked for a company called CKE Enterprises, who today owns Carl's Jr. Restaurants in Hardy's. She was their treasurer back in the day. So her primary job was actually doing corporate cash management. It's kind of fun now as a professional looking back on some of their 10Ks and seeing my mom named us an NEO. I've been told, I haven't confirmed this, but people have told me she was actually the highest ranking female in the restaurant industry at the time. which I don't know if that's a credit to my mom or a discredit to the restaurant industry, but looking back, I can see just how tremendous that was. I remember growing up with her talking about this stuff all the time. And actually, I have a memory being 10 years old. She's sitting me down on my bed and explaining to me how she earned extra yield on stockholdings by writing covered calls.”
2023-06-08 · Capital Allocators · Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source