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John Pfeffer

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113
first
2022-02-01
most recent
2022-02-01
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Easy and hard, easy in the sense that the trends that I described a moment ago are such powerful tailwinds that some level just doing almost anything, as you've said in the last decade in that direction has paid off in absolute and relative terms. At the same time, it's hard. And it's hard in the sense that it's very much of a power law. The best investor is going to have massively higher returns than the second best, let alone the 10th or the hundredth or the thousandth. So it's easy in the sense that it's easy to probably get up the initial part of the curve and it gets, and the curve gets really, really steep and it gets really, really, really hard to keep moving up the curve. But the rewards for that are extraordinary. Again, I'm an investor, so it's my sport, I think, in terms of returns and measure in that way. There's always room to get better at it. And there's a real reward for it.”

    2022-02-01 · Invest Like the Best · John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 262] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Just worry about blowout. You just say, well, okay, well, I don't want to be levered, or at least not much. I don't want to go short. And then all of a sudden you sort of say, well, it's actually pretty easy. I want to be looking for things that maximize return because I don't really care about goal. And that also probably tends to push me towards being a bit of a convexity junkie.”

    2022-02-01 · Invest Like the Best · John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 262] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Values get out of whack and whether or not things are overvalued or undervalued currently or the fact that in hindsight they were at least temporally overvalued in the late 90s or whatever, this is the overwhelming thing. The other thing is, by the way, there's a corollary, which is a given moment you think that maybe there's too much of a consensus around that and valuations are too high. What unit as an investor you're going to invest in not tech ingenuity doesn't seem exciting to me. I have this sort of cheat code, which is that we're just investing our funds and therefore we have an infinite investment horizon. When you stretch investment horizon to infinite or whatever, then a lot of things in an investing collapse become quite simple with a long enough investment horizon, risk is literally”

    2022-02-01 · Invest Like the Best · John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 262] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Where they're heading and kind of how they relate and all of that. And rather interestingly, first time I heard about Bitcoin and so forth, and I just thought this is right. The root is Wright's law, which is the experience curve, this relationship between exponentially declining cost of production every time you double the cumulative units that you produce of something. I did Moore's law being a derivative of that. A lot of things are driven by Moore's law, but also other examples of this. That's such a powerful thing that it overwhelms kind of anything else in terms of potential investment drivers. And of course, within that, there's things like software, which again, you kind of see threads of that through a lot of different tech verticals just have this phenomenal economics, insane sort of zero marginal cost, and then to kind of realizing that we're actually at a unique time in human history. And it just seems to me that notwithstanding the fact that sure market”

    2022-02-01 · Invest Like the Best · John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 262] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “To dominate can be very hard. The people you know, they're sort of like your Twitter feed. I mean, all kinds of stuff is sticky. And so you've got to decisively move away. At the same time, say, what am I looking at? So I had stumbled across, I'd read a New York Times article about this thing called the Singularity University that Ray Kurtzwell and Peter Diamandis had put together. So this was in Q1 2011. And I said, you know what? I'm going to go do that. And it just happened coincidentally that the opening dinner of the week-long executive program the Singularity University was the evening of my last day at KKR. So I literally penetrated my badger, whatever the heck it was, and walk into this university dinner. And like the most binary kind of very clear, leaving that, now what's this? It's been a week immersed in an understanding exponential technologies.”

    2022-02-01 · Invest Like the Best · John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 262] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, I mentioned I was in private equity, so I was a partner at KKR and then decided to do something new, but I just said, you know, it's time to do something new, but what? And I had this intuition, okay, so I'd been in tech in the 90s in France. For 10 years, the intervening decade, I'd been in private equity doing, you know, leverage buyouts and stuff like that. Which is fascinating, fascinating and amazing investment product. But again, I'm not vocational about anything, so I didn't do it because it was vocational is because I thought there was a great opportunity post.com bubble in private equity because of falling interest rates and shift back to cash flow. And that turned out to be right. And, you know, so I came at it as just another product and another business. And after a decade, it was like, now what's going to happen next? I need to kind of reframe. And part of reframing is one, it is to kind of force yourself to really step away from your prior frame because your prior frame is going to tend.”

    2022-02-01 · Invest Like the Best · John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 262] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Of the reasons probably somewhat emergent is that it kind of makes sense that people who've adapted or been forced to adapt or chosen to adapt at some very profound personal level are probably pretty good at creating new things and pretty well suited to what the world is like today and more and more every year because it's just going to get faster and steeper”

    2022-02-01 · Invest Like the Best · John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 262] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Is very, very fast and steep relative to human lifespan. And so it seems to me that the dominant survival strategy shifts to being adaptable and collaboration remains super important always, but it's more adaptable than conformist. And that might mean completely changing sectors. And there's clearly a hugely successful people who say the absolute Bill Gates, who famously says, look, you want to do one thing and do it well and stick with it and all of that. And obviously he's done better than I have. Fair enough, but the ability to adapt is the dominant strategy. And it's interesting that when I look at our portfolio and all the companies that we invest in, the funds that we invest in, the percentage of founders, managers, whatever who are immigrants is insanely high. I mean, obviously that's an emergent thing. It's not something that we think about, but I think that one”

    2022-02-01 · Invest Like the Best · John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 262] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Let's put it this way. I hope that I lack inertia, whether it's less than others is, I'll let you judge. But I aspire to that. And for all kinds of reasons, one is just because it's fun, to be honest and interesting. And the other one is that let's start from the premise that a long time ago, even though it might have been an exponential, the rate of change relative to human lifespan was incredibly slow. So the dominant strategy would have been to conform and collaborate the kinds of things that you would select for would be obviously people who can work together, but also then tend to conform because it was really low payoff, high risk to suddenly go off and do something different if progress was relatively slow compared to human life. Now, of course, we're in a part of the exponential, you know, part of the curve where change”

    2022-02-01 · Invest Like the Best · John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 262] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “500,000 people that I just really couldn't be for physical reasons or they're just so much smarter than I am or something else there's no way to replicate and that sort of practice of doing that probably reflects and how I think as an investor in the fact that I try to be flexible and try to move on and in fact when I'm focused on pushing myself to improve I think in terms of probabilities and updating probabilities as new information comes as opposed to certainties or whatever when I think about how to improve it's how do I update my probabilities faster and getting that balance right. I link that of course to this trying to be flexible and willing to change worlds and change environments based on what's going on. If you think about the extremes, if you never update these dogmatic ideology and so forth, okay, so that's clearly not good. The extreme is everything that happens is updating your view of the world. You're always going to have a”

    2022-02-01 · Invest Like the Best · John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 262] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Out of university. Maybe you chose your first job. You clearly didn't choose where you were born. Never get white people anchor so much around the one thing in their life or just about that they had zero control over but shifting away from that my point about the changing networks is i have made these changes and i think part of that's because i have very low need for status and security and social context i'm happy to go and do my thing When I was a teenager, backpacking and going different places and all of that, I had this game what by and sort of glance inside of somebody's window or whatever, wherever I was in the world and sort of go through this kind of thing and say, well, I could be that person. And then like kind of play that out on what that would mean or I'd walk by and one of the things I realized is let's say, you know, population of 8 billion, there's maybe only like 100,000, maybe it's”

    2022-02-01 · Invest Like the Best · John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 262] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “In that space, and then make the determination that it's time to sell or time to exit or time to move on or that there's something more interesting or whatever, and do that and then go off and do it all over again, create an entirely new network. And every time I do it, my prior network thinks I've completely lost the plot. Usually for years, and then maybe as much as 10 years later, say five to 10 years later, they suddenly realize, oh wait, I was really on to something. And of course, the new network doesn't know who I am. There's no context. I don't easily fit epithetic type. I don't understand why people put themselves in that position. I think it's the craziest thing that most people live their lives and have careers that it becomes this massive path dependency on what really was probably an almost nearly completely random thing of like their first job was.”

    2022-02-01 · Invest Like the Best · John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 262] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I've lived in 10 countries, spent time in many more, but actually lived in 10 different countries, in different industries. I was in the video industry in the 1980s, the tech industry in the 90s, then private equity and in the 2000s. Now we're building a retail business of all things. And so obviously living in different language bubbles, which tends to be what media information often structures around to some extent and perceptions of the same facts vary quite a lot when you do that, when you're consuming information in different languages in different countries and different perspectives and so forth, and then having changed networks successfully over my life, when you say changing industries, that's one thing, but also what that does mean is I'll decide to do something, to build a business in something and I'll go build it and I'll build this network and I'll build a reputation and I'll be somebody.”

    2022-02-01 · Invest Like the Best · John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 262] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source