YouSaid · the spoken record

Mala Gaonkar

lines on the record: 66
first: 2026-01-21
most recent: 2026-01-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And see what comes up. I relax with spending time with the people I love, my friends, my family, reading, going for long hikes. So the usual ways of that I think many of us have of disconnecting being with nature and being with friends and family.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't believe in plenty of structured thinking in the rest of my day. So that point of the day, I just let my mind roam”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I typically read the papers. I usually just spend time thinking, and then I sometimes go for a bit of a walk, and then I read all the papers, the usual stuff, and then dive right into it.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is very virtuous circle, right? Because if you're curious and humble to begin with, you learn and you see how much more there is to learn and that keeps you humble. But you also are excited by the possibilities out there. So I think it's just very much a virtuous circle of getting on that wheel to begin with. And I think plus a more fun, right? What's more fun than learning”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think curiosity is key to pretty much everything we do in each of these, whether it's solving a problem philanthropically, finding a great investment and understanding it as well as you can, or producing a good piece of creative work. I think the other is openness. So I think with the writing, it's a great exercise in humility, unlike the other two spheres of my work. No one really cares if I write another short story or not. The world has plenty of those. But to really make sure that people do care, you have to keep revising and revising. And what is to make it as good as possible? And what does revision is just openness to possibility and openness to something better? And I think be aware of certainty. I think that's probably another commonality across all of these. The person who is 100% sure that X or Y or Z is happening is something that always raises a red flag with me. It never is that certain.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think all of this goes back to this idea of how everything is a narrative in some ways and really thinking about the context and how powerful that is versus the individual characters of the play and how they all work together to really thinking about a systemic whole. I think that is the common point across each of these. The other is curiosity.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As well. So it just really about thinking in new and fresh ways and making sure that that feeds into a more creative, less siloed thinking. How do you bring?”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life backwards dealing with memories with these experimental aspects woven in. It played very successfully in Denver and it's now moving to the Goodman Theater in Chicago. So that's been really fun.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the theater of the mind was based actually in a series of neuroscience experiments. I was very interested in what was happening around some of these economic aims we talked about, Thaler and Terski's work. There's one called the Dictators Game, for example, where even though an individual in a group playing this game could take all of the coins on the table, they do not, they want to share, so that's hopeful. And I was interested in that. And I wanted to take that to the basement of the science museum in London, one of the great museums of the world. And my friend Brian Eno said, no, no, no, there's something more to this. Introduced me to David Byrne, who's thinking about an experiment in a very different context, which was more sensory playing with proprioception and how you can inhabit the body of a doll is actually a Swedish lab called Erson Labs that did this work. And when we met, we thought, okay, this is actually something else completely different, which is a theater piece. It has a narrative. It's a story of a life of a man living.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You do fun dinners. And we ask them to do predictions. They all came up with pretty pessimistic ones. So this is conflict between the narrative self and what I see, how I see myself versus the social self. And so I think that conflict is something I like to write about and think about. And it's been really fun.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we're getting calls from people in the US saying maternal mortality is rising here, it's a real problem. How can we use those same techniques here in the US? And then that then led to a really program with Uber, you know, with Dara, actually. I reached out to. I think you've interviewed here to do rides for moms. So the problem was not having a maternity plan and making sure women actually went to the clinic, in which case transportation was actually the interesting thing. It was transport, not hospital care. So understanding the why is really important. So I'll wrap up there, but I think that's a really important side where both the technology side and the philanthropic side overlap really interestingly. On the creative work, look, I think we're happiest as people when not when we're obsessing ourselves, but when we forget ourselves, whether it's a professional work or philanthropic work or creative work. And so I very much do it out of joy have since college, writing short stories, that is. And I think at the end of the day, everything is a narrative, right? And we had dinner recently with a group of very diverse grains of very”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not using contraception in this community is something that we've been spending a lot of time on. And data as a public good and data science as a public good is something we spend a lot of time on. So that's a big part of the philanthropic effort. And we work with groups like the Vel and Lelinda Gateskamp Foundation and others. It was local governments to help. So for example, one thing that was interesting.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I learned through people like him, through people like Atul Gawande, and others that I've worked with. And that all led to Semmis Geier, who was working at Gates Foundation at the time and I to set up Sergo Health. And this really going back now over a decade. And our view was very much how do we take healthcare service delivery and really help with data sets that are targeted not just data in the set of data, but behavioral data. So I think one of the most interesting things happening potentially in AI is adding the why to AI. AI is very good at solving what questions, what ad will Nikolai click on next, but not why. And I think adding this large-scale behavioral data, which you can do with some pretty basic Bayesian networking math, to say this is why a woman is not going to the maternity clinic to deliver. This is why XYZ is”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do two main things apart from my professional work. So one is the philanthropy, which we can talk about, and you asked about the creative works. I can talk about that first. Well, let's talk about the philanthropy. On the philanthropic front, I started very early, so from year one at Lone Pie, and I felt it was very important to start giving back. And just as I do as investor, it was really about backing really great social entrepreneurs and making sure we could see them early. I was very lucky to meet Paul Farmer, who was early in building partners in health at the time. sadly passed away, but was a great mentor to me. And he said, he always said, you know, Public Health is more like armed robbery than it is, you know, helping the old lady cross the road. You have to break things to build things. And it truly is. And there's a lot that needs to be done in terms of breaking siloed thinking to really get solutions to people in a rural maternity clinic in India, for example.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Value in this industry because I'd really think it's a terrific one for people who are intellectually curious of all stripes and shapes and sizes to come in and be of use to the world at large.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say, look, first of all, I hope that's a record that's broken very quickly, and I'm sure it will be. There's some really amazing talented women out there. Look, I hope I'm not just a role model for women, but the broader investment community, and hopefully over time, the philanthropic community as well. That's a very important part of my work and my ethos and my identity. I would say I'm a little, I really think the investment business broadly, whether when you're an outsider in any way, shape or form, is a great one. It's about as meritocratic a business as I can think of. I mean, I could be green Martian with two horns in my head, but if I produce investment returns, there'll be a line out the door wanting to get my product, right? So I think it's a very meritocratic industry, and I just hope that places like Sergo, places like the platform you're running here are just ways for more people to...”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From some of the fact that India was more closed off at that point in time. And so I think as a result of all of that, I also came away with a sense of great pride in what India stands for and what it has become today and what will become in the future.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Became very clear to me. And the resulting loss in trust in institutions, the resulting corruption that that often results in was something I grew up with and I just was all around me. And I think it's something that led in me at least to a very fierce sense of a need to give back and be of service. And I think that's partly also my family, my great-grandmother was in jail working because of her work with the independence movement under Gandhi. And I think that idea of social service and how you give back was very much that became all the more reinforced by the social realities of growing up in India. Now, all of that said, it was also wonderful in some ways, partly also because of the barrier. You have very strong local culture and local dynamic and a very rich literature and sense of history and self that came about as well.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much so. I would say growing up in India, growing up in a Bangalore that was not the Bangalore it is today, a very sleepy town, it was actually considered a retirement town at that point. My parents are both, my mother's a doctor, my father's an academic, and they worked there in that capacity. And it was a very quiet, very academic, very cerebral upbringing in many ways. But it was not without exposure to the very stark realities of India at the time, an India that was suffering in many ways from the walls that were put up. It was a closed-off economy at the time, the licensed Raj, as it was called. And it was very apparent that that was leading to real issues for the economy overall, even as a young girl growing up. But I think also seeing the level of income inequality, something that is striking not just India, but the world at large and the perils of that.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you are wrong, which happens a lot. And so, at least to me. So I think that's probably three concrete examples of clear lessons. One around systemic not siloed thinking, the other around wariness around financial leverage versus the other drivers of leverage that we all are happy about. And the third being around these biases that we talked about earlier, including the sunk-cost bias.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's, in my opinion, that's not an excuse. I think precisely because that is so hard, it's a really important and interesting opportunity set for new ideas.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, well, yeah, but there's going to be this AI thing, and that's going to be big. Turns out they missed significantly because of a concomitant crash in crypto and game permitting delays in China, which were driving a big portion of demand for the video gaming part of the business. So I sold, which I shouldn't have, but here's the bigger, that was a mistake. But the bigger mistake was not that. The bigger mistake was then not revisiting NVIDIA later. So this sunk cost bias I find is a very powerful one, and this is why I spend so much time now at Sergo to make sure that we keep a strong kind of survey of the available idea sets out there and make sure we continually revise, including the names that we've missed, so errors of a mission as well, to make sure we don't bump into this issue repeatedly.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you began to see how parallel compute would be necessary, how GPUs would be helpful for that, parallel impact essential for that parallel compute to work to drive this interesting new engine of machine learning. I didn't know what generative AI was going to happen, but you definitely saw what was happening with machine learning in early stages of what would then become generative AI. And the fact that was back then, apart from just GPUs for video games, there was a big crypto component as well. So it was gaming and crypto that was driving NVIDIA at the time.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other is avoiding balance sheet leverage, like public LBOs, I've learned the hard way are probably not my thing. I've made mistakes where I have invested in decent businesses that were over, pretty decent business, that were over levered. But as a result, they had much less maneuvering capacity when times of inevitable macro tensions arose. So that's another big, big lesson, and I made mistakes there. businesses like Altis, for example. The third is, I think, maybe the most interesting one, going back to discussions of the AI chip stack and of how old technologies can disrupt in new ways, which is NVIDIA. So NVIDIA saw it very much as a GPU business what it was, but then 2015 we had the deep reinforcement learned, the deep mind papers come out. And it was incredibly interesting and exciting.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is what's interesting. So, you know, thought it was absolutely right, and then obviously 2014 Microsoft comes out and buys the thing for $7 billion. And it was a very painful day for me and for my firm. And then 18 months later, Microsoft writes it off. It's gone. And so you can be right and you can be completely and utterly wrong to your earlier point on the short side. So what was the lesson? The lesson is If you think about the business as a standalone business, yes, you were right, great. However, you didn't really think about all of the other strategic value of the business broadly over time. So thinking about a business not an isolation, but thinking more systemically but not in silos is something I have to learn over and over again and something I teach my team. So systemic, not silo thinking. That's number one. And the no-key example is one.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there were several. I mean, I think, and I was really lucky to work with the brilliant group of people there, including Steve, I would say one of the big lessons I distilled was really what we discussed around biases. Let me give you a very specific example. I'll give you a couple of examples. And you talked about shorts. We can start with shorts. One of my biggest mistakes at Lompine was shorting Nokia. And I shorted Nokia”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I think valuation matters a lot. We look at free cash flow multiples. We expense stock-based comp. We do all the unfashionable things and look at things pretty conservatively. And the reason for that is what I said earlier about wanting to manage risk. So I think about risk-adjusted returns. And I think valuation and what you pay up front is very much a part of that. And particularly thinking about valuation and the information asymmetries in the market even more so.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find those are very rare and few and far between, and that's not enough usually. I think in addition to that, you have to have the timing correct as to when exactly those winner or loser dynamics will play out. Usually if it plays out through some combination of clear price competitive pressures, clear share competitive pressures leading to those pricing pressures, and then that combined with other factors such as just misexecution by management, you have a pretty good short. The problem, though, is that combination of factors occurring within the timeframe you need is a tricky one. And then add to that all of the sort of factor rotations and the passive nature of the markets today, often driven by quant and ETF and other funds, you have other dynamics that are driving trading you need to think about.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question because it's really the opposite muscle of the longside, as you know. It's really thinking about, so sometimes you will see clear shorts that are the broken mirror images of the lungs, X is winning, Y is losing.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As long as possible on the long side, obviously, shorts are obviously different, they're more catalyst driven and usually tend to have sort of sub nine month kind of catalyst periods. But on the long side, as I said, I trust our process to look at duration. So we're really looking, as I said, for that combination of factors driving incremental returns and capital that can be put to work at those incremental returns that really are playing out certainly over three to five year cycle in terms of our valuation horizon. But ideally, we see levers beyond that.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think there's a perception that those can be scraped away by the AI models, but I think that's almost very hard for me to see or understand.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, those would be businesses that provide, for example, financial data. So think about even for your portfolio, all of the real-time pricing that's needed for FX clearance or for fixed income or for the equity markets. I think those are real-time data very hard for LLM, for example, to ever disrupt because of the real-time nature of that. But that's embedded in real workflows around trading and compliance that I think are very hard to disrupt as well.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are really emerging and forming and have formed. So those are probably two big buckets what's happening around the chip stack layer, which have really, and the med tech layer, which play off last 20 years. So these are not new. I think there's another interesting category as well where there's a view that AI is maybe disrupting a little bit more than it actually is. And so I think within sort of real-time data and data analytics, there's some proprietary data providers, I think are really interesting and a really terrific businesses where they have both a system of record and the system of workflow combined. And that combined with a very basic innovation engine, those three combined often create very durable. What type of combination?”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Training is a little spiky, but inference is the annuity stream. Ultimately, this is what we're going to be calling on the models to do day in, day out. And those are going to be within specific LLMs. Google will have its own inference stack, OpenAI anthropic, and others. And I think what is happening around Google's TPU is really interesting in terms of reducing that. So I think ASICs or ASIC chips, application-specific chips that are designed for specific types of workloads and what's happening around that creates very long duration modes. And so we've been focusing a lot in that kind of thematic. We talked about medical technologies earlier, but I do think the combination of go-to-market modes combined with process innovation that just keeps compounding, embedded in a large pool of global doctors, nurse practitioners out there actually executing, creates a lot of stickiness as well. So I think that's another area of sort of where great businesses are.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Taiwan, called the process engineering aspects of that. So it's not really just about one thing. It's all about multiple things. So I love that sort of systemic motes where there isn't just one little simple, it's not you just own the gold, only gold mine in town. It's that you own the process around how the gold mine is extracted. So I think I like businesses that have those kinds of those dynamics to them. I also think there's something really interesting happening now in the trip layer in AI where There's been a lot of talk about training, but I think, you know,”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say the Broader, you know, and we've had some of these investments in my prior role as one this is the great aspect of these businesses, I think what's really interesting right now is what's happening with the chip stack. So we've been spending a lot of time on that. So, you have businesses like TSM that are well known that have really kind of”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that combination of incremental returns, capital you can put to work in those incremental returns, having multiple levers to both manage the positives in one and the negatives of execution risk in the other is what we think about”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incremental returns, but the capital they can put to work at those incremental returns are diminishing. The growth market isn't there. And so trying to understand what category of business that is. And then even if they do have a lot of capital, they can put to work. And we're seeing this in the technology space today. Execution risk is enormous. And so I think we need to make sure that we're getting the level of return for that level of capital being put to work versus the sales and size of the existing business today, because that increases execution risk, which is a risk I very much need to think about.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when I say moat, what do I mean by that? I mean a business that has very high incremental ROICs because ultimately the value of a business is going to be the return on incremental invested capital times the dollars you can put to work at those incremental returns, right? So it's a balance of what is driving that ROIC and multiple ways are really the best ways, right? So if it's just by driving a price, I don't love that. But if it's driving a price and there's feature innovation and there's market growth through new geographies or new products, that's great. So multiple levers on driving ROIC is one. The second is the capital you can put to work those incremental returns. There are many businesses that have not many, but there's some great business of high.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In even the late dying days of the Soviet Union, how powerful that was. So I think that's something we need to balance as well.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think you need to have a methodology and a process to bring that into your system to thinking and creating tools so that you and your team can nudge that way? And then remember back to the nature of the markets themselves, stocks move as much a narrative as they move on numbers. So you have to be respectful of that context and just be appreciative of the context. Back to my point about context.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that simple. In fact, it's incredibly complex, and there's a multiplicity of factors that could go right and could go wrong. And spending time in that full gamut is something I make sure we do. And I make mistakes when I don't.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is compromise. So if you feel that you are only buying or investing in a business because of pure valuation, or you're investing in business because you think the founder is the next messiah, but there are other issues, but you're going to kind of smooth those away. So basically, essentially, being overly emotional in terms of the investment decision making. Whenever I see that, sometimes when I get too excited about something even, I think that's a red flag to make sure that we're really thinking in a very balanced and thoughtful way about all the aspects of a business as opposed to just focusing on one. And I think that's where the bias is very inherent as humans, we're very trained to look for that one big, exciting moment or thing. That's how we evolved, right? We were looking for the predator that was about to pounce on us. But in reality, I think in the modern world, it is”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a very experienced team. I'm very lucky to work with this small handful of truly excellent people who've had decade or so each of long and short stock picking experience. And I really use them as collaborators. I really think of them as people that are very important to my decision-making process. And I could not, this is very much a team sport in my view. And so, you do need that strong team. And I view myself as much a coaching and mentoring role. And one of the big drivers of CircoCap, I hope, is that I can attract and mentor the next generation of really great investment talents.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not just assuming issues that might be a headwinds to the thesis away. And I spent a lot of time on that. I spent a lot of time also making sure we're talking about errors of omission and commission. But I also want to make sure we don't get in to make mistakes. So a lot of my time is also thinking about what are the assumptions that are being made out there that could possibly be wrong? Where could things go astray? Where could market disruptions happen? And so that's something I spend just as much time on. And FOMO is probably the biggest, right? So I like to tell my team it's not, let's move from FOMO to TOMO thoughtfully missing out, making sure that we're looking at whatever it happens to be, crypto or quantum or whatever the flavor of the day might be. Maybe we can try and expand our circle of competence, but if we can't, making it clear what our circle of competence is, keep pushing it out, but be very clear about what those lines are and not overstepping them. So I think I would say my”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next step is to your point your question earlier about intuition, system one versus system two thinking is then to put it through a very fine filter of the overall check investment checklist. I very much believe in the kind of a checklist driven approach. We go through that and then in addition to my point about biases, making sure we have a way to track the thesis and make sure that we can hold on to that rope. And the reason for that is I think we are very subject to some very colorfully named biases, right, whether it's confirmation bias or availability advice or some cost bias when I look across my many investment mistakes one or the other of these biases. And they're very human and they're natural and they have some positive aspects, but for investing maybe a bit less so. So I'd like to make sure that there's a data point that we can attach our investment thesis to that's unbiased so that the investment team and I can track this and make sure that we're, you know,”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not I wake up in the morning and bang, I look at that. It's really a longer duration. There's a long incubation process, I think, for me of ideas. So I read a lot, I think I talk to my team, I talk to the broader networks that we all have access to out there. But then back to the point about change happening at the edge, it's really about going out in the field. It's about going to that obscure industry trade show that happens to feature automation of new robotic systems where you might get a new idea. It might happen to be this panel, this regular ongoing survey we've done since before our launch of AI developers and non-tech industries to see what are they actually working on? What are they actually trying out that's working, that's not working. So it's really, I would say from more obscure lenses that I get my best ideas versus what you would expect, you know, just talking to the existing power players, although that's obviously important as well.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some of the, we obviously know about the very large market caps that exist, the very large businesses exist in the private realm. And we know about the fact that there are fewer businesses that are out there in the public markets than have been for a while. So those trends aside, I think another reason to look at the private markets is because they're often the most disruptive. Change always happens at the edges, not at the core, right? And that's my fundamental view. The edges is really the small company, the private company, the unsung founder who's just emerging. That's really where change in the margin will happen. So making sure that we have our networks and thought processes out there, not just in the US, but globally, within these four areas that we focus on, these four big industry categories we focus on is something that I think is incumbent upon us in talking to private companies as part of that process. It's as simple as that.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happened was a little bit different, right? We had instead a rise of very corrupt practices, we had the rise of autocracy across these countries, and we know the headlines today still speak of these. You cannot take away or abstract away from 70 years of communist history and simply assume that people are going to just have a new framework of thinking. So I think the same is true today. Like you really have to think about the very powerful overall context as you're looking bottoms up at businesses. You have to have almost the right eye and the telescope and the left eye and the microscope to really think systemically and clearly about how businesses will evolve in the context in which they are in today. So that's something I think a lot about is how do we address These very specific failures of our think”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My pattern recognition has, I think, expanded from being less driven by individual analytical viewpoints and more to thinking about the context. And so I've probably overemphasized the person and the CEO or the leadership or kind of the hero model and underemphasized the very powerful social context in which companies, businesses were operating. And I learned this a hard way. I've had plenty of failures. My first job working in Russia and Mongolia as a junior analyst for the World Bank, I came in there, this is a particularly poignant example. I came in there thinking, okay, great, we're going to take these stand-owned enterprises. We're going to value them. We're going to distribute tickets through the various local bank branches, open up the stock market, boom, capitalism, liberal democracy, it's all going to be awesome, the end of history done.”
2026-01-21 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source