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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“We both love the sort of Kahneman Farsky, Thaler work, right? And I remember my father once giving me this great quote from Bertrand Russell, which is humans will do anything they can to not have to think. And it's very simple. Like, Kaneman talks about system one and system two thinking. And system one thinking is that intuitive gut thinking that frankly is positive. It drives very quick fluid reactions from humanity day to day and it works perfectly fine. But system two thinking, which is really getting into the weeds and really thinking methodically and logically is really hard. And so I try to focus on making sure my team and our portfolio is driven by system two thinking.”
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 spice for us is quality. So, I think we have really moaded long duration businesses and we have very debiased ways of tracking the data where it's not just based on my intuition or the team's intuition, but really based on systemic thinking and not siloed thinking, that's the spice. That seems really exciting to me because that's a really hard thing to think about and do well. And I think thinking, I think it's important for us to talk about this a little bit. You're a real student of the investment process, Nikolai. But, 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
“One I think that allows you to play offense when at some point or the other due to the passive nature of the market structure now increasingly, the odd factor rotation here or there could disrupt a portfolio. That allows us to play offense during those periods. And we believe there is actually sufficiently interesting set of investment ideas across each of these four sectors where we're not compromising. And we have very different drivers of the long theses of each of these names.”
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 very intentionally sat on these four verticals who happen to be enterprise data, tech broadly, financial services and healthcare services as well as industrial technologies because I felt those were the areas where these themes of emerging technology disruption were most relevant and where you could see market leaders with very durable moats where incremental returns and the capital you could put to work at those incremental returns had a clear path. given all the technology trends we're seeing today. So we purely just focus on those four areas. We also think about thematic exposure as well. And the reason for that, I think, is very simple.”
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, yeah, I think broadly this idea of how technology is intersecting with non technology businesses and how you can use data to analyze that and de-bias the very human decision-making process, something we spend a lot of time on.”
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
“Surgery is conducted. So I think the intersection, people talk about AI and robotics in the manufacturing space, but I think people don't realize sometimes is they're about 300 million surgeries conducted globally, and they're just beginning to be penetrated by what's happening with robotic surgery, specifically companies like Intuitive Surgical. Surgical conduct itself are really leading to a lower error, easier training for medical students and an overall better context for how these therapeutic care can be conducted. And as you know, there's a big discussion obviously around how healthcare costs can be contained. And I have some hopes that AI applied intelligently can help with this.”
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 what is happening within medical technologies is not perhaps as well or broadly understood as it should. So to give you a very specific instance, if you look at the imaging space, so MRIs, CT scans, and so on, the accuracy and the speed at which these images can be conducted are now improving at a pace of almost 70% versus what we would have even a few years ago. That in an aging demographic globally has been incredibly helpful for not just therapeutic care, but preventive care in a way that makes obviously overall care much more cost effective. So I think that is one big area around imaging and really understanding earlier how some of these chronic diseases are evolving. And I think obviously nipping these in the bud earlier has been one big one. The other big area has been around how”
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 suspect they will be, and they probably should be, because I do think there is something about human collaboration that works best at a smaller scale. I think some of the most interesting data, and something interesting ideas, come through looking across borders, across the borders of industry. So how AI is influencing medtech, how AI is influencing material science innovation in aerospace. I think those are more interesting angles, or just as interesting angles as purely looking at AI as AI within technology itself.”
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, very specifically, if you want to track sort of product adoption when we started out, when we started at Lumpine 98, when I was looking at some of the early adoptions, even say around Adobe products back in the day when they were just transitioning to cloud, that was a very manual process. You went out, you called customers, you did surveys, surveys were usually done by phone, response rates were trickier to track. Now we actually can use survey bots to do these things. We can actually have a combination of both augmented human surveyors as well as looking at some of the deeper dives. We can track through machine learning in a very automated way a larger number of product skews. We can scrape the web, which to be clear wasn't at the scale and scope of what it is today, to see product adoptions, to see who has open APIs to their suppliers, who doesn't. So there's a whole range of both TechSack mapping, product adoption, customer adoption, even outside the typical consumer adoption data 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
“We're looking at where technology is intersecting with non technology businesses and where, as I said, old technology is disrupting in new ways. So that's one angle. We look at the usual checklist of competitive and customer and other checks. I would say the other big lesson is really around biases and how you can use data science today in a way we couldn't when we started our investment careers, given how fast and how open source now machine learning is. So you can very cost effectively create very strong third-party data checks, including automated surveys, including automated tracking of various data points around markets and tech adoption that we could not very early on in the late 90s when we're setting up our career.”
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 have an investment team, including the data science team, and that we regularly meet table this size so that we can have a roundtable discussion. Jeff Bezos has talked about sort of two pizza box teams. I think we'd like to stay at one pizza box in terms of our team size. One pizza box. Yeah, exactly. If we keep things lean, I'm saying 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
“Yes, so I, in order to distill to your question about how we identify these truly great businesses and keeping that discipline, there are a couple ways of doing that. One is focus. So we decided I wanted to keep the team small. If there was a consistent piece of advice I got from CEOs, many have been on this podcast with you, whether they're running huge companies or small businesses or founders, was to keep the team size small. So it's not just about AUM. Obviously it's easier to multiply a dollar than it is to multiply a billion dollars. But team size and keeping team size small and making sure that collaborative and cross-border thinking, which is so fruitful for new idea generation, particularly creative idea generation, that was paramount in my brain.”
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
“Make our video games look a little more fun. And then fast forward to now, they're actually driving what's probably one of the more tectonic plate shifts in terms of social and demographic and technology shifts of our time, which is AI. So I think how old technologies disrupt in new ways and looking for that in non-tech businesses is something we spent a lot of time on 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
“As I said, a small handful. I don't think there are that many. We focus on really four verticals where I think there is a bit of an edge from one very specific factor is every business is a technology business, right? So if you're an aerospace company or a med tech business or a financial data business, you are a technology company in your backbone. If you want to deliver at scale and with quality, you have to be a tech business. And I think understanding the tech stack map of businesses is something we spend a lot of time on, especially in non-tech businesses. I think that's one. The second is how old technologies can disrupt in very new ways. So if you think about something like, we've talked about this, but the auto industry, which employs far more people in the tech industry, but it's being disrupted right now by technology that was invented in 1976, the lithium ion batteries. So I think that's always interesting to me. We started investing career, we were buying GPUs 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
“And we do that through our product is really our process, a very transparent process of looking for very specific factors that really are distillation, as you pointed out earlier, of my lessons I've learned, the many mistakes and lessons I've learned from investing over 23 years with some of the best people in the business my former colleagues at Lumpine. And so that distillation has led to Sergo. There are many different factors that lead to identification of a truly brilliant business. But the way I define a great business as a business with very long duration motes and duration really is our true differentiation.”
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, ServocaPap tries to do what many investment firms try to do. It tries to beat the market over a three to five year cycle with less risk than the market, a risk defined as loss of capital, not volatility. And the way we try to achieve that is by identifying this very small handful of truly great businesses that exist in the world.”
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