YouSaid · the spoken record

Mason Morfit

lines on the record: 86
first: 2025-09-29
most recent: 2025-09-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Judgment, but they don't know the industry and they don't necessarily have a point of view about what they're looking for. And what we observed over these many years was that oftentimes this search degenerated into adjective-based conversations. So we want a leader. We want a communicator. We want a technologist. We want an operator. And those are important criteria, but they don't specify to do what, where we have found the most fruitful working relationship is where we can marry that judgment and network and wisdom of all these people with a specificity of mission that we can provide. And then some of the deep diligence on backgrounds of candidates, matching them to these missions, you end up getting to a good outcome because it is also hard for public companies in high profile searches to really do deep background without the help of a firm like ours that has expert networks and methods that we can do to unpack a candidate's history very deeply and then do the kind of financial deductive work that”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About a public company, unlike a private company where investors have a very specific investment thesis, we're doing this and know what they're looking for. A public company is sort of an evergreen institution, and the board members generally don't have an investment thesis almost all the time. They're chosen from outside that company's industry. So they have great life stories and super impressive people and a great business.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Key things are that the CEO needs to lead the company to achieve. When looking at internal candidates, external candidates, we're assessing, have they accomplished similar things in their roles in the past? It's about track record. Obviously, ethics are extremely important, creating a performance culture is extremely important. In each company's unique situation, there's usually a few key value drivers, and we're super focused on finding the CEO who we think is best able to achieve those objectives.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our orientation is to try to work with great management teams from the outset. So we're going in as part of our evaluation of a situation. We're hoping to prove out the existing team has a high level of capabilities. We get involved with companies for long periods of time. We say three to five years is our typical investment cycle. In some cases, it's 5, 10, even longer. CEO succession sometimes during that investment cycle is relevant. There have been 27 cases where we've been involved in CEO succession. The approach we take, we try to be quite deliberate about it. We start with the strategy, as Mason said, and we create a scorecard of success. What is the company need to achieve to reach its potential over the next three to five years be very specific about what the one to five?”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Among those criteria, when you mention getting the right CEO in place for succession or just having the right team in place, everyone's trying to figure out getting the right people. What does that mean and how have you figured out if someone in the seat is the right person to bring it forward?”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way that will attract the right investor base, an investor base that will be patient for what we are trying to get to, because it might take us, if you're in the case of Adobe, three years to convert from a license to a subscription model, and we want investors that get it and are along for the ride and are not trying to guess the quarter. Those are the basic building blocks of how we can help A company, recover from some of these diseases of abundance, and inoculate itself against some of these temptations and weird things that public markets can do by creating alignment with public markets for a mission that's usually three to five years.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about them almost like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that all click together and reinforce each other. Number one is strategy. Are we doing the right stuff? Are we playing in the right markets? Are we focused on the right things? How do we tracking that progress? We call that either dashboarding or building a better board book or KPIs so that we really see true economics, then it's executive compensation, which is how do you type outcomes to that? There's CEO succession and talent management, which is do you have the right people to execute that strategy? Do the people match the strategy? Are they tracked with the right dashboards? Are they paid in the right way? And then you've got corporate identity slash investor.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Board with something brand new. I looked back at the Microsoft proxy this year and I was really pleased to see that the basic architecture of what we design over a decade ago is still in place. It's cool to have been part of how this enormous important company reoriented itself. That's how this works. Robbed did something similar to MSCI or you guys to death with example after example of applying these methods to kind of make it a us project, us and the management team and the board working together to get to truth and get to excellence, not bullying or shaming or lecturing from the outside.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we could deduce that there was massive amounts of costs and losses being poured into these hardware initiatives to the tune of four or five, six billion dollars a year that might be better spent driving Office 365 in Azure instead of trying to chase the iPhone or chase the Google search dream. Looking over this analysis and talking it through privately and reaching decisions about where we're going to allocate capital and energy and where the identity of the company is going to shift happen in that way, step by step by step meetings eventually we wrapped around another skill or tool in our toolbox, which was executive compensation. Once you've heard what's going on through this deductive reasoning and shadow P&L organization, and once you shift the strategy and once you have the right people running the company, how do you then tie compensation to it so that it reinforces everything you're saying and shifts these organizations that in that case at 100,000 people you had to get on?”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out where allocations are going in terms of cost. You can understand in a way that is complementary to existing reporting and complementary to management because they are looking at what the bureaucracy is reporting up to them. They don't necessarily have this orthogonal look at stuff and it is estimations and guesstimations and Schwag math on a spreadsheet. But time and again proves to be really insightful. I'm going to try to connect one idea I talked about earlier, which is that public company get pushed around by the public markets. Their strategy tends to drift in reaction to what's hot. Martha was going after e-commerce because it was hot. Microsoft went after phones because Apple was so hot and so was Google. They went after Bing because that was hot. And so they poured tons of money into these initiatives that were not accurately tracked by the existing financial reporting systems of Microsoft, but you could triangulate them from the outside. So when Satcha took over as CEO and I joined that board, we started presenting these outside in orthogonal looks at the business.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alone, if this thing works, it's worth more than the entire company. So, what about all the other pieces of the empire? Where's all the money going? We networked our way to the board. We networked our way to the company. We made a very large position on this, not with a prescription from the outside about why what they were doing was so stupid and why we were so smart. We didn't actually know the answers. We didn't yet know what to do with Bing or what to do with Xbox. The vote of confidence that we made they liked and that opened them up some more. We applied a tool that we had refined by that point in time called the Shadow P&L, which was financials are reported out as a function of the bureaucracy of the company, not necessarily as a function of the real economics of the business. So the segment disclosures you're getting are not necessarily the true economic picture. But if you're a good securities analyst, you can deduce what the true economic picture is. You can interview people and figure out.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We invested in Microsoft in 2013. The headlines at that time were lost decade. The ticker should stand for missed search, phone, and tablet. It was not a well-liked company at all. It had been traumatized by antitrust investigations a decade or so prior, and then it was facing an existential threat from two things, the smartphone that had been pushed forward by Apple and cloud computing, which AWS had pioneered. So the PC legacy of the company was not what was going to take it forward. And the stock was trading at about eight times earnings. I went to a normal investor relations roadshow where the office team present, and they were talking about this thing called Office 365, which was to take office to the cloud. I came back and I did some math in a spreadsheet, and I was like, oh my gosh, one thing that's happening is that office is decoupling from the window cycle. They used to be sold. You'd buy a PC with Windows and Office on, and they'd be completely coincident. You could see it starting to separate. And the second thing was office.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I say empathetic because we've worked on these issues over 25 years that different companies and situations so we can say here's how we've worked with a company on the same problem in another situation. It generally also inspires trust on the other side.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We believe everybody wants to get fit. And that's a different mindset that we have compared to others who are more cynical, who see and focus on the conflicts of interest and question motives. We honestly think that every management team wants to do well. Every board member wants to do well. As a result of that orientation, it leads us to have conversations about issues at a company in a generous way. Yes, we want the company that we're investing in to achieve its potential, but getting there is often quite hard. Tough decisions need to be made about strategy. CEOs have been saying yes to a lot of things, sometimes need to start saying no to a lot of things. Sometimes there are carve-outs or restructurings. These things are quite difficult. So we try to approach those conversations in a empathetic way.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way to think about it is if you're a steel company or an airline or you're in some commodity industry and you misallocate capital for 10 years, you go bankrupt. Someone takes you over. If you're Microsoft, if you're Adobe, if you have a very strong franchise and you don't necessarily operate to potential for 10 years, you have a flat share price. You have some upset investors. You maybe have some upwelling for change. There's a lot of tolerance in a great business for lack of focus. We've always tried to have the conversations with management that we think the board should be having. When we go into a CEO meeting, I think to myself, if I were a board member of this company, and sometimes we are, what would I be asking to the CEO to talk about what's going to double or triple the value of the company in the next period of time?”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too much food and drinking too much wine can lead to a disease of abundance, so can having too much cash flow. And it can be further supercharged when the capital markets get all exuberant about this. And jack you up with very cheap equity and debt. I'm reminded of this. Ronald Reagan quote about looking at the big pile of horse manure and saying somewhere there's a pony.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through line that Rob just touched on has been so consistent, which is looking for high quality companies. We define those as ones that have high returns on capital, great incremental margins because they've got big moats and they've got either intellectual property or network effect. A lot of value investors could recite those mantras. But we've become experts in is understanding how those go bad. Because if you have a really amazing cash flow engine, it can tolerate poor decision making, poor talent. You tend to see companies say yes to a lot of things because why not? To diversify into a lot of peripheral activities that don't benefit the core, to not run their businesses very tightly from a cost structure standpoint to build up excess cash on the balance sheet and to eventually sort of lose their corporate identity because they've spread themselves too thin. The vernacular we have inside of Value Act is these are the diseases of abundance like eating.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We put the quality of the business first in our filter, not the valuation, not the degree of underperformance, but the potential of the business to grow, to add value to its ecosystem, to add shareholder value over time. Part of the reason that activists investing has had its cycles, and not every activist investor has survived those cycles because a lot of practitioners of the industry have been excellent campaigners, great users of the media, but not necessarily great investors. Jeff and Mason from the very beginning put investing excellence first and foremost in our firm ethos.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two ways to look at it. One is from an investing standpoint and the other is from an engagement standpoint. If we think about how we think about value creation in the public markets, there's two sources of alpha. There's making a great investment in a company that's going to outperform over time because they have megatrends behind them, because they have very strong unit economics, because they've got competitive protection that business can compound in value over time. The second is to engage with the company and to improve its chances of success, to improve its capital allocation, to improve its strategic focus, its operational execution. There are a lot of investors who are great in the first category, and there are also a lot of practitioners of this activist investing who focus on the second operational improvement. And I think what's allowed value act to stand out over 25 years is that we've tried to be excellent in both categories.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one is smart enough to figure it out on their own. You need a team internally. And then if you can augment it externally. And by now, 25 years in, over 100 investments, over 50 board seats, we have this army of people that are really good friends of the firm, advisors, LPs with us. And then the third way to create returns is to influence the future. And that is also a significant part of what we do. change how the course of history is going to flow. That was what we were doing in the early 2000s. And these thunder collapse of the scandals and then the bursting of the dot-com bubble set us up to go on a run. And Rob joined midway through that first chapter of the firm.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to go head to head with Amazon, but that's directionally what was going on burning $40 million of EBITDA when clearly a much better strategy would have been to fall back to a licensing strategy like to Kmart and other places that were in the works and getting focused, getting operationally excellent, steering through crises. We proved our metal through that crisis and embarked upon building competitive advantage through relationships and life experiences because these things compounded snowball. I often say if you're going to go through life litigating and intimidating and threatening people, you're going to burn a lot of bridges. But if you go through life building things with others, you're going to build up an army of people that will help you in the future. There's only three ways to win in equity investing. One is you have better information or faster information and computer programs and fiber optic cables that you tunnel through railway lines and stuff. And we don't do that. The second way is you understand the world better.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partnership, not confrontation, litigation, intimidation, press threats, fear, et cetera. One of the other slipping on a banana peel and ending up landing in a pile of money as one of our LPs used to describe it was we had invested in Martha Stewart's company during the crises. We got her to sell the only share she'd ever sold in our company, $60 million to us because we told her how scary it was to see all these scandals. And shortly thereafter, she went out inside her traded security and ended up going to prison. And Jeff, our founder became chairman of the board of that company. Now, all of a sudden, little value act that was not a well-known entity at all, a chairmanship at one of the most important governance crises in the markets. And we got to go to work on these issues of strategic focus, operational excellence. It's paradigmatic of that time that Martha had a big e-commerce site that they were building out. I characterized it by saying Martha.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a view that there was a great white space. Venture investors have board seats and engagement and great voices into their companies. A couple things really set the firm up for success. One was that there was a big mess left over from the 90s, all this massive equitization. We went up to 8,000 public companies, many of whom did not have strategic focus or operational excellence. Industries were fragmented. Balance sheets were very cash heavy and not efficient. And then a funny thing happened in 2002. There was a wave of corporate scandals and we're on WorldCom Adelphia, which was followed up by a wave of regulations, Sarbanes-Oxley. being the most notable at that point in time. That wave kept coming after the great financial crisis, the convergence of an opportunity set for problems we thought we could work really well on with a regulatory regime that forced an attitude change of corporate boards and how they operated created this opening for this strategy to really work. We weren't alone, but we did it differently. We did it with little publicity, very much sharing credit with an attitude of teamwork and”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that period of time before Rob joined Mason the whole way through other than this very different way that you both described of conversing with management teams, what was the overlying strategy of Value Act from the beginning?”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To five years, as soon as I got out of that meeting, I thought I have to see if I can join these guys. Just serendipity. Value Act happened to be looking for someone with a consulting background. Mason was leading that search for someone. Got into the process and managed to get the job.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there were times when I felt we would see opportunities for a company that weren't being captured and we weren't in a position to help them. By 2010, I was focused on this idea of working in an investment firm where you could partner with management influence management. And I happen to be at one of these investor conferences in New York. And I happened to be in a meeting with Jeff Oben and one of our partners at Value Act Jake Welch who were meeting with a company CEO in the defense industry. And it was like a revelation for me. The conversation that they were having was not about the next quarter, it wasn't about analyzing the history, it was pulling the CEO out of the quarterly earnings game and asking the key questions of what is going to double or triple the value of the company over”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Done it through security analysis. It just clicked for me that this is something that I'd really like to do. I could take the business analysis, learn through consulting, and apply it to the markets. When I got back from India, Parthenon had started another investment vehicle that was focused on public equities. I made a good connection with the portfolio manager of that fund who asked me to become a full-time analyst. We did interesting work, but the thing that was missing was that we would do great work generating insights. We could have a dialogue with the IR team of a company, but we were not in a position to influence management.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pivotal year before joining Value Act for me was 2008, Parthon wanted to expand into Asia, and they were looking for a junior member of the team to go and help create the culture for that office. I jumped at it. I'd never been to Asia before, but it seemed like a pretty interesting adventure. So I was there for six months. The project I worked on took me all over Asia, not just India, but the Middle East, China, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong never brought me to Japan, but I did learn how to navigate different business cultures at a pretty early point in my career. The second reason 2008 was pivotal for me was the financial crisis happened. It kind of put capital markets front and center for me and became fascinated with the markets and also fascinated with the stories of some of the investors who had predicted the financial crisis.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unlike Mason, I didn't grow up in a very exotic location. I grew up in a suburb outside of Boston. I had a great childhood, great educational opportunities. I'm very grateful for that. But my path led me to Dartmouth College as an undergrad. I studied the classics, classical languages specifically. But I knew that there wasn't much that you can do in the world with that field. So during my time in college, during every break I had, I made sure to work in different fields of business. When I graduated, I decided to take an opportunity to work in the consulting industry at the Parthenon group in Boston. It was a group that spun out of Bain, and they were very entrepreneurial. They had a great culture of risk sharing with their clients. They had formed one investment firm, Parthenon Capital. They were trying to expand globally.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little bit of a match in my head on the idea that public companies can do weird things to management teams in the bubble, in the euphoria on the way up and the desperation on the way down. I literally publish a report on the accounting shenanigans that were going on in the industry, which did not make us very popular with the management teams in the group. And right before all the walls completely smushed me, I met this guy named Jeff Ubbin, who was founding value acting, had no AUM whatsoever to speak of, but an idea that you could invest on the principle of being a long-term thinking partner to management with a voice not hero worshiping people, but viewing them as peer to peers and partners that you're building something with. All of that made perfect sense with me. And so I ejected from the Big Bang and I went to the startup that had nothing. And that's how it all began.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me. I looked around and I saw a system that was built on hero worship number one. We used to bring folks like Jeff Skilling of Enron in and have these big town hall meetings and everybody would Uwen About how brilliant he was. And next in would be Hank Greenberg from AIG and then Sandy Weil from Citigroup, this system of putting people up on a pedestal. It was a real quarter by quarter mentality. And in order to play that game, you used people in a transactional way to trick management into giving you breadcrumbs that would let you game the quarter and get an edge and get the model done right. So there I was in my little backwater of the healthcare group. A lot of these companies should have never been public to begin with because they were former nonprofit organizations that had been turned into public companies and then rolled up. Some of them collapsed quite spectacularly on the way down. They started engaging in some behavior that was aggressive on the accounting front and bad M&A. And that started to light a little.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first job on the street was at CSFB doing equity research. There was a guy there named Michael Mobison, who wrote really interesting papers that rang my bell in the same way. He was looking at how ant farms behave and how emergent behaviors work. But he was a real outlier on the street. I was attracted to what he was doing, but very repelled by everything else I saw around me. I spanned this error from long-term capital management blow up to the dot-com bubble burst, which was a interesting time to be on the street, one of the biggest equitization booms in the history of the markets. I worked in the healthcare group, which was ironically the only sector that did not work during that period of time because President Clinton balanced the budget and all the healthcare services companies crashed and was in a cubicle that was shrinking day by day. They kept cramming more and more people in and people next to me would be in the tech group promoted to these massive offices. And I was in this office space dynamic where at one point I couldn't even turn my chair around. So as the walls were literally closing in on.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you think about the supply demand curves you learned in college, which had sort of presumption that more is always better, Gandhi had a A third dimension on these graphs. The aha for me was that as you get larger and more abundance, behaviors change. A lot of the companies that we invest in are great businesses with cash flow and they experience these symptoms of abundance that can sometimes be very productive and sometimes very destructive.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wrote a paper on Mahatma Gandhi's economic theory, which had wildly different assumptions about human behavior than Western economics. Unbeknownst to me, Princeton had hired Danny Kahneman out of UC Berkeley Hundred miles north, Richard Thaler was at Harvard doing behavioral economics, but that wasn't really a thing. The canon was that everybody was rational, everybody was greedy, everybody was maximization oriented, nobody was irrational and had psychological behaviors that didn't fit into this homo economic mindset. Thought that was incorrect. Some of that. Orientation laid the groundwork for the investing that we did later.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I grew up in Asia. My dad worked for the State Department for USAID. I spent three years in New Delhi, India, then eight years in Jakarta, Indonesia. I went to British schools. My friends were Australians, Brits, expats from India. Played on a little league baseball team with all Japanese kids and a Japanese Didn't speak English. And I think this background gave me a sociological. Awareness of backgrounds and culture, a feeling of outsider looking in, observing. I came back to the US for high school and then went to college and I studied economics, but I was really interested in the mathematical modeling of human behavior, some of the theory behind the things I'd been experiencing”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't deserve the credit because there's not just the CEO and the board. Usually when we're investing in a company, there are a lot of people inside the company who see the exact same opportunity that we see. It's almost never the case that we have some idea that nobody in the company has ever thought of. There's usually a troop of people who are celebrating when we get the CEO to pay special attention to the idea that they already had. Those people aren't going to get the credit either. The reality is that maybe nobody deserves the credit because it's a collective exercise. We tell our story to our own investors we don't do much in public. After 25 years, it's an opportunity to tell our story a little bit. I'm Ted Sidees, and this is Capital Allocators.”
2025-09-29 · Capital Allocators · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source