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Maverick Capital Co-CIOs

lines on the record: 26
first: 2026-06-18
most recent: 2026-06-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, I mean, it definitely has to do with AI, right? Like, I feel like so much of the experience and conversation is just dimensionalized in monetary terms in terms of what does it mean from an investment perspective and enterprise productivity or in the negative dystopian vision of AI because that can provide pretty effective engagement bait. But I think the reality is there's a lot of just upside optionality and positives to come down the road. And so that kind of open-ended excitement of what could come of it is kind of big to me and what I'm excited about.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're not shy with going with the consensus when we think that makes sense. And I think I'm sure there'll be hiccups in the road, but just the impact of AI on the world over the next 10, 20 years is, I think, going to be way more profound than we can possibly fathom and just seeing how that plays out will hopefully be very exciting and not so scary, but I think it'll probably be a mix of both.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can be too dissimilar, right? If three kids under six, so you know the vast majority of my time is spent with my kids positive or diffusing whatever the latest crisis is. But, you know, I've always tried kind of, since always, right, I've had an interest in humanities, broader social studies, kind of things outside of a strict business context. And so I try and spend some kind of residual time kind of maintaining some of those interests that take me out of the immediate business world. Mostly kids”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say it wasn't just one piece of advice, but my grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, and that his experience had a big impact on me. And it was just an attitude of keep going, persevere. You can do really difficult things. You don't know how bad things can get. Be very grateful for what you have. Mean answer”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My oldest sister, I remember she once said to me, she's like, no one is really thinking about you all that much, right? Am yeah, youngest too. And yeah, she's like, you know, no one's really thinking about you all that much. In many ways, that's very freeing because I feel like a lot of times you can get stuck in situations that are sort of like predicated on this idea that everyone's evaluating it and you can kind of overweight certain opinions and sort of just reminding yourself that like most people are pretty concerned with whatever's going on in their life and you're kind of the last thing in their mind. It gives you a certain freedom to just like move and operate and think in a way that I personally found pretty liberating at like junctures of key decisions”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of in my Hall of Fame, both unbelievably smart, grasp really difficult concepts very quickly, very commercial, very entrepreneurial. I think also what's sometimes underrated, I know this is the lightning round, but it's underrated about some of these investors as they build really good businesses. They're really entrepreneurs as well, and some of them are phenomenal business builders as well as investors.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's getting deep in the weeds, understanding how businesses really make money, really work, and then being able to kind of extricate myself from that to see the bigger strategic picture as well. Look, I think we're both kind of fanboys of Stan and Uncle Steve. Kind of hard to be in this business and not be. And I hope Uncle Steve, you're watching. I believe the Mets will make it back to the World Series, and I would definitely not turn down tickets to the owner's box. But I think we both feel like we've worked with one of the greatest investors, and Lee Ainsley, and I think my experience also at Corbex with Keith Meister, I'd put both of them up there as”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that I'm able to balance a fundamental analysis with a commercial intuition, right? I think some people can get too bifurcated. You can get too academic and not face the reality of the market or become too much of a trader. And so I think being able to craft and ground my decisions in what is happening fundamentally and secularly, but also just gut checking and requiring some sort of commercial view of how that transpires in a reasonable risk adjusted timeframe within public markets.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I would just add to the prior question in terms of stylistic differences, there's a lot of different kind of flavors of investment style and approach and almost by definition everyone believes that theirs is the right one. But I think that deep down there's also this recognition of I'm kind of happy to have a counterweight who might see things differently to in theory protect me from my own excesses maybe in one direction and then that works vice versa. And so yeah, I do think that at the end of the day, there is an appreciation that no singular investment philosophy is kind of perfect in a vacuum, but sort of having a degree of counterbalance ends up working out pretty well.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we have known each other for a long time. We're friends as well as colleagues, our families are close as well. We realize we're in it together. We know how difficult the business can be and that there's ups and downs and you're never as good as you think you are and you're never as bad as you think you are at the bottom. And we from day one agreed that we would to the extent there were disagreements, we disagree and commit. And I think we also have Lee as a Is very helpful just providing general advice, but also helping us think through things. And yeah, I think it's just at the end of the day, a respect and appreciation for the other person. And I think also an appreciation that we make each other better.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that the risk of China as an industrial counterweight to some of this infrastructure trade is something that concerns me, right? Like going back to what I was telling you before, there's a reason why a lot of the value historically accrued at the application layer because that's kind of where a lot of IP existed, right? Whereas brute hardware and materials is more subject to commodification over time. And so to the extent a lot of the companies that are big beneficiaries here are playing in spaces that are historically more ripe for Chinese competition if you think about lasers and the optics space or analog semiconductors, right? There's this kind of universal maniacal focus on like, what's the next bottleneck like memory? And so I do worry about people underrating the structural industry differences of some of the businesses that are driving a huge part of the equity.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's something we talk about a lot, I think. It really ranges from the division that we see within the US and just the ability for this country to make very rational decisions on a long-term basis, the nature of our system is one where it's hard to make rational long-term decisions given short-term political incentives. So that's a concern, I think geopolitical dynamics certainly with China what happens in kind of the Cold War we have going on there is obviously another big risk that we're focused on.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Process and that takes time, but we're seeing signs now in early stages of drug discovery, of pickup and consumable usage there as well. And so I think that's a space that's very much poised to become an AI winner and kind of modern mercantilist winner as well. And then the other thing that's also really interesting about that space is it's been a space that's been consolidating for 20 years and right now kind of all of the companies are left for dead, but there are real money buyers in that space in the likes of the big consolidators in the space and there's three to five depending on how you want to define it. And there are a number of companies in the more 5, 10 billion dollar range that I think are ripe for M&A interest if those fundamentals don't turn fast enough kind of a similar dynamic that we see when the biotech market sells off you see the pharma companies come in and write that usually.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we actually think there are pockets of healthcare that are very much on the right side of the biggest trends in the world. So think AI, reshoring manufacturing that will come to healthcare as well, but we're not yet seeing that in the numbers, and that's specifically in the life science tools space. So the companies that are involved in providing the products to discover drugs and manufacture complicated drugs, there's a big shift towards reshoring manufacturing from outside the US to the US. So there should be a big cap X boom in the equipment needed to manufacture drugs, which we should really start to see, I would say, three to six months from now, which should drive a very nice revision cycle, as well as AI driving the discovery of many more drugs, which obviously leads to many more drugs ultimately being manufactured. Now they have to work through the clinical trials.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Frequently against companies that had very low margin basis to begin with. I think what's interesting now and what we're starting to see is we actually think that migration though is going to begin to swing back the other direction where the trade becomes a bit more back downstream towards the infrastructure and application layer where it's about servicing AI and actually transforming businesses with the productivity gains. And that has different implications, obviously, right? Suddenly things like CPUs or the databases that they're talking to become the critical choke points. Because I think what we've seen is I think there was a thesis maybe a year or two ago that LLMs would exist in an island where the answer to all of your organization's questions would essentially be answered from within that framework. What we're seeing in practice instead in the world of AI agents is that it's more about integration of that LLM within many ways the pre-existing enterprise workflow and stacks and so”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, look, I think the hallmark of the trade to date has been an inversion of kind of the 2000s and 2010s paradigm where the value accrued at the software application layer to an inversion of that where suddenly it's accruing at the hardware and infrastructure layer. I think in general to monetize the trade, it's been about following that migration of that bottleneck further upstream, right? So in the early days when your demand is still within the existing industry production capacity, your downstream physical outputs, things like GPUs, are where you see the most explosive growth. Once you cross that threshold, which we have in terms of demand being in excess of industry production capacity, the bottlenecks move upstream, right, to the fabrication level, to the tools that go into making them, even to the obscure materials listed on a Japanese stock exchange, right? And so that's kind of where the market is moving is towards those areas that have the sharpest revision.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that context, there's a debate within the market on where the real terminal value of AI Will most accrue over the long run? Do you have a sense? Do you have a guess or a strong beyond where that will take place?”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last couple of years was well under 100%. So there's clearly a difference when the buildout is being funded by the largest, most well-capitalized companies in the world. The offset is that we just recently seen a multi-trillion dollar market cap company, right, suddenly tapping equity markets for that next tranche of the buildout. So it's the kind of thing where a difference can exist, but it might be a little bit tighter than it was before. And I think the heart of the question is ultimately going to be the ROI on that spend and how it translates. I think that the way there's a risk in markets is when we have that handoff, right, the buildout of infrastructure for the training, that handoff towards the underlying applications for AI that are actually transformational from a productivity standpoint, the question we all have to wrestle with is, is there an air pocket in that interim, which is what creates the opening for volatility in the markets, even for a trend like AI in which you can be a full-throated belief?”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that's obviously like the critical question, right? Because we're in a world where the AI trade is no longer just GPUs, right? It's the entirety of that broader hardware, infrastructure, energy ecosystem, and then in a similar vein, all of the services and software and broader complex perceived to be on the other end of disruption. And so I think the question people have is how sustainable are these current levels of CapEx that seem really high? And I think the cop-out answer, right, is we see clear areas of difference versus prior build outs and periods of access. If people think about the dot-com bubble, but it's also evolving and some of those things that looked very different are having more similarities by the day, right? So the thing that would be most often thought about is just the source of funding, right? So at this point in dot-com bubble, your cumulative CapEx was essentially running 200% of your operating cash flow. And so it was almost definitionally externally funded. Now that number...”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's talk about the markets a little bit. It's been a terrific four years or so in US equities. A lot of that rally, of course, has been powered by the AI buildout. How do you guys think about the sustainability of that trend and that theme?”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Page risk report, looking at idiosyncratic contribution to volatility, sliced all sorts of ways, every factor, making our own factors. So that's really evolved. Obviously, the research process and the tools used in the research process have really evolved. And I would say in the last five plus years or so since we took over, I'd say there was a period at Maverick where a real focus on near-term valuation metrics became pervasive. And I think that was somewhat of a deviation from Maverick's first, call it 15 years or so. And so I think we've brought it back to that first principles approach.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think much more has stayed the same in terms of the important parts of what we do than what has changed, though obviously a lot has changed over 30 plus years in terms of. Investment process. And so when I think about the constants, it's the culture of maverick putting investors first team very much working together and collaborative in the context of a very high performance culture. From a strategy perspective, the first slide of our marketing materials is the same as it's been since inception. Performance that's driven by alpha, not market timing, not sector exposures or big sector exposures, I should say. long-term view deep diligence, partnering with good management teams, taking a long-term view. So a lot more, again, I would say is similar rather than different, but there definitely have been some changes over the last 30 plus years as well. The risk systems are night and day when Lee started. He was looking at net exposures by sector and beta-adjusted net exposures by sector, and now we're looking at a 20 plus.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really done together with Lee as well, and two other members longstanding members of Maverick. And we really look at that both holistically and at the sector level. And there's a whole host of statistics, and that's really evolved over time. And it's kind of sliced and diced every which way you can look at it. But what we're really solving for at the end of the day is the whole portfolio and we're managing towards the optimal portfolio, not the optimal sector allocation.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fundamentals. And so you get a degree of natural operating momentum underneath the trend where if you're working in industries that maybe have less end market secular growth, then you have things that can be more idiosyncratic in nature where managerial decisions have a greater impact on underlying earnings power or you're oscillating around a macro operating cycle that's been going around for seven decades. And so I think in general, Ben's focus on highly specialized, more idiosyncratic novel ideas versus a little bit more in the mold of sort of classic secular thematic investing is on the surface, at least one of the differences in how we approach things.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think at its core we share certain commitment to kind of commerciality and first principles that does have a fundamentally aligned when it comes to capital allocation. And I think that from a stylistic perspective, we're both pretty candid, straightforward, have kind of a high degree of just basic trust and camaraderie, which ends up being kind of critical with decisions kind of throughout the day investment or otherwise. I do think stylistically we do have differences, right? I think it's hard to parse those differences as being a function of different sectors been grown up in the healthcare and cyclicals universe, myself growing up more in the TMT universe. Where in the world of TMT, things like secular trend, operating momentum, thematic dominance are obviously extremely critical, right? Because the realities when a secular trend is in your favor, you typically see the multiples of stocks rerate in the same direction as the revisions in under”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right. So Lee had obviously had a little bit of a sense of our thought process from an investment perspective, right? In terms of our performance when we were sector heads. I think beyond that, though, there was a couple year period where we were beginning to kind of just incubate general ideas and thoughts about kind of organization read large, investment process and philosophy writ large. And so I think even before he executed the transition, he obviously had some degree of conviction in terms of how we think about some of these bigger picture items that would be relevant in the event of a transition. And so I think by and large he had this view that one, he already had a sense of our natural chemistry, a kind of approaching certain critical decisions together. But I think also just some of the natural similarities and differences between us would provide a degree of interesting counterpoint that I think he thought would be beneficial for the culture and the organization.”
2026-06-18 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Maverick Capital Co-CIOs on Finding the AI Winners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT