YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Schwimer

lines on the record: 85
first: 2018-10-15
most recent: 2018-10-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“A coach that's going to help determine if I get moved up or down, and here I am getting in these fighting contests with them. Instead of really when a motion is, there's a saying, when emotion is high, logic is low. And when you're in this situation, just say, okay, and move on, then, hey, let's have a meeting. Let's sit down one-on-one and say, you know, this is what I was thinking there. What were you thinking? And really listen and understand, then you can get your point across, and then it's a much better chance for people to understand my side and for me to understand their side instead of just right when something annoys or frustrates to jump on it, really take a step back and have that conversation. I wish I had learned that much, much sooner.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I see things that are just wrong and that I don't like, I handled it very learning how to handle that was something I really wish I had learned earlier. And in baseball, there was problem after problem because I had this algorithms and models to determine what pitches I should throw to what hitters. And that's kind of how I became successful being senior sign having one out of a thousand chance was because I was able to figure that stuff out. And I would shake off and a hitter would get a hit, which happens, of course, as much as I shook off. And the pitching could, why'd you do that? Why'd you throw that there? Like, well, do you want to go back and analyze every single time I've shaken off? I bet my record's better than it was when I wasn't. And he was like, you can't have those kind of conversations like that. And it just would get into these fighting matches. And then this guy's.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to go with Bill Gates. And the reason isn't the Microsoft stuff, it's what he's decided to do with his wealth. And you're on this earth. I want to make a ton of money and then use it to help as many people as I possibly can. And Bill Gates is living that. I mean, he had a great idea, you know, ran an incredibly successful company, obviously, and is now using that to give back. And the whole giving pledge with all these guys, I think, I don't think people realize just how important that is for the economy, for just mankind in general, of what that's going to mean, giving 99% of your wealth up in order to help others, I think, is admirable. And I would love to meet him and shake his hand and say, thank you.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, a book I read a few months ago from Annie Duke, it was Thinking in Bets, which was really how I've kind of always done everything. And so kind of reading it was sort of an entrance into my own brain. It was like she knew me better than my friends knew me. It was the weirdest thing, but also some of the behavioral stuff that I hadn't really understood was really cool insights. And I think that for business, people, investors, I mean, anybody can get anything out of this book. I think it's really, really cool.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard, met my dad, had me, started working at the Department of Justice very low level, and ended up ascending to becoming the CFO of the Department of Justice, Office of Justice programs, which manages tens of billions of dollars. And all the while took night school to go to college. All the while never missed a single one of my games. When I realized in my, I guess using my 20s, like what she had done. I mean, it was, how did you do that? I mean, she's truly inspirational in the fact that she will fight and compete and do everything she can in order to succeed. And I think I get that from her. And she is my true role model in life.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, the way they taught by example, I was very fortunate. I grew up in a middle class, maybe upper middle class family. Both my parents always wanted me to follow my dreams, whatever they were, and I've always loved sports. And they, not only do they tell me to do that, but they supported me in doing that. Any kind of pitching lesson I wanted, they gave me. Any kind of team I wanted to play for, anything at all like that, my dad was unbelievable about that. But I do want to talk for a minute about my mom, if you don't mind, because she is my true inspiration. And I've been very fortunate to have two women in my life that are incredible. But my mother, obviously first, she is the American dream. She is the definition of resilience. She grew up in a very tough family situation to the point where on her 18th birthday she left the house and had to kind of figure things out completely independent on her own, took a job just like entering data and just really worked really hard.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's pretty easy efficiency. When people do things inefficiently, it bothers the crap out of me. I'm the kind of guy that everything I do, I try to make as efficiency as possible, whether it's you're at a urinal and trying to figure out when to flush the toilet to make sure the pee in the water goes down together so you save those two seconds every time every day. I can't stop thinking about how to be more efficient. It's probably bad. But then when I see people do things inefficiently, it's bothersome and it's hard”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was going to say basketball, but we talked about that earlier. I'm going to go with, you know, I do every single morning before I start my work day is an evil sudu. And I try to do it under five minutes. And that's how I know if my brain's getting sharp or how I'm feeling on the day. So I love, I love that. I think it's a really good mental kickstarter for the day. I'm a huge Game of Thrones nerd as well. I've read all the books. I post on message boards. So it's pretty bad.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, there's the prediction, and we'll have to get this out either slightly before or slightly after it all plays out. We'll see. All right, my glitter into some closing questions. What's your favorite talent or hobby that you either have now or you had in your past?”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not in a seven game series now with the pitching staff. I mean, it's offensively, and a lot's going to depend on a couple starters here or there. And the Red Sox have done an incredible job. Great team.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I grew up a diehard Yankee fan. My dad born and raised in New York City. It was hard to now not add nearly as much because I got players in the Red Sox that are the major leagues. They're hitting home runs, and I'm excited. I'm like, who am I? But I think the Astros are going to be tough to beat. I think that the clear favorite in our, I guess, modeling, if you will. No.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. I don't care about teams anymore. I used to. And I don't. It's just all my, it's my family that's out there. And so I just root for those guys hard, my wife, my family, friends that come over. We're all pulling for our guys. And it's really a lot of fun. It's really, really cool. But you want a little baseball playoff prediction from me?”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're about to head into the playoffs as you watch the Major League Baseball playoffs now. Do you have a completely different lens where you're rooting for your players like a fantasy game and not rooting for your fantasy team? 100%.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say as a fund, it's definitely skill from a player to player level, there's luck, if that makes any sense. So there are players that we gave $100,000 to that I thought were long shots that all of a sudden break camp with the team. Like, how is this happening? Like, that's lucky, they're way better than we ever expected. But then there are players that we're 90% going to make it, and now they're having down years. They get demoted. I think that's unlucky too. But it's all depending on how you feel about the model to really determine that.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, there's always this element of luck versus skill. When you're talking about kind of a base rate of 10% of the guys making the pros and 3% really making it, and you have numbers that are 20, 30, 40%, there's clearly skill. Where do you think in the results you've seen so far the outcomes have come from that skill and the model and where has it just been good luck?”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. High beta, low beta is exactly right. So we didn't want all these guys that we don't think have a 20% for these long shots, a full fund alongshots, or a full fund of sure things. That was what I was kind of talking about. We got lucky to have a really good mix of both. I was going to just play it by year. We're signing all the long shots, then I would take a step back. Or if we're signing all the sure things, I would take a step back. But it really worked out naturally well. And that's really lucky, I guess, for that to. Yeah.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the interesting thing about the model we could have two players that we think are $500,000 players, but one we think has only a 20% chance to be in the major leagues. Has a 5% chance of being a Hall of Fame type player versus another guy has a 98% chance of being in the major leagues.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so it's funny that a lot of investors, especially in the financial world, they say, oh, you know, we got to make sure we have too many shortstops. Like, no, people can get traded. And this is too much of our portfolio to a single player, et cetera. So that is eliminated in our second fund with sample size. We're going to have 500 players in that fund Our first fund, there was a major concern about that. We have 77 players in it. We don't want them to have the concentration of that money going to a couple guys. So that was a very big concern early. But it kind of worked itself out. So in the beginning, we had such a good array, some lows, some highs, some different positions that it really just worked itself out. But it was a strong consideration.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They would produce things that weren't exactly what I wanted. And I said, wait a second, if you don't understand something, let me know and we can go over some more. I was thinking everyone would come to me, but nobody really did. So now I'm like, okay, do we have to have meetings? You know, so I'm kind of going back to the maybe there is a reason people do these things. So, I mean, look, as you can imagine, at 29 when I started now 32 years old, I always look at everything. If I started this today, how would I do it? And then do it that way. And I had this idea and most of it works, but there's some of it I have to understand. We have to conform and do things that the normal way, I guess, if you will.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh God, how many? Do you have another five hours? Yeah I've made a lot. Obviously, the medium mistake was a big one. I would say this is kind of, in baseball, there's a term called eye wash. And I don't know if many people know what it means or is, but it's basically doing things just for the sake of doing them. So you take three hours of pitch and cover first base. I do that for five minutes. What am I going to gain if I do that? Just because you're there, right? It's eyewash, we call that, such eyewash. So I want to create a company that didn't have any eyewash. We're not going to have meetings every five minutes or every week or anything like that. I create a team and I say go. I trust Jason. I trust his team. Figure out how we can do things. Well, that didn't work. And the reason is when there were certain things I needed or wanted for different meetings.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly right. But the problem is there are groups, you know, the MLBPA for one. Let's say we invest in 500 players. 499 never make it. We have $150 million. One makes $100 million, so gives us $10 million. $140 million was split between $499 people. The OMBPA looks at is players just lost $10 million because they don't care about the minor leagues. And to see the amount of pushback we're getting from them and from agents that obviously don't care about their players and care more about them keeping their client is very frustrating. And I think that the goal should be to inform the players. I'm not saying you should tell players to take this. Never. I don't think anybody should ever tell a player to take this deal. I also think nobody should ever tell a player they shouldn't. They say, here's the options. Here's what we're forecasting for you. You make the choice. That's all I want out of this. And maybe I was too idealistic in thinking that was going to happen.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most disappointing aspect by far was the pushback from the Different groups, organizations, people about what we're doing. And it's all because they only care about the subset, the small subset of the group that makes it right. Just because I said over half the players will make it, we're still projecting 20% to be profitable. Keep in mind, they had to play three years. If you think they do 10%, they're returning $150,000 because they make $500,000 a year. In order to be successful, you got to make the big money. And if we can get 10%, we'll be very successful. I think we're going to get about 20%, which means we're going to be losing money on 80% of these players.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or not, so we chose not to do that for several reasons. We have to weigh the cost of our time and our effort and the ultimate end goal and our chances of success in that endeavor. To NBA, actually three MBA teams now called us and wanted to fire their entire advancing department, have us be the analytics department for those teams remotely. Look, they know Jason. They know Zach. We have guys on our team that they know the, I mean, we picked off the very best guys on all these different teams, and now teams are taking notice of this. They say, look, I can hire guys full time, but they're not going to be in the same ballpark as your guys. And, you know, do you want to do this offering us great deals? We think we have two or three ideas that were really kind of”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reach out to us offering us multi million dollar year contracts to help them in advance of the World Cup in Qatar using advanced analytics.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whoo, well, that's a great question. So we've assembled a team that. Is truly incredible. And it's really an honor to work with those guys. And I tell them that. And it's kind of easy to assemble a team, to be honest with you, because you look at these guys, Harvard, all these brilliant people, and they can go make half a million dollars a year on Wall Street, but a lot of them make 50 grand a year working in sports because there's so many people that want to work in sports. They care about quality of life, their quality of work, they don't, the salary is not nearly as important. Well, I say, hey, I'll give you a triple or more of what you're making in baseball plus equity in the company. Every person that comes with me gets equity in the company. So they're part of it. They're partners. They don't work for me. And they kind of do, but they're part of the team. And so we have this team and we say, okay, now what are we going to do? We've been getting offers. Every day it's a new offer to soccer federations have reached out to us. We have nobody that has any experience in soccer, by the way. Two soccer federations.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course. It's a very mutual thing. And now that we have the pitching metrics, it's even better. So the pitching metrics that we came up with help our fund in investing in players. It helps our relationship with teams. It helps investing in players.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2017, 17 teams called us this year, 24 teams called us at the trade deadline asking our advice on who are the underrated prospects in this organization.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, absolutely not. And we have really good relationships with teams. And so it's important to note the subjective analysis that goes into our offers. We have the math part, which gives you this, let's say this player should may, we're going to offer this player $500,000. Then we call the team. Our scouts are the teams. So we'll say, hey, what do you think about your player? And they'll give me the work ethic. They'll give me the how he's like in the clubhouse. Players like him. I'll call opposing scouts. Hey, what do you think about this player? And that you get some very valuable insights. We had one player that was a third baseman and really dominating. We love this kid. We call the GM of the team who tells us, you know what, this guy's going to be a first baseman. He's not that great defensively. He's going to play himself out of the position. Well, our model has third base versus first base is a big difference in terms of dollars. So now we can massage the number. We put it in his first base. Paul and I will both go over the numbers and come up with offers. Put it this way. Last year the trade deadline.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have many, many players in the major leagues. They've all paid on time and in full. It's because of how we sign them. We get their financial advisor involved. We get everybody involved so everyone understands the deal and actually comes straight from their financial advisor at this point. And it's a pretty easy process.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For that. And I love Francisco. I love all of our 129 players now that we have. And during the entire time, I rooted for him every day. And it's like family. And family, sometimes there's going to be disputes. If we have 129 players, if one is upset, that's one too many, in my opinion.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company comes in with a spot them later and offer them a lot more money. And now he gets upset. Why did I do this original deal? I'm not sure what happened, but someone convinced him, hey, make a fuss about this. This company, Big League Advance is big. They'll settle it. It won't be an issue, which of course we would never do. And so he comes out with this complaint filled with lies and that people started believing these lies. Like he didn't have a lawyer review the contract. We forced him to do these things. The good news is we had proof to back up every single thing that we said. And once they saw that proof, they knew there was nothing. Francisco ended up dropping the case. We actually countersued him. We settled the countersuit. He paid a portion of our legal fees for the case and then wrote a very long apology that was highlighted actually in this Ports Illustrated article that came out about us, which was good. I mean, look, he made a mistake in doing that and making up these things, but he ended up accepting response.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so unfortunately, we did have a player sue us and his complaint was actually the first time the public had heard anything about us as a company, which was a really probably my biggest mistake I've made so far as CEO, and I'm sure I'll make a lot more. But I wanted to keep as low a profile as I possibly could in running this company. And the reason for that partly was selfish. I don't really like the spotlight. I like to operate under the radar. And so the public now hears of us from this complaint from Francisco Mejia, who when we signed him, he had 42 games in A-ball. Wasn't a top 50 prospect. It was a good player, definitely a good player at the time, but wasn't one of these surefire can't miss guys. And he had the next year, he has the season of a lifetime, gets all the way from 42 games in A-Ball to the major leagues. It's almost very, very rare. And so another.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are a couple people that have tried to compete with us, but nobody really can because nobody goes and gets the guys that are outside the top 300 prospects because you can't predict which ones are going to be. And so there were some Goldman guys that quit and tried to do it. They have a couple players, then they left because they realized they couldn't do it when they were projecting the player. Okay, I know this guy's going to be good. It was too late. We already had him because we could project him and figure it out earlier. Unfortunately, there's been some bad actors coming in the space that I'm hearing from other players saying sit them down in a room, hey, sign this contract right now. I'll give you money, which is a big, big problem for me. And players aren't understanding the contract's not in their native language. They don't have a lawyer review it. They don't understand what's going on, which again is a major problem, which is actually a big reason why we're pushing for a law to make sure these players are protected. And so we are going to try to get that through Delaware.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about competition. So you start this clearly you're a first mover. There aren't other people doing it. Are you still the only game in town now trying to buy steaks and minor leagues or have other people come in and try to compete with you?”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This and see how he gets to that position. So this picture they showed me, look, he should be between 35 and 55 because of how he got to that position. So it's all about the preceding step, not in general with pitchers. So once they showed me this, they built a model that was truly revolutionary.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He brought on several people, one alt name in particular, Zack Bradshaw, who there's a competition called Kaggle Competition for Machine Learning Experts and thousands of people apply for this all across the world. And the data set at the time was predicting March Madness and he won that competition. I mean, this guy's another out of this world machine learning expert. So getting back to pitching now. So now I have this team and I was telling him about the pitching. They said, well, let me take a look at it. And what they did is they saw, and they said, look, you're looking at this the completely wrong way. You're looking at this linearly. You're measuring the angles and you're comparing it to the subset of these 12,000 pictures. That's not how you should do it. For example, what I was doing was I know when your front foot hits the ground, a certain angle should measure between 20 and 40 degrees. And I know that's the healthy degree. And they're saying, no, that's the healthy degree for all 12,000, but not that specific picture. You have to individually.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So good. They announced him as the assistant general manager of the team in his early twenties, which was amazing. Did a great job there, came back to the league office, turned down jobs, turned down jobs, finally Magic Johnson tapped him and said, hey, come work at Lakers. Your office will be right next to mine. Your report to me, you can build your team and let's do something. And I got to give magic a lot of credit for a lot of the old school guys wouldn't have done that and wouldn't trust numbers and math, but magic and I don't know magic at all, but just in hiring Jason, what a smart move to understand. Look, I may not understand this stuff, but I want to bring on somebody that will. And so I called Jason up and I said, hey, I'm trying to build this team. And after talking to me more and more and more, he calls me back a couple weeks later and said, this is my dream job. This is what I want. Do you mind if I do it? Which of course I was like, absolutely. And so Jason did leave the Lakers, came to work for big league advances, our chief strategy officer running the entire analytics team.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The smartest guy we know in sports, all sports. And he goes, Well, that's easy. The answer to that is this guy Jason Rosenfeld, but he'll never ever do it because he got tapped by Magic Johnson and he'll be the Laker GM in five years or a GM of another team in very short order. But in his experience, he'll know who's good. So I did some digging on Jason and I found out he went to Harvard and was a two-year president of the Advanced Analytic for Sport Club and intern for Darryl Morey and Sam with the Rockets and really helped build that system the Rockets use. Then while with the Rockets met Yao Ming, thought that there was a lot of potential business with the NBA and China. Keep my eyes like 19 at this point and decides to teach himself Mandarin becomes fluent in six months and a majoring, a second major in Mandarin at Harvard. I mean, the guy's out of this world smart, out of this world. It's just another level. And ended up going to the Shanghai Sharks.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So we're trying to figure out throughout the delivery how much stress are you putting on your elbow and your shoulder. So you look at the delivery. There are so many theories out there on what causes arm injuries. And I was just going to try to test for them all. Now in the beginning, in the first fun when I was doing this, and we were investing in pictures because I was able to get the high, medium, low, it wasn't until we raised the second fund that we had a lot of money from the management fee to really get a team. And they were able to crack the code on pitching that I wasn't able to. Sam Hinke, who ran the 76ers is in our fund, Paul D. Podesta, obviously. And now here we are with the second fund. We got a lot of capital. I called him both and I said, I want to turn this thing from a baseball company that invested minor leaguers to the world's greatest sports analytic company is my dream and my vision. Now I want to hire these guys to help the baseball model, obviously, but then get into whatever else we think we should get into. And so I called Samson. I was like, who's?”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dr. James Andrews is one of the best surgeons around. He did my surgery, talked to him at length about this, biomechanic experts. I mean, I talked to everybody I could talk to about it. And just basically tried to test for what they were saying. And what came out of it was what they were saying was kind of accurate, but not quantifiable. It was good enough for me to build a model to say this guy's high risk, medium risk, low risk. That was it.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they have elbow, shoulder surgery, and that can really, really hurt a career. So I was doing tons of research, did all these deals with all these different companies to get more than 12,000 pitching videos. And I had done so much research on injury stuff after I had gotten hurt. And I'm looking at angles of all different kinds of parts of the delivery to try to figure out exactly how much stress Pitcher is putting on his elbow and shoulder to determine what's his likelihood of getting hurt.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what's going into it and conceptualizing it all. What we figured out is what we talked about earlier with what actually matters to Major League success and actual value of players. Now the one thing that we haven't touched on yet is pitching. Those are all offensive stuff. Pitching my model initially was very weak compared to my offensive model because I'm saying all these pitchers are going to be great in the minor leagues, but they weren't because they got hurt.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of deploying the money. So we raise a second fund, we raise $130 million for the second fund in order to do it over a much longer period of time.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vortex, if you will. And that's when we expected the fund to last five years. I thought it was going to be three. They thought I was crazy. It ended up being 18 months.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredibly successful. So to the point where over 75% of the players that we sign aren't top 300 prospects in baseball when we sign them, which is amazing to think about. So if you have a 3% chance making big money and now you eliminate the top 300 players, now it's down to fractions of 1% of those guys. Now, again, when we sign them, they're outside the top 300. They become prospects and they become good. And that's what's happened. But we've been very, very successful to the point where our first fund was a $26 million fund. And also I should say the biggest X factor in the plan was our players going to sign, right? I'm going to these investors and I've got everything figured out and they have power players going to sign. And they are, I don't know. I have no scientific reason for that.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I didn't figure that. And so, and again, that's only a few agents. Most agents are really good about it. But then that's when I started going to players directly. And I said, look, you hear it from me. And then you talk to your agent. So if the agent tells you anything different, you now know the truth. More importantly, I'm happy to have a three-way call with you, your agent, and you get all the right information. And then players start signing left and right. And that's when the snowball effect happened”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you give a guy a million bucks, he's one of the good ones, one of the very, very few that do make it to arbitration. Now other agents are going to come into and say, look at this terrible deal you made. You're going to make all this money and give all this money back to the advance if I was your agent. I would have never had you do this deal. And now the original agent is worried that the player will leave him right before the agent's big payday. Yeah.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Friends as an agent, I call and he says, Listen, Schwim, I'm going to just going to tell you how it is. I don't know how you didn't see this, but what you're doing is obviously helping players. There's no doubt about that. But also, I'm going to forbid every one of my players from doing these deals. And I said, that doesn't make any sense to me. Walk me through that. He says, well, agents are heavily regulated by the union. We have to sign a player every single year. And we don't get paid from a player until they play three years in the major leagues. So they have guys in A-ball. They're not going to get paid for seven years. But they have to get that guy's service every single year. So he says, listen, if you give a guy a million bucks, he doesn't make it. What do I care?”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The story is this gets into not great stuff here, but I had to learn on the fly. And that was a lot of players were saying no early, which is, again, fine, but I went to go, and keep in mind, I had talked to all the agents about what we're doing. They all seem to like what we're doing. They clearly understood it. And I was going through the agent to talk to the player, figuring that's how it was going to work because, again, we're helping their player get to the major leagues and we're not taking anything out of the agent's pocket. So I thought this was great. And all of a sudden I go to players say, hey, I know you said no. Just ask curious as to why. I said, well, I don't want to give up 35%. I'm like, 35%, that's insane. We've never asked for that. Another player says, well, I don't want to do this deal because if I don't make it, then I'm going to be bankrupt. Like, wait, no, you get to keep the money if you don't make it. So I'm getting that there's a major red flags here. So I go to the agents. Some of the agents aren't picking up my call. Like, what's happening here? So finally, one of my good.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Financial advisor. All these minor leagues have agents, financial advisors. Talk to them. And then after that, just to make sure they understand, we videotape the signing before the signing and ask them all these questions. Do you understand if you make $500 million, you will owe us $25 million in your career, assuming they do a deal for 5%? Do you understand if you never make it, you'll never owe us a penny? And go through, there's a list of 20 questions. I won't bore you with them. But that's the most important part of it to me is making sure they absolutely understand what they're doing.”
2018-10-15 · Capital Allocators · Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source