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Mike Zapata

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65
first
2018-05-29
most recent
2018-05-29
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1
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  1. “Sure, so I'll refer to those rare seal teams. I won't be telling you anything that you can't discover open source. Yeah, so this is there. When I started 2001, they had just done Force 21. And it was a sort of a restructure of the seal community.”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It's a little bit of both, you know, because as you get older, you're sort of developing this grit and its tenacity and focus and you just, it's determination. And I think that that is a little bit of my upbringing. And you take that into buds.”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Think there's a balance of nature versus nurture. I'm not sure if I was born with grit from day one, but I can tell you my circumstances sort of helped provide that. So, I mean, I grew up in Texas, my parents got divorced when I was pretty young. Have a good relationship with both parents. My mom was single, raising three kids. I was the middle one. We grew up on food stamps and turned my government cheese, powdered milk. You're shaking this thing. You don't have a lot of money. You got to figure this thing out. My mom's working. We're going to school. But there's that level of grid and determination that gets developed. You see the work ethic in your parents. You see what they're doing and what they're trying to overcome in order to give us a better life. So very early on, I mean, I was working at the youngest of eight, like nine, I remember working. And you keep doing this. In high school, you're working, college you're working, everything's working. And so that's a challenging environment when you have to do that. But it develops you. And so I think that.”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Or it'll stay the same. And if it stays the same, it's just pain. You got to work through it. But injury is a big aspect. The guys that shine even in their time of injury, they will actually be kept on to recover and to try it again. Whereas people that don't shine, they will be let go after they're recovered.”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The idea of not getting hurt is very true because there's a proponent of luck there. It doesn't matter how hard, how physically able you are, how mentally strong you are, if your leg is broken, then you can't do it. But you'll see somebody dragging their leg. You know, you'll see somebody that it sounds a little grim, but you get an ankle that's fractured or broken. A one person will stop. They should stop. The smart thing is to stop. You'll get somebody that is not as smart and goes back to that person will keep dragging their foot and they'll just hop on one leg and they will be so persistent to get the job. That's the guy that we want and that's the guy that will make it through. And the thing with injury is it becomes a new normal. I always often say that it'll either, and these is very simplistic, your injury will either get better, which no problem, or it'll get worse, which will force you at some point to get it worked on.”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “That's first phase. Are you hard enough to put up with it, and will you not quit no matter what? Second phase is, are you smart enough? Can you stay calm and dress situations? This is a lot of underwater navigation. It's a lot of pool competency where you have to stay calm in situations where you feel like you're going to drown and you're nine foot underwater. How do you do that successfully? Can you follow directions in a very high pressure situation? And you can't get any higher pressure than not being able to breathe. And your time is very limited and you know that. So how do you navigate outside of that in the proper way? That second phase, we lose more guys there. Third phase is, are you safe enough? Can you shoot and move with a team and do it in a safe way? Use explosives. And once you get through that six-month period, you graduate buds and then you have another six weeks of advanced training. So after about a year of training, you become an official seal.”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Is I say, Are you dumb enough? Are you hard enough to put up with the pain that you're about to feel and not quit? And really, we lose most of our guys in that first phase. We lose about half of the guys. And the culmination is hell week where they keep you awake for about five days. You have about four hours of sleep over those five days. And you're just constantly running and you're just getting, we call it getting beat, but just physical exercise and you're getting worn down. Most guys quit during that time.”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, absolutely. Buds test you to the nth degree. And that's really just a proving ground to show whether you can actually be part of that environment and you can put up with it. And I think the fascinating thing with Buds is that most people, when they look at careers of guys that what we have done, they assume that we've never failed. And their idea is that we've never failed in anything. So because you have to be good to get through that. But the fascinating part about Buds is that it's designed for every single person to fail. And it's not about failure. It's about metal and grit and being able to get up and keep pursuing the mission no matter how you feel, no matter how tired you are, no matter how mentally fatigued you are, get the job done. How do you do that? I think that Bud's defines that. So if you want to get a little more granular, I look at Bud's as three phases. First phase, second phase, third phase.”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “When I left the community, I liked investing. I was investing my own. And I thought, how do I? And I put sort of the money in there, and the idea was that any gains that we did, we're going to give a portion back to ultimately the wives and children that were left behind if anybody doesn't come back. And we've had that. I mean, I tell people that I've been to more funerals than weddings in my 20s. And so the ultimate burden is carried by the families that are left behind. So a portion of the funds go into that. So when I created Sententia and launched, Sententia is a Latin fancy word for purpose. So it still means the same thing, but that's the genesis of it. It's a purpose fund, it's purpose driven, a portion of all of our gains goes back to the families.”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And the goal is to get to 100 million where we think that we want to take a hard pause and we want to make sure that we're very thoughtful once we breach that.”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “When I got out of Columbia, I had a couple of options, places to go to. I ultimately decided to put together family friends fund and we launched in january thirteenth. So we've been doing this Cententia Capital for about five years. We are, I would say, long biased, primarily US equity, some outside exposure concentrated about 20 positions, and we tend to focus on small micro cap right now. And that's sort of the flavor of the fund. We find a lot of our mispricing opportunities in that small microcap space, potentially because of indexing. There's a lot of reasons for that, but we have the ability to invest in that because we are a small firm. And I have one analyst with me at a part-time sort of helper for the business side. And I think what we talked about, my goal, frankly, is just to sort of be the best investor that I can be. That's ultimately where it's at. And I think that we will take a pause. We're looking for an anchor investors now.”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “To be along that same line, so there's a lot of risk mitigation, there's a lot of assessment, there's a lot of looking at managers and looking at their incentives. There's all these things that have a direct correlation to what I used to do, and it's just fascinating. And I liked that idea of low risk but high reward. The question is, how do you do it in value presented that?”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It was the idea of the principles that were expressed in intelligent investor, and the idea is that stocks are less risky when the prices are much lower. And that sort of defines value, whether it's going to be a net net or whether it's going to be reduced multiples compared to competitors or historical, something is driving that stock price down, and that is driven by emotion. And I think that in my mind, we mitigated a lot of risk in the SEAL teams, a lot of our operations. But most people think that what we did was high risk and dangerous. And we simply didn't see it that way. And I think that that's what value investing sort of replicates. Value investors are able to sort of cut through with the noise. They're able to sort of isolate positions, isolate ideas, and test them to see if there actually is an opportunity. And most people don't want to touch that. So we tend to get attracted to that smoke and fire seems to be...”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Something I discovered just before I started, actually. I wanted to be an investor, and I thought that the right script was sort of emerging market investor because I had been in these uncomfortable positions, uncomfortable places where most people don't like to go. And that's an opportunity for us to go in and sort of create value and infrastructure and investing. About a month before I started Columbia, I was in the Accelerate Program in January, went to a mixer and met some friends, and somebody said, hey, do you know about the value investing program? I said, no, what is that? And they said, what do you know, Warren Buffett? Yes, read the intelligent investor. And I did. And it was Lightning Bolt.”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, it's pretty quick. I mean, I graduated from undergrad. I got commissioned into the Navy as an officer, and I was in May of 2001. And just quickly after that, I checked into Buds, which is basic underwater demolition slash seal training. So I went to seal training and I was in seal training when 9-11 actually kicked off. And I knew that day it was just an incredibly fortunate place to be. And the idea was, you know, you just know that the years ahead will be well spent. And they were. ten years seeing sort of this ramp up in combats, having incredible experiences, and that took me to 2010 when I transitioned out. So, you know, without going into too much detail, we can, but it was just that experience of being in the SEAL community, working with teams, working in those capacities at that level over those years, just a perfect ten-year time window that we were able to do. And it was a fortunate place to be. And that was sort of preceded my time.”

    2018-05-29 · Invest Like the Best · Mike Zapata – The Darkest Night: Lessons from Battle and Value Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.89] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source