YouSaid · the spoken record

Neil Mehta

lines on the record: 123
first: 2025-04-15
most recent: 2025-04-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A defining moment was I went to public school and then went to a private high school. I was a pretty cocky 14 year old. I came in and I had a great mentor named Joe Rosenthal who took me under his wing, just liked me and was like, you know, I'm going to just get to know you. He was an administrator at the school. And he would come to watch my soccer games every now and then. And one of the soccer games we had, I scored a goal and I did what any 14-year-old hooligan. I put my shirt over my head. I spread out my arms. I started flying around down the field. I celebrated like we just won a championship. I think we actually lost the game, by the way. It was like really embarrassing. And then after the game, Joe pulled me aside. He said, don't ever do that again. I'm like, what do you mean? Scored a goal. I'm going to do that every time I score a goal. Don't ever do that again. Have some class. Know that you have teammates that helped you score that goal. Know you have people that passed, know that you have a coach that trained you. You're better than that. Don't ever let that happen. Never did anything like that again. And it sticks with me to this day. I think about what kids, it was the kindest thing.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it can be distracting. I think that maybe one of the flaws I have at Green Oaks and Green Oaks has in general is we find that when we make it not about the work, when we talk about the work, it can diminish our ability to do our jobs well. Willing to try on an opinion like a sport code, and if it doesn't work, I'll throw it off. And I have no pride in authorship or ownership. And so the ability to move opinions around as we talk about things without any touchstone of must be true has helped me. I find whenever you start to say things publicly, then it becomes part of who you are. And we haven't felt the need to do that.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there was a guy, Aaron Peskin is the guy's name. He was a politician. He's out of office now. He had picket signs with my face on them, you know, marching down the street, billionaire taking over city. And I wasn't doing any of that. I think they thought I was trying to develop the city. They never reached out or called or talked about it, but I was just trying to preserve that street and make them restaurants. And I think when I take a lot of joy from is it has a very similar field of Green Oaks, which is I'm backing other people that are building great restaurants in a new theater. There's a bunch of cool stuff happening on the street. There's like three or four blocks now. It's really remarkable what will be done on that street. I'm enabling other entrepreneurs to go build something that will delight people. This is at a little smaller scale than what we do at Green Oaks, but it's been so much fun. I don't spend all that much time with it. I have a great team that runs it on a day-to-day basis, but I was just on the street yesterday and it was so fun to walk down and be like, oh, this is where this coffee shop's going in and we're doing all-day diner and rebuilding the theater with a great partner. And it'll be really fun.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“San Francisco has this funny progressive bend, which is we'd rather have empty buildings than have someone own them that they seem to be too wealthy to own.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physics for like 100 years. String theory, all the atomic weapon work that came out. It was all from that small group in Budapest. And so I think losing San Francisco to some of the progressive causes that have plagued the city would be pretty bad. And so this was one part of my little corner of the world starting to invest and make it better. But it came from a place of wanting to make that street beautiful. And if we can make that one street beautiful, then you could maybe do that across other parts of the city and you could make the city livable for families and have people still there. I started down that process about a year ago. I was just doing it quietly because what was there to share?”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different to New York and it's different to the finance and the real estate and other industries, which are a little bit more, I don't know, rent-seeking is maybe the right word I want to use, but I think there's something about tech and the aspirational nature of company building at San Francisco harnesses uniquely well. I don't think there's anywhere else on earth that's anywhere like it. Tel Aviv may be getting close, but it's really San Francisco. I think losing that, and we've tried really hard to kill it for anti-business or anti-growth, we're high taxes, we're anti-family. a lot of things going in the wrong direction My view was these were imminently fixable and if we fix them, it could make San Francisco great for a long time. And I don't think you could take these things for granted. I mean, you go back to like the 1920s, even earlier, the Hungarian physicists in Budapest, and you had all these great, you know, the von Neumann's in the world all living there in Budapest and World War II came along and Hitler came along and wiped them all out and they all dispersed different parts. That group of physicists, they were the foundation for modern”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I was just quietly doing it, and I did it as a nonprofit because it's a terrible financial investment. I mean, just to walk through the financial math, I'm buying buildings in One Street called Filmer Street, it's in Pacific Heights Street I grew up on. And I'm buying stuff at like a five and a quarter cap, which treasuries were five and a quarter when I was buying this stuffid, small rundown commercial real estate. That usually has no tenant or if the tenants leaving, which is why the person's selling me the building. And then I'm putting in like a mom and pop restaurant and a three cap, which barely pays its rent. And I have to do all the TI. So like a terrible financial investment. So we were like, oh, you're so good for doing something. No, it makes no sense to do it any way of the way besides a nonprofit. So I started a nonprofit with a good friend of mine named Cody Allen. You came out to San Francisco during COVID. I think San Francisco is a really important city. I think it's important for America. I think it's important because it's ground zero a lot of the most interesting people all over the world to come and build their version of the future.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, it's not a story I expected to have come out or ever talk about, frankly. I mean, maybe you and I talked about it off the cuff. We did.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the thing, if you were with us at Green Oaks and you just sat with Benny Knife for like a day, I think the thing you'd probably be most surprised about is how much we care about beauty. Like we love spending time on a P&L, but the reason we like this so much is we like beautiful businesses, we love beautiful relationships, we care about beauty in the world. We want to make the world a little bit better tomorrow than it is today. And we think Reno's could be driving enormous impact doing that. That's why we invest in the companies we invest in. That's why we don't care about finding a software company in Minnesota and buying it three times revenue and flipping it five times. Don't care about that at all. It's probably a better business than the one we're in. We're okay leaving that on the cutting room floor. Manifesting a bunch of different ways. I'm born and raised in San Francisco, so I dedicated a reasonable amount of money to trying to fix just my street in San Francisco. I was doing so.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I've only got to know Mike a little bit better recently. And not a lot of people would know this. I don't know if he would describe us as a competitor when we were coming up, but I certainly think about them. I think they're amazing firm. And Mike recently retired. When I was going through all the San Francisco stuff, when politicians were holding my face on a picket, Mike emailed me and I was like, can I help you a little? Any help, what you got? And he recommended that I write an op-ed. And he's like, I know you don't want to do anything publicly. I know you wouldn't like this, but I think it's the right thing to do. You should be transparent and direct with what you're doing. And I was like, sure, I'll try doing it. He helped me. And he was on the phone with me helping me. Outside of this conversation, it would have gone unsad. What a remarkable thing to do for a young kid that he doesn't need to help in any way whatsoever. He's a really amazing human being.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And private equity and growth companies. Yuri broke that mental model for me. And he was the first one I remember making a large scale category defining investment and a category defining company that was so obviously going to change the world. The way he built TST, the number of correct decisions he's made compared to the number of bad decisions he's made, it really is a remarkable ratio. I can't name, I think the total impairment in all of DST is like very low. The quantum of money they've made as a firm and then also with his personal investing and things like Bydance and Antoine, you just take one of those and that's all of a firm's returns. By the way, who do you think is the best?”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. He's like, ah, but he fails to realize that the market's growing. And he was right. I've seen him multiple times. And by the way, underrated for how great he is with entrepreneurs at times. He's come up and stepped into the plate. Sometimes you can measure investors, not by figuring out where the momentum is going, but when the going gets tough, how they stand up for entrepreneurs. And I've seen him three or four times step up to the plate in a meaningful way, whether it's Tony at DoorDash with his bomb at Kupong, pay off most times, not all the time, most times. I think that's really remarkable. The reason I say Yuri is when I was at T-sha and Yuri made the investment in Facebook, I didn't know you were allowed to make investments like that. I remember going to my boss and saying, are we allowed to invest in like money losing internet companies at $10 billion in enterprise value that are still private? I know the growth investing of buying things at four times revenue. That's a software company and adding a couple boltons into it. That to me was growth investment.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They make fun of his PowerPoint slides. They make fun of the investments he makes. There's almost like a twinge of, I don't want to call it racism, but xenophobia to him of like, what is this guy doing coming out of nowhere? The guy has multiple times made $100 billion returns. I remember when he invested in ARM with a lot of respect for Monset. I don't think Green Oak should emulate the way they invest. I think Masa is an N of one. But when he invested in ARM, I had a friend of mine who runs a large investment bank call and say, could you believe how stupid this guy is? I can't believe he bought arm. That thing is tanking. It's never going to work. This guy had his semiconductor's analyst on the call with me. And semiconductor analyst runs out a list of reasons on why this investment's never going to work. Moss and another entrepreneur. And I decided I'm going to give all the reasons. I'm like, here are all the reasons the semi-analyst from one of the...”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a controversial answer. I think it's Yuri Milner. The easy answer is Masa. Most people, I think the Mike Morritz is and phenomenal, Peter Fenton's, like phenomenal investors. It's hard to argue against MASA. I will in a second. Have you spent time with MASA? He gets made fun of a lot. He is incredible. First of all, step back for a second. This guy came from Japan when he was in his teens. He didn't speak a word of English. Was ostracized for not speaking a word of English, studied his butt off, it goes back to Japan, creates one of the largest enterprise value companies in Japan over the course of twenty plus years along the way decides to become an accidental investor. At one point he was the richest man in the world. One thing I think is underrated is Silicon Valley is a fairly insular culture and has never really been that nice to Masa.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't always hire while we can fire fast. We run a very tight team. We're reasonably intense in the way we run that team. You can make an argument that you should not run at this intensity level. You could run at 70% of this intensity level and things would be just fine. I don't still think we'd be that happy if we did it. So it probably the right feedback, but I don't value that much.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sure we have tons of critics. I actively try to seek it out. So I think I can apply on some of it. Yeah, although you feel free to add in. I just had a dinner where I met a bunch of young people. I asked them this specific question. I said, what are the most negative things you can say about Green Oaks? And I'll give you each comment because I thought all of them are valid. So the first was Green Oaks wildly successful early, but as of late, what have they done? And I think that's such a healthy attitude, frankly. You're only as good as your next day. My pushback was it takes time the stuff you're judging us on 10 years ago, the stuff you will judge us on in another 10 years that we did today, but it just doesn't show. So that would be the first. The second would be some higher priced rounds that look like really crazy on the outside. They don't make any logical sense. Why did you do them? We have some logic for why we did them, but we could be wrong. Benny and I as founders, we've pushed our organization really hard. One of the other pieces of feedback might be like, are you pushing too hard?”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How they might make different decisions if they didn't, and they have structure our lives in such a way where I really enjoy the people that we spend. I have a WhatsApp chat with my LPAC. I mean, I talk to them a decent amount. I talk to some of my investors. They're like friends of mine. I get to do this with people I really love and admire and respect. They've oftentimes, our best ones have given us courage when we might have even lacked a little bit of it. I think about them as partners and shareholders in our business. And I think there's three reasons why. I think the first is I enjoy them. That's like the most obvious one. I really do. They never invested another dollar with Green Oaks, I'd still be good friends with most all of them. And that's becoming increasingly true every year at Green Oaks. The second is we're competitive. We're deeply competitive. And it really bothers us if we're not amongst the best returning investment opportunities for our LPs. Remember there's a table that came out in 2021 and it had the endowments by return. And I was really proud of the fact that for the three or four top ones, we drove some real performance.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have friends that sometimes complain about their LPs or the updates they have to do or the conversations they have to have.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hate to put in that crudely, but that's kind of how it works. I fly out of Kigali, we got to take care of this claim. It's a big claim. And I'm like, well, we have to prosecute the claim because that's too much. That's outside of the table for how to think about the value of this accident. So we go to court. The guy that shows up as the defendant in the claim is not the lawyer for the claimant. It's the claimant that died in the car accident. I mean, case closed. Guy's right there. This is all done. Lo and behold, there's this performative jury that's like, ah, you know, like this is out of bizarro world. This is crazy. And so we're like, this is not a country we want to be operating. So it took that experience of building this insurance company where like there's no winning here. It taught us a lot about the kinds of founders we want to partner with, the kind of markets we want to be in, the way we want to spend our time. It costs us real time and money and years. We haven't lost that zeal of wanting to build something really special.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're growing it. None of these businesses had great solvency law. I mean, this is like very early in the life cycle of how insurance works in these countries. But our view was if you read about Rwanda, it's like the Singapore of Africa. We get on the ground, our insurance teams there. This business is terrible for every dollar or premium we get. We lose a dollar 80, which the insurance business, you can't make that up with investment returns. You're in a bad position. And we were the best of all of them. Why is not everyone else bankrupt? Like, well, it's a funny thing. Nobody really audits these companies and as long as you continue to write more premiums the next year, you can make it work. Like, well, that's not going to work for us. So we decided we might not want to be in this business as we make that decision. We get a claim. And the claim is from a wealthy family that has some political connections. And it turns out that someone that we insured died in a car accident. There's a terrible thing. Now, there's a pretty systematic way to think about P&C insurance globally. There's like a table for how to think about life.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It out, Banker gets out at 5 or 6 a.m., gets back on the plane back to London right away. Sablaji's like, so I was up all night figuring this out. And we're like, this is where we're flying in like an hour. This is terrifying. And so that was the first time we went out there was hearing this story. It was incredibly fun. We bought 75 to 100% of an insure out there. We bought 75% of insurer in Pakistan, which Benny's Jewish. I'm Indian. We're both American. This is the first time I'd have gone out to Karachi. Benny's like, I'm not going. You got to go. And so I was going out there. We were about to close this transaction. And my mom, who's from India, she's crying. She's calling my wife. She's like, he can't go to Karachi. It's like too dangerous. And it was a phenomenal experience. And we had an amazing partner in Pakistan. He did a fabulous job with the business. I have nothing but incredible things to say about him, about the country, about our business there. This is a great story about Rhonda. We bought the leading PNC insurance. We're also one of the largest real estate owners because of the insured on all this real estate. So we're in Kigali. We buy this business.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know what's going on, but just like figure this out. And the front desk check-in person's like, I don't think you understand. I gotta call the police. There's a dead guy in the bed. You gotta stay right here. And the police come, sure enough, dead guy in the bed. And the banker is furious. It's now 3 a.m. in the morning. He's like, this is crazy. You've got to get me in the police going, no, no. You're a suspect now. We got to like take you to the police station. And he's freaking out. He's like, what do you mean? I don't know who this guy is. I don't know what happened. I just went in my room. There's cameras you can check. Nope, we're taking you to police station. They put him in the back of the car. They tell him he can make a call. He takes out his phone, calls our banker. His name was Balaji. And Balaji's like, oh, this happens. Don't worry. How much money do you have on you? He's like, I got $1,000 on me. He's like, that's not enough. You probably need $10,000. Can you get a wire to them in the morning? And I don't even know how to get a wire. He's like, don't worry. I'll take care of it. I'll get you out by 5 a.m. The lodge's up all night.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The story we're like listening to it, like, where is this gonna go? And the banker is furious. He's like, this is crazy. I just want to go to sleep. It's like 2 a.m. in the morning. I got a big data corpse on my back. I don't know what's going”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Night. He flew in. I was going to do with you guys. He stays at the same hotel, dropped off his bags, took him out to dinner, and we went out to this great dinner, had a bunch of drinks. He goes back to his hotel and he proceeds to tell us the following story, which is this English banker goes up into his room, checks into his room. There's a guy sleeping in his bed. And then the English banker's like, what is going on here? And the closer the door goes downstairs, tells the person at the check-in desk, there's someone sleeping in my bed. You must have double booked the room. This is a huge problem. The guy's no, no, no. That's not possible. I'm sure reissues him the key. This is your room number. Go up. Goes in. Guy's still sleeping in his bed. Banker goes downstairs. Goes to the front desk counter and says, you've got to come up with me. This is crazy. There's a guy sleeping in my room. I just want a different room. The front desk check-in person goes up with him. Sure enough, there's a guy still sleeping in his bed. The front desk person goes and checks his pulse. It's cold. Dead guy in the bed.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Man, it was the craziest thing. So we decided we started a holding company called GGH. By the way, the punchline here is it went terribly. This is the single biggest mistake we've made at Green Oaks, I think. It's a funny story. So we took a team out of Zurich, Switzerland that was our operating team. We had about 12 people. They were working with local teams. The first trip we made was to Nigeria. Actually, before I got on the plane to Nigeria, I was in London. There's this late night flight. And we had assembled a list of businesses that we might potentially want to buy. The list was only six companies, seven companies. We had a banker that was on the ground that we were working with that was like only an insurance banker. We had known him for a little while. We've been studying our approach for maybe six months or so. The flights arrive at 10 p.m. And our banker calls. He's like, hey, I'm so excited about the trip. Can't wait for you guys to get into town. I'm like, well, great. Can't wait to get there. He's like, I got to tell you, I got to skip dinner with you guys tonight, though, when you get in. Why? You know, we're really excited about our dinner. He's like, I had a long night. I was up all night. It was kind of crazy. We're like, oh, what happened? I had a guy from London here last night.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think one person asked us have we been to Africa or Pakistan or any of these places, but we did it. And then we took a small team from McKinsey insurance practice, which was known for helping some of these insurance companies. And the idea was you can't buy ping-in in China. It's too big. But you can buy the frontier and emergent market insurers in places like Pakistan or Rwanda or Nigeria, places like this. So the first thing we did was just get on the plane and go to these places. So we went to Nigeria. I have so many fun stories about this.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we did this, and it was a phenomenal investment for Dong Bu and Qualitas and SEB. They were really good investments. Sorry, D had Green Oaks when we started. We had a traditional fund structure. I idea was let's start a holding company where we buy anywhere between 51 and 100% of these insurance companies. We suck up those premiums and we can invest them in a wide variety of different assets. It's like phenomenal idea on paper. In fact, we did it right when we started Green Oak. So we went around and raised $150 million of capital from some great investors, many of our longtime investors. And we started a holding company.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a holding company that owns insurance businesses Frontier and emerging market insurance companies. Benny and I had spent a lot of time at Deeshaw studying insurance businesses in places like Ping An in China, Dongbu in Korea, Qualitas in Mexico, Salinko in SEB in Thailand, Selenco in Sri Lanka, businesses like this. And actually the cool thing was if you study these P&C businesses, they all follow the same kind of curve. You could draw an XY-axis. You could put GDP per capita on the X axis. And then on the Y axis, you could put insurance penetration as a percentage of GDP. And it follows this S curve. And the S curve is basically rich country has 10% insurance penetration. The exception to this, by the way, is the Middle East countries. They get really rich on oil and then don't have insurance penetration. And then the really poor countries are at the bottom. They have very low GDP per capita and they have low insurance penetration. And our view was if you believe in a country's GDP per capita growth, a levered investment is to buy the best.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 to 12 That is high as 15 historically, but our numbers actually come down quite a bit. And we only have 55 companies across 15 billion of AUM renoaks. I could talk to every single one of our founders in half a day and still have tons of time.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Billion from you, and we want to be able to answer that call. So that's kind of determined how we think about our funds have gone from the, I guess, tens of millions to the billions, but it hasn't really been a function of the number of companies for funds has not changed at all. In fact, it's gone down.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you have to decide whether you want to be in the Hall of Fame of Returns or the Hall of Fame of AUM. And by the way, Ivory LP has to shut their ears. But that's an okay answer for a ton of people. The Hall of Fame AUM is a well-trafficked game with lots of buildings in New York, have names of people that have been in the Hall of Fame of AUM, and that's a great way to live life, not to take away from that. Ever Benny and I, and maybe it's because we had some success earlier, we're large investors in our own fund, it's just a more interesting way to try to be in the Hall of Fame of Returns by partnering with the kinds of companies we like to work with. If that's the case, then you want to reach the right limit where you can invest without reducing returns. And for us, our largest investments are $500 million to a billion plus in size. And we do that with some regularity. We want the founders we work with to call us and say we want $500 million to a billion dollars. We are thrilled to get that call. And we want to make sure that we could always answer that call and we can be the partner. And that number may move up over time, but that number has served us pretty well of at least a couple times a year. We'll get a call for can we get 500 million to?”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You remember this? And I remember getting out there, and I remember sitting down with him. We talked about the business. We talked about all the things. But I remember the first thing I did is I said, boy, in the paper's a lot nowadays. How's it feel? How do you feel? And he didn't talk at all about himself. He almost was like down to tears. He was talking about his team. He was talking about what it's like for employees of his who have been on the company for a long time to have their kids go to school and hear that their parents' company is going bankrupt. And he was going into enormous detail about this and you could feel the pain. Was it on the articles about him? It wasn't even on Billy to manage cuts. It was that he was trying to balance getting through this with making sure that his team felt good about how he got through this. There's very few CEOs. In the fog of war, when things speed up, people start to make snap decisions very quickly. What impressed me most about earning at that moment in time was how he just slowed everything down. I remember at the dinner the waitress came by.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a bunch of really good stories about carbon. As the stock started drop and we started buying more, not everybody was thrilled with us, but we thought we fundamentally understood that he would be able to reverse the unique economics on a per unit basis. And there are things he could do to not just stape off bankruptcy, but be an ongoing concern with a strong capital structure. And then the second part of that is the debt side was really reflexive. If you're right on the first part, you're kind of right on the second part. So it's a two-part investment for us. One was the company won't go bankrupt. Second, is this a business that could go from 400,000, 500,000 units to 2, 3 million, 5 million units over time used cars, about 40 million units a year or something like that? And I remember this is a big debate for us, but it really always comes back to founders. I went out to Phoenix, sat down with them for dinner. I got on the plan. I was reading the papers. And four of the articles were about earning how terrible earning was. It was like, he's a crook. He's awful. The company's terrible. They can't pay their bills. It's about to go bankrupt. Employees are leaving in droves. It was like left for the dead.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it wasn't until later, I'll come to a couple stories. It wasn't until later that I realized there's certain COs that might react immediately in order to placate the market. What he was doing was doing a bunch of A-B tests internally to figure out what were the right things to cut and make sure that he could manage the company through it and grow on the other side. It just takes a lot of intestinal fortitude.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the 20 goes down to five. Ben has a great line, which is what's the difference between being down 95% and 97.5% because has. And so that was a tough moment at Reed Oaks. We invested a substantial amount. I became one of our largest investments in our fund. And we had a view. Our view was that Ernie had a decent amount of runway. There were things he could do operationally to fix the business fairly quickly. And we did what any investor might do at the time. We went line-ended by line. We said, here's where he needs to cut. Here's what he needs to change. And much to our chagrin at the time, Ernie didn't do any of those things.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None. As it starts to go from $70 billion or $300 plus a share down to $50 a share, actually, and $100 a share, we started to become very interested in it. And there was two questions. The first question was the market was getting killed. I think it was one of the largest peak-to-trough drops in used cars in the last 30, 40 years. Was this a one-time thing? Was this going to reverse? The second is economics were terrible. I don't think he mind me saying that. He was losing $3,000 a unit on an EBITDA basis, if that wasn't enough. He had about $2,000 of interest payments per unit. So he had $5,000 per unit of costs. So the question was, not if, but when is this company going to go bankrupt? And so the stock went from $100 to $50. We started to buy around then. Of course, we started to buy all the way down to about $5. My partner, Ben, it doesn't feel great when you start to buy at 50 and then at 30 and then at 20.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand it's the Amazon of cars. And it was maybe at 450,000 units being sold each year. And Ernie did this big acquisition, which is Odessa, ramping up. He used quite a bit of debt to do that. I think he financed all of it with debt. And so added a bunch of debt to the balance sheet. When things started to slow in 22, everybody's excitement about the fact that he was building infrastructure to go to a million or two million cars went the other way. People became very nervous about the business surviving. And the stock went from $300 a share or $338 to eventually went down to $5. How many companies can you name that went from $70 billion market cap to one and weren't like a fraud?”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, a little bit of hard work operationally, hard work technically, doing it out in the middle of nowhere on behalf of customers that you want to serve differentially well. Similar dynamic in Carvana's case, you have all these local competitors that have a limited selection. Usually they're wearing leather jackets. It's not a great experience to buy from them. Carvana was making that a much better experience. Only got to know Ernie when COVID came. The stock was maybe $100 stock. During COVID, it went down to the 30s. I called Ernie. Ernie, now's the time to take some money from us. He's like, great. Love to do it. We got very close for Green Oaks reasons. We ended up not proceeding and investing, I think it was going to be about $500 million in the business at the time. It would have been a great investment. I would have talked about it as one of our big mistakes. It went from maybe $35,000, $40 a share up to $300 a share, whatever it was over 2020 and 2021. We have these moments of Greenhawks where you're like, ah, now it is well recognized as this amazing used car experience. It's going to be dominant.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a funny one because it was public. Carvana's a company we had been following for a long time. Never took venture financing. You know earning a little bit. He was out in Phoenix. He was building a customer experience that we always thought very highly of whenever you talk to customers about Carvana, they would talk about how much they liked Carvana at a differential rate to Carmax. It makes sense. You could buy and sell a car easily. You get delivered to your door. You have much larger selection.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weekend, day and night. It wasn't 18 hours. It was 24 hour, two blocks, 48 hours of straight work. And by the way, Sunday, another credit to Parker, Sunday looked like everything was going to be okay. And Parker's like, just in case, this is the right thing to do. We're going to do this. We handshook on a deal. We're doing the deal. What an amazing partner to have in Parker. Monday morning, every Rippling customer got their money on time at that schedule.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the opposite rippling used SVB for essentially plumbing essentially of capital that would be then dispersed to employees for customers of theirs? And so it was just like rails that was using. And by the way, credit to Parker, there's a lot that's been said about Parker from his previous company. And I have to say he's the one of the most high integrity people I've ever met in the world. Just to talk about customer centricity, the reason he called me on Friday morning wasn't because Ripling was in trouble. He called me because he wanted to make sure that on Monday morning, his customers weren't in trouble. All of his customers got money. There were other payroll companies that were planning to send an email out on Monday that was like, sorry, you know what's happening with the U.S. financial system right now. Payment to your employees will get delayed. That was not an okay solution for Parker. So Parker called me on Friday morning. It took us about 30 minutes to agree to invest $500 million. Credit to his team, by the way. Spent the entire...”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not good. This is real. I call them a week later, and I was like, I know your revenue just went to zero, but I have conviction that you are the right end state solution for this market. And I think instead of battering down the hatches and preserving all the capital you have, I think you should be aggressive in capturing FlowShare. And we'll write sort of unlimited number up to 500 million. It ends up being less than that, but up to 500 million for you to go do that. And it took us four days or something like that. Trip action is dramatically accelerated its market share leadership over the course of COVID, over those two years it went from number four or five in the industry, maybe even number eight in the industry, I think, to top two in the industry and was able to be aggressive at a time when other people were nervous. Another example is SVB weekend with Parker and Ripling. We've been investing the business for a long time. It's always helped us to have a prepared mind. And when we have these moments,”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me start with Navan, which is formerly called Trip Actions. Trip Actions for those that know it is travel management company. It does your corporate travel and expense management end-to-end. It's a company I had been following for a little while and COVID came and was a travel management company. It's not a good thing to have happen to your business. And so trip actions, which is what it was called at the time, revenue went from 100 million down to zero. It happened overnight. Remember Trump first version went on TV and shut down all the flights from Europe. And he felt like Lehman Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever, but I think it was a different day. And they felt like, oh.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great returns, the way you find undiscovered opportunities. There are really only a few ways to make money in the world. One is speed. You just move faster than everybody else. Citadel may be a version of that. That's really interesting. Our favorite combination is when you have the same speed and the same information, but you have differential insight. I think what we've become much better at Greenhoaks is increasing the speed and velocity in our information asymmetry and being able to generate differential insight that matters to long-term enterprise value. Putting those things together with a small team and building a flywheel for doing it over and over and over and over again every day, that has been a sea change in the last couple years.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the highest bid order, we have got much better, not a little better, much better, at separating the vital few from the trivial many. There's a version of Green Oaks two or three years ago where not just me, everybody at Green Oaks would do 12, 15, 20, 30 meetings a week. We used to show this slide to our investors. Here's how many CHBs happen. And we had 92% coverage. Aren't we great? We'll never leave a stone unturned. That's the way I grew up. I grew up believing that the way you generate”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, this is it. This is all I'm going to do for the rest of my life. I mean, as long as I can, and investors lobby me too, and the founders we work with allow me to, yeah.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most likely that the series B's trade approximately the same term. And so I think having a system that allows you to build differentiated insight in a targeted way can yield. I can't promise it. But it's also just a much more fun way to live life. I think when you talk to founders, now again, for the 3,000 founders that will get funding, the Matrix large scale, I'm glad our industry is going from a cottage industry to becoming this large asset class. It's going to help so many people get so much more. It's actually great for Green Oaks for the later rounds too. There's some of those companies that might be very interested in this down the road. But for the 10 to 15 best founders that care about that relationship, they care about speed, they care about fidelity, and they care about price. I think we are much better experienced.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we should invest in most of what we do are series based on ours. I was looking back at every round that we had done for the better part of 13 years. Every single one of those had some other company that traded in its sphere of competition that traded at approximately the same turn within the same 12 months. Isn't that crazy? The best companies and the worst companies at the Series B or series, they trade at approximately the same multiples. There's exceptions here and there, but by and large, very few people could actually tell the difference between the two. Now, if you and I were evaluating Coca-Cola, You might know 10 times more than I know about Coca-Cola. If we both had to figure out what earnings per share were in 10 years, we wouldn't be that far apart. It doesn't matter that much. But our industry at the Series B, we can both look at two companies kind of competitive, both doing 30 million in ARR, growing 100% a year. There's a chance that the one you invest in is worth many billions in enterprise value in the future and the one that I invest in is borderline installment in five years. There's a huge spread, but yet it's”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The speed, the understanding, the capability of that firm, and valuation. Now, that doesn't mean you could be the lowest valuation. That's certainly not what I would claim. In fact, I think in some cases, we are the highest valuation too. But we have differentiated in some on why we are willing to pay that without sacrificing returns. That comes from understand. And if you are driving for coverage, if your job is to make sure you don't ever miss a series A and you're doing that by hiring a very large number of people, then what you're sacrificing is fidelity and insight. It's impossible. You can't scale that within the entire organization to like support Mitchell's. I've never met a firm that's had more than a few good investors. It's so hard. So you end up just doing a lot more. And it's not clear to me that any firm is that good at figuring out what's good and what's truly exceptional immediately. Figure out over time. I was looking back at a lot of our series B's.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By and large, people are doing investing. It sort of looks like painting with numbers or something like that. You're looking for certain types of characteristics around growth rate. And by the way, venture capital that invent this summit and TA have been doing on the growth side for a long time. InSight's pretty good at it. On the private equity side, the entire industry works this way. If it's a 21 IRR, you do it. If it's a racket private equity, if it's 21 IRR, you do it. And if it's an 18 or 17 unlevered, you don't. Maybe that's even changing. But like those are kind of the numbers. I think the mistake people are making is this is not the private equityization of our industry. These are the founders building companies. Now, with private equity goes to the highest bidder. Every company essentially goes to the highest credible bidder that could move fast and straightforward in our industry. I can't think of a single company in our portfolio, not one. Tell me if you could think of one in yours that took the highest valuation. Only they took some combination of the partner, brand.”
2025-04-15 · Invest Like the Best · Neil Mehta - Finding Future S&P 500 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.419] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source