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

“Two things are allowed to be true at the same time, which is our space has too much capital and it's actually less competitive for great companies. A lot more companies are getting funded. Thousands of companies will get funded by really great investors. And if you look at the matrix we just described, you divide by sector industry or whatever its geography stage.”
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 work 100 times. I think it's 2 billion when Don Valentine did NVIDIA, and now it's 200 billion or something like 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
“Consumer startups, it's become this specialization of our industry, that goal I mentioned, that's Green Oak School. Of course, I don't think everybody would agree that that may be their end state goal, but they have maybe a different job to be done on a day-to-day basis. Our industry is more like, I think this is investing generally, investing a game of reducing complexity. It's a game of reducing noise. There's too much noise. And I find the people that willing to have the intestinal fortitude to dramatically reduce the noise and make their job extremely simple and have the temperament to allow it to be so simple, to know that you only need 110 points of IQ to do this. The number of people that I feel we compete with on that is very, very low.”
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 used to think about this a lot, especially when we were starting, because in our first many funds, people would ask us, they'd have a list of other firms they'd ask us about and they'd be like, what about these guys? What about these guys? I found that, first of all, if we're going to screw it up or lose, it's usually something we're going to do internally. It's almost always we've internally messed something up that has led us astray. And just getting this stuff right internally, that's hard enough. So I don't spend that much time anymore thinking about the competitive dynamic in our industry. I would actually argue has become much less competitive. It's counterintuitive. Think about what we're doing. We're scouring the world for founders that we think are going to build future S&P 500 companies at the exclusion of everything else. But if you think about the job to be done in our industry, it's been layered. People that injected complexity in ways that are so counterintuitive. They're firms whose only job is to do fintech in Brazil. They're firms that their only job is to do everything that comes out of Y Combinator. Their only job is to do New York City.”
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
“Invest a lot of capital just based on that. We try to bring the abstraction level back up to what does this mean for customers? And then we work backwards from that. So when we talk about the model companies, our reaction has been like these large CapEx spends. My feeling has been, and by the way, I've been wrong. If you look at the valuations of these businesses, the investment that you have to make versus the payoff you get, and then the fact that you have to make that investment 12 months later and there seems to be like a pretty fast catch-up, it just didn't strike me as in the laws of business is a great business model. Of course, ChatGPT has proven that you can build a consumer business on top of it.”
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
“Did you delight customers? Do you break trade offs to create something operational or technically really great? Do you have a competitive advantage? Is it a large market? Whenever we've screwed it up at Green Oaks, it's usually been because we ignore the laws of like crypto. No, no, you don't need a board in crypto. Don't worry about it. No, no, you don't need an auditor. It's not a thing that you need. You don't need to delight customers. It has nothing to do with customers. It has something to do with price movement and fun flows. It makes sense to me. I guess the laws are different this time. They never are. We absolutely look at evals and r1 benchmark and figure out, wow, deep seek figure out a way to deploy a model at the 35x reduction for input output tokens on a comparative basis to open AI's reasoning models. Like that's a pretty impressive feat. What are the takeaways in terms of competitive advantage for open AI's model on comparative basis to others? That's a really interesting question. But what we try not to do at Green Oaks is get excited about that development and then deploy our time and effort eventually.”
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 do a lot of that. If you just step back for AI, we're investing in a bunch of different companies across a bunch of different industries. What is the common thread? And there's this great, I forget the name of the book, but it was about the Wright brothers figuring out how to get a plane in the air. And there's all these people chasing, trying to be the first one to flight. Of course, you look at a bird and they flap their wings. I got to replicate that. And the Wright brother is like, wait a second, the laws of aerodynamics are the laws of aerodynamics. You're not going to change the laws of aerodynamics. You just have to figure out how to make fixed wing flight work. And of course, they make it work. And I think business is the same, which is like the laws of great businesses are the laws of great businesses.”
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
“To the max. And when we talk about investments, Green Oaks is not atypical for us to sit around as a team and talk for three or four hours about a single company. And then we go home, we put our kids to bed, and then I'll call Benny and we'll talk from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. in the morning. You almost do that every night. I've talked to Benny already four times this morning.”
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
“Right away, I knew Benny's zero to one clock speed is the fastest I've ever seen to this day. I've never seen someone look at a business or look at a model or think about a situation and so quickly get to the jugular is astonishing. The second thing I'd probably tell you about him that's unique is he's able to extend our time horizon as a firm pretty consistently. Sometimes when things are moving really fast and you're in fog of war, you can find yourself constraining your time horizon and trying to make decisions that are optimal in the short term just to make sure that that's the corner you could see around. And Benny is so good at stepping back and reminding everybody, including myself, especially myself, what we're trying to optimize for over the fullness of time. I mean, really, really astonishing. He is the most clear and concise thinker one could have as a partner. So often I describe a situation that I'm thinking through. We talk about everything at Green Oaks down to when you walk in what the lighting is in our office. We are micromanaging.”
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
“He was a freshman. It was during like spring fling. I was telling my brother about this financing structure. My brother couldn't care less. Like, this is not what is interesting. And Benny, who was his roommate, was sitting on the couch and was like, oh, KD or KG financing structures. And I was like, this kid, I was one of these older brothers who thought all their youngest brothers, friends, were like goons. There's not serious people. And I parked on. I was like, who is this? It was love at first sight. Benny and I became close friends.”
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
“Would do it in order to give you jobs to give their local citizens, the shipyards would be full and they'd make it very tax efficient for doctors and dentists in these countries to invest. You have to really be steeped in strange financing structures in your late teens to be interested in this stuff. So I was telling my brother, my younger brother was at Penn.”
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
“Statement I wish upon anybody in their life to have a partner and a partnership like when I have with Benny. I think if Renoaks was an abject failure and we screwed everything up, I would still be grateful for the journey I had with Benny. And by the way, I should highlight Benny is my true partner. I talked to him more than I talk to my wife, Josh, actually by a fairly large margin. Josh would agree with that. So would Cheryl, Benny's wife. It has been 20 plus years where I don't think there's been a single day. We fight all the time. There's never been a single day where we've actually been frustrated with one another. I met Benny. We were both still in college. He was kind of between freshman and sophomore year. I was in my junior to senior year, and I was working at investment bank and as an intern, I was working on a financial transaction. It's actually a really interesting financial transaction. It had to do with a cruise line ships and the way you would finance some of these cruise line ships is you would find a country that was willing to give you 100% LTV financing when Germany, they're called like a KD or KG structure in Korea they're called something else.”
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, sure. Yeah, I can tell you, ever can tell you a lot about Benny. Tell me a lot about Benny. Someone asked me a couple days ago, they were starting a firm, they asked me.”
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 ended up being able to do a little bit of that there. I had left at the end of 2010, beginning 2011, moved back to San Francisco to start Green Oaks purely because this is all I wanted to do.”
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 they would spotlight the swimmers. And the first time they did that, nobody's phones were out. The last time they did it, everybody had the little glow on their face. And the BlackBear just didn't have that same glow. I would look over and ask my friends, like, what are you guys using? And they're like, oh, we're using QQQ, which was the predecessor to WeChat. And I remember going home and being like, QQ, what is this thing? And then look it up, study as much of it as I could. And I remember finding a stat, which was QQ was adding something like 30 million subscribers a month, which is still a crazy number, by the way. But at that time, that was unheard of. It would eventually turn into WeChat. And at the time, Adam was asking me to look at distressed banks in Europe that had been around 150 years and had 30 million total deposit holders. This company was adding 30 million people a month. And I was like, I want to spend all my time on 10cent. I don't want to spend any of my time on some distressed bank in Europe. This is an interesting to me. And much to his chagrin, frankly, thanks to his support.”
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 time, I was blown away. I was like, wow, this is a pretty crazy world. But they would take out their phones, start using their phone for things. And I had the BlackBerry at the time, 2007. The iPhone came out in March of 2007, I think, the App Store in 2008. And it hadn't really got to China in any way whatsoever. And I remember the Beijing Olympics in 2008. And so I went out to Beijing. And it was really at the Beijing Olympics where I started to flip into what could be happening in technology, where Michael Phelps won all those medals at the Beijing Olympics. And the lights would go down in the cube.”
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
“In a chair, and they'd auction off the apartment building. I'd be sitting there competing with a guy that was wearing a wife beater smoking three cigarettes. I'm like, who is this guy represent, $30 billion plus investment manager? Who is this guy? There's moments you get in life where you realize there's the top. And this was one of them where this guy just took 100% LTV financing from some bank that would eventually have to wash the NPL through their balance sheet.”
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
“Macau real estate, Chinese real estate, India real estate, distressed debt came later. I'll give the most favorable interpretation. If Adam was sitting here, he would describe it as I was a benevolent but negligent boss and I let Neil go spend time on things that were interesting to him at the cost of spending time on things that were important to me. I'm very grateful to this day for him allowing me to do that. I remember going out to Guangzhou to look at real estate. It's like 2007. And I get out there. Guangzhou was nothing at the time. It was a couple buildings. There's no Google Maps out there at the time. So you land and say, hey, I have to go through this apartment building. I have to look potentially buying this new high-rise apartment building that's just coming up built by Spec developer. I get to buy it and rent it out. The yields might be in the 12 to 15 range. Pretty good yields. Get out there. Nobody would know how to get to this apartment building because the road didn't exist six months ago. So you'd have to pay some guy on a motorcycle to take you out there. They take you out there to the high rise. You'd sit 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 moved around a whim. This is a great story. Adam called me and he's like, Hey, you know, I want you to come join me. I was like, great. You know, I'm happy to do it. Wrapping up here probably another six months. And we can start to talk about it. He's like, no, no, I mean Monday. And I was like, well, I probably need to figure out all out. But I guess I could just be in the office in New York on Monday. He's like, well, I need you. I'm in Hong Kong on Monday. And I was like, wow, that's fast. And I got out there and it was like we were looking for office space. It was not well organized. We were figuring it all out from scratch. And it was an amazing time to be out there at 24 or something like that to be out there was amazing. It was an incredible experience. And China was taking off. I spent my time doing all sorts of, it was a special situations group. So I actually spent none of my time on internet companies. I spent all my time looking at.”
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 I was out of Kane Anderson in LA buying software companies, and I had a great mentor, and I think about him as a great boss named Adam Fisher, who's at D-Shy. He ran a small group there, which is financed by a parent company called OPG. He was in New York, and then he moved out to Hong Kong. And when I got out to Hong Kong, this was like 2007.”
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
“Probably as a compliance issue somewhere, but yes, I just have a Green Oaks email. I really felt at the time, and I feel this today, that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was lucky enough to figure out pretty early and nothing was going to stop me from doing it.”
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, it was. At that point, we were at well over a billion smartphones being shipped. Facebook was already a big company. Alibaba is a big company. This was like 2011, 2012 kind of thing. Cloud and mobile were obviously going to be pretty large. And so somewhere in that presentation where penetration curves of cloud penetration curves of mobile and how there's 10 to 15 plus years opportunity here, there's nothing about AI. There's a little bit about fintech, what we were seeing in China and fintech and how that might be irrelevant for other parts of the world. I think Brazil and India and Europe were in there in that context. But it was really across consumer internet fintech and application infrastructure software and the opportunity to build new platforms that would become future S&P opener companies.”
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 other way is I have a set of ideas, and these are ideas that I think are really interesting, some portion of the money you give me is going to go into these ideas, and the rest is going to go into ideas like this. I was very much in the latter camp. I was describing what we were seeing at companies like Palantir, which is one of our first investments, tiny amount, flip cart, company called Oyo Rooms, coupon, I was starting to say, look, these are the kinds of ideas we're seeing. This is what I like to be investing in. invested a de minimis sum of money in these businesses today. I like to invest a lot more tomorrow. It was driven by really three things. It was driven by the teams. It was driven by the quality of the businesses that I thought those companies were building. And it was driven by returns math. And my view was this is the beginning of a 20-year, 30-year opportunity ahead of us. And I articulated that over the course of maybe 30, 40 minutes.”
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. And I have to get back to some of the hard things we've gone through. That was one of the good things. So when you're 27 years old, there's two ways you can walk into a meeting like that. You could walk, well, maybe on a spectrum. One end of the spectrum is I'm 27. I'm really smart. I don't know what I'm going to do.”
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
“Terrible. He was a legend to us already. And he sat down and he listened to every word. He asked incredible questions. At the end of it, it's like, I'm in, committed. I'm going to invest with you at Green Oaks. And then he offered a number of other introductions, which I'll come to in a second. But not only that, about six months later, he came out to Green Oaks. He came to our office just for our team to meet Henry Kravis. I remember he came into our bullpen and he's like, I hope you guys are making me some money. And walked away. Just to do that for a young team, a young fledging organization that looked up to someone like the way the best part about that story, I'm not the only one that has that story. I think there's a few dozen people that have that story about Henry, which is just incredible.”
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, Henry Kravis was one of our first investors, one an amazing. I should talk about a couple of them because you always hope to get to a point in your life where you get to pay it forward. One of our first ones was Henry Kravis, and Henry, we went to go see him at his old office at KKR. And we walked in. We didn't know we were supposed to wear ties. Maybe wore a suit jacket, but I was dressed probably something like this. What I wear every day for 15 years. And we walk in and Henry's in a tie and he walks into his conference room's breakfast and he looks at us, he's like, nobody told you about the dress code.”
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
“Remember, we came out here. I stayed at the double tree on Lexington. I don't know if it's still there, but I give you the cookies. And you stayed in one room with two double beds. And I don't know if it's still there, but Blackstone used to be across the street. And we had friends, we were too cheap to go to a Kinkos and print out the deck. So we'd have our friends at Blackstone print out all our green oaks decks in the printing room. And then we staple them together and we go up and down here. And we have some amazing investors who joined us.”
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
“Thing about our business is the barriers to entry are very low, but the barriers to excellence are really high. You hear a lot about being excellent at Green Oaks. And so I think a lot of the challenges anybody who starts a business has tons of challenges. They haven't almost felt like that because we have a lot of fun with the way we do things. But I could give you in order to number. Actually, I was just looking out the window and Benny and I first came out here. We didn't have a seed deal or we didn't have anybody that was going to back us when we left D Shawn and we had to go do it all on our own. And we raised our first 50 million of capital.”
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
“Like, oh, well, I guess we came back. And we didn't do the primary work ourselves. We actually outsourced that work. This is one of our big learnings. And if you looked at the feedback we got, it read like it was much worse than it actually was. I'll never let that happen again. Some of those characteristics are exactly what we look for. And I founder, we like micromanagers. We like people that are in the weeds. We like people that fire fast. There's oftentimes we read about founders who have such divergent thinking. their team thinks one thing and they are hell-bent on going another way and they have some data to back it up but they're hell-bent on going another way”
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, oh man, what a great question. Tons. It's funny, we learned the hard way on this too. Early on where building green oaks, it's like GCO1. We had heard some amazing things about Elon Musk and SpaceX, obviously. He was already Elon Musket SpaceX. Again, Elon Musk at Tesla. He was already the guy. But we had some mentors, some people in the venture capital industry. It's actually the biggest mistake we've ever made at Green Oaks, this mistake I'm about to tell you. As we had heard, he fires people quickly. He's hyper aggressive. He manages down to the nth layer. He micromanages people like crazy. He disappears for large spots of time, comes back in and changes everything. And we're like, wow, this guy sounds like he's doing too much. And we had mentors and friends of ours who were like, he's not backable.”
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 there's any secret to it. I think it's highly replicable. I think that one thing to note is we started 27. We got a long way. We have no beach houses. We like being in the office 80 hours a week. We like working with each other. We're extremely high performing. We love understanding companies. There's nothing else. We're not on Twitter. Like basketball, we don't have to go to any games by just being ultra focused on this at the exclusion of anything else. Surprising how much you can get done.”
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
“Which is a little bit of validation, a little bit of actual company building and partnership, a little bit of speed and velocity. And so I think if you're one of the 10 to 15 best founders, people like us should be able to find you before anybody else finds you. You shouldn't have to explain what you do all that much. We can understand from the outside in better than most anybody else on the earth. And you should get all of renovates, not a little bit of green oaks, all of us. And because we know that there's not more than 10 to 15 people we want to really meet each year, we don't need to bifurcate our firm into multiple layers and have investment committees or any of that. We can be laser focused on the vital few and basically leave alone the trivial many.”
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
“Everybody has a slide which says what are the series A's or Series B's or Series C's that happened this quarter and what percentage coverage did we have? What they're explicitly telling you is they're saying we are optimizing for coverage. There's too much happening. There's too many ways to make money. The world's a big place. We have five offices and all these great people and we are a factory that's able to produce it. Now I think that's actually the right end state for vast majority of our industry. I think 90 something plus percent of our industry should work that way. But I think folks are 10 to 15 best founders each year. That's precisely the wrong way to work. Well, you should definitely not do is meet someone in that little matrix, have it elevated to a senior partner at the firm or maybe most of these firms are not found to run anymore anyway, but have it elevated to some of the firm. And then they chase it all down and bring some people in and try to like win it and you become one of 35 or 40 investments they make that year. I think it reduces the purpose of venture capital.”
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 that has resulted in essentially the private equity of our industry. Think of a lot of our brethren, and these are friends of mine. I really like them and I think they're doing a great job. But they essentially have like a matrix. They have industries on the top and I don't know, maybe geographies or stage, whatever their matrix is, something comes into their firm, they serve it to that part of the matrix, that little box of people goes and chases after it. And what they've done is they've said, listen,”
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
“Scale venture with lots of capital, lots of companies, lots of coverage, lots of AUM, lots of people is the right way to prosecute it. And I think they're right because I'll get to why we're doing it differently. But I think they're right because why should people have earned 35 net IRRs for the course of many decades? That's too high for any asset class.”
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
“What's happened over the last 10 years in particular, but it's been happening for a while is when I grew up in the industry and you drove down Sandhill, there's like six firms. And the way the process worked is you'd walk into someone's office. Usually someone was famous. You'd be a known name entrepreneur. You'd tell them your idea. They kick it around for a while. They do three more meetings or maybe four more meetings. There's this great Elon Musk quote, which is every manufacturing process is wrong. Every production process is wrong. Every design, yeah, I won't get it exactly right. Every design process is wrong. It's just a question of how wrong because the likelihood we could have envisioned all the available capabilities that we have today when we design that process is zero. Like, you know, so many things have changed. I think our industry is a little bit like that. You're going from this process where people would take a little bit of time. They wouldn't really know your company when you walk through the door to now we've gone from a cottage industry into a large scale asset class at this point. And I think there are a lot of firms correctly so that believe venture assets.”
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
“Take some time. It takes some time to get that experience right, especially in things like infrastructure SaaS, where at the beginning the infrastructure product is just not that good. This takes time to get the product into a performant level where it can actually delight customers. Consumers are a little bit different. You can feel it right away. We're looking for defensibility in that, what technical or operational trade-offs have you broken that allow you to have the early signs of a moat. We're looking for competitive advantage of network effects, shared scale economies, counter positioning, corporate resources. These are just adjectives we use to describe the characteristics of a business that allow it to produce unfair amounts of free cash flow over a sustained period of time. I tell this to our team all the time. I think with Buffett, you could sell 30 points of IQ and still be great. I think with us, you could sell like 40 to 15 points of IQ. It is not complicated. It is the discipline of only looking for those types of businesses and those types of founders. There is no secret sauce. It's just consistency of doing that over and over and over again across thousands of companies.”
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, that's exactly this is controversial. I do believe there's an archetype for a great founder, and I think that once you see it and learn it, it's a repeatable process. And I think some of the things I mentioned are part of that. I think that you're looking for usually someone that's built a jaw dropping customer experience. That's why we invest at the stage we invest in.”
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 I'm talking to them about their business. I'm trying to figure out are they high focused, high ambition, determined? Do they have divergent thinking that allows them to see something in the world and in their business that other people would vehemently disagree with but is right? So it starts with the founder, personality of that founder. And I haven't been able to sit down and write on the piece of paper. I think every great founder looks approximately the same. Every bad founder looks different. There's some quote about having.”
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'll give you a battery of things I'm looking for, but if you put a gun to my head and you say there's only one thing you could ask this company or people at this company, and they never actually ask it, but I always think about it right away, is when I visit a company and I watch people and I meet people, I'm trying to evaluate just one thing, which is if you pull to everybody at this company and you ask them, are your best days ahead of you or behind you, what would the proportion of people say and especially the most important people It's not you're over your growth It's not margin. It's not strong form competitive advantage it's not JDC all of those things matter But if I picked one thing very early on even in the startup you could tell if the energy is not there if I'm more excited about the future I mean I just was in Europe a couple weeks ago a vast majority of people seems like 40 years have believed the best years are behind that non-afit of them if you were running a company that's the one stat you should care about more than anything else in the world when I spend time with a founder”
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
“Think it starts well before a first meeting. I think it starts with figuring out why you want to meet someone. Why are you differentially great for that person to meet? What do you understand about that business? What do you understand about that opportunity? For the vast majority of what happens in our market, we and I are not the right person to have that first meeting with. But there's a select number. I don't know how many meetings happen to our markets is tens of thousands at this point. There's probably 200 that happen a year where we think we have differentially great partner to that person and we know it well in advance. And so we prepare an incredible amount before that first meeting. I don't mean like go on the website and use the product a little bit. Our first meeting should feel more like a fifth or sixth meeting that I found out rather than a first meeting allows us to go much deeper in that the things I'm looking for, if someone just asked me, I'm going to give you a tangential side. Usually I like to visit a company rather than them come to us, which is also counterintuitive because you can do less meetings if that's the case. So I love to go visit.”
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
“Above 30 and start to bring a growth mindset and grow culture back to the organization. He commented to me many years later. He said he was one of the hardest things we did. I'm so glad we did. I'm so glad we became a high growth firm again.”
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 have like one of their best quarters. They're just like that doesn't mean we're going to slow down. We're going to keep going. Having unreasonable expectations is a competitive advantage. Another example of this is von Kim who grew the business incredibly fast at Koupong for a long time. And oftentimes when you have strong product market fit, it is like your moral obligation to drive it as fast as possible. But things break along the way, especially if you're in the Adams business too. And at points we had stockouts and were constrained by what we could offer consumers. We had to hire more drivers. We had to build more warehouses. We had a year that was like 18% year over year growth. And there were people involved in the company that were telling Bond, oh, that's good. You don't need to take it back up. Just leave it. You know, Amazon never grew more than 30% year over year. That's fine. You're good. Just get back to 30%. I remember having this conversation with Bomb and I said, I think one of the hardest things you'll ever have to do is convincing everybody at the company to be a high growth company again, to try to take that growth rate.”
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 know what's interesting is almost every Is a great example when the war started more recently when Hamas attacked Israel and some disproportionate share of the people involved in whiz and the go-to-market team and the engineering team went to go serve for their country. Of course, our natural reaction, I think it was like you three years, it was October, of course. So we were like, ah, this is the right thing. And of course, we should just absolve the company of any expectations for November and December. Just forget even reporting. Just worry about your people and worry about the country.”
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 going to be a lot of people that disagree. Growth is an output, not an input. And growth for growth's sake makes no sense. But one of the unique things about our industry and about great companies, if you historically look at the growth rate of many great technology companies, they were very high for a long time. They had a lot of growth persistence as well, or growth endurance is another way to put it. The next year was it in the 80s or 90% of the previous year, the best companies have extraordinarily high growth persistence or growth endurance. I am a believer there's this meme that's come out, which is too high of growth like Destroys Company. I think very high growth is very good for companies. I think like unreasonably high growth is very good for companies. And Mario Andre quote, where it's like, if everything's under control, you're not going fast enough type thing. And as healthy in my mind, in the businesses I've been involved in, it's healthy to let a few things break here or there in order to keep pushing. And that results in a high growth. And especially for software companies or bits companies rather than Adams companies, I think it's good.”
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 Microsoft, you could go to the 80s where you had Dell and SML. You could go to the 90s where you, of course, have Google 2000s, you have Facebook. The small number of companies, I think 1% of the S&P 500 make up 90% of the value. And most of those were growth. All of those were really growth companies. They were companies that over the course of many decades reappropriated free cash flow away from these legacy incumbents, moved it into their own purview, and became a staple for how consumers and enterprises work in the world. And to me, that is such an enjoyable way to spend your time, to find founders that are hell-bent on trying to create one of those S&P 500 companies that delight customers at scale. It's also the most rewarding financially. I think the companies that we invest in will capture a lion's share of new economic value in the world. Everything else is just a shell game around it. I have lots of friends that figure out what's happening quarterly with Netflix. Doesn't matter me at all. I'm much more interested in figuring out, is Netflix a great compounder?”
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
“Big believers in capitalism, the microphones were in, the chairs were in, the view outside, it's all built with capitalism. As far as I'm concerned, this has been the greatest invention humans have ever had. I believe it is our job to further our journey as humans within the framework of capitalism. When we started Green Oaks, we described ourselves as a growth. We actually never used the term growth. We just said we like to invest in great businesses that are going to be a meaningful part of the S&P 500. To this day, I still have a list of the S&P 500 companies on my desk. Certainly list all the time. And I just try to figure out what companies are not on that list today and will be on that list tomorrow and how to work tirelessly to become the single most important partner they have. To be honest with you, I've been surprised that people think there's other large scale ways to invest besides growth. I think this is by far the most interesting way to invest. And a couple reasons why. I mean, you could go back to the 60s and you could talk about companies like AMD and Intel that were around in the 60s. You could go to the 70s where you had Apple.”
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 invested a little bit under a billion in total capital across 10 years. Led 5D arounds. We invested almost every other year, if not every year, in the company for 10 years until it went public. And then since it's gotten public, we've bought more shares maybe two or three of the 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
“Premise of the business and the quality of the business is being questioned. And I think if you could see through it, sometimes that's right to be questioned. We were wrong. But every once in a while, you could sort of see through that and see the other side that this is just one step along the way of building a great 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
“That where we could generate alpha, where we're sometimes differentially great partners, is by having a deep understanding of the business model. So in the case of coupon, in the case of most of the businesses we invested, we made multiple rounds in. It's never up and to the right. Oftentimes in internet and technology, good businesses are hidden in bad P&Ls. Not everything works right away, but things are going really fast. And people sometimes think GreenOaks is looking for momentum or forward progress. Actually, we're happy with volatility. It's kind of counterintuitive. Volatility is something like we're very open to, and we're open to it because when there's moments of high volatility, it's a lot harder to understand what's happening to a business, what's happening to a market. And so we will follow great founders into their businesses, and there'll be moments where the businesses do not feel all that great. There's been, I think without exception, most of the businesses we've been invested in for more than five years have gone through a rough patch or two where the fundamental...”
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