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Neil Mehta

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2025-04-15
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2025-04-15
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  1. “I have a controversial statement, which is I don't think there are many truly amazing founders that are building bad businesses. I maybe rented one or two, but they figured out pretty quickly. I think that truly remarkable founders think in terms of jaw dropping customer experiences. They think in terms of competitive modes. They think in terms of scale, getting to large TAMs. So every once in a while, I run into a founder that hasn't figured that all out yet, but usually they're very young and the learning curve is very steep. It always starts with founders for us. Now, I'm going to come to business models in a second, but if you believe what Green Oaks believes, which is, I don't know, there's been, what, 100 billion people on Earth that have lived in something between the number of 10,000 to 100,000 have affected the technological progress of humankind, our job at Green Oaks is to find few hundred more. I could join the pantheon of great humans that have driven humanity forward, then we're squarely focused on that first.”

    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

  2. “Never met a founder that doesn't want to climb the tallest mountain. Of course, I want to climb the mountain. It's the ability to demonstrate that they've mapped out their route, they've shown you how they're going to ration materials. They're going to show you what trade-offs they might have to make along the way. They'll tell you how they've built the team to make sure they get there. They'll tell you the steps of what's going to happen along the way. They've maybe even tried a few paths and come back and said, okay, now I'm going to go this way. There's a credible aggression to it that I think is unique to just pure aggression. Many of the rounds we led in the company were a result of bomb attacking this mountain. The building of coupon was over 10, 15 years to where it is today. And there's beds in every delivery camp. Bomb was sleeping on the floor. I mean, there are points where I talked to Bomb more than most anybody else in my life. I mean, Benny and my wife, Gosh. Oh, yeah, still to this day, I still talk to him a tremendous amount. Back then, I don't think there was an hour a day where I hadn't talked to him. 2 a.m. in the morning, 3 a.m. in the morning, 4 a.m. in the morning, 3 p.m. in the afternoon, 10 a.m. in the 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

  3. “Saying no to everything else, everything else at the cost of doing what the single most important thing is. There's two parts to that. It's the ability to prioritize what is most important. You have to practice it to be able to intuitively grok what is most valuable and most important. And then the ability to maniacally do that at the cost of everything else is an intestinal fortitude that just not a lot of people have. Second, just the ambition. There was a lot of clarity reasonably early on that by building this one peak capability, BOM could build the best e-commerce experience in the world. Not the best in Korea, not the best in Asia, the best in the world, better than Amazon, better than anywhere else on Earth. He has done that today, but at the time that didn't just ring hollow. There's a lot of people that say that. You meet founders all the time that have very lofty ambitions.”

    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

  4. “That kind of focus is just extremely unusual. People like to say they're focused. They don't really understand what focus means. Focus means”

    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

  5. “Time and I just made it up, and he was kind enough to bring us in as an investor. And it's hard to start anywhere but the founder, which is in this case Baum. And Baum, I would say there's a bunch. It's a lot of the tenants we look for in any great founder. Baum possessed right away. It starts with focus. Baum had this unique ability early on to identify what was the most important thing in the company and focus all his time on that at the exclusion of everything else. It wouldn't be unusual if you looked at Bomb's calendar on a Sunday night, everything the next week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, it would just be blocked out with one single thing he was trying to accomplish. If it was negotiating cost of goods sold in the diapers division in mid-2014, there'd be two weeks locked out for diapers to just do that for six hours a day, five or six, and he would just assemble a team and go deep on that and let everything else burn.”

    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

  6. “Exactly. We're still actively investing and helping where we can in the company. I consider Bomb's development of coupon and the development of Green Oaks that I've had is they're intertwined. I mean, it's one of the first investments we made. And I joined the board pretty quickly. And it was a seed investment. Green Oaks is probably best known for its growth investments. We'd like to leave growth rounds in companies that we think will be a meaningful part of the S&P 500 over time. When we invested in coupon, Green Oaks barely existed. When I was telling Bond that it was Green Oaks, he's like, I've never heard of Green Oaks. And don't worry, nobody's heard of Green Oak.”

    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

  7. “We think of ourselves as very long term investors. And if you really want to understand how long I've been on the board for about 15 years and this is public information just last quarter, we were buying more shares. So it tells you”

    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

  8. “Actually, the way we came up with the term is bomb would show us, you'd see in the cohort behavior, average retention in pre-1P delivery was probably in the 30s overall for the market, not for coupon specifically. Coupong for Brockett, which was eventually called Rocket, their one p capability, was in the 60s on a corporate retention basis. So it was clearly working. But that wasn't the coolest part about it. The coolest part is when we would ask customers about their experience. We'd do these video recordings and coupon would do them as well. I remember multiple of the videos, the woman was crying. The mom of the house was crying because the diapers were showing up the morning of and she didn't have to carry these giant boxes home from the store. She's like, if you took this away from me, I don't know what I would do. Please don't take this away from me. That is not an MPS score of nine. That is a jaw dropping customer experience. That is 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

  9. “Never once a driver to take the left turn because it takes a little bit more time. It was like that kind of optimization. It was infrastructure. It was building warehouses that were the size of football fields in place that doesn't have a lot of space, by the way, in Korea. It was building delivery camps and it was building localized distribution points where you have thousands of apartments to be able to make sure you could have even people run up and down the apartment to deliver something. It was making sure that you had the right packaging so that didn't get stuck with lots and lots of boxes. It came down to where do you leave it outside someone's door so you don't wake them up when you deliver it at 6 a.m. to make sure it's safe. When you add all those things together.”

    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. “But at the time, building that, it sounds easy. Open a warehouse, put a bunch of stuff into that warehouse, hire a bunch of drivers, work with those drivers to fill up their trucks, deliver to the door, take it off. Now, there's a bunch of stuff that breaks when you actually try to build that experience step by step. The first thing is the unit economics completely break. Second, to actually drive throughput through these, do you buy from manufacturers? How much do you buy from manufacturers? What do you do about your inventory turns? how you surface the right stuff on a website. It is extraordinarily hard to go build all that stuff. And it took years. It took two to four years to really start to build that flywheel. So it worked. And what did it entail to build a jaw dropping customer experience? It took new technology, goopong built not just a new warehouse management system from what the consumer touches on a website all the way down to new routing software. FedEx famously.”

    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

  11. “To you where we created the word, I created the word after spending a lot of time with coupon right at the beginning of Green Oaks. And in the case of coupong, so Bomb started a business that was just starting to sell products like any other online site would sell products. It was really a marketplace. And he made the decision in 2013, 2014 that he would start to transition that to building one papability, meaning that he could pick, pack ship, and deliver a wide variety of SKUs, everything from soap to tissue paper to golf clubs to fresh groceries over time. And the early days of that, if you ask people around Korea, they would tell you, we don't need faster delivery. Everything shows up here in two and a half to four days. It's great. It's totally fine. And his view was actually it's consistent, reliable, fast delivery. You get the stuff you ordered on time, usually within 12 to 24 hours. And that sounds obvious today. You order something 12 hours later or 24 hours later it shows up at your door. Now it's called the rocket experience at coupon.”

    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

  12. “Think about when you pick up your iPhone or the first time you might have used an Uber, if you're a developer, the first time you use Stripe for payments or if you're a trader, maybe you opened the Robin Hood. Capitalism is basically full of a sea of businesses that are not really doing anything that difficult. They're just kind of Me Too products that are swimming in the river of beta, if you will. And I think the steps to creating a JDCE, a jaw dropping customer experience, it usually starts with breaking trade-offs. It usually starts with doing something very difficult, either technically or operationally, that would usually give competitors nightmares. You have to do something that was borderline impossible or perceived to be impossible before. You have to do it from a customer-centric perspective. You have to really figure out what the customer pain points are. You could ask some customers, but usually customers can't even articulate all the pain points they're facing. They just know they're frustrated or this experience is suboptimal. We're lucky at Green Oaks over the last 12, 13 years. We've been lucky enough to partner with a number of companies that have built jaw drop in customer experiences.”

    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

  13. “Drop in customer experiences and JDCs. It's like we have a tattooed on our arm. And if you step back, there's a fundamental tenet at Greenoaks, which is a very small number of the world's founders are going to produce a significant proportion of the value that humans enjoy. And they're going to move the world forward through the products they build and the companies they build. And everything else is just kind of a shell game along the way. And there's some tenants around building those remarkable businesses at scale that we think are really important. One of them is building a jaw-dropping customer experience. It's really hard in the world of capitalism to build something that delights humans at a differential 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

  14. “Internally at Green Oaks described a company as an artist painting a painting. I tell a lot of our young team if you're in the business of evaluating painters, you've got to study the types of tapestry you could use, how paints they use, the different forms that you study all the great artists of every generation through history. You talk to artists all the time. And companies are just really founders painting in many ways. I think there's an appreciation I certainly got from that of what quality can look like on a comparative basis to something that's just not as good quality. Could you describe this acronym JDCE that I know is a key part of the early Green Oak story and something I'm sure you still think about a lot and maybe pick an example and go as far down as you can on what made for a JDCE in a company or product that you were evaluating? Yeah, JDCE stands for jaw dropping customer experience. If you put five drinks into everybody at Green Oaks on a Friday night and you're just like, tell me about your life. They just talk about Jod.”

    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

  15. “For it was deeply infectious. I mean, my brother and I would spend all the time studying every gun, asking every question, and by the end of the summer, I could usually run down whatever was in that shop and tell whoever was in there. Can you tie the feeling of that appreciation for the craftsmanship to what you do now? Is there a direct line? Do you think that had you not seen those guns that was it that impactful, that early appreciation for craftsmanship, or would you have come to it a different way? It's hard for me to know the difference if I hadn't experienced that, what it might have been like. But having experienced it, there's no question in my mind that there was an appreciation for humans creating beautiful work for other humans in particular that I really appreciated. And if you think about the business I'm in today is evaluating founders, building what we think are generational companies and being a partner to them. And I do think there's an artistic form to it. I mean, we often”

    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

  16. “Was astonishing, and it came from these stores that he used to have. And it was not really, you think about Gabaz Pro Shop, Hezekiah, it was not bad. It was really collectors' items that he found his way to collecting and selling over the course of many decades. I'd hang out at the shop all the time. And the people that would come in would be everybody from English gentry that were looking for a place to hunt in India and they'd know him well. His name was Darichind. And they'd say, Darichind, what about this gun versus that gun? And he'd sit there and he'd opine for 10 minutes on which gun was better than the other gun. And it wouldn't be the millimeter casings or the pullback. It would be about the design and the craftsmanship that went into each parcel on the gun. It was an appreciation for the artistic craftsmanship that went into this beautifully designed piece. It was a little bit like talking about art. In fact, there was almost no relevance to what the capability of that gun would do. I would just spend hours with him in the shop. And that passion he had.”

    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

  17. “This house was tiny. It was one or two bedrooms, a kitchen, and then literally just a hole in the ground for the toilet. It was a pretty run-down piece of property, dirt everywhere, very little flooring. But what he did have in that house was an amazing gun collection.”

    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

  18. “I was particularly close to my dad's side, my grandfather in particular. My dad was busy traveled a decent amount. And my mom would tell you that my grandfather raised me just as much as they did, especially when I was young. My dad was hardworking. He's my best friend. He's an amazing influence in my life. I still consider my best friend. My grandfather was the opposite of my dad. He was very calm. He meditated for an hour plus every day. The culture I grew up in is Jane, which is a subset of the various Indian cultures or Indian religions. Jainism, a little bit like Buddhism, has a lot of tenets around meditation. He has the most peaceful, calm guy. And so when I was growing up, I just knew him to be this very calm, straightforward, deep equanimity. And it was only when I was eight or nine years old I learned that he owned a gun shop, which is sort of counterintuitive to the guy he was. And we would go back to India to Bombay, Mumbai every year, at least once a year, sometimes even twice a year. And when we got there.”

    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

  19. “I think I have to ask about your grandfather first. Yeah. Whoever taught you the artisan craftsmanship of gunmaking. Can you start with that story? Yeah. My parents moved here in the 70s. My grandparents are both from India. Both sets of my grandparents are from India.”

    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

  20. “Their approach reflects their singular pursuit. Finding companies that will become a meaningful part of the S&P 500. In our wide-ranging conversation, Neil shares this mission along with his framework for identifying exceptional founders, his concept of jaw-dropping customer experiences, and how his grandfather's gunshop in India shaped his appreciation for builders of all kinds. Once you've heard directly from Neil, I highly recommend you read our in-depth profile of him. Neil gave our editor-in-chief, Jeremy Stern, unprecedented access to his life investment philosophy, and the work that has made him one of the most successful and unique figures in modern investing. The outcome is a brilliant profile about a phenomenal investor. Find the profile on our website, join colossus.com, and in the show notes of this episode. Now, please enjoy my excellent conversation with Neil Maida.”

    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

  21. “Today is a special episode. My guest is Neil Maida, founder of Green Oaks Capital. In 2012, at age 27, Neil left DE Shaw to start Green Oaks with his friend, Benny Perez. One of their first investments was in Kupong, a South Korean e-commerce company led by founder Bom Kim. Neil was so convinced of Koupong's potential that he invested 40% of their initial $50 million fund into that one company, a bet that eventually returned about $8 billion. Over its first 13 years, Greenoaks has backed legendary companies like Figma, Wiz, Carvana, Stripe, Discord, Rippling, and Toast, generating over $13 billion in profits with a thirty three percent net IRR to LPs. Henry Kravis, one of Neil's early investors, describes him as extremely disciplined with exceptional timing who has gone against the tide many times. Green Oaks operates with remarkable concentration, just 55 core companies across nearly $15 billion in assets, managed by only nine investment professionals.”

    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

  22. “Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at JoinColos.com.”

    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

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    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