YouSaid · the spoken record

Nikhil Kalghatgi

lines on the record: 102
first: 2018-04-10
most recent: 2018-04-10
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

“Basically, means no one in your position has ever asked for a meeting with them one on one. And so having that brash sort of, it's not arrogance.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's nonlinear. It's super nonlinear. And people don't realize when they are in a moment of explosion. They always realize it afterwards. But if you knew when you were in a moment of explosion, what could you do about it? Could you put more gas to the fire? I bet. Would you manage it differently? Oh my God. People feel like they're drowning sometimes when they're in a network explosion moment. They just were on a podcast. They started a business. People are reaching out to them. They achieved a new title, whatever it is, and they don't realize, well, maybe they can throw resources on it. And one of the things I mentor helped me do was realize, you know what, if you are really self-aware of your role, if you have extreme humility about it, you'll actually be able to get really, really far. So she encouraged me, you know what? It doesn't matter. Reach out to the four-star generals. Ask for a meeting. You are the lowest person in the totem pole.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had a weird career. As an engineer, basically, I got recruited very young. I was still in college. And this person who also was an alumni of my school, she recruited me, became my and really taught me about how to manage extraordinarily large organizations. I mean the largest organization in the world, at least outside of China, the US government. And that is an unbelievably hard thing to do. And it's not just managing up, now managing sideways. It's also managing outside your organization to help that manage inside. And it's this crazy game of thrones where you're having to leverage relationships outside your organization and ultimately massage your network in a way that the whole body of your career feels relaxed and is fluid. And so the thing that I came out of it was, you know, when I was in college, I don't know how big how big was your network in college if you had to measure it in people.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I won't go into details, but our ten billion dollar redevelopment project ended up being worth zero dollars. But hey, what's 10 billion among friends? I built a lot of good relationships out of it, and it was a great experience, and I love Puerto Rico as a result of it.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tons of tax benefits, U.S. law, it has a departure point for a lot of the rest of the Caribbean. The government is incentivized to do things for us. He realized, holy moly, on like three or four different industries, we could make billions and billions of dollars. This is insane, and there's nobody bidding for it. Anyways, long story short, or long story long, we ended up helping write the RFP with the government, convince them to sell it, responded the RFP that we help write. And someone else ended up responding to it too.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely illiquid, can't untransactable. People think it's dead in the water. Exactly. It's like trying to buy the White House. Point blank, everyone will say it can't be done. Maybe that literally can't be done. But maybe there's something that is in that same bucket but is actually with a lot of work, a lot of time, maybe some money, some political leverage, all that kinds of stuff. So my friend, and with the help of myself and several others, tried to buy something called Roosevelt Roads, which is a former military base in Puerto Rico owned by the Puerto Rican government. It's a beautiful, beautiful plot of land with fiber underrunning the whole thing. We could build the world's largest mega yacht complex. It had an airport with this internationally zoned already. It's at the right latitude if we wanted to launch rockets into space. In Puerto Rico, obviously it's”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. So I was like, wow, well, I don't even know how to think about this question. It's crazy. What is most undervalued asset in the world? Is that a, I don't know, is it a person? Is it an idea? Is it a place? I don't know. And so we've kind of had to, you know, do this. It took like weekends. And eventually, we found it. And he kind of looked at each other. I was like, is this what it is? This is unbelievable. And it has to be valuable on so many different levels to be the world's most undervalued asset. And the one thing about the world that was among the top choices that was consistent across the world's most undervalued asset is that everyone believes they're unattainable. And that's why they're undervalued. Structurally can't transact.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was one. And then the second is one of those guys had this crazy, crazy, crazy idea. And the idea was, what if we could find the world's most undervalued asset? Would be such a cool thought experiment. And what if we moved it from a thought experiment to a capital?”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should just create an awesome, cool community that focuses on things that we're excited by. What are we excited by? I'm always excited by impact investing at the time. So we created this thing called a Necker Summit, and we held it on Necker Island, which is Richard's private island. And we invited superstars to have their own family offices. They have these obscure businesses, some founders, and we said, what if we merge them together, create this insane experience that no one else had before? Do you think we could create new best friends? And then we would be the arbiter of best friends. That's ridiculous. They would love us forever, right? That's like introducing someone to their spouse. They owe you for life. And out of it came some amazing investing opportunities, some extraordinary relationships, and we still do this trip.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't happen every day. It doesn't happen every year. I said, what if we could create something that could manufacture other people to have best friends? That's insane. And out of that two things came from it. One was I decided to do some business with these guys, and I'm going to tell you that story. That's my greatest failure. And the other one is I was like, you know what?”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the craziest thing I've done? Oh man. It's the craziest thing I've done. What a wild question. So I was really fortunate to be invited on this trip with Richard Branson on vacation many years ago. And I ended up meeting three best friends off of this trip. These are extraordinary superstars. When I say superstars, I mean at the Elon Musk level. And some of them are household names today, and we all became, we chat on WhatsApp and whatever else all the time about things from ranging from divorce through love and getting drunk next time you hang out on some crazy place, right? And I said, guys, this is ridiculous. We went on one trip together. And how often do you make a best friend? When's the last time you made a best friend?”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me a competitive advantage, not just because the upside is big, but simply because other people are undervaluing it. And if I see value in things that other people undervalue, guess what? I have a pricing advantage.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the primary learning for me was that I was able to observe a culture and an investing strategy that was really, really inspiring, but it wasn't necessarily my own. And I had to discover how to value investors and how to value entrepreneurs. But I still, it took me years as a VC to really understand what is my value add, not what is the firm's value add. And for me, it was all about can I be that deep, independent learner, become an expert on a sector, and become that consignliary to a founder to achieve that moonshot vision as well as be that moonshot investor. And honestly, I just really loved doing the stuff that no one else is willing to do. The crazy outlandish, wild visions that no one else is willing to consider. And you know what? The irony is that that actually gives”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge, huge, huge public Japanese company has Silicon Valley tier one product velocity. Is a combination that I don't think anyone in the world knows how to underwrite. Certainly most equity analysts couldn't possibly begin to understand that. But even for a venture investor or the average shareholder, it would be pretty difficult. But I can tell you that it's one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen, a multibillion dollar giant financial services regulated company that can push out product super, super, super fast.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take huge, huge, huge mega risks from an outsider's perspective that have more times not paid off. And I was there when Alibaba went public, which is an extraordinary experience when SoftBank bought Sprint and many other companies in the tens of billions of dollars. And my group was focused on venture capital, very, very early stage stuff, but we sat next to the group that did the larger stuff too. So it was a pretty extraordinary experience to see folks operate a huge, huge organization and still move very nimbly. That's actually why, actually, one of the reasons we partnered with SBI Holdings, a large publicly traded financial institution in Japan, formerly known as Softbank Investment. And we've been able to find a partner that actually fits the rubric that I shared with you earlier on how to evaluate early stage companies that have moonshots. And the idea that a”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's crazy by most people standards. But that's truly how he measures his success. So I was able to observe some of that really, really long-term thinking and incorporate it into my professional life and my personal life. So, you know, I think it was, there's a phrase, you can correct me, you can elaborate on who said this, but every major decision in your life, you kind of could just look at it from the perspective of your deathbed, presumably an elderly many years down the line kind of scenario. And look back, you know, would, on my last breath, if I look back, would I be happy with that decision or not? And so trying to look forward over 100 years and look backwards 100 years is sort of my rubric for most key decisions. And I've seen SoftBank over and over and over again.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Softbank is the world's most, I think it's the world's most profitable telco. It's a giant conglomerate and it's probably most well known today for the vision fund, the $100 billion private equity style technology fund, the world's artist technology fund. But the reality is that's just another strategy that MASA's son, who's the founder and CEO of SoftBank, he has taken in order to achieve his 100-year vision. And by those 100-year vision only pales in comparison to his 300-year vision. I don't know how many folks out there have a 300-year vis”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Venture capital is dead. I'm kidding. So I had a great experience at Softfink. I got to tell you an extraordinary organization. Masio's son's long term approach. I think as peerless?”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Appreciate that. It served me well, especially in that room where it was like you're a millionaire, you're a millionaire, you're a billionaire, you're a millionaire, and do you deserve it? And asking people straight up to their face, because you make a buck or two and people, I don't know, maybe it's their ego, maybe they feel they earned it because they had a hard whatever it was. But the reality is we're all way, way, way blessed.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has to be in the same vein of a good pun is like an example, but it has to be within the spectrum of acceptability, of course. And it also has to be responsive to that person.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Man, this is so giving away all your secrets. No, I would say you're constantly looking for the angle that no one else is expecting and presenting that as like a reasonable option in conversation. Yeah, you can call it surprise, but it has to be a certain type of surprise. You can surprise someone by saying anything derogatory or negative. That's a bad surprise”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do self referential humor. Here's how I do all this kinds of stuff. And she's like, Nikhil, you beautiful idiot. You have accidentally derived our entire syllabus. And I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. I've never read a book on humor or metacomic for that matter. And they're like, this is exactly how you build a joke, exactly how you structure it. And I was like, interesting. I've been using it to get ahead in the professional life.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was like, that's kind of funny. I was like, why is that? And this was kind of the case whether you're the class clown that can still get A-pluses in college or whatever it is. I was like, this is kind of interesting. As an example, when I was at HBS, originally I was still at a company when I started, and I realized how can I do this company and do investing and go to business school full-time. I was like, there's no way to do this. Well, what if I somehow trick or charm depending on your perspective the professors into letting me babysit their kids or do an extra project on the side or whatever's I got to do in order to get it done. So humor was partly that approach. And with this call this professor gave me to like, hey, I heard you've thought a bit about humor. It's very unusual for a financial services investor guy to have thought about this sort of stuff. I was like, I don't know if I've thought about it, but here's my principles of humor. X, Y, and Z. Here's how I manufacture humor. Here's how I create surprise in conversations. Here's how...”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The study of humor is really, really, really an intellectual one. And people don't think of that. So the professor called me and I was like, listen, I've been studying humor for my whole life, not as a comic or anything like this, but honestly, I'm not the tallest guy in the room. I'm not the smartest guy in the room. But in a room full of VCs or a room full of hedge fund guys, I'm pretty decent at standing out just based on keeping conversation light, no doubt, ridiculous”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, what do we do instead? It got replaced with eating breakfast with my wife every morning. And I realize holy moly, I have been missing out on one of the greatest sources of happiness in my life ever since then. And to this day, we still have breakfast together virtually every morning save for travel. And now we have a sober time together. Everyone else is fighting through the week to have dates with their wives. I have a date with my wife almost five days a week, right? And it's sober and it's a good moment of the day and all that kinds of stuff. And I realized this thing that was in the happiness category was actually detracting from my happiness because people overestimate what makes them happy and what makes them unhappy. They've really never thought to think, well, you know what? By subtraction or by changing it, could it be something orders of magnitude more valuable in my life?”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And on this very first time, we went to San Francisco. And I at this point in my time, this is years after the original version of the happiness project. And I said, you know what? I'm going to document everything I do in my life. Again, haven't done it in a while, take inventory and the things that make me super happy, the things in the gray area and the things that make me unhappy. They don't all have to be tier one quality things. One example, there's this coffee shop. I walked to on the way to the subway every day. The baristas know me. It's tasty, loved it. It was a great experience. And I thought this is something I really enjoy. It doesn't have to be that important, but it was a part of a habit, it was ritual that I was doing regularly. When we moved for that month, I didn't have that place anymore. And I realized, well, that kind of sucks. I just lost something I really, really, that brings me a lot of maybe superfluous happiness, but still happiness nonetheless.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's a real world example. One of my mentors, Brad Feld, takes his wife on, I don't, I think they still do it, but for many years at least, they lived in a new country or new place, I should say, for a month, a year. And I don't think it was vacation. I think it was, you know, they lived there and they worked there. It was a really cool life experience to have with one's partner. I looked at my girlfriend at the time and I was like, we got to do this too. This is a great idea. This is fantastic. We get to live in a new place together. We don't have kids yet. Let's experience life. And we'll still work, right? And we did it in San Francisco one time. We've done it in other places other times.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Value of the things that they're not sure make them happy. To make that more clear, if I asked you what are the things that make you happy, you could name the ten things right away. And if I asked you what makes you unhappy, you could name them right away. And if I asked you the things that make you unhappy and the things that make you happy, how confident are you? You're probably wrong on a lot of those things because you've mislabeled the category. And some of those things should actually be in that middle gray area.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Street, you've never been down. And the question is why? Well, you might find something that you've never seen before. You may actually just enjoy the different route. And there's a little bit of serendipity there. And what is it about that practice of taking a different route that is so helpful? Well, there's two things. There's the idea of manufacturing serendipity, and you never know what you're going to find, and that becomes the idea of exploration, which you touched upon earlier. But to me, there's this idea that people always over estimate the things that make them happy. And underestimate”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of people, and the practice of happiness is basically one of constantly fighting a ball rolling downhill. I don't know what that says about the nature of humanity, saying that maybe we're all prone to fighting tensions and not that we're all prone to depression or anything like that, but you really have to work at it. And I think the happiness is basically a slippery slope. And if you don't pay attention to it or you think everything's hunky-dory and you move on, you may find yourself all of a sudden at the bottom of the hill. So how do people practice? And that's really the nut, this third idea of happiness to practice is really where all my habits around happiness came out of. As an example, there's a book out there that talks about on your way to the office, whether you walk or drive, maybe once every other day, when you're not in a rush, take a new route. Explore.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I hadn't even fathomed the idea of what great sacrifice have I made. Have I made a great sacrifice for my relationships? It makes you feel very small at first. And you think, am I really even trying if I haven't made a sacrifice? And then they could go and they could point out a sacrifice that they had made. And that was, of course, these relationships develop for a long period of time. These are not budding relationships. But they took that idea of valuing the closest relationships to you to a level that I hadn't even understood previously. I thought that was pretty interesting. The third thing that I had learned was many of these folks recognize that happiness is not a state of mind. It's not an end goal. It's not the result. It's a practice. And keep in mind, this is a very select group of people. This is not the entire world. This is not a recipe for everyone's happiness, by the way. This is just what I found in this hundred.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Knew exactly when they made their biggest sacrifices in their life to focus on those relationships. I thought that was pretty interesting. And looking backwards and thinking about what great sacrifice have you made for your relationships is a very hard thing to do.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. That I thought was really interesting, and you really have to look, you know, do whatever you have to do to look inside yourself to realize what makes you happy is not someone else's. Therefore, all the things about don't judge yourself against other people and don't compare yourself really fall out of that. The second thing is that this group of folks consistently valued their relationships and worked so insanely hard at their relationships. There was almost a consistency of diligence in managing their top two or three relationships. So generally your spouse is kind of the obvious one. In some cases it was their kids as well. But I ask them, how do you know you're giving the attention that they deserve? It's very easy to say you value relationships, but are you actually doing anything about it? And many of them...”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So everybody wants to be happy. Everybody always asks, do you have notes? You can write a book on it. What came out of it? Probably the most common thing that came out of the happiness project for me. Is many of these folks had a very, very clear definition of their version of happiness, and they couldn't care less what other people's definitions were. It's not that they, I mean to say that they were mean or rude, it's just that they recognize that everyone's happiness is irrelevant to other people. And I can't define your happiness or anyone else's, nor could I ever possibly begin to fathom.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An interview, it's just for me. This is there's zero, you get zero benefit from this other than you might be helping me in the future. And they were like, yeah, totally, you know, as long as it was confidential. So they almost took me up every single time. And as a result, it began to create this massive network of really personal relationships with folks from the founder of their own family offices. The other element I forgot to mention is that they created their own wealth”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or famous, or you know, obviously, everyone's pretty wealthy in this group because I had very clear aspirations when I started this project of who I wanted to be. And I realized at that level of wealth, most folks have actually had a chance to take a breath and think about what makes them happy. They've had a chance to define their happiness. And at about 60 folks, I realized, you know what, there's kind of a few similarities between all these folks. And at 100 people, I realized, wow, there's a lot of similarities now. I got my list. And, you know, by 160, I was just being egregious. And it was just a networking exercise. Because it's funny, you call up an ultra high net worth person and you're like, listen, I don't care how you major money. I don't care that you're living on private islands and do whatever it is. I just want to be a happy person when I grow up. And they're like, oh, well, this is an interview I haven't done before.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A promise to myself that Some of the wealthiest people in the entire world, I'm going to ask them how they define their happiness, how they practice their happiness, how they learn to be happy if they're happy, all these kinds of questions, and then take the summary of information and incorporate it into myself. And it was an extraordinarily selfish act, right? I was purely for my own benefit. And that's okay. It's a place to start. There's nothing wrong with that. I said, listen, I just want to do this for me. I didn't tell anybody about it at first. And so I made a list of all the people I wanted to meet. They had to be sentimentaires on their first marriage with kids and observationally happy. Observationally happy because no one really ever knows if someone else is happy. But you kind of, you know, hope. So my goal was to interview 60 of these folks over a year and a half. And I had to ask them the same questions. I took so many notes on them. And the picture's really simple. I don't care if you're a trillionaire.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So as you can tell, I base a lot of what I do today based upon the experience I had when I was a kid. And my parents, my family are super important to me. Everyone around me knows that I'm a pretty happy lucky guide. Like, tell lots of jokes. I taught a class on the business of humor at Stanford Business School. And happiness is a passionary of mine, absolute passion area. Everyone that meets me says I've got a big smile on my face pretty much at all times and constantly cracking jokes. And I get a lot of that from my dad. My dad unfortunately had a, let's call it, a health issue some years ago. And as a result, it was a very challenging time for our family. I can recall times when I was going to school, going to visit him in the hospital, coming back, and pretending like everything was fine, kind of rinse and repeat. So I made.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By comparison. So for me, it's not about delusions of grandeur or about being able to tell the biggest tale or being able to say it's a ten trillion dollar idea. It's about, okay, I have a crazy long-term vision. We may never get there. But what I can tell you is I know exactly what we're going to do in one week, two weeks, four weeks, eight weeks, sixteen weeks, and looking backwards over the last 16 weeks, I can tell you the eight different major product revisions that we've done and what we've launched and pushing products no matter what, because that's critical to learning.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The number one way I measure entrepreneurs, early stage, growth stage, late stage is product velocity. High product velocity is everything. Why? Product velocity is learning. It's learning in the wild. You get feedback on your product in real time all the time. And it's really hard to push product. It's probably the hardest thing. You know what's easy? Coming up with slide decks.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got it Can refuel, you can see the galaxy, you can do all kinds of things that you want to do. And that's really the, once you boil down asteroid mining, which is a nice marketing tool into...”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not in space. Water's heavy. Water's super, super heavy to get out of orbit. It's actually much cheaper if you can find it somewhere else.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's it. It's truly that simple. And if you can identify water, you have just created a natural resource in space that is on the order of magnitude of over a trillion dollars for a single asteroid.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. In the case of asteroid mining or fish farming, or I can think of probably 20 or 30 other areas that I think are ripe moonshot sectors. In that case, the challenge you're trying to solve for is natural resource constraints. And we travel currently by combustible engines and fuel, basically. And jet fuel is really, really expensive. And it's a limited supply. And if only we had nuclear fusion or some of these kinds of things, which are just unfortunately they're from a technological perspective, tricky and from political perspective, trickier, we are stuck with jet fuel and rocket fuel specifically. And so we know how to make rocket fuel from water and a couple of other processes. But basically water. So the real goal of asteroid mining. Is identifying water.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is a really great question. I'm so excited about it because I get to talk about sci-fi. And I love sci-fi. So in the world of measuring markets, the real question you should be asking is three to five years, maybe even seven to ten years down the line, will the macro trends that are absolute most important macro trends, will they result in a market opportunity that is in the hundreds of billions of dollars of size? That is the real question. Hundreds of billions of dollars of size of market opportunity. Is it a win or take-all market or not? And why is it a winner-take-all market? How do we ensure that what we're doing now allows us to have the elements of a winner-take-all?”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. But what you can see is that there's three types of investors in the world. And one of those types lends itself more to moonshot investors than others. The three types investors are, number one, markets, which is me. Number two, people, which is a lot of seed investors. And number three, business models. And for me, markets is everything. Tailwinds are a rising tide that lift all boats. I find it really easy to look at a market structurally and understand what's missing from it. You kind of have to take a holistic approach to venture capital, not a micro approach, which is really focused on the team. And don't get me wrong, there's no panacea here. There's different strategies for different investor types. And for me, I just found my type early.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you use every day, maybe in your deodorant or your perfume, more this lacquer on the table you're sitting in front of, and all that stuff is usually organic and grown from other materials Change things by multiple orders of magnitude in terms of cost, efficiency, productivity. And in the case of some of these moonshots, it's really hard to know whether they're going to be 10x, 100x, 1000x, millionx sort of upside. I don't think anybody really knew the upside of Uber. I don't think anyone really knew the upside of Google at the earliest stages.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing, and if I succeed in a year, great. If I never succeed, I'll probably have made some progress towards your goal that you otherwise never would have. And maybe if you're really lucky, you will get Obama on your advisory board or change the law in the case of planetary resources did a handful of others. So obviously the venture world in general is about enormous outcomes, but small probabilities, usually very few of the investments make the entire fund or make your career in some cases. Moonshots maybe seems like, let's take asteroid mining, for example. Maybe you could use that as an actual example of how do you handicap something like that that just seems science fiction-like relative to another ad supported social network or something like that that's a little more tangible. Trying to underwrite Twitter in the seed and Hyperloop asteroid mining, companies like Ginkgo Bioworks, what's that? They design organisms. They make stuff.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resource there when the going gets tough. Sometimes I just want to be money, and hopefully they are as advertised. In my case, I've tried to invest all of my time in very, very, very focused areas. So my philosophy is I'm obsessed with happiness, obsessed with productivity, and on that productivity vein, productivity is really just learning how to learn. And I learned that most VCs try to do lots of little things to help their companies. If I could just do the one thing that no one else in the world is willing or able to try, then I'll probably beat everyone else at that game because no one else is trying to play my game. So as an example, early on in meeting an entrepreneur, I would say something like, what is that one thing that would change your business by an order of magnitude, but honestly, the chance of probability is such that you can't address your time associated with it. It would be too risky to put quarter of your time on it because you got to pay the bills and get sales and hire employees and things like that. And let me focus all of my energy on that one.”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It might be something like changing the law could be something that I could do. That would be my moonshot within the scope of them. It could be getting Obama on their advisory board. And then all of a sudden, I figured out what my moonshot alignment is with their business. So actually Moonshot is really an investment strategy, not like a sector. Say more about why that's an advantage. So that's not even really a term. I mean, it's a term, obviously, I've heard many times, but never talked about on the show. And I'm always fascinated by what creates a sustainable differentiated investment advantage, even if it's just like a niche. And this feels kind of like a niche. Like you don't hear people focused on this. So maybe say more about how you think about it from, you said something you could do better than other people. So it's an investment strategy, not a sector is kind of like what it comes back to. So most VCs, most investors, and I invest across asset classes now, but most VCs, you know, they join your board. They try to be helpful in a lot of ways. They try to be your best friend in some case. They try to be your...”
2018-04-10 · Invest Like the Best · Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.82] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source