YouSaid · the spoken record

Nima Shayegh

lines on the record: 99
first: 2025-12-21
most recent: 2025-12-21
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

“Yeah, I called him about, you know, I was doing some work on the renewable energy business. At the end of it, we had this long conversation and he said something like, so what is it that you do again? And I said, you know, I'm an investor. And he said, ah, so you're a money massager. And I think that, you know, it's classic that the perception of what this business is is like we're sort of sitting around just massaging this portfolio of securities. It's not a real profession. I don't feel like it is actually a real profession. It's sort of a beautiful means of exploring your curiosity and hopefully serving people while you do it.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Distortions that are caused by our own egoic perspectives. When we need to appear superior, when we fear being wrong publicly, when we fear public humiliation, when our perception of reality becomes worked and we stop seeing things as they truly are. And I think this has plenty of parallels to investment because when we're making decisions from that. Then, of course, we make these terrible decisions. So, yeah, I mean, that's my roomy quote.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And before its last mirror has existed, you would just polish the surface of these mirrors and polish it and polish it and polish it until the bronze became reflective. And it's the metal that you were polishing was left uneven or corroded. Then when the light came into the mirror, it would sort of scatter in every direction. It wouldn't actually reflect clearly. You couldn't see clearly. That to me, this metaphor about us as mirrors, human beings as a mirror that needs to be polished because we're essentially, we start out as this base metal, which is not reflective and is not beautiful. But with polishing, you can sort of reflect the reality. That is such a precise metaphor for the human condition and that unevenness and the corrosion of an unpolished mirror is essentially akin to the”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there's one quote of his that is one of my favorites, which is, if you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished? And he's talking about, on one hand, he's talking about something that's probably pretty obvious to everyone, which is that if you take everything personally, if you're sort of oversensitive, then you're missing the lessons. You're missing sort of the teachings of these moments that irritate you. But what he is actually talking about was the way that our egos distort our ability to see clearly. So what is it about a mirror? You know, in the ancient world, mirrors were not made of glass. They were actually made of bronze. And the craftsmen of those years would, you know, I think for tens of thousands of years, 10,000 years, they were probably made this way, where a craftsman would combine copper and tin and create bronze.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I think makes him timeless is his ability to embed deep truths about existence into the most ordinary everyday imagery, whether it's a garden or the sun or a candle or a moth. He points you from the obvious and the visible towards the invisible and the essential. And that way of seeing always resonated with me as an investor because investing at its core is an act of perception. It's about seeing beyond the narratives and what the news is talking about and what other investors are talking about to try to grasp the essence of the business. What is it that actually makes it tick? And Rumi, you know, that's all Rumi was about.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the mainstays of Runumi's teaching, as you say, is this constant sort of provocation he provokes you to see past appearances and ask what's actually real, what's going on, what's the truth. And he was also astonishingly prolific. He composed, I think, 60,000 lines of verse, something like that. And yet he wasn't even a professional poet. I think he would laugh at the idea that people are now calling in with the poet. He was a spiritual guide and he had disciples, and many of his poems were actually spoken, you know, spontaneously when he was in this ecstatic meditative state. And some of his, you know, some of his companions would write things down that he wrote. And as to why I chose him as the namesake of my partnership, you know.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, Rumi, as you say, he was a 13th century Persian mystic. And one of the things that I always find fascinating about him is that in the late 90s, early 2000s, Rumi was actually the best-selling poet in the United States. So he sold more copies than Shakespeare, Homer, you know, Dante, Milton, you know, take your pick. And it raised a question, which is, what are all these Americans doing, reading the poetry of a Persian mystic from 800 years ago? And I think that part of it, I think part of it is that Rumi's ideas are universal. He speaks to something timeless in the human condition, which is this deep yearning to see beyond the surface and to discover meaning beneath appearance.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That this is a great way, and I took it and it ended up being a lovely ride. But it really sort of reinforced this idea that no one's coming to save you, particularly in investing. And that idea of investor idol worship, it's easy to think that by following someone else's path, by investing in the way that someone else invests, that that's the right path. But ultimately, it comes down to you and you have to make your own decisions and you have to trust your own judgment and you have to develop your own discernment. There's no substitute for that.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I will claim to be a great surfer. I love to surf. I do think that there are plenty of parallels in surfing and investing. Surfing really demands a surrender, this idea that you're not going to predict what's going to happen, but you have to sort of be open and receptive. And I had one experience actually down in Costa Rica with Chris Bay. There was a lesson, there was an investment lesson which came ironically when I was out there waiting for a wave. And I saw one coming. And I sort of looked to my left and looked to my right. And being not a great surfer, I'm always looking for someone to tell me this is the right way to take. And I was looking at everyone was sort of focused on their own. Everyone was playing their own game. They were sort of in their own heads. And I was waiting for this validation. I wanted someone to tell me this is the right one. And I just end up deciding.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Studying these specific businesses. So, really, I think 80 plus percent of the time it's an opportunity cost kind of a calculation.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much more of a positive decision rather than a negative decision. A negative decision says this is too big. I am scared. What if it goes down? A positive decision says I really need to own more of this because it's so great. I got to get the capital from somewhere. And I think that cell decisions come in a few flavors. You can either sell because you made a mistake, which happens, of course, from time to time. You can sell for opportunity cost reasons, which is what I'm talking about here. There's opportunity cost of capital. You'd prefer to own one business over the other. There's also the sell decision, which comes when something is sort of egregiously overvalued. Meaning, you know, you may not make money for a long time. You may have negative returns for a very long time from here. I'm not sure that that has ever happened in my experience over these first six years. So that's super overvaluation. I haven't seen that yet.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, someone was asking me recently how do you sell? And it's the classic difficult question to answer. And what just emerged was that Picell, based on, my cell decisions are like a love versus fear question. And suboptimal cell decisions, in my opinion, are fear-based decisions, which are, you know, I had a 10% position and now it's 12%. That's too big. What if it goes down? I'm going to pair it back to 10. This kinds of thinking happens all the time in the name of sort of risk mitigation and the name of rebalancing the portfolio. And if that's the case, you sort of never get the full benefit of one of these great investments. So what's a love decision? A love decision is something where you feel compelled, you feel sort of called to own more of this business over here. But because you run fully invested, you have to get the capital from somewhere.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, absolutely. I think managing the psychology, structuring the environment, the experience in 2022, I hate to put it this way, but it really wasn't a big deal. It really wasn't. It just felt like a normal run of the mill time. And I remember the day that Carvana hit $3.55. I was out on a hike that morning. And it really just, it wasn't all that big a deal. Now, if it was a huge position, maybe it would have felt like a bigger deal. But it started out as a smaller position and I sort of added to it on the other side. I added to it at 10 and I added to it at 40. And so on the way back the other way, I made it in a bigger position. So yeah, I think this is a difficult balance to find sizing something to the point where it becomes psychologically difficult versus”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over history have tried to make this point that volatility is your friend, it's the friend of the investor. And the hangup, I think, is that even if we know that, do we trust our ability to make the right decision when that moment comes? And I think if you trust that when we're down 50%, that I'll know what to do, then what's there to fear? You can just sort of let it come.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone is, you know, I shouldn't have owned this. What was I thinking? In some cases, those were true. But in other cases, it was merely a reaction to price action. And ironically, I think that had we not had 2022, our return since inception would actually be worse. Like if you just took Rumi's portfolio at the end of 2021 and just wrote it for the expected returns that I thought we were going to get at that point, it would have been okay if it was just linear up to the right. It would have been nice and comfortable. But I think the opportunity that a down market gives you is the ability to coil the spring because you can start, you can recycle your capital, you can sell things that are down 30, 40 percent to buy things that are down 70, 80, 90 percent. And that actually benefits you over the long run. And that's why Warren Buffett and Lou Simpson and so many people.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's such a great point. And the more that I've thought about this, the point on surrender, I think surrender goes hand in hand with trust. In some sense, the reason why we can all intellectually say that it's normal to go down 50%, but we don't want it to happen. It's because in some ways we don't trust that we'll do the right thing when that happens. You know, there's a lack of trust in the self. And I think that The experience in 2022 was illuminating in some ways because on one hand, in 2020, 2021, it was as though everyone's a long-term investor. You know, everyone wants to own these stocks for 10 years because month after month, it's just getting richer and richer and richer. And people are very excited. But then in 2022, you could just see the time horizons shrink and suddenly everyone wants to learn a lesson.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that these moments where things are going really well are an opportunity for humility and when moments are going poorly, it's an opportunity for trust to sort of recognize that this is normal and to trust the process. In practice, I try to, you know, I won't claim to have it all figured out, first of all, but I try to find some harmony between different aspects of life, whether that's work, family, health, you know, inner life. That may mean exercising. That may mean making space for meditation. I think, you know, my family, which I joked about in the beginning, has no interest in business is sort of a blessing in some ways because spending time with people that you love who have absolutely no idea what the stock market is doing can be great. And those things, Salon, try.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think maybe it's two things. The first is, as I mentioned, it's really studying history. It's recognizing that these periods are normal. And so when they come, you shouldn't be surprised. You should just know that every investor has had their due over 30, 40, 50-year record. Every investor gets their time. And so when it came in 2022, it didn't last that long. But I was mentally preparing for it to last for, you know, five or ten years. I just knew that every investor has these periods. And so buckle up. You know, that's what was going on in my mind. So part of it, I think, is just intellectually understanding that it's normal and constantly reminding yourself of it, constantly reminding your partners of it. It's easy to become complacent when you notice your capital accounts just rising month after month to think that it's game is easy.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be up or down 70% in a day because of some headline. And what I wanted to prevent myself from was having a lot of inbound inquiries from people, even though I want to be helpful. I knew that it would be challenging for my psychology to try to respond and defend. It would create commitment bias. And really, I think the moral of the story is that stocks can do anything in the short term. You know, literally anything. And to spend a lot of time trying to predict if or when they might go down by a lot, I think has been challenging.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the time we bought our first share as the stock had declined from 370, $370 to $25. And I think the short interest at the time was 75% of the free float. So everyone thought basically this business was going to go bankrupt. And actually, my timing was not so great because I bought the stock at 25. And just a few months later, it had gone to $3.50 or something. So it went down. It went down by another 85% or so after I bought it. And during this period, I definitely was not talking it up to people that I knew. I was talking about it. So I would bring it up just to talk about it. I wanted to see if there were different perspectives. But I didn't want to say that I liked it and I didn't want to say that I owned it because there were certain times during this ownership where the stock would.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, brought the business to a sudden halt. They made this big acquisition. They took on a lot of debt in order to do it to sort of finance themselves to sustain this rapid growth rate. And the mistake happen, the bonds, when the mistake happened and the business sort of turned the other way, the bonds got down to 30 cents. The stock declined by”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And while I was working with Lou, a colleague of mine, Armin, a good friend of mine, he created this web scraping tool. It was sort of an early web scraping tool that could compare apples and apples on Carvana versus cars on Carmax. And it was clear that Carvana was underpricing the industry by like $1,000 per unit. And that's significant for a product where the gross margins are like $2,300 for Carmax over the years. And so it felt like in a market that transacts 30 to 40 million used cars per year, this business was poised to compound and have this long reinvestment runway and these people were very focused. And so I watched from the sidelines as the stock promptly rose 20 times in just a few years from there. And then in 2022, a combination of bad luck and misexecution.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Michigan Avenue listening to the Carvana Roadshow and just being completely struck by the thoughtfulness and ambition of this management team. And at the time, my own sort of investment palette was not really geared towards companies that were so early in their growth, you know, growing hundreds of percent, burning so much capital. And so I decided to just watch and see from the sidelines. And over the next few years, they really executed flawlessly. They extended into new markets. They turned their inventory faster. They increased delivery speeds. They improved profitability in specific cohorts. They created like an in-house infrastructure, in-house logistical infrastructure that was vertically integrated, first party. And they could create scale economics and sort of create this much better customer experience in the used car market.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make sure it's just a little bit. And stylistically, I think on this point, I've learned a fair amount from people like Bill Miller and another good friend of mine is Quincy Lee, who's done some of this over the years, being able to sort of migrate in and out different styles. Even Charlie Munger, you know, when I spoke with him, she's done this to a certain degree. He had his large Costco holdings, but he also bought something like Teneco in the early 2000s, which was a distressed auto supplier, you know, not a good business, but he was able to buy it at a very low price and sort of participate in this big outcome. In terms of Carvana, you know, the story there really began when I was working with Lou because we were shareholders of Carmax. And I think at one point we owned around 5% of Carmax equity. And I still remember being in Chicago, you know, walking down.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'll preface this by saying my preference is always for a large holding in something where the risk of impairment is basically deemed remote. And I would prefer the whole portfolio to just be you can participate in a tax-deferred way in low risk compounding for many years. You know, that's much better. Every once in a while, you may find something where you can have potentially the same impact as a large successful position, but even when the position size, the starting position size is sort of immaterial. And I will occasionally own something where you have a smaller position and it's deemed to be highly asymmetric. Warren Buffett has his rules of investing about don't lose money, don't forget rule number one. And I might add in a little addendum in there that says if you must lose, if you may lose money, just make sure it's not that much.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have enormous respect for those who come before you. But usually you have to learn the hard way that investment judgment is deeply personal. And I noticed that all the time, even with people that share in almost identical philosophy, where it's like we're finishing each other's sentences in many cases, we still end on disagreeing all the time about specific businesses and position sizing and how to weigh certain kinds of risks with a specific company. And so investment judgment is deeply personal. And I think Carvana is probably one example of this.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But on the other hand, if you isolate yourself completely, you risk missing important perspectives and you risk falling in love with your own ideas, creating an echo chamber. And so I try to live in that kind of in-between place, you know, what in Buddhism they might call the middle way where you're open to receptive, but at the end of the day, you're trusting your own judgment and your own instincts. And so One of the most helpful evolutions on that point is letting go for me was letting go of what might call investor idol worship. Because when you're just starting out, it's very natural to sort of subjugate your own intellect because people that you respect, you put them on a pedestal to assume that becomes their famous because they have a great track record and manage a large fund. You know, they must know better. And of course it's good to have.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, first of all, I'll say, you know, I'm incredibly grateful to have a small circle of friends in this work, people that I respect enormously, not just for their talent. Some are peers, others are mentors. And having a circle like that can be incredibly valuable. It gives you access to thoughtful perspectives. It can create a healthy intellectual tension. It sharpens your own thinking. But like we were just saying, like almost everything investing this one, there's a paradox to manage. Meaning if you rely too heavily on a network, you risk groupthink, can you risk outsourcing your judgment? And that robs you of the conviction that you need when markets become volatile. And I always think of that old Templeton line where he says the best, I think he says the best performance is produced by a person, not by a committee.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of these questions, you sort of learn that you need both and you need them in some kind of harmonious proportion, which only intuition can tell you how much of each you need. And so with something like building an investment firm, it's really, of course, you need some capital to start. So you can't just go off and start, especially when you're young in most cases. But if you spend all your time doing that, then your actual investment performance will suffer. And so there's this line that needs to be found between the two. Another one is to have a network versus to be independent. That's another classic divergent problem that one has to solve when they're in this investment business.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you should give the children immense freedom so they can explore and nurture their own interests. And another group of people might say, no, you need discipline. You actually need rigorous discipline and following the rules. And that's how they'll learn. And so at the extremes, you've created a divergent problem where the answer to how should you educate our children is either freedom or discipline. And you're sort of on two different ends of the spectrum. And I'm not sure that this idea is all that new. I think Aristotle said it best when he said that every virtue is in the middle of two vices. But so much of investing sits at this point. To your point about urgency versus patience, about working hard versus letting go about trust versus skepticism, concentration versus diversification, you know, generalist versus specialist.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in Guide for the Perplexed, she talks about the difference between convergent problems and divergent problems. And a convergent problem would be like one where the solutions to the question increasingly converge on a single answer. So classic example would be, you know, how should we create a two-wheeled human powered means of transportation? And so people will put solutions forth and increasingly you'll learn that it's the bicycle. And the bicycle has been the answer, the conversion answer for quite a long time. Diversion problems are different. Divergent problems are those where they don't converge on a single solution. In fact, many solutions become polar opposites. And the classic example here would be asking, you know, how should we educate our children? And so one group of people might say,”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it's a really tricky problem. And I think so many of these questions with investment, they are what's called a divergent problem. In the 1970s, there was this gentleman named E.F. Schumacher, and he wrote a few books that I really enjoyed over the years. Schumacher himself was actually a protege of John Maynard Keynes. And one of the books he wrote was called Smallest Beautiful. Another book that he wrote is actually called Guide for the Perplexed, which of course is a homage to the same title by Maimonides.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Across the street, we were actually cutting our prices. So you can imagine the very sharp Wall Street analyst is doing his channel checks and looking at what's going on in the stores. And he would find that this business doesn't have any pricing power because everywhere that Sam's Club's coming, they're cutting their own prices. So what kind of good business is Costco if they have to cut their own prices? But of course, these were all temporary dynamics. And Charlie's answer was that the product quality was improving. The management was ethical. You know, the culture was meritocratic. These are all root qualities that wouldn't ever have shown up in any spreadsheet or in any fancy research report. But the root qualities were what allowed him to own the stock for multiple decades and never get shaken out of it.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Company specific issues, including competition from folks like Sam's Club and Walmart. And the stock declined quite a lot. And it went from, I think, 50 times earnings in the late 90s down to 12 times earnings, somewhere in the early 2000s, maybe 2003, 2004. And I would, you know, very few investment firms would be able to hold a stock like that for the whole way. Because throughout that period, it's so easy to say, well, Sam's Club is going to come kill them and this business has low margins. And you can concoct all of these narratives to shake yourself out of the position. And I think what I once asked Charlie, what did he see that allowed him to own something like this for such a long period of time? And his answer, the first thing he did was actually remind me, don't forget that in markets where Sound Club was opening stores.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the high single digits, and all of that would sort of roll up with operating leverage. You'd get to mid teens, earnings per share compounding. And that sounds great. But what happened is that in the early 2000s, they realized that they sort of overshot on their ambition and they had to rein it in. So their store growth went down.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, Costco is an example that I find to be quite striking because Charlie bought the stock, I think, in the early 90s. And he held it until his death. You know, he held it for decades. And within that period, you could look and say, wow, I think the stock has compounded in the high teens for multiple decades. And so it was a wonderful outcome. There was a period, I think, between 2000 and 2010. where the stock didn't move at all. I think it was basically flat. And I wanted to understand this case because it's very few people would think of something like Costco flatlining for an entire decade. But really what happened was that they went into the late 90s and they were very ambitious. They thought they could grow new stores at 10 or 15 percent a year and their comps, their same store sales would grow.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. It's something that I like to spend some of my free time doing, which is to reverse engineer the great investments of the great investors. And not just those periods where things are going great, but I'm really keen to understand those long stretches of time where nothing happens. And it's hard for you to sit on your hands. And you start to see everything else going up and you start to think, you know, this, you know, my current companies are not doing so well and you get seduced by greener grass over there. And I think so much about holding a business for a long period of time is to be able to see what you have clearly. You know, Rumi has the quote where he says, to be able to look at the thorn, but also still see the rose. And so to have a balanced understanding of what you have and not to be swayed by these long periods of underperformance.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For a long period of time, you know, I think at one point it was more than 50% of the company was held by people on the inside. And that illiquidity and lack of promotionality creates a situation where the shares historically have traded with a fair amount of volatility. It was recently looking back at this and it was sort of interesting that the company has been public for around 10 years now. And over those 10 years, it's compounded quite nicely. I think the long-term compound return has been more than 30% a year for a decade. But over those 10 years, more than half of the trading days of those 10 years were spent in a drawdown of more than 20%. So it's like you hold this stock that's bouncing around in more than half of the time you're sort of experiencing this drawdown, which I think makes it quite difficult for.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's exactly right. And I think that part of, I may be just drawn to it because I notice when someone's doing special, they don't always have to go and broadcast it to Wall Street. And Appfolio certainly fits the bill there. You know, it's an extremely non-promotional culture. They don't provide long-term financial guidance. And that frustrates cell side analysts and many other funds because they basically want the company to do their work for them. They don't have Q&A on their quarterly calls, as you mentioned. The calls you can listen to one of their calls. It's like 10 minutes of prepared remarks. And then they say, all right, thank you very much. See you next quarter. And people are left like, you know, what happened? And for that reason, the stock has been largely misunderstood by the market for years. And the shares have also been closely held by a handful of long-term owners.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their potential for pricing power. And as they add these features, they can charge a small sliver of the value created. And as you grow in the market, the vertical software business is such that you gain a reputation. There's what's called referenceability, which allows you to gain incremental market share. When someone's making a purchase decision, they're usually calling over to a friend of theirs in the industry and saying, what do you use? And they say, oh, I use App Folio. And so the product becomes kind of the standard in the market increasingly as you get bigger. And as long as you're treating customers well, you have these relationships for a long time. And so it's really a win-win sort of ethos and allows them to reinvest capital for the next decade.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It touches, it creates an incredible stickiness and it sort of enjoys this center of gravity in the real estate market. That stickiness when you have customers for 10 years, 20 years in many cases, many privately held software companies will take advantage of that stickiness by cutting costs, by stopping the innovation, by leveraging off the balance sheet, jacking up prices. But Appfolio's ethos, it's sort of embodies a partnership approach. It's by far the most customer-oriented culture in the market. And to be in a position like that allows them to take a much longer term view. So they tend to add functionality that is impactful for the customer. And because they're sitting in the middle of all these workflows, they can continuously develop new features and functionality that's increased.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the real estate industry. So it saves property managers a lot of time. It reduces the need for labor. It just simply makes their lives easier. And the product allows you to fulfill many tasks, whether it's collecting rents or screening the tenants or scheduling maintenance or executing a lease. And because it sits in the middle of all these workflows and the employees that the property management”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Long lived. So that excludes all kinds of things from the funnel. I tend not to buy things just because they look statistically cheap. These ideas that they seem like they'll be okay just for the next few years, but they'll likely face some kind of existential threat over the next few years. So I won't buy a melting ice cube regardless of valuation. I won't buy bad business models or people that I don't believe are aligned or talented. Some people can do this well. Some investors can do this well. I'm not one of them. Now in terms of the long duration reinvestment, I think something like Appfolio is a good example of that. It's a business that sells software to real estate property managers. And ultimately, the product is a significant entropy reduction.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Charlie said it best where the longer you hold something, the closer you will get to the intrinsic reinvestment return of the business. And so if you intend to own something for a very long time, it's imperative that the business itself is generating high returns. Not to say that it's generating high returns on a reported basis, but it has an ability to reinvest at high returns. Because if you're just throwing off cash and you have to either dividend it out or buy back stock, it's not intrinsically compounding the business. So I'm looking for businesses that have this intrinsic ability to compound capital over time. And so I basically won't buy things or add to things unless I'm convinced that the direction of the future economics, the direction of the compounding of intrinsic value is”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“create alignment across that ecosystem, the odds of compounding, the odds of a good outcome, I think, are dramatically improved.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is just the output. So in the case of roommate, I wanted to emphasize that this is a performance-oriented partnership. It's not about raising capital. It's not about having a good couple of years. It's about compounding capital for multiple decades. And I'm thinking in a quite long time horizon when I make investments. And what that means is that you also have to find businesses where the managers of those businesses have a similar orientation. So if you can align that time horizon and that sense of patience and that goal over across the ecosystem, whether it's Bruce Flatt at Brookfield is thinking about the next 20 years. And then Rumi is thinking about the next 20 years and Rumi's limited partners are thinking about the next 20 years. If you can.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you very much. And the concept of alignment is another root quality that can't be quantified and it can't be measured. What happens in the investment world is that we try to set up rules and heuristics to sort of force alignment. So they'll say, you know, what percentage of the company does the CEO own? Sure, you know, if they own a lot of stock, that's great, but not necessarily. I think for certain kinds of companies, certain kinds of people, the output doesn't matter so much. Like if Warren Buffett owned a little less Berkshire Hathaway stock, I don't think his behavior would change all that much. If you gave him some big incentive plan to incentivize him to compound, I don't think it would change his behavior that much. So alignment is something that, you know, I think it's best done. You have to sort of embody it first and then the output of that.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're so serene, you know, not to say that it's always comfortable to watch your account balances declining, but it was about as easy as you might expect because you felt this alignment across the ecosystem that just made things much more seamless. And I suspect if I would have raised a lot of institutional capital out of the gate, that probably some percentage of that capital would have left during one or these periods and maybe that experience would have been uncomfortable and you would have felt like you disappointed people and that sort of thing. And I think his advice to just focus on producing a good outcome for the people who trust you was wise.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His main focus was to his main advice to me was to focus on producing results rather than doing a lot of the things that you're told you should be doing, like getting a fancy office and putting together a pitch deck and running around and trying to raise money from all these people. I'm so grateful that he gave me that advice because the first couple of years gave me so much space that I think benefited both in the process but also the relationships with the people that did invest with me from day one. And I started roomy not too long before COVID and not too long before another decline in 2022. And the experience of these periods”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For a long time. And it's this idea that if you can help more people, of course, that's intrinsically better. It's something I spend so much time wrestling with because what greater fulfillment is it than to be of service to people that you have real relationships with? From that perspective, it's like the more the merrier. But there's always this balance that is this counterbalance to be mindful of. And I don't think that you can scale close real relationships infinitely. The moment that you stretch something beyond its natural equilibrium, I think it exacts a payment from some part of your life, whether it's your work, whether it's your personal life. And stretching something can dilute what makes it work in the first place. And it's something that I just continue to think about.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT