YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Black

lines on the record: 84
first: 2025-10-27
most recent: 2025-10-27
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

“In my professional life, I never quit. I never, ever stop because I've so regretted doing that one time when I was in college.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the same answer that I gave to the prior question, which is keep showing up because I did not keep showing. The one time in my life I didn't keep showing up. I have regretted for 35 years that I didn't finish it out and see where it might have gone. It was actually a pretty decent college football player, Division I. When I got to the team, they were ranked 16th in the nation. And I played a year and then realized I didn't really love it as much as I used to love it. I was fairly gifted in terms of talent. And I've always wondered, I ended up leaving my senior year and I've always wondered what would have happened if I would have given it everything I had for at least 12 more months. And I short-circuited myself. And it's one of those things I've always regretted. But you know what? What's come out of that is...”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The importance of just balance in your life, I think, is something that I've really learned to appreciate, particularly probably in the last few years. It can't be all about work all the time. And I know in my life, and I've certainly experienced this with people around me too, when people don't have balance in their life, you drive the people around you crazy. I've certainly done that. You get in your head about some issue or something at work and then you, it's the typical thing you think about when you can't sleep in the middle of the night, then you wake up in the morning, you're like, I can't believe I didn't sleep for three hours because of that stupid thing. And I think you have fewer of those kinds of moments when you have a lot of balance in your life. And I would conclude spirituality as another key component that's really helped me understand the importance of what really matters the most at the end of the day. And a lot of these little things, they're outside your control and you can't do anything about it and you need to just show up.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really the idea around keep showing up. Now, it's interesting. I just kind of naturally did that. I have multiple examples of where I need to keep showing up in order to ultimately have success. But yeah, my parents were all about, hey, you just keep showing up every day. And you know what? Eventually something good will happen. And that is just my life just defines that. There were so many times I could have quitted something. But the fact that I kept showing up and doing good things each and every day has been remarkable for me.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think not to judge, not to be judgmental, to try to understand that we're all flawed individuals at the end of the day. I've made certainly my fair share of mistakes. Your parents extends you grace and forgiveness and to understand the power of that and then to be able to be in a position to in turn extend that to other people around you in your life I think is something that I think just is necessary to have a have a healthy, happy life.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“DCFs, Ted, you know this our business worships. At the modeling of discounted cash flows on businesses, and everyone thinks the magic is in the DCF and very, very little of the magic is there. That's just a tool, and that tool is only as good as the input. So from my perspective, I think there'd be a lot better asset managers out there if they would focus more on the business and the culture versus the valuation.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A hard one for me, Ted, because one, I would say 25 years ago I tried to quit the industry because I was a Bank of America and it was a very miserable time for me. I had a really good mentor and friend who walked me around a lake in Oakland and convinced me not to quit. If I had quit and went and become a camp counselor, I wouldn't be here at WCM doing something I absolutely love to do. I'm sorry to give you more people, but I'd throw Kurt Winrich in there for sure, Mike Trigg and Sloan Payne. These are all my partners. We have a leadership team that is second to none. There's just something magical about what we each bring to the equation, and they've all had massive impacts on my life.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“DCF models People that anchor to DCF models is by far my biggest pet peeve because I do believe back in the early days when we made mistakes, we spent an enormous amount of time on DCF models and we were precisely wrong by the way 10 years later.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By far lack of gratitude. We have so much to be grateful for. As Buffett said, you're born in America and won the lottery. You're in the money management firm, a great money management firm that's had a great deal of success. You should be incredibly grateful. And what to me, with gratitude comes responsibility, and that responsibility is making sure that you give back.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Watching Ted Lasso. I would say taking time every day to break out and try to just sit and be thoughtful about something that has to do in this case at work with the firm or being thoughtful about the portfolios and how their portfolios are being run. But I would say in general for me, it's just taking enough time each day to sit down and think about where are we going as a firm and what can we do to make sure the culture is healthier. There are a lot of aspects to that, but it's really just being still and quiet for a period of time to be able to think.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the best show on television. Love Ted Lasso. I also love reading investment books. I've probably read every single classic investment book. In fact, I'm reading one right now called Capital, written by Charlie Ellis about the Capital Group. Really one of the better investment books out there. If you're an asset manager and you want to know more about how to run a two and a half trillion dollar firm, read that book. So I like to read thoughtful books on the investment business, but first and foremost, watch Ted Lasso.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As an individual, if you have 14 people that are, that's their sole focus every day, you're going to go a lot further, faster than you could ever do if you were just focused on yourself. And so if we can continue to kind of preach that message and get people to live that out every day, then I think we're just going to have more examples of leadership and people just making situations, stuff that Paul and I will never see and ideas and situations will improve. And we can keep this going, I think, for a really long time.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this started from Kurt, and it's something that we have to carry on. It's really to get people to think about others more than themselves. And it's really difficult in the type of environment that most asset managers find themselves in. And the way I've tried to describe it to people in the past is like, okay, you've landed on the lily pad of investment management at WCM. You have nothing to worry about anymore. Let's relax. We've got your back. You can make mistakes here. We're going to support you. This should be your last job under most circumstances. And you can get people to really buy into that and believe you and trust you on that, then all that's really left to do is then focus on the other people around you. And if we can have, say, an investment team of 12 or 15 people where everybody walks in the door every day and their number one objective is to make everyone around them better.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Concept that makes situations in people as successful as they can be. And that's, I think, as we become more successful and there's more people that are having lots of success, I think one of the things that Paul and I talk about a lot is”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a scaling question how to continue to do More of what we have and create more leaders in the firm. I think that's a big focus of mine, things around equity and compensation, creating a lot of upward mobility for people, talking to them about the idea of being a steward of WCM and having an ownership mindset. One of my favorite things to do is to still write internal thought pieces that touch on maybe some of the behaviors and values that I think have been essential to our success. I wrote one last year called The Other Stuff, which talked about some of the unspoken core values of the firm like scrappiness and irreverence and humility. And then we're doing things to think about how to become better coaches and mentors. We started an advisory board that's sort of a group of people, a layer below our leadership team and spending more time with them and trying to groom them into the next set of leaders in the firm. For me, leadership is really just a pretty simple.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'll see him enough during the year, and we'll still get a lot of his wisdom. I just called him up the other day on a compensation issue saying, Kurt, you know, I know you really well, and I know you could go one of two ways on this. What do you think? That relationship will continue on. And that's where he's, you've got 35 years of wisdom that we can still tap into.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question as well. And it's interesting. The good news about Kurt stepping away, he's going to remain chairman of the board. So he will still be with myself, Mike, and Sloan at our leadership training retreats that we go to periodically throughout the year. We'll see him once a quarter for board meetings. And he's actually still going to stay engaged. It's funny. Here's the former co-CEO and chairman of WCM. You know what he loves to do? He loves to edit the quarterly newsletters and the quarterly updates that we do. That's what he loves to do. He's that guy that loves to be in the background. So he's going to continue to do quite a few things. He won't be in the investment strategy group anymore. But Kurt's influence is so ingrained in this firm today based on his love for people.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it sounds corny these days, but it's a living example of caring about other people more than yourself. And Kurt will tell you, he has been wildly overcompensated for the last 20 years, and he's happy to do it. So it starts by the core values of the person themselves.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kurt will tell you it is not all about him. It is not all about him. This firm was not built by Kurt Winridge. This firm was not built by Paul Black. This firm was not entirely built by Mike Trigg or Sanjay or Pete Hunkel. This firm is the collective efforts of a lot of people. Now you can argue, okay, hey, we were founders. We were there in the early days. We were there when we were trying to keep the lights on, when we were suffering performance from the domestic strategy. And there's some value to that. But ultimately, we know that we've all done extraordinarily well. We won the lottery and we don't need to get every last dollar off the table. I'd much rather leave something in Kurtz this way. He'd rather leave something to me and Mike and Sanjay and Pete and Sloane that endures and goes on than he would trying to get his last $100 million. It's a mindset and it's a life philosophy that really is about caring for others more than you care for yourself.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And nobody can afford to pay a market multiple for a $50 billion firm. And what's happening? The talent is leaving. They're losing PMs. They're losing top research analysts. That firm will be worth a fraction of what it once was because the founders aren't willing to be generous.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seven years he will receive his dividend every year for the next seven years, and then that will retire into treasury and it'll be accreted to everybody else. Now, the downside on that for Kurt, of course, is he could probably go out now and sell his 20% in the market for 10 times EBITDA. At the end of the day, if you're essentially selling it for seven times EBITDA, add an income tax level versus a capital gains tax level, he's actually receiving about four times EBITDA for shares that are worth an awful lot of money. So we've just concluded that if you want to keep this going, the founders have to be generous and the founders have to be willing to walk away with a much lower multiple than they otherwise would have made. And I think it's the best model that we found. There's a big company in London going through this very same thing where it's a $50 billion company. There are a couple of founders that want to cash out, but they want to market multiple.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously demonstrated the ability to add excess return to the portfolio or somehow move the needle on the profitability side. Now, as many people know, Kurt Winrich is retiring at the end of this year. He owns 20% of the company. Part of my work on other money management firms was trying to figure out the best way to transition Kurt's wealth that is literally worth hundreds of millions of dollars right now to the next generation. And we could sell 10% more to Mike, but Mike would have to borrow $200 million to do that. We could say, look, the firm will fund you, but you still have the overhang. What we concluded is the best way to transition wealth is the founders have to be generous. The founders ultimately have to take a significant haircut in order to make sure that the company continues to prosper. So we've chosen to basically sunset Kurt. That means for the next”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me go back a little ways. At one time, Kurt Winrich was the primary owner of the firm in 1998. He basically owned 100% of the company. Today, Kurt owns 20% of the company, and we went from basically one owner in Kurt to, I believe, at the end of this year, we're going to have 50 different owners in the firm. All those transitions of wealth have been done at book value within the company, which, you know, basically is the computers, the sofas, the desks, and the chairs. It's not very much. Kurt has deluded himself from essentially 100% down to 20%, all at book value. So there was really no money made by him on the transaction to dilute himself. Now, obviously, he owns 20% of $105 billion firm versus $100 of a $200 million firm. It's really worked out well for him. But that's been kind of our model across the board. We will grant shares to people that have”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really bringing me down. Well, as soon as that, then I finally wake up and I go, okay, it's time to move on. We ultimately let them go. So we're much better now. We will still build around weakness as long as it's not toxic and they're a good cultural fit, but we're getting much better at saying, you know what? It's probably better if you leave and go find something you're more suited to. Very hard decisions. And this is a people business and we care about people, but we do take that to the extreme sometime.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very difficult question for me to answer because the truth of the matter is when you look at the history, and certainly the last 20 years or so, my answer to that question would have been, Seven or eight times where I've just built around somebody that was weak, as long as, as Mike said, they weren't toxic to the culture. The moment they start bringing down your stars is the moment you've got to move. Now, classic example is we had a research analyst that was actually here before Mike was that Mike worked with for a lot of years and we kept trying to get him on board. Hey, we're going into international. We're moving more towards Mo trajector. We're moving more towards the important work on culture. And this individual is just completely committed to DCF modeling in wide moat businesses, right? This went on for five years. Every six months, I'd talk to him. I'd say, hey, you've got to really get on board. This is where we're going. This is what we're doing, but he had three kids and I didn't want to let him go. And eventually Mike came to me one day and he said, you know what? I'm really, really being brought down by this guy on a regular basis.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Encounter too many of those situations. But the funny thing is Paul and I actually had lunch with somebody a couple weeks ago and we were sort of chatting about this. I don't think people probably totally appreciate about leadership is oftentimes when you let someone go in your organization Paul or myself might have to be the one that has to do it. But you know what the reality is nine out of ten times your people tell you that that needs to get done before you actually have to make that decision yourself. And that's been, I think in almost every case, I can think of people coming and saying, I can't function as well as I was anymore because of this person. They're bringing me down or saying, hey, I know enough that this isn't the right situation anymore for the firm. It's not good for the firm. And then frankly, it becomes, okay, now I know I need to do something.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, those are never easy conversations. I think the truth is in our experience that it's really been cultural complications and bringing the people around you down that has ultimately led to us to say it's time to part ways. We give people an enormous amount. I mean, my own experience at this firm was, and I've said this before, it's not like I came into this firm and just started shooting the lights out. And so you go into it knowing that you need to give this person time and a long leash to make mistakes and make sure they understand it's okay to make mistakes. The important thing is that are you acknowledging them? Are you learning from them? Are you getting better from these mistakes? And making it clear to that person that hiding mistakes and you'll go further in this firm faster if you actually acknowledge that you've made mistakes. And so we do a good enough job, I think, on the front end to make sure we don't.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the types of people that are typically attracted to this industry. That's a hard concept for them to get their heads around. So, yeah. And then what's been great about someone like him is you've seen him sort of evolve into a leadership position where he's managing people and then he's going through his own challenges of somebody that may not originally be getting it and being patient and seeing that cycle play itself out again. And that's ultimately how we're trying to scale the whole thing.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really impressive background, but this is his third stop and is getting a little older. And I think in the back of his mind wondering, okay, what if this doesn't work out? And yet we're talking about all these things that, you know, he looks back at it now and laughs because he's like, how could I be wrestling with this culture thing when it actually explained, you know, why my prior two firms had struggled so much? Oftentimes what requires a lot of patience when people don't initially get why like caring can be a competitive advantage as you guys know I'm originally from Kansas City and a big Royals fan and there's this great quote by our president of baseball operations and he says, I tell people all the time there are a lot of smart people in baseball and we're just not going to outsmart them. We're not smarter than anyone else and we're not going to work harder than anyone else either. But we have to care more than anyone else. That's our best chance. We have to care more.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could go on the list of people on our team that honestly you hire people that have come from other firms in many cases in his case it had been a couple firms that had been difficult experiences and so he's on his”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to get the best out of people as a leader, you show vulnerability. If you show your vulnerability and your honesty about your life or what you're doing at this firm, people will respond to that and they will take it to another level. That's been our whole story, just open vulnerability from leadership. And you will get a lot more out of people than you could otherwise. I love the story, Mike, if we have time, if you can just tell them about Greg Eis. The first year he was here, he couldn't even understand this Moch trajectory concept. He couldn't understand the culture work. And he was actually ready to leave the firm, right? And you had to talk with him at one of the retreats, which by the way are the most powerful events that we consistently do because you get more out of people with little alcohol and a little fun than you're going to get out of them otherwise. But I love his transformation”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think a bit of a splash of cold water in Paul's face at that time. And I think I got the outcome out of that that I was looking for, which was to get him Get him focused again. And the only reason I'm really telling you that story is then that Paul then on his own, and I actually said this at the end of the conversation, he goes, you know what? You just helped me make my speech to the entire firm. And so then Paul on the first night of that retreat basically got up and told that exact same story to the entire firm. And it was just like showing that kind of vulnerability and practicing it day in and day out is really difficult, but it's the only way that you can continue to help new people. We can talk all about old stories. And there's a little bit of, I always wear there's a little bit of like the Abraham Lincoln when I was your age. I walked eight miles to school there and back every single day type of thing. But then when you can also show that in the moment examples of what the leaders are going through to keep this thing going and keep it pure and keep it the”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An understanding of why we do things the way that we do that's really the only way we're going to be able to scale the culture beyond the core group of people that have been here for a long time. So it's a lot of storytelling, but it's also in the moment vulnerability and openness as well. We had our retreat this year, took the whole firm to a ranch up in Montana. And Paul and I had there was a bunch of stuff going on in advance of that retreat. At one point, Paul had been asking me a bunch of questions about things that happened absolutely nothing to do with WCM. And at one point, I took him outside onto one of our patios and I just, I was tearing up and I said, would you just stop it with all these questions about this real estate deal that you're thinking about doing up in, I don't know, was it? Idaho or something. And I said to him, I go, this firm is a gift.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think before we even think about indoctrinating them in our investment philosophy, I think the hardest thing is to indoctrinate them in our way of doing things and our culture. And I love telling this story. But when we were first coming out of our abyss, I guess we started to have, we do a lot of retreats with our different teams and with our whole firm. Paul would inevitably get up and he'd start crying at these things. And at one point, I was like, would you just stop it, you know? I'm like, listen, like we're rebuilding this thing. Like, stop getting up there and like talking about the past and crying. Let's go, man. And I have done a complete 180 on that because, and I've acknowledged that I was wrong about that. And the reason is because it's those stories and explaining them to people over and over again and letting them understand where we've come from and giving them.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About our firm, particularly as we get bigger about is it family, is it friends? And I'm kind of gravitating more towards this notion of just being a group of friends that deeply care about each other because I think it still speaks to that desire and that need to go the extra mile and be there for one another.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A sister, but don't mistake the fact that I'm saying that we're friends to mean that we can't still deeply care about each other. In fact, I have always said that a group of friends, some people have said, well, if you're all friends, nobody's going to want to hold each other accountable and you're going to just be having fun all day and messing around. And I said, it's actually the exact opposite. My experience in my life with my friends has been that I don't want to let my friends down. If I have a boss who's a complete pain in the ass and he treats me terribly or she treats me terribly, what I probably not lose sleep over the fact that I didn't really go the extra mile for that person. Yeah, probably. Yeah, if I didn't like the person, I probably wouldn't bother me that much. But, you know what? If it was a friend of mine who really cared about me, who was really invested in me, who'd gone the extra mile for me? Yeah, I don't want to let that person down. And so we're having a little bit of an internal discussion even today.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things we've wrestled with recently is in the past, I think we've been quick to sort of describe WCM as a family. And actually Toby Ludge, the founder and CEO of Shopify, which is an investment of ours, had actually a great internal memo that got leaked last year that talked about and clarified the fact that Shopify is not a family. And it really resonated with me while I thought the same thing about the firm in the past. I really view this to be just a group of people that really care about each other, but a group of friends more than a family. I mean, the reality is we're all born with an own family. You've got a mother, you've got a father, you've got siblings, you've got children. That's your family. It's like, you can't really do anything about it one way or the other. But being a WCM really is a voluntary exercise. No one's forced to be here. I mean, I have the choice not to have a brother or...”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we're getting far better at it, and we're at that point now where if you don't do it with 75 people, you're going to have a lot of more issues across the board because not telling someone the truth affects other people in the organization in a negative way.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working 10 years ago. Let's just be truthful about that. And those are discussions that were increasingly have because we almost feel like we've gone too far, frankly, on the caring for people side. And we haven't gone far enough on, look, part of caring for people is telling the truth and being candid, and that's not going to be as fun for you. But you know, we're going to be really better for it at the end of the day. I mean, Mike, if you want somebody to tell the truth to you, then work with Mike Trigg. Mike Trigg tells me the truth very candidly all the time. And most of the time I accept it really well and I work really hard to change either my behavior or not my attitude because I have a great attitude, but mostly my behavior and how I interact with other people. It's a work in progress and it's very difficult. Caring's easy, I think, for us as an organization. Truth telling, which we're working on, is much more difficult.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting question because it is not a natural part of the firm. It's something we're really wrestling with now because we've been very, very good at caring for our people. To me, if people really know they're cared for and that we would go to bad form, and I've got a couple of terrific stories about that where we really have gone to bad for people initially, if people know you have their back and that you truly care for them as individuals and people, you're going to have, I think, a lot of success with that individual. But part of that, and this is the part that I'm trying to get better at too, is truth telling. It's having those hard conversations that say, you know what, I'm disappointed that you really haven't measured up in this particular situation. It's having that discussion, let's say, with a sales guy that, you know, you've made a lot of money. You've done really well. But are you working as hard today as you were?”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the other one, curiosity and a learning aptitude is just another really big one that I think has been consistent with our best hires. Because ultimately when you're hiring somebody, you're trying to project what they're going to be like in five years or 10 years and people that are just like when you talk to Mike Tian in this firm, you just are struck by the level of curiosity. And on a given year, the new things he's trying to learn from one year to the next. And I think that in being a highly self-aware person, I think are two of the really big things that have been consistent with successful people in our team.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a sense of humility is really important in this business, this idea that you don't know the answer to everything. If you're humble, you probably ought to keep grinding away at your task and trying to get smarter and better. And so humble, hungry, and smart. You've got to have smart people and smart people to us are not book smart. They're people that really have a really good sense, a really good common sense, and a really good intuitive feel for the business and for the markets. And so at the end of the day, I think our most successful hires have been people that have great attitudes and are really good cultural fits. And you can kind of suss that out over a period of time, but it takes time.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I was going to nut that out, Ted, I would say a couple of things. One, the single hardest position to hire foreign money management firm is research because at the end of the day, you don't know if that research analyst is really any good. Typically, they don't have a track record. They don't have an extensive body of work. And so I've found that our most successful hirings have been around people that have certain characteristics that I would say reflect a great attitude. Give me somebody with a great attitude that's reasonably smart, and I can probably work with them. And so, you know, there are really three characteristics that I would define in there. One is you really want somebody that's hungry, that has a lot of passion for investing, I think having passion for investing, maybe they were stock jockeys when they were 15 years old and they started, they got hooked on the business. That's a good thing because if they love what they do, right in those very difficult periods of time, they're going to stick with it.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone that we followed, we liked. It was very much, in a way, Paul's experience with me in the newsletter, just saying things that kind of resonated with you personally. And then ultimately, I think we figured out that he lived in London. We reached out to him, direct messaged him, turned out that he was actually doing really, really well in an investment management firm in London, and then just basically courted him to come to WCM. constantly trying to stick to that. We really tried not to use headhunters. We find that to be an unbelievably inefficient, very conventional process. We don't try to overweight background and pedigree in a big way. We've really tried to keep our standards exceptionally high. I think that's sometimes Paul would argue maybe I've kept them too high. But I think we've gotten a lot better at hiring over the years. I still find it to be the lead.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the thing that we have really stuck to since the beginning is looking for talent in unique places. Paul talked a little bit about the origins of how myself, Pete Hunkel, Sanjay Ayer, how we were all hired, all of which had relatively unconventional backgrounds. I was writing a newsletter at Morningstar. Sanjay had left business school. Pete had an operations background. In many respects, all of us are self-taught investors because we didn't go through a traditional training program at a large asset manager. And I think it's created the starting conditions for having people that just think differently and try to somewhat creative and curious. And so we've really tried to stick to that. We hired somebody two years ago that we actually originally found on Twitter. He had a Twitter handle under a fake name.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there's a single marker of a toxic culture. When an allocator would sit down with us, it was quite often actually that you can just see there's a chemistry, there's a love, there's an admiration, there's a lightheartedness, there's a self-deprecating nature to the way we interact with one another. I can't imagine that if a firm had a toxic culture that you would see that, and that's feedback we've gotten that just, wow, like instantaneously that people would say to us, wow, the chemistry between you guys is just something that we've never seen before. I think we've told that story in the past about many, many years ago visiting Whole Foods and talking to the founder of Whole Foods, John Mackey, and expressing to him the feeling that Paul and I had upon walking into their offices and his response to us was, yeah, that's because there's an absence of fear here. And I think that that's something that has always resonated with us. It's something that's kind of hard to put your finger on.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love it because it keeps me connected to people and I see people all the time. And they always stop by and they say a few things. And I get to ask a few questions. In my office, by the way, is about six feet by six feet large. So it's not a big office, but it is a thoroughfare that everybody walks through every day at least 30 or 40 times.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the inside, obviously, but then there's also a door to go out to the alley behind our building, which actually leads you over to the research team. And it's just become sort of like a throughway, basically. Everyone just loves, rather than walk around the corner and going through the front door when you go over to the main building, myself and probably 30 other people in this firm just prefer to go in that door. If it was me, I'd probably hate it, frankly, if I had 50 people coming in and out of my office every day just to say hi for two seconds and walk through. But like Paul actually loves it. We didn't even design that actually when we did it, but it was one of those things and you've never...”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other really critical things like skill, talent, cultural fit, judgment, the other really sort of key criteria that go into making good hiring decisions. And then another one that I just love that we tell a lot is there was a firm that many people had told us they were very similar to WCM. They were a growth manager, concentrated funds, employee-owned. And the founder of that firm, his favorite thing to do was to every day he wanted to empty the dishwasher in their kitchen of their office. And that was kind of his way to stay in touch with people and people rotating it out of the kitchen and say hi to them. And one day a couple people came into the kitchen as he was doing this. He had no idea who they were. They look back and say, yeah, that was maybe in hindsight, maybe a turning point in the culture of the firm. And so trying to be very successful, I mean, the wonderful contrast to that here is that Paul's office, there's a door to access his office.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go. I'm not going to go do that. Or if I do have a difficult conversation with somebody on the team that did something that is an issue, oh, have the head of HR go do that, right? And so you create more bureaucracy and layers between you and your people and you suddenly, I don't know, you just lose a level of closeness to the organization that I think can potentially be really, really bad. When companies get really big and they suddenly have all their resources in the world and they can hire anybody they want, we've heard lots of examples of firms. What do you do? You just go straight for pedigree. All the people that you could never hire back when you were a billion dollar asset manager and you could only pay people $150,000 a year, you go hire all those other people now that you can afford them, right? And you stop and pedigree is one of those things. It's like the easiest thing to identify and track, whether it's like background or education. This is the most visible thing, which is why it's the most overrated, probably, in terms of like.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source