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

“When we have new people come here, at least on the investment side of the firm, we have them do case studies on their old firms. And we learn, I'd say like little anecdotes that could lead to the possibility of a culture becoming toxic. And all these people have had great experiences at their firm, so they don't come in and just do these scathing case studies on their old firms. It's just like lessons learned and insights that they've had. One of the individuals said at my old firm the minute that we hired a head of HR, when we looked back on that, we said, you know, that's when the culture changed a little bit. And to me, that's always a lesson that stand out. And I don't want to lead anyone to believe that we don't have HR functions here. We have people that do typical HR functions. But when you hire someone to be the head of HR, what do you do? You start outsourcing, I think, very important duties as a leader. You know, if I suddenly need to let somebody”
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 truth of what's going on relationally within the firm. People are going to flee very quickly as they should, as they should. That was the main one. The other one that was really important, a lot of firms fail when the founders want to move on. When you have a firm that's worth, let's say a billion or two billion dollars, the difficulty of transitioning ownership from the founding generation to the second generation or third generation is overwhelming because the founders usually want to get a market multiple for what they've done and they've spent their life doing it. It's kind of reasonable, but the firms that have failed have been the ones that have taken on massive amounts of debt in order to finance the buyout of the founder. And that's fine as long as everything's going well. But when it's not, inevitably the younger people who have all the debt, then you start toying with their”
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
“We had to do a lot more slew thing by talking really to former employees of a lot of organizations. And the preponderance of the evidence to us was that when those tough times came, the true culture revealed itself. And the true culture in most firms where we have a bunch of high performance, highly educated, highly compensated people tends to be a little toxic. And so when that bad performance came, inevitably portfolio management teams turned on each other. Portfolio managers started pointing out who made the mistakes on the portfolio. And there started to be divisions among the team to the point where even one firm that's fairly well known divided its portfolio management team between institutional and mutual fund money because they actually couldn't get along. And as you might imagine, that was a death blow to the institutional business because as soon as you show”
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
“So, if these couple of managers that went through what you did weren't responding to you, and then when you did reach out to one, he said next to nothing that helped, how did you go about learning what these other firms did?”
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 know how we're going to get out of this. I'm so grateful that we've got good people around us because we're going to have to figure this out together.”
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
“Jumped on an airplane. I'll never forget I stayed at the Ritz-Carlton. I had no business staying there because we didn't have enough money to stay at a Ritz-Carlton. Stay at the Ritz-Carlton downtown Wall Street and was incredibly excited thinking, you know what? I'm coming to the mountain. I'm going to get a great inspirational speech on how to keep the lights on. So we met at a restaurant for about an hour and a half. I kept asking questions, but he kept talking about himself. And he never, in the whole conversation gave me anything that would give me any hope that we were able to keep the lights on going forward. Now never forget that because I was already depressed. And then when I left that meeting, I went into a downward spiral that lasted about a month. I jumped back on the plane. I came out to California and I said,”
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
“Losing $4 billion worth of assets and getting down to as little as $800 million, we had a $6 million revenue stream. We were barely keeping the lights on. We had about 20 people. And in my despair, and I was in despair, I actually called up a manager back on the East Coast, well-known value manager, who had written something in a publication that talked about being a value manager when we went through 97, 98, 99 during the tech boom, and we underperformed horrifically, we lost almost 70% of our assets. And by losing 70% of our assets, our firm was on the brink of going out of business. And I remember thinking to myself, oh my gosh, this guy is going to help me navigate how to get through this. So I called him up and to his credit, he said, look, yeah, I'd be happy to meet with you.”
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
“Along with just a few billion dollars under management. And what I found, and this is actually a funny story, one day Mike comes into my office and he said, you know what you ought to do, Paul? You ought to literally get on the phone with the founder of every failed money management firm that we can find and ask him why their company failed. Now think about that. You've got some high performance people that have done very well in their life. And are they going to want to talk to me about the mistakes that they made? And the answer to that is, no, they're not. I probably called four different founding CEOs of companies. I'd get their secretary. I'd say, hey, Paul Black from WCM, love to talk to Mike, and I talk to Mike or Jim. And they'd say, let me get back to you. They'd put me on hold. And then they come back. I'm sorry, Jim's not available right now. That happened time and time again. Again, there was this one time when we were in the depths of despair after.”
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, that was a lot of it because, as you know, Ted, we bought the original founder out in 1998 when there were $200 million in assets. And the firm had been founded 22 years before, and it was run by an individual who really didn't get the importance of culture, much more dictatorial, much more top-down. I can't overemphasize the importance of that lesson to what we've tried to do here to make it very, very different in a much healthier culture. But some of the lessons we learned really quickly is everyone talks about culture, especially today. But the time when you really see whether the culture is healthy or not is when performance suffers and inevitably performance is going to suffer in a money management firm. And I can tick off at least six or seven companies that have been $100 billion companies and literally half of those are out of business today and the other half are struggling.”
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 guys always talk a lot about culture It's important in how you're looking at companies, it's important in WCM. When you circle back to that inflection point 10 years ago and thinking about what you saw in other firms that didn't work, what was it that got you to culture outside of Paul, your old original experience in the old WCM”
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
“Lot of time exploring those new fields of compounding knowledge to see if there's new sources of alpha that we can go after. And so it's changed, but it's changed in evolution in terms of the things that we really know are important.”
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
“Positive mode trajectory no longer sort of works or no longer makes sense. It's the effort to continue to find new investment frameworks to identify growing modes or new ways of assessing culture. And that's what I mean in terms of iteration and continuous improvement and constantly get better. It's just finding new tools and techniques to apply those same philosophical principles to the companies that we're looking at. And then also leaving open the possibility that there could be something else that ultimately becomes a huge source of alpha outside of those two things. We're pretty upfront about the fact that over time, and sometimes you may see this a little bit with what's happened in growth investing and how many people now talk about owning compounders and things like that, that to some extent motor trajectory may not be the significant advantage 10 years from now that it was 10 years ago. And so we're doing a lot of things internally. We have something now called the WCM Artist Studio, which is effectively an R&D lab that we're building inside the research team that's going to spend a lot of 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
“I think the other thing to your question that comes to mind is when we talk about change, I want to be clear about this, there are certain things that we hold pretty near dear. The view of culture and moat trajectory, running focus portfolios, there's certain philosophical pillars of our process that we would never expect to just wake 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
“Years and they might only get it right once, but they're massively rewarded by the marketplace for doing that. It's not the same. You can't survive nineteen failures on the money management side and then come back and say, I finally got it. It's taken me 10 years, but now I got it. You've already burned all your equity and you've burned all your relationships. You know, to your point, Ted, I think it's really interesting that we had a whole different client base with the domestic strategy than we ultimately had with the international strategy because we could not go back to the consultants and the allocators that we had raised money for on the domestic side and then turn around and say, hey, I know we got that wrong, but we're really going to be good over here on the international side. So we had to completely pivot how we actually launched and sold the international and global strategy.”
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
“Actually, because we've put up really good numbers, they're fine with that. If we had not been putting up good numbers and then we said we wanted to continue to evolve and change, they'd say, well, your process that you currently have isn't working. So why would I want you to improve or change? Right. I've never actually seen an industry that penalizes change more than the money management industry. The whole notion is you have a philosophy, you have a process, you've been doing it for 10 years, theoretically your numbers are good. Why would you change anything? The concern is if you change the process or the philosophy that you're likely to underperform. And it's very, very different, let's say from the tech industry or the healthcare industry where change and innovation is rewarded. If you talk about tech companies, they might be on their 20th iteration of an idea they've been trying to develop for 10 years.”
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
“Unfortunately, we have some phenomenal clients that have really, really bought into this idea that there is an iterative nature to our investment process and that it gets better over time. So the way we think about Moe trajectory, the way we think about culture, the backward-looking work we do, the case studies we do, the investment process, and we ask people to hold us accountable. Like if you're meeting with us a year from now and we're not telling you some new novel things that you've never heard, there's something wrong.”
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
“Curious, this evolution to start with large cap growth domestically turned to internationally this idea of getting better and embracing change is something that conceptually makes a lot of sense. But when you're externally talking to clients, clients generally don't like change. And I'm curious, how have you over the years effectively either trained or communicated with your clients so that they know that you might not be the same a year from now, two years from now?”
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
“Change this element of the process, or there's just so much angst over trying new things, people worried that we're going to look stupid if we do something and it doesn't work. And so as much as there's external pressures that you have to combat, they're just as intense internally as well.”
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
“Is the reason, and it's certainly a question that we ask today, is it now a $100 billion plus asset manager? How do we not repeat the same script that you've seen a million times, Ted, with other managers that have experienced a period of success and then they get built up to be something really exceptional? And then five or ten years later, people have either forgot about them or they're kind of a butt of a joke or something. And I think that unwillingness to change or adapt is a big reason for that. What I've experienced through my journey at WCM is not only do you have to convince your people on the outside, there's also internal pressures. And there are all sorts of stories we could tell you about us wanting to push the envelope in terms of changing and evolving, and you just bump into a lot of resistance from people internally where it's like, oh my gosh, like you guys want to do this now? Like, why? We're having so much success. You really want to.”
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 know just to sort of pile on here, I'm often surprised by how little time allocators explicitly really try to dig into a firm's culture. It's oftentimes not even the first or the second thing that somebody brings up. They want to talk about process. They want to talk about philosophy. They want to talk about The numbers, risk management, your screens, things like that, and it's this culture is oftentimes the last thing. But I wonder if just kind of a failure to adapt.”
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 isn't about change, that isn't about trying to get better, and isn't trying to think different. And, you know, the only way that you can do those is if there's this incredible amount of trust within the investment team and the organization, the trust to believe that we're going to figure this out, we're going to get better, and the results will eventually come.”
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 here's the truth. The reality is you can't think different or get better in this industry if you're just thinking conventionally. Because really, as I wrote about in the paper why money managers fail, one of the main reasons they fail is because when mistakes are made, people want to point fingers and blame. And you can't get better if you don't try to learn from your mistakes. So we have made every mistake in the book in the early years. And we actually used it as an opportunity to try to figure out the solution to the investment equation. And by doing that, we stumbled upon the idea around really how different competitive advantages need to be evaluated. And then the importance of a corporate culture. Those are all things we kind of intuitively knew, but we also knew because of our failures with the domestic portfolio that we had to pivot and do something very different. You can't do that in an organization.”
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 we need to keep the pedal down on that. And then getting better was we knew we had gotten so much better as a result of the mistakes that we had made with the domestic strategy that Paul was just talking about. And there's certainly, I think, an orientation amongst lots of us within the firm about continuous improvement and that just being power wired as people. But we knew that while we had gotten better and we had learned from our mistakes, and that was a reason that we were still able to have enough money to rent a hotel room to have this conversation that we couldn't stop that, that we had to continue to really press on getting better. And so we codified that or we just made that a very explicit part of how we wanted to behave. But those two things were less about, hey, that's a platform that we can plug people into and continue to create a lot of value and make people the best version of themselves. That's what it is today. But at the time, it was just 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
“As a research team sat in a hotel conference room seven or eight years ago, and we asked the question, okay, what's really going to make WCM different from an investment or from a research point of view, we arrived at think different and get better. But the reasons that we came up with those two ideas were really kind of a reflection of the experience that we had just gone through. The firm sort of evolving from a domestic focus to international and particularly an emphasis on growth within the non-US space, people sort of forget now, but back in 2007, 8, 9, 10, 11, that was still sort of an under-allocated.”
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
“Other part of that story, though, that I didn't tell was really how we actually came up with that. I mean, to some extent, the so-called WCM platform, which I just described, the way we frame that today sort of came later. The reality is when we...”
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 thing I would add is when we talked last. We talked about the core values of WCM on the research team, think different and get better. When we talk about them today, I often describe them as sort of the antidote for what's wrong with the industry. We talked about the lawn feedback loops and investment management and how that leads to a set of suboptimal behaviors, a lot of groupthink, a lot of fear of failure or career risk. And so people as a result. Afraid to stand out or do something different, or they're afraid to admit vulnerabilities or weakness in areas that they need to get better. And so we feel like by building a set of behaviors or values and really encouraging people and making it a safe place for people to think different and get better, we feel like we've found the solution for what's wrong with a lot of active managers.”
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
“Get pretty conventional and pretty average returns. So it was at that point, and actually adding Mike to the equation where he came over from Morningstar, that we began to wrestle with that whole idea of what is important with a competitive advantage. And part of that was it wasn't about the absolute size. It was about the direction of that competitive advantage. As we started working that out more and more, we started having greater and greater success.”
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'll start with that. You know, when we started the domestic growth strategy back in 1999, we were very conventional in our thinking. We did what everybody else in the business does buy those big large cap companies that are high quality. They have huge competitive advantages. And we were trying to buy them at a discount to intrinsic value. And that worked for a little bit until it didn't. And when it didn't work, what we realized is that we had camped too hard on trying to find really cheap companies. It's interesting. The mistakes that we made with the domestic strategy really helped us when we launched the international strategy because that whole notion, and we've talked about this before, of buying wide moat businesses cheaply, I think is flawed today because everybody's trying to do the same thing. So the reality is we found that if we just keep doing what the conventional wisdom says you should do, we're probably going to get...”
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
“Say that while that is true An unconventional approach. So, Mike, when he came on the show last year, talked about thinking differently, what is it about how you've gone about this relative to the industry that's really made it work?”
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
“Remember, you can't look at the founders of the firm for any help because the loss that occurred from $4 billion to under a billion dollars in assets in the U.S. growth strategy put them into PTSD so they were no help at all. That's how you do 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
“Part you decide one money management portfolio manager probably doesn't work for this. Let's add somebody else. So you add an inexperienced portfolio manager to the team. So now you have two people that have never run international strategies in their life. They have no portfolio management experience. And just for fun, you add a third person who drops out of Columbia Business School because they didn't feel like they were learning anything different who is thinking, I'm going to leave the industry and actually start a hamburger stand. You add him to the equation. And then you know what you do is you literally say, okay, you've got literally a million dollar portfolio running here. Why don't you go out and sell it institutionally across the board? So they go on the road, they start showing up, they build a five-year track record. That five-year record's phenomenal, but even after five years, we literally had $3 million in the portfolio. And just for fun.”
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 where you start is with a $4 billion firm. And running a large cap U.S. domestic portfolio, you underperformed dramatically for five years. You get fired by pretty much all of that $4 billion in assets. And the interesting thing is you make sure you don't fire any of your good young talent because you do want to live to fight another day. But you take the income hit all at the principal level. And then you have an operations guy come up to you and say, you know, I was thinking about what we were doing in U.S. large cap growth. Why don't we launch, since it was so successful in US, why don't we launch an international large cap growth strategy? Now, mind you, the gentleman who came up to us was in operations, had zero investment experience, spent time in the industry selling garlic boxes in Gilroy, California, but he had this idea that we thought, hey, you know, we've got nothing to lose right now. Let's try that. So we put him in place. And here's the interesting.”
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
“So, this is kind of amazing. I know, Paul, since you last came on, W. Sandwich, this relatively little known $25 billion firm. And I know a couple months ago you wrote a piece about how to build $100 billion firm. I thought it'd be interesting to get your take on what it took for WCM to get there.”
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
“Cultures, hiring practices, telling the truth, integrating new team members, managing turnover, and transitioning leadership to the next generation. Please enjoy this fascinating conversation about how to build a hundred billion dollar money manager with Paul Black and Mike Trigg from WCM. Paul, Mike, great to see you guys.”
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