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Ramtin Naimi

lines on the record: 145
first: 2025-07-29
most recent: 2025-07-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I wanted to find a way to start getting more ownership in these deals while still being collaborative because I still had no name at this point in Silicon Valley and arguably whether I have much of a name today. But back then, definitely nothing. What I wanted to figure out is the founders that I wanted to work with wanted those firms on the cap table. So there is no world in which I was saying it's Miriam Driesen, who are you going to go with? Because I was going to lose that 10 times out of 10. But what I started understanding was that I could lead these financings and breathe the multi-stage firms in as a co-lead. And when I led, I still left enough room for a co-lead, but I really started to stress test how far can I push a multi-stage firm down on ownership before they ultimately walk on a deal but are still happy about it. And the number I settled on was about 10%. Pretty much every multi-stage tier one VC firm will do a seed deal at 10% if they have to. If you push them down to 6 or 7, it's just not worth it. They'd rather wait for the series A. So then we started leading financings more consistently. We ended up leading 14 companies in that first fund. And the first four deals I ever learned.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably about 55. What we did early on in that fund was purely co-investment model. I met founders and I now knew all the top guys at all the multistage venture capital firms. So the companies that I thought were the best I would introduce to the relevant partner at one of the top funds. And I'd say, I think these guys are impressive. I like what they're working on. You know more about this category than I do. Why don't you check a meeting with them? And if you like it, let's find a way to work on it together. You take your 15. I'll take my five. And I did about 20 times perfectly.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focused on was ownership as a relative metric as opposed to an absolute metric. I knew I could get 5% ownership in these deals very consistently, and I knew the firms that I was co-investing alongside can get 15% ownership in these deals very consistently. And back then, these firms are much smaller than they are today. So let's assume the typical multi-stage fund that I was co-investing alongside in 2016 was $1.5 billion and my fund was $100 million. If I can get 5%, they were getting $15. Sure, I had one-third their ownership out of a fund that was $115 the size. So I actually had 5x the exposure. And this is actually frustrating explaining to people because people ask me if I had an index approach. It's the opposite of that. I'm the most concentrated exposure you can get to these companies. There's only four institutions that truly grasp that. And by the time we fully deployed Fund 1, it became pretty obvious that in 94% of the companies we had invested in, there was not a venture fund you could have invested in anywhere in the world that would have gotten you more look-through ownership in that company than you would have gotten through abstract. And then our next fund was highly institutional. Now we're very institutional today and everything.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came from a lot of people that looked like them. So Josh Kushner, Matt Kohler, Neil Meta, Leaf Excel, Dan Rose, Thomas Lafont, Chase Coleman, Santo Politi, and then I got a bunch of operators, Jerry Yank confounded Yahoo, Frederick Cresty founded Okta. I ended up getting four institutional LLPs in Fund one. Those four institutions were two college endowments and two fund of funds. But I basically rewrote the book on portfolio construction with my first fund. And it stems back to what my initial part of the strategy was, but what I was basically doing, part of the reason I had such a hard time attracting institutional capital was institutions had this framework that venture capital firms needed to own 15% of a company in order for the math of a deal to work out, which never made that much sense to me because they were stuck on that 15% framework for like the last 25 years. The difference isn't that 25-year window these funds have grown 10, 20, 30x, but that 15% threshold stayed a constant or 15, 20% they wanted these firms to own.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ovitz. Michael Ovitz introduced into Bill Ackman and Kevin Warsh and David Sachs. And then ultimately a consortium came together with all those individuals and they bought an equity stake in my management company when I was 26 years old. That deal had a timer on it because I didn't want to be owned by anybody in perpetuity and that lapsed a couple years ago. So I'm proud to say 100% of my business again. It was kind of a surreal experience where I went from having no network and these were only individuals that I'd read about to having met all those people in a matter of three weeks and finding a way to structure a deal with all of them. Kevin and Michael were probably the two most instrumental people in that and have stayed my two closest mentors to date. I kept doing the SPVs and I kept writing the angel checks for an additional year until at which point I realized that I actually can institutionalize this approach. I set out to raise seed fund one. That was $100 million fund that I raised in 2018. Those guys had anchored the fund with about $50 million. The remaining chunk of the fund.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Epright as well, and he took Zoom public and then ultimately sold that to PayPal for over a billion dollars. But he's also been a phenomenal investor. He was in the $3 million post money valuation round of Airbnb. He was the first dollar into Pinterest. He was early in Uber. He was early in PayPal. And all roads from my network ultimately actually lead back to Kevin Hartz. So Kevin and I met, him and I headed off. He was maybe in his first year of 10 years a partner at Founders Fund and he started writing checks into a few managers. He wanted to find a way to work with me, but then also just opened up his network to me. And this is the most special thing about Silicon Valley is there are certain people in Silicon Valley who just want to help other people succeed. I've been fortunate to be blessed by having relationships with a lot of those people. And Kevin met me and when he ended the meeting, he basically said, if you were this good at this not knowing anybody, I wonder how much better you'll get if you know all the right people. Kevin had introduced me to Chris Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz and Keith Raboy. Chris Dixon introduced me to Mark Andreessen. I think it was Mark Andreessen who introduced him.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was when Cyan Bannister, who was a partner at Foundries Fund at the time, but had spent a lot of time at AngelLists, she had noticed me and her and I spent some time together and she introduced me to her close friend, Kevin Harts. And Kevin Harts, the time was a partner at Foundry Spund. And Kevin Harts is a legend in Silicon Valley. He founded Zoom XOOM Zoom in the early 2000s.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it just meant being relentless, checking in constantly what can I do, how can I be helpful, I really did focus on just being likable. I just wanted to be somebody that the founders were like, he's a good guy, he's working hard, let's get him on our cap table. And I wasn't aggressive about my check size. I don't care if it's 25,000 or 500,000 anywhere in that range I'm happy with. I made myself flexible enough that it became hard to say no to me. If you give founders hard constraints on an allocation you need or ownership target, you make it very easy for them to say no to you because they're like, sorry, I can't make that work. But if you're flexible, people just generally, if they like you, won't work with you. But after I finance those companies, three most freaking co-investors we had were founders fundries in Coastlan. I didn't have a relationship with any of those venture capital firms. So individuals I was tracking turned out to be the right individuals and the firms that I wanted to co-invest alongside ended up being the firms I ended up co-investing alongside by the nature of finding these individual foundries to back. And that's kind of when my journey picked up.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the most part. Some of them were obviously, I just spent time with every junior VC at every single venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, and I would have catch up meetings with all of them on a weekly basis. And when I heard multiple people in one week mention the same names over and over again, I just started reaching out to those individuals.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“47 deals in that first 10 months. And there I got an angel check into Rippling. I got a first dollar check into Solana at four cents a token. I got a seed check into clay. I got a seed check into cherry, a seed check into Newfront, a bunch of crypto companies. I got into the management company round of a hedge fund called Polychain Capital, which for a brief period of time was the largest cryptocurrency hedge fund in the world and even privates as well. And then I got to see a bunch of the companies that spun out in the early crypto ecosystem. So Avalanche, DYDX, RSPVs have returned close to $100 million on Angelist at this point. But within the first 47 companies that I'd funded, Ripple and Solana have coin market caps of north of $100 billion today. Rippling is approaching to $20 billion market cap and everything else I mentioned is between a $2 and $7 billion market cap. So out of 47 companies, two cent of corns, one deck of corn, and about eight or nine unicorns, these individual types of foundries that I was tracking turned out to be the right types of individuals to track.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2016. And that's kind of when I realized that an unfunded seed stage founder might be like the easiest person in the world to get a meeting with. I was nobody at this point in Silicon Valley. And the fact that anybody would take a meeting with me was nice. As their financing rounds came together, I would ask for any allocation they would give me, anything from a $25,000 check that everybody's an angel upwards to a $500,000 check that I'd raise as an SPV. And I'd use Angelist for that. I'm probably like the number one angelist success story. Angelist really catapulted my career, and I think it's actually an amazing business that more people should pay attention to and leverage the same way I leveraged. But I think over my first 47 seed deals, I funded in a 10-month window between August of 2016 and June of 2017.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You actually need to be better at picking than you were historically. In terms of what we started to do in the early days, what I did was I looked the last few hundred companies that were backed by the multistage tier one venture capital firms and I started to identify patterns that existed in the foundries they were backing and venture as a pattern matching business for better or for worse. But what I started to notice was that they liked founders that went to one of these schools, got one of these degrees, worked at one of these companies in one of these roles and one of these periods of time in that company's inflection. So I started just tracking individuals that fit the bill on LinkedIn. It's probably, I don't know, six or seven thousand people that qualify.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was also Airbnb and Dropbox and so many other companies in Instagram that were funded in that window, there is no world in which you could blanket an asset class and should be able to generate a 357X. So that was very clear sign that deals were too cheap back then. And as anything, which markets get more efficient over time, deals start to price a little bit more accurately. And I thought that seed funds were holding on to those low prices a little too drastically. And multistage funds had a bit more of the right idea. Now, if you start to think that a 3,000x multiple on a seed deal like Uber gives you a 3x across a blanketed coverage between 2008 and 2011, then you could argue seed deals need to be 3x more expensive as a floor. But if you mix in all the other companies, you could probably assume that seed deals should be 5x more expensive as a floor. And by the way, even if that's the case, that means that an average entry valuation of 25 million, if you blanket the entire market, you should be able to break even on your money, which should never be the case because as you know, investing is challenging. So now we're in a market where”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often than not, it was the fact that they were willing to offer valuation in terms that a seed fund couldn't compete with. And I decided to build a seed stage venture capital business, initially aligning my interests with multi-stage funds as opposed to aligning my interest with seed funds. The reason I was actually thinking that people were wrong when saying multistage funds were jacking up the prices of all these deals is we pulled the data on this. And if you look between 2008 and 2011, there were about 1,000 seed deals funded in that time frame, or at least publicly announced seed deals in that timeframe. So there's some survivorship bias there. What you need to ultimately look at is that probably 80% of the company's got announced because that's just what ends up happening in ventures. So let's assume there was a thousand companies. And Uber was in that bucket. And if you wrote an equal size check into every single one of those 1,000 companies, you would have gotten a 3,000 X just on Uber. So you would have actually had a 3x net venture capital portfolio blanketing the entire market.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Financing was led by multi stage venture capital firms and seed stage venture capital firms. And when the early days, people didn't think multi-stage firms did much seed investing. But if you look at Sequoia, they led the seed round for Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Newbank, and Andreessen led the first institutional rounds for Okta, Databricks, and Slack, and Costa led the seed round for Instacart and DoorDash and Index led the seed round for Robin Hood and Figma. And Lightspeed led the seed round for Snap and I think app dynamics. And the list kind of goes on and on. What became obvious to me was that seed funds that claimed they had proprietary deal flow were mostly kidding themselves. They're a little delusional. And it's hard to believe that a seed firm that has two or three people have more coverage at early stage in a multi-stage fund that has third or 40 people. And then it became very apparent to me that when a multi-stage fund and a seed fund tried to compete with one another, that it was very hard for a seed stage venture capital firm to compete with a multi-stage venture capital firm. Oftentimes, multi-stage venture capital firms had brand weight the seed funds going to compete with, but more often.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The simplest way to describe this is how I came up with a thesis for how abstract actually invests, and this thesis has evolved over time, but the thesis in which I started abstract was trying to identify which companies of the highest likelihood of becoming power law companies. And I identified power law by any companies that had a private market cap or exited north of a $5 billion valuation. What I'd realized over time was that if you eliminate Uber and Roblox from the equation whose seed rounds were led by first round capital, it's close to impossible to identify power law companies in which the seed round was led by a seed stage venture capital firm. This has changed in recent years, which is why our strategies also evolve. But the thesis in which it was built off stayed constant and that multi-stage tier one VC firms were better at seed investing than seed funds are. And it's not to say that they'll outperform them because I don't think the portfolio construction model allows for that anymore at the scale of those funds. But I do believe that the power law companies of the future will be more likely have seed funds.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a lot easier to identify what is going to be a great company than who is going to be an artist that stands the test of time. There is a lot more tangible things you can look at. There's much more fundamental and technical things that you can look at that'll tell you that something is special and something is good. There is a market for pricing in the venture world that might not necessarily be the case in the art world. Fair market value is very clearly determined in the venture world. The company goes out to fundraise, an auction is run, and term sheets are offered and a price is set. Those things are obviously very different. Those are the primary differences is really just venture is a much more tangible, even though it's tangible. There's a lot more to underwrite.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You at least $100 million for this collection. We will reduce our commission from 26% to 13%. We're going to give half the commission back to you. And there's no shortage of stories where they guaranteed too high to compete with the other auction house and they ended up losing money or their net margin unended being two or three percent. I don't think the auction houses have huge market caps. I think Southey's about like a $3 billion market cap and it's well over a hundred-year-old company. So I think good businesses, not phenomenal businesses, their margins are a lot more volatile than one would think looking into it externally, but I'd say the blue chip galleries seem to have endless pockets. What they spend money on is beautiful gallery space and making beautiful exhibitions, but they have a cost of goods, which is basically zero. And then very, very large tickets, and then 50% Rev share.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say they make the most. Auction houses, you would think they have no costs except for marketing and displaying the art, and then they take anywhere between a 15 to 26% commission, depending on the value of the art. And then I started realizing that's actually not the case. They have competitive dynamics also when Paul Allen passed away a few years ago, his entire collection became available for sale. And I think it was at Sotheby's. The collection sold for, I think, well over a billion dollars in cumulative sales. When someone like him dies, he's an extreme example, but there's plenty of people that have collections worth $50 million, $100 million, $300 million. And it's usually the estates of those people that the auctions want. And it's part of the reason that the estates actually have to go to the auctions because obviously you have a finite amount of time before you have to pay the taxes. And the quickest way to sell everything they send it to auction, that's when the auction houses start competing with each other over commission split and guarantees. It's more along the lines of, hey, we will guarantee you at least $500 million for this collection. We'll guarantee.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say the galleries. I think the big galleries do quite well. The big galleries that have great clients and are able to control their markets tend to not only manage all the primary sales, but they tend to also manage the majority of the secondary sales. And this is how they control the market. If you're buying”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The art world, it's the same thing. It's sending your dealer a gift when their baby's born and sending them Christmas gifts, checking in from them from time to time. And the reason I mention saying top of mind is the most competitive time to get a painting is during an artist's primary exhibition or during a fair-like Basel because they send that preview out to their entire collector base. 5,000 people are going to see that painting. You're definitely not the only person who wants that individual painting. And your odds of getting that are close to nothing unless you're willing to jump through a million hoops to get there. Every single artist, they're working, they need to make money. So more often than not, in between exhibitions, they might make one painting and give it to the gallery and say, please sell this for me. That's where I found most of my work. The artist just made this one painting available. We're offering it to you and three other people. Please let us know what you think. And your odds are much higher when it's just shared with you and two or three other people.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. They're going to know that they can keep giving you consolation prizes. Ultimately, they want you as a collector. So if they realize you're only going to buy what you want to buy, they'll ultimately give you what you want if you play along and play ball. But if you're the guy that can give second tier and third tier work to, you will always be the guy that gives second and third tier work to. That's funny. There's that aspect of it. And a lot of it is just staying top of mind. What's worked best with me and what works best for me in venture also. I see early stage seed companies at a high level of frequency because I stay top of mind for my founders who have friends that might be starting companies. I stay top of mind for angel investors that are actively grooming the next generation of founders and are looking for people to introduce them to lead their seed rounds.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a lot of things. There are things that Owitz has taught me over the years in the early parts of my collecting. There was a painting that I wanted and they didn't offer me that one. They offered me the consolation prize instead. And I was talking to Ovid or Stu. I'm like, what do you think? Should I take it? And they said, no. Because if you do”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny thing is that they compete for the artists very similarly to the way VCs compete for deals. It's very obvious who are the artists who are the most in commercial demand, who are the most in institutional demand, and who they could see building their careers over the next 10, 20 years. The courting process is the same. We'll do a better commission split with you. It's not 50-50 with us. We'll go 60-40. We'll go 70, 30. You want a signing bonus? Here's a million dollars cash up front. Go with us. Don't go with them. It's very competitive dynamics amongst them to get the best artists. Generally speaking, in the talent world, contracts are pretty ironclad. You can't just go from one person to the next. I still don't quite understand how that works. I'm still curious to learn that aspect, but artists do frequently go from one gallery to another.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the end of the day, artists actually don't want their art in people's homes. They want their art in museums. They don't want their art to go in someone's living room where only 20 people will ever see it. They want it to be hung up in the MOMA where millions of people will see it over time. And that's why you see a lot of these guys on the boards of those museums, because those museums want to ultimately foster relationships with the people that have the greatest collection. So those collections, at least a large portion of them, one day end up in their museum. And that's why museum affiliation is also a really great way to access great art, because galleries are more inclined to give great paintings to people who are on the boards of the MOMA and the Met and the Whitney and the Guggenheim because they know that more likely than not this painting, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually will end up in the collection of this museum. So that is definitely where status comes into play. It's why when you see the boards of these museums, they don't look like boards of any other industry in the world because the boards unlock access to what these guys consider to be the greatest art.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a real thing. I don't actually get involved in any of that because that I don't have time for it. I don't think I've ever gone to actual exhibition opening. It's part of the upside and downside of being in San Francisco is there's no art in San Francisco. I don't think I ever bought anything that I saw in person before buying it. I've only ever bought these off previews. Yeah. Because you have to find time to actually fly somewhere and go see something in person. And my schedule, unfortunately, is not lend me to have that leisure to do that. But I think it's very common in the New York world, especially among finance guys who are active art collectors. I think it becomes competitive dynamics of, oh, you have one of these. I actually have the better one. Oh, we're both fighting over the same painting. I'm the one who got it. That's where the galleries leverage those competitive dynamics to do what's ultimately best for the artists.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it looks like, a messy version of one of their paintings, or this looks like a painting that they started working on, and they realized it wasn't going in the right direction. So they kind of half-assed the rest of it. Versus this is something they nailed and they know they nailed it. A lot of that just has to do with training your own eye and looking at a lot.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in the art world it's very definitive examples of what that artist is known for. Something that you could look at and basically say this is exactly what the artist was trying to get across in his message and it came through very clearly in this painting or this sculpture. Oftentimes you'll see a painting by an artist and you'll have to do a double take to realize which artist actually painted it. There are certain paintings that you look at by an artist and it's so obvious that it was painted by that artist within the first second of looking at it, you know who painted it. That's obviously a really good indication. A lot of it is just frame of reference. You don't actually appreciate what is a great example until you've seen tons of examples. It's a phrase that Obitz always talks about frame of reference. The same thing with the more companies you meet, the easier it gets to discern what the better companies are, the more art you look at and the more art you look at by specific artists, the easier it becomes to identify what a great example of that artist is. Certain things you look at, you're like, well, this looks like one of their paintings.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Michael, I think he's got three picasas, but I think he's got the three best picas ever, and he's got probably the best Mark Rothko I've ever seen. He's got the best Franz Klein I'd seen. Even in contemporary artists, he has the single best Laura Owens abstraction I think that was ever released to the public. I think what he was really good at doing is like anything else, there's competitive dynamics. People get drawn into the competitive game of, oh, well, I can't get that paint. They just give me this one instead. I think a lot of it has to do with the discipline of waiting until you can actually get the highest quality examples of the best work by these artists because there's no shortage of collectors' homes you could walk into. That's low quality art by great artists where they just wanted to have a home filled with art by recognizable artist names, but nothing that in their collection is something that a real collector would say is truly great.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fighting over, and two that are really good that most people will be happy with. And the rest of the show is Artist Made 20 paintings, and then the gallery was like, we could sell 12 of them. What you start to notice over time is the most dramatic appreciation in art happens in the highest quality examples of their work.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're putting shows on for them constantly every day in my inbox. I'm probably getting 30 previews for exhibitions for new shows opening by new artists. So more to seed investing, the volume of art you're being sent daily and the entry prices to access entry-level art are just getting astronomically higher. Your bar needs to be incredibly high for the new living contemporary artists, but it honestly makes the value investing of looking to what is the art that's proven the test of time that might be an opportunity to get a great example of today, what might those opportunities be? Probably the most interesting thing I've learned about the art world, which is something I didn't appreciate until I started actively collecting, is quality of a painting versus just like work by a given artist. And it's why you see certain Picasso sell for 5 million and one sell for 100 million. I never truly understood the concept of masterpiece until I started actively collecting, but on every exhibition put on by a new artist today, as I mentioned, there's 12 paintings. And of those 12 paintings, there's probably one that's incredible that everyone's going to be.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a given gallery, and that artist will present 12 paintings in that show, and that'll be the only 12 paintings they make available to the public for the next two years. And 100 people want those paintings. Now you have to jump through hoops of, well, you're saying, well, I'll buy this painting and I'll also buy one painting, give it to a museum if you give this one to me. So the real costs of actually collecting are not what the prices are at the primary because you can't just walk in and pay that much for the painting and get it. And one of my mentors tells me he's never bought a painting for less than $100,000 that he's made any money on. The barriers of entry are quite high to actually get the higher quality blue chip art. Obviously, there are totally still examples today where you can get lucky and get something before it's truly discovered and do well on it financially. But when competition comes into the market, the market services that demand, so there's way more artists represented by these galleries today than historically. Historically, these galleries would represent 10, 15 artists. Now the bigger galleries are representing 75 to 80 artists. Smaller ones are representing 25 to 30 artists.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This has changed dramatically in recent years, Ovid's always tells me that he wishes I started my collecting 20 to 25 years ago versus starting collecting today. And I asked what was different about 20 to 25 years ago. And he said, 20 to 25 years ago, entry-level art was $10,000. Blue chip art, not blue chip costas and Rothko's, but blue chip contemporary art was in the order of magnitudes of low hundred thousands. 20, 25 years ago, you could walk into a gallery and if there was a painting you liked, you could take it home, you could place it on hold, you could live it within your living room for two weeks and decide whether or not you wanted it. You could make a gallery and offer to 20 to 25 percent less than what they were asking for and have the painting. The number of collectors in recent years is dramatically increased. Here's another parallel to venture. The same way the number of investors have dramatically increased. And as a result, the entry valuations to art have dramatically increased as well. And the competition to acquire art has dramatically increased as well. There's now 10, 20 artists exhibiting primary shows.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Squarely in that bucket today. And then there are artists who are a little bit more niche who have collectors and their markets are very, very strong, but their markets can't sustain 50 paintings, 100 paintings transacting every year. Their markets can sustain 8 to 12 very high value paintings transacting every year. Then you always try to think about that in your calculus. If the market depth is shallow and I'm a young collector and everybody else collecting this artist is 30 to 40 years older than me and 20 to 30 years am I going to be the only person who's collecting this artist? There's a lot of things to try to think about there, but I think at the end of the day, you're really just trying to buy art that stands the test of time.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I try to go back and look at some historical things for whatever reason in the art world, it tends to work like this cycle continuously where things that were iconic 20 years ago tend to be undervalued 20 years later then get very highly valued 30 to 40 years later. I tend to find things that were the undisputable iconic bodies of work from the 90s and 2000s that today might be out of favor. And a lot of the people who were very iconic in the 90s and the 2000s happened to be white male artists who were currently out of favor in the art world and there's not a lot of demand for their work, but it's a really good buying opportunity for those artists, at least in my opinion. And then the next thing you look for is depth in that artist's collector base. There are certain artists who have huge followings. They put out 50 paintings through their multiple galleries per year and they're all sold. They have 50 paintings that show at auction and they all sell and they clear large price tags because their art appeals to a large demographic of collectors and George Condo and Rashid Johnson are probably the two artists that fit the most.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stu has a couple of great ones. These were basically old Marlborough ads that Richard Prince had basically ripped out of magazines and then turned them into photography and sold them, but they became iconic because he owned the concept of appropriation as an artist. Early 2000s, late 90s, Richard Prince came out with those nurses where he was printing out those old nurse book covers and then painting over them. And then that became more iconic thing about appropriation. And then you had Tracy Emman. She was a lot more graphic than most female artists were in the 90s about female body as a subject. When you're trying to identify those things in real time, it's very, very difficult because there's a lot of art exhibitions at any time in the city of New York. New York is the king of exhibitions. There's ones that are positively claimed, but two, three years that artist fizzles out. When you're collecting artists who are practicing and active, it's very challenging because there's a thousand artists in any generation and only 10 of them end up mattering 20 or 30 years later. If I collect active.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. If you can afford to buy any piece of art in the world, it's easy to know what the 50 most iconic things in the world are. And everything's for sale in the art world. So as long as you're willing to pay the price, you can build that collection. And then the collection that scored the highest was a wife and husband who were both government employees. The husband was a postman and the wife was a librarian. And they spent their weekends collecting art in the 60s and they were collecting pollux and rothgoes. They ended up giving it away all to museums. They never actually did it for any monetary gain, but their collection ranked so high because they were actually able to judge based purely off of talent and skill before anybody had any idea who these artists were and before there was any value assigned to their work. And every decade long window, there are certain bodies of work that are considered iconic that if you think to that decade, these are considered iconic bodies of work. In the 80s, you have the Richard Prince Cowboys, which Michael has probably one of the greatest ones out there.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason Ovitz's collection is not attainable is due to the sheer value of it. There is this one art list that ranks collections based on the means at which they were obtained, which is actually really interesting because people today say Steve Cohen and Ken Griffin have the world's greatest collections, and they probably do, but they don't assign the same score to them because”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Venture capital firms try to maintain relationships with those firms that spot talent earlier and earlier. The big galleries tend to maintain relationships with a few of the mid tier or smaller tier galleries early. So then what I started to do after that Spend time with those galleries that I started noticing where the early spotters of talent Basically, just started maintaining those relationships and then trying to see what I actually liked from their programs because, like anything, not 100% of the artists graduate. So from there, that's when you have to apply some of your own judgment and hope that you have the right taste to identify what are other people going to find appealing, what are institutions going to find appealing.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then I started to realize that there are smaller galleries and even smaller galleries beyond that that tend to share a lot of artists with the larger galleries. And it's because they were the ones who initially discovered them. It's the same ones over and over again. Similar to the venture capital world, you have the four, five, six top venture capital firms in the world that tend to have exposure to every power law company and any generational company, any given vintage. And then more often than not, you see the same firms that finance those companies earlier and earlier and earlier. Like”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or even the estates of the most iconic dead artists, they tend to be represented by the big four galleries, Hauser, Gagozian, Zwerner, Pace. Once they're represented by those galleries, they are now deemed a blue chip artist and their prices are very, very high, but their prices tend to sustain or even appreciate because those galleries are very large and they have very big clients and they represent a lot of institutions so they can control the markets for those artists. So people tend to be more comfortable paying a premium to buy art from those galleries because of Inherent safety net you get when buying from them”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before me. It's guys like Mark Grote, John, and a lot of female artists like Jenny Savile, Laura Owens, Cecily Brown, Jacqueline Humphreys, and then in my generation, it's more along the lines of Rashi Johnson, Christina Quarles, Avery Singer, Marina Reingantz, Anna Wyant. And all of these artists tend to be now represented by all of the blue chip galleries. When I started dabbling into the art world is when I realized that there's an overwhelming number of parallels between the venture world and the art world, primarily in the way. Blue chip galleries work and the way that the big platform venture capital firms work. But if at any given time there is 50 important practicing artists in the world,”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early 70s artists that are maybe one generation before me, these guys are late 40s to late 50s, and then artists of my generation, and that's everyone who's 28 years old to 38 years old. I started to understand who is important in the conversation at any given time and who is getting museum institutional interest. Who are museums paying attention to? Who are museums hosting exhibitions for? What makes this artist unique? Where does this artist draw inspiration from? There's a lot of artists that are great and have all those boxes but might necessarily be something that I want to live with. I personally, my wife as well, we like living with our art, even if something could be a great asset to hold if we don't want to hang it up on our walls. We don't feel right about the concept of just buying art for the purpose of putting it in storage two generations before me. It tends to be more heavily dominated white male artists, guys like Richard Prince, Christopher Wool, George Condo, a generation.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somewhat attainable. And then I worked with an advisor briefly just so I can familiarize myself with the market. Once I spent enough time familiarizing myself with the market, I realized like anything, if you're going to invest time and resources into something, you're better off doing the majority of the work yourself. Obviously, it's good to have people like advisors who are experts who are boots on the ground in the ecosystem advising you here and there. I think you need to maintain the relationships with the galleries yourself. You need to maintain the relationships with the auction houses yourself. Even having some direct artist relationships yourself. So I spent time and energy and resources dedicated to learning as much about it as I possibly could. I wanted to collect primarily contemporary artists and primarily living artists and I decided to collect three different buckets of artists and I break them down by generation. So I have artists who are two generations before me and these guys are in there mid to late 60s.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have two incredibly close mentors, one who introduced the two of us, Michael Ivitz, and then another guy named Stuart Peterson. Both of them have world-class art collections. Michael has storied art collection. I'm sure you've seen it. But I spent a lot of time at their houses over the years. And every time I went, I tried to learn a little bit more about what was in their house. They could both spend two, three hours walking you around their home and talking about what they have and how they got it and the story behind it, the history behind it, the significance of it. I always just thought that was really interesting. And I never really had much time for hobbies and it was one that I thought my wife and I could enjoy together. I needed to find the golf. I thought golf was a little one-sided. So for me, art collecting seemed like it could be golf for both me and my wife. So then I just started dabbling in understanding the markets. And then I realized nothing in Michael's collection is attainable. So kind of scratched most of those artists off my list. And then I looked at Stewart's collection. Most of it was unattainable. Some of it was artists who were still”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source