YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Hinkie

lines on the record: 80
first: 2025-09-09
most recent: 2025-09-09
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

“Your people find you. I'm smitten by all these examples. Imagine being Charlie Munger and meeting Warren Buffett over dinner. And it's like, yeah, of course they were rude to everybody for 90 minutes. Of course they ignored everyone. Of course they got deeper and deeper into a private conversation in the middle of a large dinner. I don't want to overdo it. Soulmates or something, but close intellectual sparring partners that in some crazy world both worked for whatever Warren's grandfather or vice versa, however it works, you come across this person and you can't find the bottom and you're like, oh my gosh, I don't know if either one of them went home that night and said, I want to call this person every day for the rest of my life. But it's believable that they would. And it's believable that they would say, finally, there's someone else out there that I can shadowbox with and pressure test my thinking with. It's surely been an amazing feeling in my life when I've come across those people.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That starts on the job next week or next decade could learn from it in a way that is useful. Most of the writing I do is sort of among my friend group and I share things I've written and documents and things with a small set of friends around me. I don't do a whole lot of that publicly to date. I just think it's terribly critical as a way to sort of put your mark in the sand about what it is that you believe. And by the way, people may not agree with you. You may get criticized massively about it. But over time, it ends up being a shelling point where many people will sort of come your way if they resonate with it one way or another.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Write, write and put your thoughts out, particularly if you're proud of them, particularly if you want to make them better. This is something I really only come to understand, I think, in the last several years, last couple of years, which is the returns to writing well and the returns to getting better and better at writing. I love the way I'm a striped fan in a whole bunch of ways in their business and their founders and all of that. I love the way Patrick talks about that they're in some ways kind of writing to the unborn employees. That's right. You can have a meeting and you can have an all-hands meeting and Strike must have 2,500 employees, maybe 3,000 employees these days. They could do an all-hand Zoom meeting and it would capture all those. What do you do about the 300 and first employee? What do you do about the 6,000th employee? What do you do about the 30,000th employee? And one of the ways to do that is to write is to write down what you were thinking at the time, to write down where you thought the things should go, to write down why you made the decision you did so that someone”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That seems as best we can tell to be hundreds and hundreds of items long, sequenced in exactly the right order, knowing which messes to step around, which ones are the critical ones, and how to influence all the people he's going to need to influence to achieve his actual dream and his actual dream, sadly, let's get re-elected.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And thinks. You imagine what you would do in that situation, pray or be worried or be overcome with anxiety or be, God forbid, excited and then be embarrassed that you're excited because you're maybe about to be the president, but that's only because our president's just assassinated. It's like, and then someone comes in with tear-filled eyes and says the president's dead. And from that moment forward, he lets out a set of instructions for what should happen that effectively govern the next 50 days that he all planned presumably in those 90 minutes. I mean, can you imagine a situation more stressful than being the vice president when the president has just gotten shot? The country's in a mess and you're likely to be tasked with something incredible that you may or may not be up to. And instead he sets out a set of principles, really like a checklist.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to be super clear. I very much don't like Carroll's books because of those men or because of what they represent. In fact, it's the opposite. But to your point, there's admirable characteristics within there. They could build a system that compounded over time, over decades. And they could see how if you could get on that trajectory and turn the wheel like this, that it would ever increasingly turn faster and faster and end up at that place, which I think is amazing. There's an amazing scene and passage of power where JFK gets shot and they're in Parkland Hospital in Dallas and LBJ's behind a curtain in a room. Secret Service is surrounding him. His wife's in the room with him. Secret Service is surrounding him because they think a coup is on and maybe he's the next target. JFK is on the operating table next door. And he describes a scene where for a long period of time, call it 90 minutes or something. LBJ sits perfectly silent.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything in sacrifice of that one goal. And of course, that person, given a high enough starting point, given a high enough set of natural abilities, of course that person would win that race.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tournament that was that big, no matter what your seating was. The two men he profiles that are seeding in life was not high. They were not a number one seed at all. They were quite low, quite without many advantages. And to get all the way to the top, you probably had to sacrifice everything to the effort. There could be nothing left behind. I think the meta lesson from there is if you zoom out, then you should say, if you're not willing to pay that price, presume someone else will. And if you're trying to win a tournament that's that popular and try to chase something as shiny, as call it the God forbid, the US presidency, you should presume there will be someone out there that will and that will devote their whole life, their whole life, and all their time.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of big thesis is for a long time people would say power corrupts and he often says power reveals when you get to a certain level of power you might say you know in sort of a capitalist terms you get to sort of f you money that it reveals who you really are and can kind of do the things unconstrained that you've always wanted to do but i think about it much more from a sort of a systems perspective that it shows you how the system works and how i think of it like a little kids play-doh maker you put raw play-doh in the back and you get this shape out the front and what that looks like and it's wildly different than people anticipate i think of it sometimes like i guess the pacific salmon that sort of spin their whole life making this one journey back upstream to spawn in this one spot and as soon as they do they die that's largely what he shows you is an effort like that which is to be successful in this place you couldn't hold anything back to win a turn”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isn't there so much to learn from that? And isn't that the whole idea, which is you're trying to sort of find people that have done all that work and can compress it down in some way that you don't have to do it? Wouldn't life suck if he went out and learned all those lessons? And then for the next person that came along and wanted to learn those lessons had to pay the same price he did. But instead, he's got this machine called a book that can send it to the rest of us in a way that can really help.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just turned 85 a couple weeks ago. He's basically written five books in 50 years, and he's not done, and he's trying to finish another one that will maybe be a sixth or a seventh, really on two subjects, both of which were you sort of would round out to power is the thing he's writing about. He starts with an end in mind in a bunch of ways where he knows the last sentence of the book before he starts writing it. He knows the outline of the book, before he knows the details. So he knows a set of outline of like where this thing is going to go and what the big chunks of it are going to be. And he can zoom out and see a systems view of how the whole thing works and explain it to someone that's a novice, some of what he's written about is government. I'm not without care, but politics is not top of my list at all for things that I care about. But he can write it in a way that makes it accessible. If you can read and you like good storytelling, then he can write it in a way that makes it accessible. And the truth is what he's done is compress a decade of research into”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought hard about what other people are trying to accomplish. And I tried to shape my language in a way they could hear it. That's half of what I talk to founders about. It's just that. How to build the API to the other person's brain. It doesn't matter what you say. It matters what they hear. And it matters how they feel. That's not a way to manipulate someone. It's a way to deeply understand their set of problems. to the extent you have edge and you won't always, to the extent you have edge, define it clearly in a way that aligns their incentives with that solution. That's mostly all of the people that I talked to along the way that gave me more and more scope, more and more leash to be me and to lean into the kinds of things I want to do. Almost all of those conversations started just that way.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I prefer it that way. There's a particular way that I want to do it. And there's a particular set of axioms that I'm leaning into that I'm wildly confident, by the way, will be successful. And I'm confident will be the kind of thing that I want to spend decades on because it's uniquely me in a bunch of ways and uniquely my experiences. It makes me super excited to be doing it.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a sucker for this one author for Robert Carroll, who's written a bunch of amazing books that I'm often pushing people. In particular, one of the books, his second book in a series, is called Means of Ascent. And in that book, which may be a little timely as of now, in that book, one candidate wins a little tiny election, seems tiny in retrospect in 1948. He wins by 87 votes and launches himself to the presidency. The other candidate loses by 87 votes, but effectively wins back his life's work that he had been compounding over a long period of time and his family. And a lot of what I try to talk to founders about is that we're looking for winners. And that's not just who won. So much of it depends on what you're counting. That notion, I very much want to be part of the ethos of the firm I'm building, which feels very entrepreneurial to me to be fair. It's quite small and I'm a solo GP. And these days it's a $50 million fund, this first one. And I suspect might be quite small for quite a long period of time.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, but Touche, yes, you're right. We're probably quite fortunate in a whole bunch of ways, which is we care about education and we care about school and we care about this sort of downstream effects of our decisions now. And yes, he's two and we're worrying about how we're going to feel when he's 18 or 19. Yeah, I would say in a moment like that, I was embarrassed at my relative lack of perspective.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The guy very patient. God bless him. I've given my three minute preamble to it. He says, No, we can't. You read the statute right. We will try to make you sign a waiver. We will probably send your kid to like a school psychologist kind of thing. We'll tell you the downsides of this. We will tell you we prefer not to do this. But if you're adamant and we'll sign the papers, six-year-old can go to kindergarten and there's no way in which at our school district we can force you the first grade. I said, great, cool. He said, can I ask you a couple more questions before we hang out? I said, sure. He said, you live in our school district. I said, yes. And he said, you picked it because you thought it was the best school district in Houston. I said, yes. He said, you and your wife have been thinking about this for a while. I said, yes. And he said, your son lives with you and your wife in the same house in our district a few blocks from our school. I said, yes. He said, your son's two. I said, yes. He said, sir, your son's going to be fine. And I said, Touche, Touche, I'll take that. It's not every day someone like out perspective.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But of course, there are some on the other side. And so we do a bunch of research and we finally get to the notion my wife and I both, we're going to hold them out until he's six and send him to kindergarten as he's six. But then I like read the Texas statutes. It's clear the schools hate this because it screws up their classes. They have a bunch of five-year-olds and a bunch of six-year-olds and they're all in the same class and everybody's really at different levels. Makes it hard to teach understandably. It's clear they're going to try to make you sign a bunch of waivers and they're not going to let your kid go and they're going to like try to say, no, you're going to screw your kid up if you don't do this. And so I call the principal and I'm like, hey, here's the situation. I've read this. Here's where we are. Here's our dynamic. What I really want to know is the answer to this question. If we show up at age six, is there any way in which you can force him into the first grade and say he's just come from pre-k, but you can make him skip kindergarten?”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell you a story that embarrassed me once that's on this frame. I don't get outgunned there very often because I do really think quite long. We lived in Houston and we had our first child and we moved into this house. My wife and I loved. We picked it on purpose and we looked at it forever, of course. For us, she's as picky as I am. It was literally a seven iron away from the best elementary school in all of Houston on purpose. Then we start doing a bunch of research and he was a summer birthday in July. And so then I'm doing all this research on like are we going to send him to school when he's five or we're going to wait until he's six. And at the time in Texas, everyone's like sending their kids, particularly their boys, later to school. Largely, I think they're playing some weirdo football game or something. They wanted to be a 19-year-old strapping linebacker someday in high school. That is not going to be our kids. No offense to my jeans. So we're doing all this research. And of course, the sort of trope is like, if your kid is bright, then they'll be bored and they'll cut up in school and they'll struggle and all these ways.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I've been looking for, but I think it will be rare. And I much prefer the sort of getting to know someone. It doesn't have to be months and months, although that's ideal. Years and years is even more ideal. But the notion that 10 minutes in, you turn your brain off. I think people do that in interviewing. I think it's a huge mistake. Huge mistake that you ask a set of open-ended questions and make a set of unconscious judgments two minutes in and call it a day. That's how we end up with some of the silliness that we do sometimes in hiring where a bunch of unconscious biases creep in.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, I believe the way I'm going about this has some inherent edge, even if small, that has some inherent edge in it, which is why I'm doing it, that I think I see the world in a certain way that will persist and will compound over time. I say that. That's my like intro to say the notion that in seven or eight minutes, you would say with a founder, that's it. I'm done. I got you. I want to do this. I find very strange. By the way, I might in those first seven or eight minutes say, this is amazing. I really like her. She is wicked smart. I'd like to learn more. I don't say I'm done. And that race I find a little strange that others think about it that way. Now, maybe to the extent, maybe if something comes along that's very much in my wheelhouse that I've looked at not two companies, but 50 companies, and I'm looking for it to be a certain way, maybe I'll be that aggressive too on something when I meet someone with a unique approach.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't, but you might if you do see if you can sell it. If you can sell it, you just took a cost center to be a revenue line. That's super interesting. And if you didn't, maybe we'll be like, okay, maybe we should stop resourcing that thing. We had 10 person SWAT team building that internal tool. Maybe you guys should just use Twilio. And maybe you should just do this because we don't think it's actually that good and it's not that much more expensive because as they do have scale, they can often push the cost down. They can often do it cheaper than you could even think about doing it. Not to mention better.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aggressive can you be about where you have edge? Do you have edge in one place? You don't have edge in 10 places. No way. If you only have edge in one or two or maybe three places, why are you not resourcing enormous chunks of your mindshare and your best people's mindshare and your hiring and your capital towards that, letting someone else commoditize everything else and handle everything else for you? And if they hose you on margins, hope the system will make it right. If they hose you on margins, someone else will undercut them you can switch to them if that's the case. But in what world is this a good use of your time to try to do something, particularly for these things that have network effects? If something else has network effects and they got started early, good luck. Good luck beating them at that. That's also why I like sort of APIs even internally. You make all these things sort of generalizable and externalizable out to the outside world. You thought you had this amazing tool internally and you might. Odds are.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, very much so. Very much so. You will outsource more and more of your business process to something else. What was the average number of vendors of a Rockefeller company? And what's the average number of vendors of Microsoft? Come on, it's massive. That trend's not going to slow down. I think it will increase. I think of it very much like you think of trade. You're trading off these specialties and ways that make the most sense for all parties. You can make those wonderfully cheaply at scale. You can make this wonderfully cheaply at scale. We should trade and do that as a sort of a life principle, trading money for time. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. As much as you possibly can.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not like we have 150 engineers just standing around with nothing to do. We have so many things to do. Let's focus on the thing we're amazing at and spend all of our time or as much as our time as we can on the thing that we're wildly good at and trade our money for time.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all those buildings, all those people. He's like, well, working on all sorts of stuff. He's like, same crap you're working on. You gave it 18 hours. What are you thinking? There is no world. Imagine if you're a startup today and you've got a 10 person engineering team that's wildly bottlenecked. Here comes your pencil pushing boss and says, hey, I think we're going to need to build a payments infrastructure. I think we need to build that because we're struggling with this to accept payments in all these ways. And so it wasn't going to take two weeks, two months, something like you guys go away, put a little SWAT team together, and like build payments infrastructure. Your developers should logically revolt and be like, what are you talking about? Have you been to Townsend Avenue? Have you seen Stripes headquarters? Do you know what they're doing? They're building this kind of infrastructure that will go all around the globe and they're great at it and they have an advantage and they have a head start. They've thought more about payments infrastructure than we ever will.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that will emerge and that will be dominant, will just be absolutely dominant. There's a world in which you should try to like fight this thing yourself because it doesn't make any sense. Patrick McKinsey, I mentioned him earlier. I love the way he writes about this, which is like someone somewhere built some tool and they care about that tool as much as you care about anything, anything. If it matters and it might not, maybe it's something small, let them do it. I started my career at Bain and Company. I was there a couple of years and I had this guy that I worked with that I loved. He's an awesome guy. One of our young people at Bain, they would undergrad out of MIT or something. You'd come back on a Monday morning and they'd been there all weekend and they're like, I've got a new trait, five-year treasuries combined with this. It's going to be huge. Put $800 in it this weekend. And my friend, he was from Virginia. He was like, you ever been to New York? He's like, yeah. He's like, see all those buildings? He said, yeah. What do you think they're doing?”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increasingly, I have this view that it's going to be APIs all the way down, and that over and over, you're going to outsource more and more of your business to some maybe micro targeted, very narrow piece of software. Only in COVID do people make bread for fun at mass. We've outsourced breadmaking to someone quite good at it. I just think that's going to keep happening with APIs, you've stopped building software for people. Now you're building it for software and connecting those two together, I think, is likely to be really, really huge. And I think over time, sometimes I think about it more like science, that it's like speciation, that you'll get more and more.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“like a wondrous tool 50 years ago people wouldn't have believed you could do that you could replace literally all of these people with this thing and it would free up these people to do all these other topics that kind of notion i'm big and that's one example of one i've gotten pretty deep in for sure apis i could drone on forever about apis i'm such a big fan those are examples of kind of rabbit holes that i've gone way way down”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No code movement. I'm a big fan of that. I think anyone tackling the bottleneck for developers is huge. I was at the no-code conference in 2019 in person. There was 200 of us, 400 of us, not that much in late 2019 as you're sort of looking at what is happening there. Obviously, like some of the big players from Notion or Airtable or the like you see. But then you see someone with real distribution like Microsoft employ many of these tools and employ them overnight in a way that should make many of these startups quite nervous. But that notion of building tools, I'm a big believer in the output of science is a machine. Once you build that machine, that's where it gets interesting. What no code tools largely do is democratize that for far more people over time. I think by some measure there's 25 million developers on the planet and a billion spreadsheet users. And a spreadsheet while occasionally annoying is”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Individually, we've gotten along fine. And one of them in particular we had, I had a very close personal relationship with, but the dynamics, the game they're playing is wildly transactional. And I very much struggle with that, of like how we should interface best given how sort of transactional you are.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try to do things that's in someone else's best interest. Tell people things that aren't in your own interest. It doesn't mean that you can't benefit from it, but I'm a big softie for some of this, admittedly. Like I'm a softie for unconditional love and showing people that you care unconditionally. And I'm a believer that over a long enough time period, most of the unconditionality goes away. People reciprocate and people flourish in that kind of environment and the harvest from those kinds of things are super meaningful. But most of the people I look up to, mentors of mine or people I've read about or people I sort of admire or aspire to be are just like that. They have someone else in their life that they view as more important than them. They're quick to self-deprecate about who they are. And they'll tell you the hard truth thing versus the short, maybe transactional thing that is wildly in their interest. I'll give you an example on the other side. I struggle with realtors. Struggle.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For those folks in your tribe, it's intoxicating. Here is said person that I love, that I chose, that I very much led into my life eight years ago or eight weeks ago. And here they are with a real question. They're not asking me pittily stuff. They call me with big stuff and say, I'm thinking about this. What do you think? This just happened. What should I do? Here's my approach. Please beat it up. I'd love that. That only came from the way I've tried to live my life for several decades now, which is to really pour into a, again, a relatively small set of people. I often sort of think about it as like fewer, deeper relationships. I very much want that. I don't have any need to run an organization with tens of thousands of employees because I very much think about it in my mind's eye, the 10 or 20 or 50 that I spend the most time with and that I sort of get the most energy from. And that honestly are the most rewarding person.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing, and one that's to be clear deeply fun for me. One quick story, I'll tell you on that Mark Andreessen has this line that I love that sometimes he says he's like looking at his phone and people are annoyed. And he's like, of course I'm looking at my phone. The best of 7 billion people on the planet. This is the best they can muster. So yeah, it's interesting. I'm looking at it. I would say I'm kind of like that, but different. I told you, you know, we sit in a meeting like I'm into you fully into you. I'm not looking at my phone at all for sure. My phone is filled with people in my life that I've invested in over a long period of time and invested in with a lowercase I. These are my friends and people that I care about. Some of these people I've spent 15 years with, some of them 15 months with. And they're sending me awesome stuff. They found to read. They're telling me incredible insights they've come across. It's a freaking treasure trove. When I wake up in the morning, I'm so excited to look at my texts, which is maybe not super healthy, but I am because for someone like me that likes being deprived.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take up my Tuesday or not, secondly, I think in decades by nature's thing going? What aren't people thinking about? What are the second and third order effects to this shift that we're seeing here? And I want there to be leverage on that kind of thinking, not momentum trading for this week versus next, but leverage on.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure, the way I thought about it was could you design a world where you could spend nearly all your time with amazing people? That's one, and where you could get leverage on seeing around the bend a little bit that mattered to me, and where patience and temperament are rewarded. All three of those things mattered, but they matter because I believe those are areas to spend time in. And they're areas I enjoy spending time in, that I sort of take energy from. So I love being around incredible people. That ought to be obvious. I'm a sucker for the old sort of Netflix parlance of stunning colleagues. I thought about could you design something where 70 or 80 or 90% of your time were just those people? By the way, at 87 capital, I can very much do that in that anyone I hire into the firm is a part of that. And any entrepreneur, I choose to spend time with is a part of that. And any entrepreneur that I pledge to spend of time with, I chose. So if I chose them poorly, shame on me. I get to decide if their stunning colleagues.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, I think the market you're entering and the sort of business you're going after really matters. But even for scaling companies, I think many of your people propagate over time. And so they can propagate with increasingly high trajectories or with increasingly poor trajectories where if you're constantly hiring brother-in-laws all the way down, then it's like, yeah, this thing is going to be a mess quickly. If instead you're saying we have an ever higher bar over recruiting where we're trying to narrow our confidence interval on these people over and over and over and spend an increasing amount of our time on who gets in the boat with us, I think it's relative to sort of the market you're in. I think it's relatively unlimited. I do think it propagate over a long period of time and end up compounding. You better be careful about the kinds of people you let in early because they will influence your hiring processes heavily from then on.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you're trying to go to the moon, and then that's what you do. You're going to leave a lot of people with a sort of bad taste in their mouth about how that went.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought of myself as an expert in that part, but me getting relatively expert and the company getting truly expert in it is a actual risk factor that I need to mitigate. Can you get down that learning curve? And can you sort of navigate your way through that maze? Because the things that got you here won't get you where you're going. If your goal is to build an enduring company that compounds over decades, you're going to have to evolve yourself many, many, many times to get there. If your goal is to flip this to Google in 18 months and do that, that's fine. But you should align your capital strategy with that. You should align your partners with that, which is I'm going to try to get to cash flow positive here. We're not going to get above 50 employees. We're going to try to get to there. We think there's many multiples that are far short of a unicorn that get interesting, and that's the game we're playing. You need to sort of align incentives with all the people on the journey, your early employees, with your investors, and with your partners along the way, because to the extent you've sold a different dream that is sort of more the norm.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's wildly similar to being a startup founder. It's not about your ability to get this product shipped the very first one and have this amazing idea. Over time, you're going to have to get better at go to market. You're going to have to get better at fundraising, at recruiting, at raising capital, at closing partnerships, and at evaluating people that you feel like currently you have no expertise in. I don't know how to hire a CFO. Founders say that all the time. I don't know how to hire a CFO. Okay. Great. There's a bunch of things you don't know. Let's design some plan by which you can get better at that so that five years from now, you don't say that anymore. You're like, oh, we need a new CFO. It's time for that. We need a new CFO to get us ready for the IPO. Fine. Let's have that be something that is far more in your toolbox than it was in the past. And you're going to need to be able to identify those things on your own or even better if people around you do it to be able to believe them to say, I'm going to have to get good at this. I've never liked that part of the job. I've never”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Area in which you're going is interesting, and there can be several winners in that space, and then I'm betting that you are wildly likely to make your way through that maze with a little bit of help and with a whole bunch of guidance from people around you and with some amazing people that you can find. That is the thing you're betting on. And you're going to have to change so much. That's one of the things that I feel like maybe I feel is different. call it coming from a world where you invest in talent in a different way, which is you're often picking someone in sports who doesn't have to double their skill level, but quadruple it or 10x it. They have to get so much better at so many things and to their credit, they're often 19 or 20. Most of those things aren't even on their radar. What I'm going to have to manage my diet, I'm going to have to worry about how I sleep. I'm going to have to manage my time way better. I'm going to have to manage teammates that are 10 years older than me. And then someday 10 years younger than me. And I'm going to have to work my way through that.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are really a power law. And the best ones can change everything. Betting on people who have these incredibly high ceilings and a reasonably high likelihood of getting there, I think is much aware of the game should be, even more than most. So the example I often use is I'll say, I like the field you're in. I like that you're in DevTools. I like that you're in software infrastructure. I like that you're in an API-driven business. Those are deeply interesting to me. Call it left field. And you're going to run it left field. I have no idea if it's going to end up dead center left field or left field foul pole or maybe even center left. That's your job. And I'm backing you to do that. And by the way, when you're struggling, I hope you'll call. And when you're unsure, I hope you'll call. And when you want someone to bounce an idea off and play shadowboxer, I got you. Call me, but you're going to actually tack and find that. And what I'm betting on is that the”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the time, just like causality. There's a common one in sports. This got to be a great culture guy, often a great culture guy is something you name after the fact based on someone whose incentives were aligned with it. I think Jared Dudley was probably a great culture guy for the Lakers this year, and he played just a few minutes in the finals and very little in the playoffs and waved a towel and was an adult and was useful and was encouraging in a bunch of ways. He's also quite near the end of his career. I think Jared Dudley at 25 might not have been quite as happy to have not played at any of those. This might be a byproduct of success versus something that's coming in. I think your confidence interval on predicting how someone will behave when it's against their own personal interest may be very, very different. Someone in a contract year might react wildly differently if their sort of numbers are being suppressed than someone who just got paid.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things in which it's not easy, and can you say it out loud? We're trying to sort of shoot fish in a barrel here, and the barrel is huge. And we're kidding ourselves. And if you're not sure, here's the meeting notes from the last five times we made this decision. We went one for five. And by the way, it's not because we suck. I'm not trying to get anyone fired. Everybody sucks. This thing is hard and we don't have much signal into this and it's wildly sort of contextually oriented.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's anything really about me or how I thought about the world. It's just a different perspective, what things that I think maybe move the needle for me or people like me in sports where the ability to zoom out and have perspective. If I'm good at anything, it's perspective and a whole bunch of ways. Sometimes that gets me in trouble. It makes me not so good at day-to-day. Sometimes week-to-week things, but makes me quite good on a multi-year kind of thing. So zoom out and have perspective. Understand how to have intellectual humility about what you know and what's unknowable and what your confidence intervals on all these things. You want to predict who's going to be a good free throw shooter next year. You want to have a fairly tight confidence interval and data can help you a lot, even simple data. Look up last year's, look up their career numbers. It's pretty straightforward. People make plenty of jumps. Those catch our eyes because they're anomalies because they're unusual. If you shot 85 last year, you might shoot 80 this year. You might shoot 88. You won't shoot 95. You're not going to shoot 65. That's on something easy like free throw shooting. There's a bunch of us.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. I'm accused of being on occasion, you know, heartless or a data wonk or ruthless. And to be clear, I can be in a bunch of ways. I am super big-hearted for the people in my tribe. It matters a lot to me, but shouldn't there be a high bar for who you trust? If you trust them, shouldn't you be trying to play a more infinite game where everyone trusts each other more and more and you're trying to compound that trust over time? The very notion of that, a lot of people are uninterested in no problem. That's totally fine with me. But yeah, I would say slowing down is a common technique.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slow down. Slow down in a whole bunch of ways. Drives transactional people nuts. Fine with me. I'm trying to learn that. I'm trying to learn that. So you read a book. I'll read a book. You don't want to read a book? Cool. You read a book. I'll read a book. We don't have time to read a book. You got to know by Friday. No problem. I'm out. I'm out.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Breadcrumbs in the past help a lot the way they've talked about people in the past, who they've looked up to, how that's changed, how that hasn't changed, who they admire, the kinds of leaders they admire, the kinds of leaders they detest. Do they want to be Steve Jobs and Elon and the like? Okay, that's a certain style. Do they want to be John Malone and Warren Buffett? Okay, that's a different style from who people admire. You learn about some of the things that they value and who it is that they look up to and what trade-offs they think are totally worth it. I mean, you mentioned the last dance. In some ways this paragon of excellence and amazing in other ways is like the cost of making that happen is like real, real. If that's what you admire the most and if that ring chasing is the most important, which is totally admirable in its own way, then fine. I should anticipate you're likely to cut many, many corners and fight guerrilla warfare in many ways that others would find untoward.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grow in these other areas or be known for excellence in this way. I have to find opportunities for you to take steps toward that because I can either fight against your nature. It's a sort of long hill version again. I can fight against your nature and get you to hold your breath and suck it up and do anything. But the moment you get freedom, the moment you make money, the moment you have better job alternatives, I think of it the same way with teenagers, the moment they get out of your house. It's got to be like this. Yep. And then they went to college. Now what? They got out of college and they've got their own money. Now what? Now what are you going to do? Turns out you're going to reject a bunch of that and sort of plop back into their original shape and do the kinds of things that bring them meaning. Get on that train or not because the leverage just switched in a whole bunch of ways.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having very high standards is fine and appropriate. And I think holding people accountable to those is fine. But to the extent they're not aligned with the person's individual incentives, I think it's quite difficult. I think it's really difficult. It's possible that someone could really truly believe in your mission and be in a full-on command and control. But often I think you're going to need to find a way to tie it to what's good for them. One of the best things I think you can do as a manager is be good for the careers of the people who report to you. And I think the best way to convince them you're good for their careers is to actually be good for their careers and to actually help them in a bunch of ways and say, what does it really want to do? Well, it's a canonical example, Snowflake. If that's snowflake and it's like, what I really want to do is make huge coin post the IPO and that's okay fine. Pull an ore right here and we can do that. We've got a method to do that and that this will line up. But if what you really want to do is go start your own thing or”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increasingly, don't think those kind of authoritarian sort of versions work very much in most environments, and some, of course, they do. And in some, those are truly necessary to be so aggressive. But I think for wildly high performers, I think there's often sort of a better way to go about it.”
2025-09-09 · Invest Like the Best · Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source