YouSaid · the spoken record

Savneet Singh

lines on the record
77
first
2018-03-06
most recent
2018-03-06
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

  1. “I'm a Sikh American, and so I look very different. You can't see me, but I have a beard and a turban, and they do a double take if you saw me on the street. You are more aware of the trials and tribulations of people who look different, who don't belong or whatever the proper word is. And I think that experience combined with a family that was very much fighting for the rights of other people, grounded you in this idea that you were really lucky. And I often say like, I've learned two real lessons in life. And one of those lessons is the power of circumstance. And I feel so lucky that I was born in America because I had, you know, that was nothing to do with me. And my dad decided to fly over here and take a risk. I had zero part of that. But it's been the most impactful thing in my life. And so from a young age, we would always, when I got my first paychecks, every job I had, my dad would make me give it away. When we had time in the summer, we were forced to go volunteer. When we were young, my dad would take us to third world countries and say, you know, let us be exposed to parts people that I think most people don't get exposure to at a young age. And so we've always felt this kind of shift to like help.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I had dramatically different parents. So I think I'll first go to my dad. One of the great things my dad did at a really young age was he involved us in big decisions.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You were 14 years old and you're waking up at five in the morning, going running with your dad. Then you still have to go to school, then you have to go play tennis after. So I think that rigor of hard work. And then obviously the empowerment your dad telling you, drop out of school to go chase something was really helpful as we got older.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So I loved playing sports as a kid, and I discovered tennis a little bit later, I guess 10 or 11 year olds, which is 11 years old, which is a little bit late for sports. And I got really good, really fast. And my brother and I used to go, you know, fly around to these tournaments, to these camps. And it was amazing. We got to play with Andy Roddick before he was an erotic. And when we were, I think, 14 or 15, my dad sat me down. He said, listen, if you want to be anything in life, you really have to give it your all. So if you want to be a tennis player, you should drop out of high school and go move to a tennis academy and go do this full time. And I still say today, I think we both whisked out and said, no, Dabb, we want to go back to school and we don't want to do this. But it was the thing that impacted me the most from that was the sheer fact of my dad giving me the option to do that obviously showed that he believed in me but it also like created this mentality that you can do anything you want and and it was it's so powerful now that i think about how much that impact had i mean my dad was one of those guys who did all sorts of experiments on us but the tennis journey was beautiful because it taught us the ability of hard work commitment to something”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Way happier than our investors or the people we look up to or our bosses, and how do you recreate that? And so we can dig into it now or later, but it led to this sort of exploration of trying to build a holding company of really powerful assets.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Not had credit before, you as the debt capital can lock in amazing terms for yourself, traditional capital won't come in because there's not five years of history, because it's new, because if you're a hedge fund with a billion dollars, like a $5 million check is just not really worth your time, no matter how high the yield is, that analyst learning how to underwrite a produce loan is not useful elsewhere. And so I had gone to Ollie and said, hey, I think this is an amazing place in the world for you to spend time. And I'll throw some money into it. And so it was a really fun journey. And so after I left GBI, I started thinking a little bit about what I wanted to do. And as I kind of mentioned, the area of the world that I was interested in was this sort of idea of being a value investor, but being an operator. And one of the journeys of mine was figuring out what does an expert share hathaway look like. I and some friends five or six years ago went to the Berkshire Hathaway meeting, and we all left there in awe. And I think obviously we're in awe of the wealth and all that stuff, but we really expressed was like, gosh, Warren Buffett is really, really content.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So, Ollie and I got to know each other many years ago and just as friends, he was a sophomore in college and I was speaking at a class that I knew the professor and he came to me and said, hey, I've got six startup ideas that I'm launching right now. And I came back and said, hey, just do one of them. And then as GBI was growing, I started thinking about, hey, what happens next in my life? I have this large illiquid asset that has value, but let's just say tomorrow I want to go do something else. There's no income stream from that. And so I started obsessing this idea of finding income streams. And so the Spanish real estate was a derivative of that. And one of the areas that I started investing in was finding really niche originators. And the idea here was, similar to what we just talked about in FinTech, that all the VC money had gone into companies like lending club and sofa and these great businesses that were figuring out how do I make student loans easier, how do I make consumer loans easier, how to make personal loans easier. But they weren't actually lending in brand new markets. And what's really interesting is if you find a new segment that”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I'm not, and it's purely because I just couldn't find the pattern. And so I always say I will do it in the event that it's one of someone in my network who I just think is 10 level smarter than I am, then of course you always throw that check. But it's not something I actively look at.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “On Capitol, Sequoya Kleiner, or the persona around it, like a figure in an industry. And so if I was to bet, I bet you what happens to the next wave of venture capital will be a lot more domain specific venture capital. So I have a customer acquisition skill set. I'm just investing in companies that are trying to pick off Procter and Grammar Gamble brands. So I want the next dollar Shave Club. I want the next Chewy. Because that's actually value add. I know how that skill set I can provide that to you. Or I am just the insure tech guy because I can make connectivity for you here and there. And so I think you're going to have a lot more specialization as opposed to I'm going to invest in venture because I'm a really special guy and everyone comes to me. I think that model becomes more and more challenged over time.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “2010 or 11. And we were, and I think the single lesson I've learned from Venture, which makes it so hard as an asset class, is it's not systematic. When you break down the successes I've had as an angel investor, there's no pattern. It was like, hey, I got to know Travis completely randomly. I got into that SoFi because my friend was there and he was like a college roommate of mine. I got into some of these deals and there was no like pattern. I couldn't create the pattern for it. And I think that's why traditional allocators struggle with the ass class in general. I think what's worked in the past is either saying there's a brand, whether it's a persona or a brand or a firm. I think that works for some. I think it's challenged more in a world of angelists and the blockchain where anybody can be a VC now.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I've existed in that world in the sense of being just like anyone else who's started a fintech company, you ended up being a bit of an angel investor. And I got, you know, I always joke like the first deal I ever got into was Uber and it was complete luck.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Property and casualty world, like broadly. So cars will be different, I think. Being able to ensure my skis when I go skiing, as opposed to always having to pay for insurance for that, you're just starting to see some of this stuff that's going to adapt to like, I think, what I think will be the new world of insurance, the new world of traditional insurance products.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I'll give you an example. I thought about, I used to think about it a long time ago, which was today if you went to get life insurance and you had any form of cancer, you're not getting life insurance. If you have diabetes, your rates are incredibly high. But it's sort of like a blind sort of like pool that you're in a box that you can't get coverage for anymore. And I think what's sort of silly about that is there are many forms of cancer that you still live in air quotes normal life. There are many times diabetes where if you take care of it appropriately, you can actually live a traditional lifespan. And so I think an area where you'll see some of this happen are in areas where you can actually have you have data now to reprice that risk to a way where it actually is beneficial to the consumer. So instead of saying, hey, you've got this disease, I'm sorry, you can get life insurance business costs you $200,000 a year for a million dollar policy. Now you can say, hey, we can price you at a relatively fair price, provided you act in a behavioral, this type of behavior pattern, which allows us to price it that way. And so that's like an area I think you'll see some, I don't know, disruptions right word, but product evolvement. I think another area will be obviously...”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I think it's absolutely possible. I think one of the great challenges of starting a fintech business is that it's very long sales cycle. And so I imagine if you're sitting in the seat of the founder or owner of Wealthfront Betterment, one of these great companies, part of you is also like, gosh, it's really great that we're this size now, but it was really, really hard. And you almost start adopting the legacy mindset of that industry that you're trying to disrupt. And so I think the challenge is, are you able to continue to break that legacy mindset to create? And I think, listen, when you're a robo advisor with 100 million of assets, you're not really anything yet. But when you have billions of dollars and you're registered and you have to, every marketing communication has to be approved by council and then by an outside council, you start looking more and more like the traditional incumbents. And so I think I believe the robot visor market will work. I feel unfortunate for the founders of those companies because I think they become missionaries. And I'm sure they'll do well, but not nearly as well as they dreamed of when they started the company, given how much capital has to go into it. But I wouldn't bet they're the ones that disrupt the product.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “But it's still the same loan that I would have gotten from a bank and still relatively close to the same insurance product I would have gotten from a traditional insurance company. And so I think we're just at the cusp of like the second wave, which will be actually new products. And that's where I think it actually gets really interesting. When can you loan to markets that couldn't get capital before? When could you insure a risk that didn't exist before that you couldn't cover before because there wasn't data to cover that? That's where I actually think you're going to have real businesses created. And that's why I honestly think the first wave of companies, while you've had some big brand names, they haven't actually had economic success. And so I think they've had VC success, but they haven't yet got to that level where they're really sustainable business models.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “My best way of sort of talking about fintech today is like an example of the conversation you have with an entrepreneur. And you're like, wow, that's amazing. And so they sort of go through the pitch and they're like, it's a great user interface. It's a great user experience. And then their final answer is always like, and life insurances companies haven't changed in 100 years. And so this is going to be disrupted. And I used to always, and that's always like an exciting thing to say, that something hasn't been disrupted in 100 years. But when I hear that, I'm kind of like, that just means it's a really good business. There's a reason why something hasn't been disrupted. It's not like there haven't been people that have been smart businessmen before you. But if something's lasted for 100 years, that's like the definition of an amazing business. And so breaking that down, I think that's sort of been the problem with fintech and that people have a poor user experience and assume that it's easy to disrupt. And so you've had the first wave of FinTech be primarily customer acquisition businesses. Get a loan online, get an insurance product online, but they haven't really created new products. And so I can now get a loan online. I can get by insurance on my phone.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Which was convincing dealer desk by trading desk, by sales desk to come join our platform or exchange. And then the second half of the journey was literally convincing all these banks to come onto a platform that was started by a 26-year-old. And it was amazingly lucky the timing was great. The investors were great. And it was just the beginning of this fintech, I don't know if you want to call it revolution, but evolution. And we sort of are the right time, right place, and recruited a great team.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I and some partners who are actually far older than I were started brainstorming this idea of originally creating a platform for people to buy hard assets. And the idea was after the crisis, there'd be a movement into one esoteric assets, but two, assets with less counterparty risk. And a simple example was when you buy your house, you buy it directly. You're not buying through someone that owns shares of a trust at a place you don't know that owns your house. And so why are you doing that with your financial assets? And is there a way to create that? And we had this sort of macro thesis that precious metals would be a place to be. And so when we looked around the world, we were kind of surprised that gold is the oldest asset investment currency in the world, yet is not electronically traded anywhere. And it's kind of the backwater, this little backwater desk of most Wall Street firms. And so we said, let's go figure out how to tackle this market. And we went and built what's, I think, now one of the largest platforms in the world to buy, trade, and store precious metals. And that journey, I think, was scary in that I always say that it was two parts of the journey. The first journey was building the company.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Try to go build something because while I love value investing, I had this entrepreneurial bug to create. And so it was a tough time. It was also probably the most formative time in my life of wanting to create something.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, it was tough for a number of reasons. Obviously, it was an interesting time to learn to be an investor. I think within my first 12 months at a hedge fund, Lehman collapsed. You had AIG. And at the same time, I lost my mother and I had randomly gotten very sick. And all those experiences at once kind of make you think about what you really want to do with your life. And I remember sitting to my brother who's had obviously a lot of influence in my life. And he said to me, okay, imagine the job of your boss at your fund and imagine the job of being an entrepreneur, which I was sort of debating doing. He said, do you want your boss's life? And I was like, yes, I really want it. And he said, well, tell me why. And I was like, well, he's got this amazing house. He's got this great life. And he's like, okay, but think of like the day job. Like what he does. I'm like, well, it's great. He gets to interview company managements, the sell side's always trying to give him stuff. It's this really fun job. He's like, okay, now would you take that job if you were paid $35,000 a year? And I was like, nope, I do not want that at all. And so that was a very amazing experience for me. I said, okay, you know what? I've been through all this trauma.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I loved it. I think so, everyone complains about it because it's a lot of work, and it's not a lot of intellectually satisfying work. But I loved it for a few reasons. I think the first was I had grown up in a small town and I had never really been exposed to this part of the country lives. And it blew my mind. And so I remember I was 22 years old and I was on a flight to Japan and I was like, this is wild. I don't think anyone in my family's ever been to Japan. And so I think that exposure was great. The second thing that was super useful was you get exposure to all parts of Wall Street. So you're on the sell side. So you see the IPO process of meeting the buy side. You see the private equity side where you're selling deals to them. You see the capital market side. And so it's great exposure at a young age. And I think the last and probably maybe the most important is you're around really high horsepower people, far more than you were in college, far more than you were anywhere else. And it was awesome to be challenged by people who, it was truly, I say this with no arrogance or hubris. It was the first time in my life I met people who could think faster than I could. And that is a really humbling and fun experience.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I was a sophomore in college, and I sort of discovered I liked business. I didn't know what was beyond that. And my father sent me the Roger Lowenstein book on Warren Buffett with a note saying, this guy reminds me of you, and he really likes cherry coke and burgers like you do. And so I read the book and I devoured it. And I started, I think part of being naive was I literally sent an email to Seth Klarman and Dan Loeb and every heterogeneous manager that was a value investor to get their view on how to learn to be a value investor. And so I spent most of college trying to understand the principles behind value investing. And that led me to invest in banking because I”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Drive yet. And so it is an amazing kind of experience to see that boom of the internet and capitalize it in some smaller way.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I grew up in upstate New York, not from a business family. My mom's family was social workers and very much into social justice, and my dad was a doctor. But we had a lot of freedom as children. And so when we were young kids, we had a Koi pond our dad had built when we were kids as a father-son project. And one summer the fish had babies, and my brother and I, I don't know how we got this idea. We took a bunch of pictures of the fish and put it up on Craigslist and started selling fish on the internet. And a year after that, eBay started to really grow. And we said, hey, we have all these baseball cards we bought. Maybe we can sell them online. And we sold them online and we said, wow, that was a little bit of money. But what if we made our own packs of cards? And so we started going to sports card stores, dealing with people that were far older than us and we were both sort of below, we were probably 14 or 15 years old. And we buy these cards, take these packs, and sell them on eBay. And slowly but surely the business grew and business grew. And I joke, but when my brother was 15 years old, he had a BMW shipped to our house without telling our parents.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, and so I think we've had a lot of transformative companies come out. Uber as an example. What I found interesting about Airbnb is if you think about the power of brand, I can take Uber, I can take Lyft, I can take Juno, but most people don't know what's beyond Airbnb. And what's powerful to me about that is Airbnb is already the biggest hotel company in the world. And if you ask most people over the age of 35 if they've ever been in an Airbnb, the answer is probably no. And so when you have this next generation that grew up in a shared economy and they become the ones with wealth, they become the ones traveling for work. They become traveling with their family, we're just at the tip of the iceberg of the volume of people coming onto that market. And so I originally started looking, where the software plays here? What are the financing plays here? It ended up that there was a really great real estate play underneath it.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “With a tourist license only sold for 10% more than a property without one, yet the yield was 2 to 3x the price. And so we said, hey, let's go, this is just a personal investment, let's go buy a property. And overnight, we got rid of the tenants left. We put it all on Airbnb. And the yield is amazing. And fast forward a year, I had left the job I was working at, and I said, you know, this is working out really well. Let's go build a business around it. And so we raised a bit of money and started and sort of became the distressed buyer of condos in Barcelona. And so I think if you talk to any of the brokers in the area, we are the fastest to move. We lock in interest rates at less than 2.5% for 20 year fixed, and we are buying at replacement cost. And it's been amazing to sort of see a cash flow profile of business firm broker and the next day be able to flip it to two and a half times that by putting on a short-term rental site.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I should preface that I am not a real estate expert by any means, but I'd say a year and a half ago, two years ago, I and a couple friends, we bought a condo in Barcelona. And our thesis was that rates were really low still in Europe. And Barcelona was one of the few cities that was still very close to the 2009 bottom where every other city had rebounded. And it was really that simple. And we traveled around on a vacation, went across Europe, and realized two things. The first was the Airbnb trend was incredibly unappreciated. And what we meant by that was the ecosystem around it had just not developed and people were underestimating just how large it would be. And so we said, hey, let's figure out what city has mispriced Airbnb the greatest and in what city it's legal. And we ended up in Barcelona. And there was this really interesting legislation that happened where the government passed tourist license in Barcelona where if a property had a tourist license, you could legally put it up for short-term rentals. And what we discovered was a property.”

    2018-03-06 · Invest Like the Best · Savneet Singh - The Berkshire of Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.79] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source