YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Mandel

lines on the record: 86
first: 2021-07-20
most recent: 2021-07-20
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

“Probably I would say my wife saying yes to me, asking her to marry her, but she kind of knew that was coming. I really always have admired and been thankful for both Joe Ellis at Goldman and Julian Robertson at Tiger giving me the freedom and runway to express myself, advance, do things without there can be a tendency of to... Dampened, right? And they both let a thousand flowers bloom. And that enabled me to have freedom to do my best and to learn. And I don't know if I describe those as acts of kindness so much, but they were certainly acts of generosity. And I think anybody who gets themselves in that kind of situation is lucky.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a lot of it is going and visiting companies with people and working on transactions with people. And that has benefited me I just was very lucky. Each of the places I have worked, which is not many, but I work with tremendous people. I learned a lot from them. I mean, I used to walk into, I used to take the 548 train from here and then the subway downtown to Goldman Sachs. And I would walk on whatever it was, Stone Street, looking at 85 Broad Street, and I'd looked up at 85 Broad Street to be like 10 of 7 or whatever, and I would go, there are more smart people, good people in that building, maybe than in any other building in the United States. And probably not totally true, but was directionally true. And yeah, there were incredible people that I learned a lot from. Tiger. I mean, I learned a lot. They're great people and I learned a lot from not only Julian, but my contemporaries too.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the most important thing is to get themselves into a organization, could be public markets, private markets, doesn't really matter where they are mentored by people who teach them really good fundamentals. And a lot of that is sort of by osmosis. I mean, not like we don't have...”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not pouring a lot more money. It can be done with a kind of amount of money we spend now. But what is required is for both politics and I'll call it embedded structures to change. And that's really hard.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have learned that the problem with education in this country is the system and the politics around the system. I've learned a bunch of things by working with a bunch of organizations in this and then a bunch of the work we've done at Lone Pine Foundation. A lot of it relates to education and has involved a lot of our people here. So 30 years ago, we did not know that much about what worked and what didn't work. And when I say what worked, I meant taking kids who are two and three years behind in school and not only catching them up, but putting them on a path to success in life. And we know now, 30 years later, that 30 years ago we had virtually no examples of that. Now we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples. And we know by and large what it takes to do that.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meet all kinds of leaders, and you get to make money while doing it. It's amazing. And so my highest and best use for better or for worse is trying to take some of that money and make things better for other people. My wife and I, she kind of focuses on the environment and I focus largely on education and we do a bunch of other things too. More recently trying to make sure that our democracy stays a democracy. And we devote a fair amount of time to that, sometimes successfully and sometimes less successfully.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say not much has changed. What matters to me personally. I mean, matters to me personally. I mean, I guess family and friends come first. I mean, I've never asked myself as explicitly this way, but maybe more explicitly all the time is what is my highest and best use to the world? If we're here, we should try and make the world somehow better while we're here. And what is my highest and best use? I've always thought, okay, gee, if I stop doing this and then became a high school history teacher or whatever, is that really the highest and best use of me? Because no, probably I would not be nearly as good high school history teacher as many other high school history teachers. And I might be impacting 50 kids or something. Fortunately, this business, I just pinch myself every day. We get to do this, get to go out and meet all kinds of interesting people, learn all kinds of interesting things, understand all kinds of interesting businesses.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that to happen across the world have been less good for the US because many jobs that were forcibly done here can now be done other places for less and where people think that less is mana from heaven so i think that the fundamental shift in technology that's kind of enabled most of that that is the big thing”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's literally billions of people who 30 years ago did not know really much of anything going on outside their village and were living in poverty. And in the last 30 years, most of them now know things that are going on well outside their village and have been lifted out of poverty. So there's bad news in the press every day, but there are fewer people in the world dying from disease, starvation, violence, then as a percentage of the global population than has ever existed any time in the history of the world. And I think we often sort of lose sight of.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I can't say we've been great at that, but that's exactly right. When there's that inflection point or change, I remember when Google came public through like a Dutch auction thing and I was like, oh, I hate this structure and we didn't participate in the offering. And then they reported their first quarter.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think so, yes. In some cases it's relatively obvious, in other cases it's less so, and then you have businesses where the business is changing a bunch, and the prime thing that like Wall Street analysts have focused on is no longer the prime thing. So United Healthcare is an example for me where companies migrated from being basically a pure health insurer many, many years ago to being a healthcare provider in all kinds of ways and a data company and a lot of things surrounding health, but the first thing that people will talk about when the company reports earnings is medical loss ratio. And you're like, that is not the central issue anymore here. And the medical loss ratio actually is a short-term thing. And if it's higher or lower, it generally corrects itself over the next less than a year because contracts are rewritten every year. So yes, finding the central key driver and keeping your eye on that ball is critical.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that is a thing we try and impress on our analysts here, et cetera. Yeah, just identify what the one, two, three things that really matter here. And let's own them. Understand them, understand how they might change, understand the data sources to stay on top of them.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think it's overdoing it. I think it is more an art form than something that is formulaic for sure. And it is constantly evolving. I mean, I just think about our business and how it has changed over the last 25 years or whatever. And unless you adapt, you keep your basic principles. You keep your basic principles, but you have to adapt your tactics, your structures, all of that over time or else you will not survive.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at some point in the eight year future or something, gap earnings will equate to cash earnings as that cycles through. So that's the, we'll see. We don't know what the future brings necessarily. But I think one thing to think about with Netflix that doesn't get a lot of focus is production and the content, local content in various countries around the world. how that content doesn't just work in those countries but works in other places and the value of that. I mean, I think certainly investors here in the US tend to look at Netflix. Most companies in a very parochial way. We often fall victim to that, I'm sure, but there's a lot more nuance to it when you think about it through that lens.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not like Well, yeah, I mean, there was the argument which was true for quite a while, that they're kind of like the hamster on the wheel. But those lines are crossing now. There's two ways to think about this, right? One is gap accounting, which is how long do you depreciate the content that you have created or acquired? And the second is, are you producing more cash than you're spending? This year, the lines will probably pretty much cross in terms of producing as much as we're spending. Now, each year in the future, they will likely have to spend more to stay in the game or ahead of the game, but the cash flows should go up faster than which is...”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, brutal and very unclear what the results of that were going to be. And then secondly, they realized, gee, if we're just in the game of bidding against others for so-and-so's already released movies, that's not much of a distinctive proposition. We got to spend a whole ton of money getting our own content produced. And both of those things not only saved the company, but created value but created significant moats. Those are two current last 25 year kind of companies that I would have people study for sure.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lessons to be studied in terms of both risk taking, how you incubate things within a large culture. And I was a skeptic at the very beginning, to be completely blunt. I didn't see how the economics, and frankly, they weren't working at the outset, but he created value by pivoting and changing things that allowed them to work. And, you know, Netflix went through two enormous pivots, right? One was we're sending DVDs through the mail and you return them and clearly, you know, the business was migrating to online and they had to make that pivot, which was...”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unlock an element of glue in the company. It was sort of a bet the company thing. It started out at $79 or $79.95. The risk was that people were going to order one tube of toothpaste and crush them on shipping costs. And it would be an economic negative. And obviously it turned out to be exactly the opposite. And it would turn out to be a brilliant move. So there was that. And then there have been a number, I mean, obviously AWS was a found thing through things they were doing internally and decided to sell it on the outside, how they've managed first party versus third party, how they've migrated the advertising business, what the entertainment business does for them. And so there are many, many things. And a number of things they failed with internally that I think are real.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the two in more recent times that come to mind are Amazon and Netflix, which are two businesses that literally were, I mean, maybe over dramatizing, but somewhat were on the brink of extinction and chose to make an enormous pivot. So people forget, I always ask this question, Amazon started Amazon Prime. I forget, maybe like 2002, something like that. The quarter before they started Amazon Prime, Amazon's total company revenues grew nine percent. It was a young company and that rate of growth had been declining. And Amazon Prime, arguably there are many important aspects of Amazon today, but it may be the single biggest.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably more the trend. And there are certain markets that undoubtedly will wear the friction cost will come down and it will become more efficient, et cetera, et cetera. It is shocking to me anyway in some parts of the fixed income world that it's still a kind of who's your buddy backslapping trading and large bid ass spread quoted is very different than the bid ask spread when you actually go to transact and so”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, basically the only thing that I don't like about this job is that I look at Bloomberg, 365 days a year Many multiple times per day, etc. And you're chained to it. And if markets were 24-7, probably be chained to it even more. Now, markets around the world largely are 24-7. There's a brief, but it's only like New Zealand is open. I mean, that is.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well I think that might happen. I don't think it would be a good thing because I think, I mean, just totally selfishly, this job is enough 24-7 as it is.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are doing, and I wish I knew what they were because I would think hard about stopping doing them or changing how we were doing them, but I've thought about that and I'm not sure what those things are.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is medics school lecture hall. Okay, and people are sitting there smoking. This is in the 50s. So there are things that”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I always, the thing my father-in-law was an orthopedic surgeon, and he describes the lecture hall in medical school, every chair had a little ashtray in the arm.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish I knew the answer to that because there are going to be things not just how markets operate, but things we do in our everyday lives that people are going to say these guys were.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't mean you have to play, there's no one saying you have to invest in something. So sometimes you play when you have feel like you have done adequate due diligence and can make a good decision and other times you just say can't play.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a price every day. And we're relatively newer last three years or so to private investing. I mean, we did a little bit before that, but really, you know, in any significant way, like the last three years. Yeah, and that's a different game. I mean, there are times when it's a fire drill and you have to sort of all hands on deck and drop everything else and make a decision with less than perfect. I mean, not to information we have, even public markets is never perfect, but less information than we'd like to have. And those markets have evolved in recent years to a point where people, and I don't think this was really probably ever the case even five or ten years ago, where people were using capital and balance sheet size, et cetera, as a competitive weapon and trying to clear the field. Before other people had a chance to do anything. You have to adapt in this business.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to imagine a more competitive. There are a lot of ways to do it, right? And you don't have to just go to an But that was the FTC's argument, and I'm sitting there making this argument to the judge, Judge Hogan, as I remember. He's nodding and smiling, and I'm thinking, oh, you know, this is great. Ruled against”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“sort of gets me about some of these FTC cases that have existed in retailing or the ones that are popping up now. I remember I had to testify at the trial of when the FTC objected to the Staples office depot merger way, way back 20 years ago. The company sued to try and overturn it. And there was a trial and I was an expert witness at the trial. And so the FTC's case was that in markets where Staples, Office Depot, and Office Max were the three Office supply superstores operated when there was only two that was anti competitive. And there were lots of markets where there were only two. But my argument was, well, wait a minute, there's Walmart and Costco and all kinds of catalog retailers and online. And if you want to buy copy paper or pens and pencils to do it or an HP printer or whatever.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They improve, they learn things, they stole things from the first guy. So I think understanding what makes customers come to you and why you have some kind of edge over somebody else, because it's the rare thing. I mean, maybe a drug in its early stage of being on patent, but it's the rare thing in any field where you sort of have a quasi-monopoly. You have relatively intense competition. This is what...”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“two things i think they understand what their competitive advantage is if they have one and second they are always looking over their shoulder i always remember being sort of i won't i wouldn't name the companies here because it's doesn't reflect well on them but there were two companies in the same business one was the leader and one was kind of the number two and i would ask each what have you learned from the other guys and the leader basically said you know i never spend any time on the other guy there you know they're not as good as we are and our numbers are better and the other guy was always looking And the second guy ended up being better than the first guy over time because”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to take it from you because the amount of capital that it takes to get into the business is not high. The barriers are really around, well, both IP and then habit, stickiness from just not wanting to change and processes embedded in your organization. But that being said, I mean, we are still finding new innovative software companies all the time. The prices that one needs to pay to play are the issue. And you have to be pretty damn sure that this company is still going to be vibrant and growing nicely out in 25 and 26 to be able to get the math to work.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suddenly going to rear their heads up and take market share from you, the newer cloud-based guy. But it is the next guy coming along.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd say the only difficult thing is, yes, this is not lost on people. And so valuations are the issue. When you get a great vertical software business, there's little that's better because it's very sticky. You generally have pricing power. And oftentimes you are riding on the back of something that's growing itself, particularly if you have some type of per usage pricing. And the shocking thing to me about both the software business and the healthcare business particularly as it relates to both biotech and medical products is just how many companies there are out there and how many little, not even so little niches there are in the business and how much they're sort of just continuous improvement that goes on. And that's, I think ultimately what you have to be very mindful of in software is not so much are the big legacy incumbents.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that is the biggest trend for sure, but I do think this notion of community is really important in terms of how people are getting information, who they trust for that information, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, as we see in our political sphere a little more, but people being able to build community around their product is something we hadn't really seen, not only before the web, but before, you know, that's how social media really amplifies what goes on for people selling.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a great product. And it'll be interesting to see now that Google and Facebook have opened this up to them, what the uptake is, because all those people or merchants on Google or Facebook Using something now, so they would have to switch. So it will be interesting to see how that evolves.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have all the tools at their disposal to quickly get up online, facilitate transactions, market themselves, manage their inventory. So, yeah, I think there's a lot that's still happening. And it's beyond just a consumer-to-business payment, right? It's business to business payments. It's consumer to consumer payments. It's the software around facilitating the payments. It's the software around all the other aspects of running a small business. It's an area of tremendous innovation.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PLs, but areas where they've been earning very outsized returns and people willing to able to either do this much more efficiently and charge less and still make good money doing so. And then just watching the level of innovation at the online checkout to watch, I don't know how familiar you are with the shop pay app and how it works. Watching how that's iterated and gotten better and better over time and anythings that have enabled small merchants who several years ago were hopeless selling on the web and now”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think many aspects of the banking business now are being partially disintermediated by digital payments companies. So it's been amazing to watch these wallets develop and the amount of customers they get, the amount of money that goes into this is Square Cash, et cetera, has been just a real eye-opener to me. I mean, I realized that millennials, et cetera, are doing everything through their phone, but to watch many banking functions, Forex, regular old transfer of money to either individuals or paying bills happening through apps and the speed with which that's happening has just been eye-opening. And oftentimes I sort of, you know, analogy is like little PT boats firing at the big aircraft carrier, which are the big banks, and picking off not necessarily large elements of their...”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they're doing and how they can take over a hospital and improve outcomes. And that's what's exciting about this job.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pour it over. And here's a fairly large business Terrible way it goes to market. And these two women figured it out and they figured it out in a very organic way. Like one of them, friend, like, let me sew something for you that's better. And they've also built their other exciting aspect about it. One of the things that the web allows you to do and a direct-to-consumer model allows you to do is build community around your product. And so they've brilliantly, I think, had this be all about healthcare workers making them better at their jobs, making their lives better, particularly, you know, pandemic obviously helped some with that, but created this just brilliant community around the product. We're not huge investors in healthcare, but you just look at what's going on there with stuff in immunotherapy, continuous glucose monitors that just that are radically changing people's lives. It's just incredibly exciting. I mean, we own a small hospital chain in China and seeing.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, the scrubs. When I learned about this, I was like, this is just awesome. Because, you know, I sit there thinking most every little niche in retailing has been.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll take cashews. It's the same thing in olive oil. So they go to planters and they say, gee, we would like you to produce for us a larger cashew. And just for us and planters was like, no, we can't do that. So they figure out and they go direct to the growers and they disintermediate planners and they sell whatever the highest market share of premium nuts in the country. And same with olive oil. They go direct to the growers in Italy. They start out buying, oh, you know, Mr. Grower, you've got this great olive oil production thing here. We'll try this out. We'll buy container load. They're like container load. You know, that's pretty good. Now they're buying multiple, multiple container loads. We invested privately in this company. It's now public figs. Sure.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, that to me is the single most fun part of the job and what keeps me excited. And we see it all the time now. I mean, there's more innovation and more amazing things happening in the business world than ever before. And learning about how Costco became the dominant seller of olive oil in America, a premium olive oil in America, is something that just excites me tremendously, right? What happened?”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it has changed a ton. I do think we have more resources to do that with than we did 20 plus years ago. But it certainly means getting to know the people running the business yourself. And we have far more data to work with now than we ever did then through web scraping, et cetera, et cetera, that are things like glass door. And I mean, there's all kinds of things that are inputs to our process that didn't exist before. The basic process is the same. We have more inputs to the process, but it's basically the same.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are a lot of things, but one thing that we've learned, or I've learned, is people can be unbelievably smart, but if they're very linear thinkers, it will never work as an analyst. We are always dealing in shades of gray, probabilities. If somebody has to know the answer, like to a math problem or whatever, if they have to know the answer, there is never the answer in our world. And so those people can be incredibly smart and might be winning Nobel Prizes or whatever, but they can't work in our world because our world is all about probabilities and weighing outcomes. And if that makes you uncomfortable, it's just not going to work.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Balance sheet. We had guideposts in terms of where we would not go in terms of gross and net exposure, et cetera. But they were making the decisions long and short. That's been going on for 20 years. Changed in certain ways over time, but basically that was the idea. And that's how we've evolved. And that translated to last three years. Now the three of them, Mala, Dave Craver, and Kelly Granite, have been making the investment decisions and not me. I'm still piping in. Sometimes they listen, sometimes they don't. Been making the decisions.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there was no real plan at the beginning. It was just an idea. And it was an idea that was backstopped by having broad ownership structure, having a relatively concentrated team, et cetera. But day one, I didn't know none of the analysts I had worked with before. We start out, there were six of us. I had not worked with any of them before at the beginning. And so I didn't know somewhat of a crapshoot, right? I didn't know exactly who was going to turn out to be what. So over time, I got to know them and they got to know me. And of course, that cast of characters changed over time, but particularly in areas where I was less knowledgeable, I started handing off that responsibility. And we had no fixed amount of capital allocated. You have 200 million or whatever. First, Sarah Gordon in healthcare. And then it was Mala and Telekom, and then Marco and Dave Craver. And we would just manage that within the constraints of our background.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sent out a today would be a mass email, then it was mass mailing, then snail mail to like, you know, I don't know, two or three hundred people, both lawyers and accountants and bankers and all that kind of stuff, but also potential LPs, potential employees. Here's what we're doing. It laid everything out and it laid out our philosophy of doing business. It laid out what the fee structures were going to be, how we were going to invest, et cetera. And that's how I built it iteratively over the next few months.”
2021-07-20 · Invest Like the Best · Steve Mandel - Investing Behind Change - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 235] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source