Acquired - Special: Invest Like the Best on Acquired

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

On this special episode of Acquired, we're joined by a master interviewer himself, Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like the Best. We turn the tables and cover the most fascinating story he's never told on ILTB... his own! What is O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, and how are they bringing "AWS-level" innovation to the sleepy wealth management industry? How did he go from Notre Dame philosophy major to quant researcher to (arguably) technology CEO and now also an early-stage venture investor... all while simultaneously building one of the world's top new business media empires? Acquired is here to explore it all. Sponsors:ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acqsnaiagentsHuntress: https://bit.ly/acqhuntressVanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvantaMore Acquired!:Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the SlackSubscribe to ACQ2Merch Store!Playbook Special! Patrick’s Favorite Themes from 5 Years of ILTB:Chetan Puttagunta (#1): Go slow to go fast — http://investorfieldguide.com/chetan/Chetan Puttagunta (#2): Open source isn’t about saving on R&D, it’s about building differentiated distribution among developers —  http://investorfieldguide.com/chetan-puttagunta-and-jeremiah-lowin-open-source-crash-course-invest-like-the-best-ep-188/Bill Gurley: Healthy marketplace opportunities have increasing marginal value to demand from incremental supply penetration — http://investorfieldguide.com/gurley/Matthew Ball: The key to unlocking the Metaverse isn’t about building Ready Player One, it’s about creating interoperable systems that will move value and information between experiences —  http://investorfieldguide.com/matt-ball-the-future-of-media-movies-the-metaverse-and-more-invest-like-the-best-ep-185/Charlie Songhurst: The best place to look for talent is in less-competitive markets — http://investorfieldguide.com/songhurst/Katrina Lake: The past of e-commerce was about price, convenience and selection; the future is about personalization and curation —  http://investorfieldguide.com/katrina-lake-the-next-wave-of-e-commerce-invest-like-the-best-ep-187/Daniel Ek: Company scaling as “seeing around corners” — http://investorfieldguide.com/ek/Kat Cole: Inversion as a tool to deal with difficult people —  http://investorfieldguide.com/kat-cole-how-to-operate-lessons-in-brand-distribution-and-leadership-invest-like-the-best-ep-184/Sarah Tavel: Hierarchy as a framework — http://investorfieldguide.com/tavel/Josh Wolfe: The “directional arrow of progress” and the simple power of extrapolating trend lines — http://investorfieldguide.com/wolfe2/Links:Invest Like the Best: http://investorfieldguide.com/podcast/Founder's Field Guide: http://investorfieldguide.com/founders-field-guide/OSAM and Canvas: https://www.osam.com

Sweet. Nice. That was great. You guys do awesome, awesome preparatory work. That was by far the best one I've done, by far. Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture firm in Seattle. And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor and independent advisor to startups based in San Francisco. And we are your hosts. Now, you'll notice this is a very abnormal episode for us. I didn't say a number. We didn't talk about a company in the intro. David, what is this episode that we were doing today?

We have a very, very special guest episode we've been looking forward to, I think all of us to do for a long time. We have Patrick O'Shaughnessy, CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, and also host of the Invest Like the Best podcast, one of our very favorite shows here at Acquired and so excited to have him on. So Patrick is a master interviewer, as we all know, and he gets these amazing guests, talks all about their businesses and their stories. Other than I think like the old episode you did with your dad, your audience doesn't get to hear about you. We want to hear about your business. What is this O'Shaughnessy asset management thing? How did you come into this? You're a philosophy

major. Now you're running a quant fund. You have a venture fund. You've built this amazing podcast empire. We're going to dive all into it. Welcome, Patrick. Thank you guys so much for having me. I'm always hesitant to do any of these because I'm scared of boring people with the same stories. But there's a mutual admiration society here of all the podcasts I listen to. Yours is the most regular. So it's an honor to be here. Thank you for having me. Thanks for joining us. Well, before we dive in, if you love Acquired and you want to hone your own craft of company building, you should join the Acquired community of limited partners. You'll get access to the LP show where we dive deeper into the fundamentals of company building and investing, in addition to our LP monthly calls

where we talk with all of you directly, and of course, our book club and Zoom calls with the authors. So if you aren't already an LP, you can click the link in the show notes or go to acquire.fm slash LP and all new listeners get a seven-day free trial. Okay, listeners, now is a great time to tell you about longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. Yes, as you know, ServiceNow is the AI platform for business transformation, and they have some new news to share. ServiceNow is introducing AI agents. So only the ServiceNow platform puts AI agents to work across every corner of your business. Yep. And as you know, from listening to us all year, ServiceNow is pretty remarkable about embracing the latest AI developments and building them into products for their customers. AI agents are the next phase of this.

So what are AI agents? AI agents can think, learn, solve problems and make decisions autonomously. They work on behalf of your teams, elevating their productivity and potential. And while you get incredible productivity enhancements, you also get to stay in full control. Yep. With ServiceNow, AI agents proactively solve challenges from IT to HR, customer service, software development, you name it. These agents collaborate, they learn from each other, and they continuously improve, handling the busy work across your business so that your teams can actually focus on what truly matters. Ultimately, ServiceNow and Agentech AI

is the way to deploy AI across every corner of your enterprise. They boost productivity for employees, enrich customer experiences, and make work better for everyone. Yep. So learn how you can put AI agents to work for your people by clicking the link in the show notes or going to servicenow.com slash AI dash agents. And now on to our special with Patrick O'Shaughnessy of Invest Like the Best. All right. Well, before Invest Like the Best, there was, well, actually not before Invest Like the the best as we'll get into the first iteration, there was O'Shaughnessy asset management, of course, where you are CEO. But before that, there was O'Shaughnessy capital management. And that was started by your dad, right, Patrick? It was, yeah, in 1990, I guess, technically in 1987. So it goes way back.

For the first several years, it was a research firm, not an asset management firm. That might be a theme we refer to back and forth today, which is the combination of open research and open ideas and asset management and how the two interrelate. But technically, it was 1987, but began as an asset management firm in 95, 96. You guys hadn't, I think, still have a close relationship with RBC, right? The Royal Bank of Canada? We do. Yeah.

So the Royal Bank is a fascinating business, an incredible business that most people probably won't know. I've actually been lucky to be more places in Canada than probably all but a few Canadians. Love the country and love that company. They're our largest, our longest standing client. They actually are the only outside owner of our business. They own a minority stake in our business. So a deep, long partnership with them has been a common thread through my career. There's an interesting story maybe we can come back to about a pivotal role they played in the first couple of years of my career in the times that

I did get to see all those tiny corners of Canada. That's amazing. Okay, we definitely got to put a pin in that and come back. So Osanasi Capital Management and the kind of core insight, as I understand it, that your dad had was that there was academic research around quantitative methods for investing and for screening and identifying equities. I believe equities are maybe all types of assets to invest in. And he was really a pioneer in kind of putting that, I mean, I guess, is it fair to characterize it as like a data-driven approach to the old Ben Graham style, Graham and Dodd value investing? Is that a fair way to characterize kind of the insight that he had? Yeah, I think a common misconception about quants in general, where I would count us,

is that we're value investors. We're not slaves to value. It just happens to be one of those things that has worked really well historically. There are other things that are very different from value that work too. But the original work was shockingly simple. And oftentimes, I find this is the case that no one had just gone to look at data to see what kinds of stocks with what kinds of attributes tended to do well. The original version of the research was literally the dogs of the Dow strategy, which is nothing more than taking of the 30 Dow stocks, the 10

stocks that have the highest dividend yield, buying them, holding them a year, redoing that same rule set a year later with a single trade. And he was, I think, the first person to bring that research all the way back to the inception of the Dow 30. And what he found was, look, this incredibly, arguably stupidly simple strategy did better than the Dow itself. And that the two pillars of that were the discipline with which it was implemented. So you never deviated from a very, very specific process or rule set and just buying stuff for a lower price. And, you know, of course, that strategy, like any strategy that gets discovered, tends to fade in its significance, but not necessarily go away. So that was the original research that I think, you know,

kicked off our entire journey as a company way back in the 80s, with an incredibly simple by hand, you know, microfiche collected data set going back to the 1920s. What's the first time microfiche has come up on Acquired? Powerful set of stuff you can find. If you're willing to just go grind and put in the work and find differentiated data sets, maybe we'll talk about this too. You know, it's often not the modeling exercise that matters. It's the information that you're able to access, clean, you know, normalize and control. And not a lot of people were at the library looking through microfiche. Yeah. So this is, you mentioned library,

the other, to my mind, at least kind of like key piece of, of even like super early in this first iteration of the firm that you guys, I think we're pioneers in is, is marrying this, you know, investing and your approach and this whole quantitative approach with media and evangelizing too, right? So like invest like the best that we all know and love today is the second iteration of invest like the best, right? It is. Yeah. It's, it's, um, I. I catch a lot of flack for the title. It's some corny, rhymey title, which I suppose it is on face value. The reason I named it this was, so my dad's first book he's written for, his first book was called Invest Like the Best. And the whole premise, so this actually predated what became O'Shaughnessy Capital, was that he

was hired by large pension funds to effectively model their managers, the famous managers of the day, the Peter Lynch's of the world, for example, the John Templeton's. And what he did was create like clone portfolios by super simplifying their investment strategies into a rule set. And so the idea of the book was extract lessons from the behavior and investments of very famous, successful managers and have it as a tool that you can carry with you or even use directly in your investing. And so I just thought, oh, that's kind of cool.

You know, I'm basically going to do a version of that where I'm talking to people because I'm interested in getting them to share portable lessons with me and everybody else. So it'd be kind of a neat tip of the hat to my dad's original research. I thought about that for about two seconds, you know, it just popped into mind and that's how, how, how it got named. But yes, there's a lot of continuity here around a commitment to, uh, I always call it learning in public. I feel like that's becoming a cliched phrase, but I can like claim to using that, that, that very early on, but I do believe deeply in the power of doing that.

So that first iteration capital management, Bear Stearns ends up acquiring it. It becomes, I think, the linchpin and biggest part of Bear Stearns asset management practice, right before, obviously, before the financial crash in 2008. There's an intermediate step, which is actually quite interesting, which was in the late 90s, the team that was at O'Shaughnessy Capital began to build a business called Netfolio. Netfolio was a version of like if Motif Investing and Wealthfront had a baby, it would have been Netfolio back in the late 90s, sort of an idea that was inevitable, but just ultimately too early for its time. So that whole team was building a, you know, effectively a robo advisor in the late 1990s was a part of that whole boom and bust cycle. I mean, it was like the quintessential story

of tons of money raised and targeted at consumers, targeted direct to consumer. We'll come back to that when we talk maybe about Canvas later on, because we're doing something very different. But again, returning to our technology roots, if I was to credit any two patterns that are in common between me and my dad, even though we never really talked about this, it was just sort of implicit. It was this love of technology and this love of open research. It definitely carries through. Would Netfolio is the idea? So, I mean, with today, if I go to Wealthfront, it's very set and forget. I pick basically the amount of risk exposure I'm open to and it does all the rebalancing for me.

With Netfolio, did it bring in that idea of the clone portfolios? Like, could I invest like my favorite value investor? You know, it never got far enough where all the different product ideas came to fruition. At first, it was very simple versions of the same screens that were being run out of Shaughnessy Capital Management, which was all around the quantitative research that team had done. And largely from a book called What Works on Wall Street, which was sort of the book that created the asset management firm, which is kind of an interesting directional story. And that was about it. I think the plans may have been to expand

types of strategies and make it more and more customizable, which I think would have been a powerful concept, one that we're playing with today, but never quite made it there. So its chassis was fairly straightforward, but it wasn't passive, like Wealthfront and Betterment are just low cost index rebalancing. It did offer active strategies. So then obviously 2008 happens. It was like February, 2008, a few months before Lehman. So then you guys take the practice and spin it back out of bear, right? And that's the birth of what we all know today, Ashanti asset management, right? Yeah. And I can now speak to this from experience, not from story, because now I've entered the

picture. So we actually left in the year before the March 2008 blow up of Bear Stearns in the summer of 2007. So technically, the first day of OSAM was July 3rd, 2007, which we called OSAM Independence Day. It was just sometimes luck of the Irish helps. We definitely were lucky, maybe in more ways than good. The plan had already been in motion long before the two structured high-grade credit hedge funds that were sort of the canary in the great financial crisis coal mine began to blow up. Patrick, you were graduating in 2007 as well? I did, yeah. I literally graduated two months earlier. Oh my gosh. So I did too. I started working in the analyst program at UBS in the TMT group there. And God,

I remember whenever it was when those hedge funds blew up and JP Morgan acquired the assets of bear for $2 a share, somebody taped a $2 bill to the road. Do you remember this? The revolving door on his headquarters in Midtown? I remember hearing the news in March. Again, like I started, and it sounds like you too, started our careers on Wall Street thinking like, wow, this is a great place to be. The market seemed to just kind of go up. You know, I didn't really have the 2000, you know, stain on my brain. My awareness of the market was 02 to 07, which was this just like up into the right scenario. And the first several months was more of that in my career.

And so I was very green. I hadn't studied, you know, we'll talk about, I hadn't, I hadn't studied finance or business. I really didn't know anything that saw the shit hit the fan. So the famous thing that I remember, cause we knew so many bear people was thinking that someone had screwed up the price that it wasn't two, it must've been at least $20, right? Like there's no way it could be $2. And so I'll never forget. I'll never forget that, that image of the $2 bill plastered up against that, that beautiful Bear Stearns building, which, you know, was part of the deal when Lehman acquired Bear that, you know, just that building alone was like a billion dollar building and they got it for nothing. So what a wild and looking back, you know, it was the aftermath of the, of the crisis

was, was really hard for me because it forced me to learn so much so quickly and in a very stressful environment with clients that are angry and upset about, you know, losing a lot of money. Ultimately, I was formative. I'm glad that I started my career with that sort of event better than having one, you know, late in one's career or after a rosy period. What does that look like when you take the firm and sort of spin it out of Bear Stearns structurally? How do you do something entrepreneurial like that with existing assets of an asset management firm? So it's complicated. The way that we ultimately did it was highly unusual where we had, as divorces go, had the friendliest of possible divorces with Bear. There was literally a period where an asset, track records are everything. And so

track records break if they're not continuous. So we actually had portfolio management team members as dual employees of Bayer Stearns and O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. 14 people, not including myself, left Bayer and were the sort of foundational team for OSAM. I spent a big chunk of my, you know, that early summer calling the first hire. I'm technically the first employee. Yeah. Also the first intern at first, although that didn't last long. So I spent a lot of my time transferring clients over. You know, we had billions and billions of dollars and thousands of accounts and it was a rude awakening for what business is like and all about. It was as friendly as it could be, meaning they helped us make it continuous and a good experience for the clients or as good as we could make it. It's interesting

to basically start a business that's already a fairly large going concern, but nonetheless have to treat it like a brand new business with all the trouble that that entails. But it was a great education for me. Again, I hadn't studied this stuff. So I had to learn by doing. And I treasure those early days, even though it was stressful and hard. Okay, my plan here was to get right into the business model of sort of OSAM, since I think a lot of our listeners are not finance native. But we've touched a few times on your education now and how you didn't sort of come from this. Take us through how you decided what to study in college. And did you intend to go into the family business or not? So I'm a big believer that hardship early on often shapes someone's personality and character later on. And one of my hardships early on in life was

completely self-imposed, which was I was a horrifically bad student in high school. I moved from a very small, very small class size school in eighth and ninth grade to an enormous 4,000 student public high school in Connecticut for high school. I had this realization that I could do effectively no work and get Bs. That was a big change for me and basically meant I got to play more video games and hang out with my friends more and play Frisbee and soccer more. So I did all those things. Probably more valuable to your life and career now, right? I mean, again, I never look back on scars with regret because they sort of form things later. So

I assumed through stupidity and some arrogance and entitlement that I would get into the University of Notre Dame where my family has a long, deep history. I didn't. And I also, because I had that thought, didn't apply to other schools that were safety schools. I applied kind of only to reach schools. So I was rejected by each of those schools on the same day. So I got, I think, six of those small envelopes that no college applicant wants to get all at once. I ended up going to a regional school that had a compatible curriculum with Notre Dame so that it would be easy for me to transfer there. When I went to that smaller school, which was in Minnesota where I'm from originally,

I took the opportunity to reverse that course. I studied really hard. I declared as a history major. I was always interested. I was always interested in things. I just hated being told what to read or what to learn. And what I found in the first philosophy class I took at that school, the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, was that philosophy let me guide my own education in a very distinct and unique way. And I just fell instantly in love with it because the professor was basically saying, go read anything you want and make an argument to me. I was like, oh, that's like what I do anyway. Like, that sounds great.

And so when I went to Notre Dame, which at the time had the best, this wasn't by design, it was just luck, had the best philosophy department arguably in the world. Despite being a religious school, it had an unbelievable, I'll call it secular philosophy department with some incredibly famous philosophers as my professors. And that was my education. My education was twice per semester, per class, read a ton of stuff on a topic, synthesize it and write a paper. And that was my schooling. I just loved that way of learning because it was so, like I said, so self-directed. So that was the background story in philosophy that sort of reignited or maybe even arguably ignited a love of learning that I still have.

I just love the topic. I could talk about it all day. I still read a lot of philosophy. I think it's a great way to build a foundation for how to think. I'm very lucky that that whole story played out the way it did, even though at times it was pretty rough and stressful as a teenager. Wow. What a great way also to prepare you for like the other part of your career now that like nobody could have seen coming at that point. I mean, I guess podcast existed. I remember downloading some to my iPod in college, but like I was I was very shy, you know, like as a kid, I, I actually think I've completely changed.

I'm not shy at all now, but I was very shy. And certainly like on the personality test would, would test highly introverted. God, if you had told me I'd be doing this kind of thing in 10 years, when I was 18, I would have told you you're out of your mind, but yeah, sure enough, here we are. Things change. Wow. Coming out of Notre Dame, like had you been thinking all along, I'm interested in all this stuff my dad does in finance and I might do that. Yeah. How did you end up being employee number one at this startup? The truth is I didn't think about it at all. And I delayed it and procrastinated this decision. I kind of thought I would go to law school just because I liked arguing. I liked

constructing arguments. I liked the competition of it. I liked being like a truth-seeking missile, you know, above all else. So that was kind of my default path that I would, you know, have a summer off and study for the LSATs and maybe go become a lawyer. And I just got lucky, right? The timing was just right that the business was getting set up. And I couldn't argue with the logic that it would be pretty smart to watch and help a business get set up. Like that's valuable experience, no matter who you are. And so I just jumped on it and that was it. There was no more magic to it than that. I don't think I actually even really read my dad's work or books. We never even talked about it at home until after college. So when I say I knew nothing about investing, like I knew nothing

about investing when I graduated. Like I didn't know what an equity was. And I joke all the time, I had never used Excel. I didn't even know what that was as a tool in college. Again, because I'm just reading and writing, basically. Which is amazing, given your dad tells stories of bringing piles of computers with him on family vacation to backtest models against historical stock market trends. Like, what was your view of that growing up? My view that was that he was at the house, but we were body surfing and boogie boarding, you know, in the waves, and I didn't much care.

Yeah, again, I think a gift that that any parent can give their kid is tremendous support and care for their interest without imposing one's own interests onto their children. And, you know, that's something that I'll emulate and repeat with my kids. So yeah, we, we just, we weren't bludgeoned with it. It wasn't dinner table conversation. It was maybe that strange now looking back on it, given that's what his, all his mind share was going to, but, but yeah, we were just, uh, we were at the beach while he was doing that. Yeah. It's so funny. I can relate so much to, I mean, obviously very different, but so much of the story, you know, yeah. When I showed up, man, for, uh, analyst training,

well, analyst training was fun, but my first couple months in the group at UBS. French literature in college? French literature. Yeah. Arguably philosophy. Although I did more, uh, like theater and stuff, man, I'd never used Excel either. I just got hammered. Like I was, uh, bottom of the class, like for a long time, uh, just that learning curve. But, but like you said, like, you know, coming in with a fresh mind and just having that, it's a stretch to call it adversity, but like, Hey, you got to sink or swim. You got to learn this stuff. And like having a liberal arts education and being prepared to learn, got to just think like it ended up serving me super well. And, um, sounds like you too.

I think the best thing that can come out of any early education is just the feeling of what it's like to enjoy learning in whatever, whatever area that happens to be, it opens the door for you to be a high slope learner and other stuff. Like if you're, if you're curious and let that be the, the pull mechanism versus some sort of push mechanism, which as I mentioned, just didn't work for me. I think that's the skill that really matters. And, and you can figure Excel out if it's a means to an interesting and curious end for you and any other tool that we have at our fingertips. So I think becoming a high-slope learner and getting the experience of how fun that can be is really the only truly valuable

thing that college or some other formal education can bestow on you. Man, you're reminding me of that. I had this moment. I remember sitting in college physics freshman year. I sort of went the engineering route. But when I was sitting in that lecture, and I remember connecting the dots between how orbit works and why I can't throw a baseball very far and understanding how that manifested in the equations we were learning, like this teacher, this lecturer, we've the most amazing narrative between the practice theory and those two concepts and putting them together. And I just remember, like, I still remember the high that I had from the flow state of what a pleasure it was to learn that. In a lot of ways, I think all three of us are constantly chasing that in how do we learn something new in such a

complete and well-illustrated way that it's thrilling and enjoyable to learn. Could agree more. I mean, that's what everyone should be chasing early on in life, I think. Yeah. Well, and always. Okay. So speaking of learning, you had to learn, educate us and our listeners too. What is this business you were setting up, O'Shaughnessy Asset Management? How does an asset management firm work, period? And how do you guys work? Well, the thing about traditional asset managers is it's, in many ways, the simplest business model on planet Earth, and arguably one of the best if you do it right. So it's literally as simple as

you take control over other people's assets. You're given discretion to trade their assets on their behalf. This could be wealthy individuals working with a financial advisor. It could be a huge pension fund. It could be a corporate pension plan, whatever that might be. And you're given discretion over the assets. You're hired to transact and trade and invest on their behalf. And traditionally, in a long-only context, you're paid a percent of those assets that's quite small, sub 1% of those assets these days as an annual fee for your services. And it's just a management fee. And in hedge funds, there's the extra layer of usually carried interest, like you would see in

venture capital firms. But the big long-only managers that just buy stocks on the long side, just to hold them, will charge some flat asset management fee. And that's the entire business, right? So it's a function of how much you manage. And the beautiful thing about it is that it's recurring. So it's very SaaS-like in that sense. It's a recurring revenue stream. Also, there are no accounts receivable, right? So you tend to strip the fee that you're generating directly from the asset base that you control itself. So it's a very, very, it's an incredibly simple model. So you obviously want to design strategies that can accommodate some assets, maybe not too much in assets because any strategy starts to die as it

gets too big. But in public markets, this can be billions and billions of dollars. And that's it. That's the entire business model. So the functions of the business are just like any other business. There's product, which is the investment strategy that's run by a research team, a chief investment officer, you know, in our case, a team of quantitative researchers building predictive models to buy stocks. That's the research function or product function. And then there's the distribution side of the house. So people talking to those investment advisors, telling them about our strategy, convincing them that we're better than, you know, the next guy, maintaining relationships, telling them about our strategy, convincing them that we're better than, you know, the next guy, maintaining relationships, telling them about performance, all these sorts of

things. And then there's the sort of operations and support functions inside the business, like any other business. So it is in many ways, the world's simplest business model, and arguably one of the oldest to, you know, financial advice of one shape, way, shape, or form has been around literally forever. And that's how our business was structured out of the gate. Nothing complicated. Was there or is there also the equivalent of a carry component, a performance component, or is it all just the asset management fee? It totally depends on the firm. Some charge a performance incentive fee above and beyond the performance of a certain benchmark.

So let's say you're hired to manage US stock portfolio. If you beat the S&P by 10%, you get to keep two of that 10% on a dollar basis. So sometimes managers charge that way. The much more common is just a flat asset management fee that's based on assets. But you can contractually do anything you want. And sometimes big investors like to pay zero management fee and a generous incentive fee so that basically the only time you make money is if you do your job and beat the broad market. Why do you think it is that historically it's been common for long-only public asset managers to be fee-based and venture capital, private equity, hedge fund managers to have such a heavy performance component? Well, we could debate the latter part of that

statement these days. I think it's just capacity, right? The reality is that if you were to give me in our US large cap strategy a billion dollars tomorrow, we'd execute it in a day or two and we wouldn't move the stocks that we're trading. I mean, think of the challenge of putting a billion dollars to work in almost any venture context. It's incredibly hard to do. There's just not enough capacity to go around. And therefore, you need to incentivize the managers with potential reward. And because the capacity is capped, you need to have that be something like an incentive fee like carried interest. So there's a lot that we could talk about in this space and the alignment of incentives and

how this should work. You could argue that someone that gets paid carry should not be able to get rich on management fees. Obviously, in practice, that's not always the case and usually not the case for successful firms. They get rich both ways. But that's the primary driver is that a strategy like ours in public markets could accommodate billions tomorrow with no real marginal cost to us and without affecting the market price. I mean, we've seen this experiment play out over the last 10 years in the private markets, and particularly in the quote-unquote venture flavor of the private markets. Billions of dollars have come in and they

have impacted the market hugely. Yeah, massively, massively increased prices. And like you say, it's hard to efficiently put a billion dollars to work in certainly private companies, but particularly venture. And like, you know, that's why we got two and a half years of joking about the SoftBank Vision Fund every time anybody was bringing up venture returns because they have a blunt instrument in deploying these billion-dollar checks. That was one firm, yeah, that literally impacted the whole market. I won't name names, but I've heard from founders who have taken SoftBank money about the absurdity of the process of diligence that went with that.

And I just think it's crazy. I think that amount of money, to put it to work, you have to be cutting enormous checks and doing so fairly liberally. So it's no surprise the impact it has on prices. Wait, absurdly a lot of diligence or absurdly not enough? Absurdly not enough. If you're thinking about even the biggest hedge funds and the amount of work they would do to deploy, say, a billion dollars into a business. It is crazy. Like, I live more in the circle of public market analysts, even though now we're, you

know, I'm spending a lot of my time in the early stage markets. But sometimes I feel like I'm an alien on a different planet because the sort of work done on companies is just so different. Charlie Sonhurst described this as the East Coast versus West Coast mentality. That was such a good episode. You did a lot of that one. He's one of the best. And I think that the right answer is somewhere in between those two mentalities. But yeah, I think there's a lot to be learned from each for the other. The West Coast has had a nice run here. So it's hard to argue with the way they've been doing things given the results. But I think the public market mindset applied to private markets is a powerful concept. But in the context of some of the biggest venture investors, I don't think,

I wasn't there, so I can't say for sure, but I don't think the same degree of rigor was applied to the work being done. Well, thank you for illustrating sort of the vanilla asset management model, particularly for long only public funds or-only public managers. How does OSAM deviate from that and how has it sort of deviated over the years? So I would say the major deviation has happened in just the last couple of years, which is our move to become much more of a software business. So we still are an asset manager in the sense of the business model. We charge people an asset management fee based on the assets they have with us. But the way that we're accessed and the way we deliver our product, I'll call it, is now heavily through a piece of software that

we call Canvas. If I'm good at anything, it's just collecting really good ideas and applying them liberally without a lot of second guessing from the smartest people I can find. And so in many ways, what we've done with Canvas is just borrowing some of the best lessons I've uncovered and we've uncovered as a team over the last three or four years. Chetan, who we both know really well, had a huge hand in this, which he knows, and I've told him several times in terms of our go-to-market strategy, so many others, a heavy hand in how we thought about product. But I think of us today as a software business that happens to monetize through asset management. I'm happy to walk into the origins there, but I would say that's the primary deviation between us and the everyman asset manager. Patrick, you're on Acquired. Please walk us through the origins of that. Happily. So when I was kind of in the early days of the podcast, the podcast was

nothing more than an open search for me after having really honestly maxed out my abilities as a quantitative researcher. The lack of statistics background caught up to me. I did a lot. I'm proud of the work I did, but you know, the team that's on our team today would, even the ones that are very young, absolutely run circles around me five times a day in terms of the actual work being done. So I had to find some new way to add value. And what I agreed to do with a couple of my friends was to do this very openly. And I tried like six or seven different things, different formats for doing this. The podcast is the one that stuck.

And I was basically just looking for areas that interested me. What could I find that was applied to our business? I could understand. I felt like I could intelligently apply. And most of that ended up being around the world of software. So I got especially enamored of the early Amazon Web Services story and the story of Andy Jassy and his TA stint, which is this program at Amazon where the senior team has sort of like a always, maybe not always, but often have like a shadow staff member called a technical assistant, a TA. Started at Microsoft under Bill Gates. Right. And Jassy was Bezos' TA for, you know, 2003 or whatever year it was. And then had this brilliant insight of, wow, let's repurpose the

infrastructure we built for our retail business and turn it into Amazon Web Services. So I talked to a lot of people at Amazon. And I just like getting on the phone with people. I find I'm pretty good at getting to the people with the right information and just getting them talking. And so I got a lot of context around how this worked in the early days. And I thought, holy crap, we have the same, obviously much smaller scale, but we have the same general type of opportunity. We're a quant firm. So we built all this crazy infrastructure, ripping third-party vendors out one by one over 10 years, rebuilding a software solution internally to help us do our jobs. We had a full-time dev team that was just building internal tools. And so the question became, well,

if this had a beautiful front-end skin on it skin on it, what would the product be? What would it look like? Let's go through that exercise. So we kind of poked and prodded on a couple of different things and settled on the final model that we call Canvas, which does exactly that. It literally is our internal tools as a service to let you design extremely customized investment strategies through a web-based portal, which we then do all the trading and implementation on, all the reporting on for the benefit of generally very high net worth individuals through their financial advisors. So what we work on is software. So it's obviously client facing like end users. What's that?

In my mind, it's client facing. Our client are the advisors. So the people that use Canvas are themselves advisors? Correct. So I'll make up a firm, RIA, Registered Investment Advisor Firm. We'll call it John Doe Capital. So John Doe Capital has five advisors, some support staff. They manage a billion dollars for 10 families. Let's just say they're really very wealthy families. Those families have outsourced their investment function to the advisor. They trust them.

They trust them to oversee their estates and their investments. Those advisors typically today don't pick stocks themselves. They used to way decades ago. Then they moved to picking mutual funds, then to managers. It's evolved. But usually they outsource the function. That could mean hiring Vanguard to do it very low cost. It could mean hiring an active manager like us. And they make that decision based on a lot of research. What we do basically is say, well, we're going to do all that, but you don't just get to pick like option A, B, or C. Instead, you get to design exactly the strategy that you want

that's specific to the circumstances and preferences of the end client. Of each of your clients. Yeah, of the actual end investor, we'll call them. And that might be particularities around their tax preferences or around what kinds of stocks they're willing to own, what sort of risks they have in their life. Arguably, if you a, you know, a Facebook executive, maybe, maybe you want to route some of your investment risk and different parts of the economy, not, not double down on, on the same sector. So there's all these sort of variables. Everyone's life's a little bit different and preferences are different. And this software allows advisors to show their clients something very unique. That's, that's totally tailored to

them. This is awesome. Like it truly is an AWS story. Like you guys were serving clients yourselves and now you're serving clients yourselves and other advisors who are serving clients. Correct. And, and our goal is to, is to make the advisor, you know, central here, right? So that much like, uh, you know, again, maybe Shopify is another interesting example that I've thought a lot about with merchants as the North Star versus customers as the North Star that Amazon has built its business on. And you could think of advisors sort of like us building for merchants. We're building a platform that they can build an entire business on top of, and at the same time, provide a really interesting solution to their clients.

And so Patrick, I have the sort of vertical versus horizontal conflict question here brewing in my mind. How did you think about whether you should sell licenses to Canvas to OSAM's competitors or not? So it's an interesting and ongoing question. I don't have a great answer to this. I like one definition of a platform, which is that you're not using the same tools to compete against your clients. And there's a tension here. Like another one of my favorite little ideas from my podcast history was an observation from Keith Raboy, then at COSLA, now at Founders Fund, when he said all the money he had made in his career was building tools for the equivalent of merchants, let's say, having the merchants be too slow to

adopt them, and then using the tool vertically integrated to compete against the legacy merchants. Open door. I always have these opposing views in my mind, but we have a long history with the RIA community. We love working with them. We were one of the first firms in the late 90s to work with that community. It's a fast-growing segment of wealth management. And we generally like the wonky stuff and are less good at the end client experience and the rest of the package. You know, we're not interested in estate planning in particular. We're interested in investing. And so I think the role that we play is the right role to serve RAs and advisors as our primary clients in that part of the business and not the end user.

It's one of those perennial questions and decisions. Like when you have a powerful product, it's a luxury to wonder, you know, what, what all could we do with this? But I think ultimately, the more you get distracted, the more you lose focus, the worst product you create. This is the perfect transition to talking about the other thing you've built over the past couple of years on your own and within within OSAM. So your Ketherboy episode, fun acquired history here. So good. At the end of it, you were, I think you've stopped doing this as much, but you were asking, you have your kindest question, but you also ask people for book recommendations. Have you stopped doing that or do you keep, are you still doing that?

I have stopped doing it mostly because I don't read books anymore for the most part, which is a strange departure given I used to read, you know, a hundred a year. But because I've lost interest in books for the most part, nonfiction books specifically, I actually don't ask the question anymore. Ah, you should ask what podcast you used to listen to. So Keith's answer to the books was Seven Powers. And Keith was like, hey, there's this book in the sky, Hamilton Helmer, best kept secret in Silicon Valley. This is a fantastic book. And so I listened to that. I picked up the book that said to Ben, I was like, Ben, you got to

read this book. And, uh, and we reached out to Hamilton and, uh, rest is history. I was like, really, David, I've never heard of it. Like, I don't know. And he's like, look, Reed Hastings says it's the best business strategy book. And he's like, the best business strategy practitioner in the world. And I was like, okay, fine. It is amazing to be just flashing back. What was that? Six months ago. And having skepticism there. Wow. I mean, just to pile on there. I mean, I was introduced to Hamilton through Daniel Ack. And I think that Daniel's the best strategist that I've personally spent

time with. And he says the same thing about Hamilton or something similar anyway. So that's two pretty good ringing endorsements there, albeit from a very similar business model in Spotify and Netflix. One trying to be the other pretty quickly. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, Seven Powers is something I think about a lot. It's now a whole section on the acquired show, which we're going to make you go through for OSAM in a minute. But okay. So like invest like the best, man. How did this happen? So you wrote this, you've talked about your philosophy of growth without goals, which maybe you can get into here in a minute. This thing has taken on a life of its own. How did it start?

Some of it's timing, right? Like it started in 2016. So before this like mega boom of podcasts, you know, I think sometimes better just be earlier, have the right timing than good. And that was definitely a component of it. I was probably one of the, one of the first couple, what I would call high-end investing podcasts. And it was just lucky timing that my friend, Jeff Graham, who had just written a book, I think it was called Dear Chairman, which was a story of eight different activist investment campaigns in public markets, including the letters that were written by the investor to the chairman. I mean, it's an awesome book. And Jeff was kind of marketing the book and I can't remember who

asked who, but we decided that we would record like an audio version of the major topics covered in the book. That was the first episode. I told my producer, Matthew, that I would commit to doing seven of them again, because if I don't have a habit, I don't do well. So I figured seven was like seven weeks felt like long enough. And the second episode was with Michael Mobison and who was a recent research friend, I'll call him at the time, and a legend in the research and equity investing business. And it just sort of took off. It was one of those things that I think had product market fit in week two and steadily has grown ever since. Turns out on the internet, like the more focused you are and the more wonky and niche you are, the bigger your audience is. Because I think the internet rewards the edges of distributions. And I just happen to be really interested in one of those edges, which was like deep, wonky business and investing discussions.

And so I've just done it ever since. And for the longest time, I never really had any goal with it. I just wanted to talk to interesting people and let my own curiosity guide me to the next guest or let the past guest guide me to the next guest. And it grew organically from there. I never marketed it. I never did anything but tweet out a link to it. Still, for the most part, although that's changed recently a little bit, don't do anything extra. And that's kind of the whole boring story, to be honest, guys. There's not a whole lot more to it than that. I should probably start making up like all these all these founders that I should make up a much more like mythical origin story.

We were walking in the woods and like, you know. Yeah. I just happened to be downtown one day in New York and that's where Jeff's offices were. And we recorded an episode and then the rest is history. How did you decide on Seven? And how did you decide I'm going to find a producer like right out the gate before I even know if I'm doing this thing or not? I tried to edit the first one myself and literally got 45 seconds into it and said,

no effing way am I doing this? So I, you know, I asked on Twitter for somebody. I got lucky that my producer, Matthew Passy, was around to answer or something. And he's been my partner this whole time. So I've never touched the, you know the production or engineering side of this whole thing. I just have the conversations. That's my role. Seven weeks.

I have no idea. I probably made it up. It probably felt like enough that it wasn't a crazy commitment, but also enough that I actually had to think about five more people after those first two and go get them and sit down with them and actually put in some effort and to see if it worked. And by the third episode, I was like, oh, I'm going to do this the rest of my life. This is so much fun. And talk about a cheat code as a way to get ideas and information.

It's like I always joke now, like books should be one tenth of their length, most of them. And you can get multiple books equivalent of insight in a single hour conversation. So why not just do that, especially if you can go get the best people in the world. So it's pretty concurrent with this whole new strategy and building canvas, right? Yeah, it preceded it. So 2016 was the fall of 2016 when I started the podcast. I took over OSAM in 2018. So there was a bit of a gap. And then we really started building Canvas in earnest at the very end of 2018. So we built it very fast.

And I sort of think about it like having APIs at our fingertips. Like we had already built so much of the core infrastructure. So it was really just tapping into the infrastructure. So even though people saw it and they're like, holy crap, you built this in three months? We said, well, really, we built it in 10 years, but we were able to move very quickly. And part of the reason for that was the lessons I was picking up and my team was picking up along the way in those first two years. And with the podcast, was it an intentional strategy to attract capital for OSAM or then later on to attract customers for Canvas?

Never. I don't believe intentional marketing almost ever works. I feel like the best marketing is like a, how did this happen sort of question after the fact. And the podcast remains a critical marketing asset for everything I and we do, but it's never with the mind towards that. Like I'm never thinking, Ooh, what can I, how can I like subliminally design something to get people to, you know, call us on this? It's never, ever like that. I think of it very much as brand versus direct response marketing. So no, never, it was never part of a strategy session or something like that and never will be because we just know that that would pervert the whole reason I think it's interesting

in the first place. And your listeners would see right through it. I mean, this is one of the biggest... Yeah, it's the smartest group in the world. Exactly. The biggest key tenant that David and I have about Acquired is assume the audience is brilliant. And not only will you then attract brilliant people, but it forces you to play at a higher level so that you get to keep engaging brilliant people. Yeah. I think that's so important. Like the second people smell sales, like it has a stench and I never want to fall in that trap. So it will remain driven by what's interesting to us, not what we think other people want to hear or not some backdoor into a business outcome that we're trying to achieve. Are there moments you remember from the last four years that were like, either like

something happened to a particular show, a particular guest that moved the needle in a big way or where you just like, we're like, Holy crap. Like this is, this is bigger than I realized. I tried to not check the metrics too often because when I wrote a book, when I was, I was pretty young, I wrote a book when I was in my like middle eight twenties. And when it came out on Amazon, I remember checking the stupid Amazon, um, like ranking like so many times a day, it's like crack for authors. I hated that. And I was like, you know what? I'm not going to do that this time. So I would check after an amazing episode that I just knew was awesome. I would check just out of curiosity. And for sure there was like a steady organic growth rate with step function changes. And I actually called this the Mobus

and bounce. Cause I've had Michael on, I think four or five times now. And every time I do, there's like a 10% audience increase that then doesn't disintegrate. So he's, he's my growth hack along with, with a few others. But yeah, I tried to, I tried to stay away from all that because again, like that's one of those feedback loops where I would feel like the listens were driving my thinking on what to do next versus just my curiosity so i've really tried to stay away from that as much as i can especially recently as the numbers have gotten very big and just just ignore it and trust that if i if i'm curious it will come across if i'm doing something by rote that will come across because the audience is so smart. So just don't do that. At the same time, it has taken on this life of its own.

You're doing a bunch more stuff around it. Can you tell us about what's next for the show and how it's bled into the investment business as well for you? Sure. So, you know, COVID has been with all its misery for so many people. We've, I've tried to take it as a, as a personal blessing as in as many ways as we can. You know, the first of those blessings is the time I get to spend with my family now and not, I was traveling a lot for work and you know, I'm not, I'm at home,

I'm sitting in my home office right now. My, my kids are, you know, I can kind of hear them in the background and I get to see them and my wife, Lauren, all the time. And that's the first blessing. The second is it just made, I think it made, it's made everyone realize the parts of what they were doing that were wasted effort, or if not wasted things, they just didn't really enjoy doing. And I, I just believe that enjoyment aligns with good outcomes for the most part, because you just have more energy for stuff. And if you have more energy and more persistence to get through hard times and so better outcomes are possible. So I kind of asked the question, like, what would the perfect

alignment be between my own enjoyment and curiosity and effort in the business? And I think the way that shakes out is what I'm going to do the next 20 or 30 or 40 years, whatever it is, is just try to be like a cartographer. Just try to map the best knowledge in the business and investing world in a pretty formal way. And again, I think probably my legacy as a quant makes me think about everything like, what does the database schema look like for something like that? What is the atomic unit? If I'm writing data to a knowledge database, what does a unit of data look like? How does the database structure? How is it accessed?

What front end do I build on top of it? All these questions that I think anyone in software would understand, trying to think about what I do through that same lens. And that's going to be my primary focus. Now, that manifests in a couple of ways. I like to be radically open with this stuff. So I'm going to publish a lot of those learnings as we go. We're probably going to open source that database in some interesting way. We are just in the process of launching our first early

stage investment vehicle called Positive Sum that I'll be spending a ton of my time on because it aligns so cleanly with this same exploration. So I kind of think about it as I'm just going to do one thing. Like I'm just going to find interesting things to learn about. I think I'm pretty good at getting to the best people in the world on those topics and somehow convincing them to share the lessons they've learned and just try to mimic, like be a human version of these companies. Like what's a good example, like a Shippo or something, which is an API that sits on top of a bunch of other APIs, right? Like I just now, I'm a good router. So when I get a question, I'm lucky. I get to, rather than answer it, which who cares

about my answer, I get to go ask the smartest person in the world on that topic what the answer to that question is and do it pretty quickly. And so I'm trying to be a router, not a originator. And that's going to be my goal. And it's going to manifest inside the business in a lot of different ways. I mentioned the new fund, the podcast will be expanding. I'm going to try to convince ever more of the calls that I do for my normal job to be recorded, which is kind of weird and radical, but I think really helps the general public as long as we're not doing any harm to any company or any individual, which we're very careful about or revealing sensitive information or anything like this. But I think that there's

an opportunity to just hit a button a little more often than not when having normal conversations than anyone would have in the investment business as they're doing diligence and research and be radically transparent and hopefully create a lot of value for other builders out there in the process. To sort of paint a use case, which is like a thing that I often do as an investor when I'm hearing a startup pitch to try and echo back what I'm sort of conjuring up in my head, you could imagine a situation where you're doing research on businesses where there are scale advantages and where you can, with a very large audience, amortize the cost of something. And you stumble upon Spotify and what they're doing with podcasting. You stumble upon Netflix, to keep the

examples we've been talking about this whole episode. And then there are a few ways to click a play button where you get to hear various conversations between you and Daniel, where we can sort of hear different insights about how he thought about that strategy from different times you've communicated with him. Is that sort of how you're thinking about it? Yeah, I think there's a question of what format does this take that becomes really user-friendly and useful? I've built and been part of products that no one wanted to use, and I don't, I try to be very allergic to that. So we'll, we'll iterate around this. I know for sure that capturing these lessons in a more formal way is going to be, if only for our own benefit,

very valuable because when I'm, when I look back at a given episode, you know, I even did it in preparation for this talk, just like looking at the episode title and saying, what lesson did that episode contain? And it's, it's amazing for many of them. Like I could just go through them right now and just tell you like, here's what I remember. And it's an incredibly powerful tool. It's easy for me because I'm the one that had the conversation. I think it's harder if you're listening, you know, like for a few of your episodes, I could say, yep, here's the lesson I remember, but it sure would be reinforcing and powerful if I could tap directly into that good stuff more directly and with more control. And so I think your example is a good one of, oh, I found this interesting. How do I keep pulling on the same string within the same ecosystem?

So it's two tasks, right? Fill that database with good stuff and find like incentive structures to keep writing good data to that database and then find a way to make it navigable for interested people through technology and software. You called yourself, your vision and what you want to do here being a router going forward. To my mind, that actually I think undersells a little bit what you've already been doing and the opportunity to do going forward. This listener said to me once, he's like, hey, you know what you guys are? You're knowledge curators. Like all the knowledge is out there.

Like this is the thing about the internet. This thing about acquired, just probably the thing about you too. Like all your guests have been on other shows. Like they have interviews in other formats. They're on YouTube and various talks. The knowledge is out there. What you're doing is you're curating it and

packaging it in the best, most consumable form. Does that resonate with how you're thinking about things? Yeah, there's, there, there certainly is a curation aspect, right? Like as, as the amount of information and knowledge explodes due to the internet, all of a sudden it becomes valuable to, to be able to compress that or curate it in a helpful way. So that's 100% the part of it. But part of it too, I guess, is helping others frame things in a novel or different way than they have in the past. Like if I'm trying to get better at anything, it's having just a really low tolerance for repetitious content with a person. Like when I'm interviewing

somebody that's done a lot of interviews, my goal is to have as much of it be novel and to have their reaction be like, huh, like I never thought about that question before as often as I can. And I find the best way to do that is I'm just easily bored. And I've consumed so much content that if I've heard something before, I'm just bored. Like then I feel like I'm wasting my time. And so I have, by having a low tolerance for that sort of stuff, I think that's the second function. It's curation and sort of like eking stuff out that hasn't been explained or revealed

in that specific way before. And so that's kind of what I'm trying to do and be selfish about it. Like ultimately, if you're selfish in solving your own problem, that's usually a good policy. And sometimes the questions I'm asking are, I'm dealing with some problem in one of our businesses and I don't know how to solve it. And so I ask somebody that's really good how to solve it. And then you find something great. Yeah, exactly.

All right. Well, I have a management question on this. So you have these like multiple concurrent initiatives. You've got sort of codifying business knowledge and making it more navigable. You've launched an early stage investment fund be right up a lot of people's alley. First, what is that? And second, how on earth do you manage to do these three things concurrently while also running a large existing business? So it's the most common question I get. And the first part of the answer is that I work very hard and have a lot of energy for this stuff. And sometimes having more hours that are productive in a day is an advantage.

So that's part of it. The second is I'm just ridiculously open about what I'm doing. So you know all my stuff, as does everybody else. I don't have any other stuff. What I generally find in my relationships with other very successful people is they also have lots of other stuff that you just don't know about. So, so there's, there's a little bit of like transparency, making it seem like I'm doing more than others. When in reality, that's, it's really not the case in my experience of highly curious people who just tend to do a lot.

And the last piece of it, which is probably the most important and maybe interesting is the way I think about it is I actually only do one thing and it just happens to show up in a lot of different like outcomes or side effects. And that one thing is, is this scout function. Like I am out trying to find what is the next interesting, useful concept idea, market area, person, product, you know, whatever that can be emulated, borrowed, copied, mimicked, whatever it might be in a productive way for the people that use us for something. So that takes the form of

handing lessons off to my team at OSAM. I work with a senior team there that I've been with for 14 years each, all four of them. So we, you know, we know each other intimately well. They're all more talented in most ways, except for my talent maybe is the scout function. They're all more talented than me in every other way. So we're closely with them and I'm handing them stuff. That's part of it. On the venture investing side, I would actually argue that my training in public markets is awesome preparation for the time I'm now spending here. It is different. It's much more qualitative than quantitative, but quantitative still matters a lot. And what I'm finding when

I'm talking to founders, especially around series A, and especially if there's a data component or a modeling component to a product, which these days is more and more common, the kinds of questions we're able to ask them about that, they look at us funny. You can tell they've never been asked the question by other operators and practitioners like we are. And so I just think it all feeds on each other to let us ask better. It's all about asking better questions at the end of the day. That's the one thing I do. Just ask better questions and ask them of the right people. And sometimes that manifests as a lead investment, a participating investment, an angel investment, an idea for a product, a podcast

episode, like whatever it might be. Those are the byproducts. Those are not the things themselves. The thing itself is get better. I guess I'll call it the art of conversation. Get better at asking questions that lead to interesting, revealing answers. That's it. And that's really the only thing I try to focus on doing. And then just build systems, you know, solve problems with technology, not with people, right? So my friend, Lior Avendar, the founder of Lobb and now Alt, I love that answer that

he gives to that question of what's a technology company. It's a company that solves problems with technology versus people. So we solve problems that way and try to build really efficient systems that let us do more of the thing we're good at, which in my case is, I think, asking good questions. Well, the good news for you, and you probably already know this, but that was what Don Valentine said, the number one most important job to be a great venture capitalist is learning to ask the right questions and then learning to listen to the answers. I don't think it's much more complicated than that. Like there's a lot of then once you open the right door, then there's a lot of work

that still has to happen. You got to, you have to underwrite the data. You've got to channel check. You've got to do, you know, you've got to do all the hard, you have to do the work. But in my case, the work is the most fun part. Like if I find a company that's interesting, going and talking to the 10 most relevant industry companies or players in that space is kind of the most fun part. And a question I've been asking is like, what if I recorded those conversations and share them in some way, shape, or form and not be too obvious, maybe publish on a lag and again, never do any harm. That's what everyone does in investing. They're reading stuff, they're looking at information and they're talking to

people. That's it. And then they're synthesizing everything. So I'm going to do the same thing, but what if I'm just radical about the way in which I share the positive aspects of those things so that others can benefit passively and everyone's the better. And that's the question that I'm trying to answer. Well, and here's the thing, you do it the right way. It benefits the companies too, right? Like you have a platform, like XYZ person at XYZ firm does that and post it on the internet. It's like, okay, well, probably they would just start getting followers and traffic and fans. It would work. You could build it up, but you can make an argument to founders like, no, Hey, like we're going to put this stuff out there. Like you're going to get a flood of attention to your company

from customers, from talent, from follow on funding. It all starts to work in this, hopefully work in this flywheel, right? We literally call it the flood. And the flood is typically the call we get the next day from whoever it was that was on with some sort of, with some sort of expletive saying like, what the hell? Like, who is this audience? Like, this is crazy. Another way to frame this would be just try to be the muse, right? Don't try to be the, don't try to be the visionary or the, or the hero. Just try to be the muse that, that gets other people talking about interesting things. Because everyone then likes that. Like that's why people listen to Acquired.

They're there because you guys love this stuff so much and you put a lot of effort into it and you're there to learn. And so they get to as well. And then they're motivated to go apply those learnings, call that person, engage with that company, whatever the case may be, whether that's as a customer, as capital, as talent, or as a fan. Like it, as talent, you know,

or as a fan, like it's, it's a powerful flywheel that gets spinning and it speaks to, you know, it happens to also be a competitive advantage. Like, you know, we were going to talk about seven powers, things that are one of my favorite questions is what is hardest to replicate about any given person, company thing. And good. I mean, with And I don't know how much money it would take to replicate acquired. I don't think you could do it. It's its own thing. So, and that's true of the best media properties, right?

They're very unique. So that comes from curiosity and authenticity. So if you ride that and let it ride, you know, this is five years deep now. Like it took, it's the five years to be an overnight success story, right? Like the numbers are enormous now, but the number was 571 people on the first episode for me, for me. So that's a great start. I think ours was about 28.

Yeah. I mean, it's all, it's all compounding right at the end of the day. So, so it ends up, it ends up being a competitive advantage, which I think is an important point. It shouldn't be the reason you do it, but it is a nice side effect. Yeah. All right, listeners. Our next sponsor is a new friend of the show, Huntress. Huntress is one of the fastest growing and most loved cybersecurity companies today. It's purpose built for small to midsize businesses provides enterprise-grade security with the technology,

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for the eighth consecutive season and the industry leader in managed detection and response again this summer. Yep. So if you want cutting edge cybersecurity solutions backed by a 24-7 team of experts who monitor, investigate, and respond to threats with unmatched precision, head on over to huntress.com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes. Our huge thanks to Huntress. Should we jump into Seven Powers? You tell me. I'm game. I love this.

I love this framework. Listeners probably to both of our shows know, you know, Hamilton Helmer's Seven Powers that he's identified of. He would characterize a power as both a benefit and a barrier. Like it's probably closest to the concept of a moat, you know, the Warren Buffett classic defensibility moat concept, but it, but it's also, it's like, it has to provide a benefit to customers and a barrier to competition of all types from coming in and eating your lunch. And so the seven he's identified are counter positioning, scale economies, switching costs, network economies, process power, branding branding and cornered resource and importantly here the point i always try and make is this is what entitles you to generate profit in your

business that doesn't just get arbitraged away by competition yep and in fact that is his he has a strict mathematical formal definition of power and it is long-term differential profit margin. So Patrick, the very easy question to you is in your web of businesses, and let's start with OSAM to keep it simple, to where do you derive power? We're definitely going to have to extend our end time here because you guys could get me going on this for a long time. I'll just throw out examples. And this was maybe one case where several years ago, probably three years ago, I did just throw out examples. And this was maybe one case where several years ago, probably three years ago, I did literally sit down as I think probably everyone that reads

seven powers does and say, okay, which one of these can I do? Which one do I already have? Or which one can I engineer? So, you know, I'll just take through ones that I think are relevant for one of the things that's going on in my world. So I do think brand is, is like the most straightforward one that I don't need to spend a lot of time on, which is just like high quality, low variance outcomes. Like that's how I think about brand. Like, can you, can you just consistently deliver something really high quality so that you build trust with people, you know, trust takes time. Therefore it takes consistency. There needs to be a high minimum quality bar. I love that phrase from Toby Lutke. I think about that a lot. If you can do that consistently with whatever it is that

you do, you will build a good brand over time. Like the logo doesn't matter. You know, all this other stuff really matters less than just consistent high performance at a certain thing. And, and in many cases you can airdrop a brand. Maybe it's possible. Maybe dollar shape club did it. I think arguably that wasn't a good business. It had really low, low retention and, um, you can airdrop a brand. Maybe it's possible. Maybe Dollar Shave Club did it. I think arguably that wasn't a good business. It had really low retention. And maybe it was an amazing story. And everyone wants a hack to create a brand instantly. And it did.

It was a good hack, yeah. Yeah, there are exceptions. There are hacks, which can be very useful. I'm not discounting them. But I think a hack should be on top of some steadily compounding trust equation with the end audience. So I do think we've established a brand, you know, what exactly it is we could argue over, but I won't say a whole lot more about that. And the barrier there is just, I think time, like, you know, if you want to establish the same brand that you see today, okay, well,

we're five years ahead or 10 years ahead or 20 years ahead, depending on which of the brands you're talking about. So I think time is an ultimate barrier to entry for some of the highest quality brands. I love that. I hadn't thought about that brand as in specifically those terms of high quality, low variance and time. You think about, of course, like we've talked about a bunch on our show in years, too. There's persistence in venture capital. What is that persistence due to?

It's due to brand power of the top firms. Well, what does that brand power do to? It's due to high performance, low variance over time. Right. So that's the first, maybe my favorite. And I know it's Hamilton's favorite too, because he's always said that to me when we've talked about it as counter-positioning. And here, I just think it is that radical transparency of the research process. I joke with a lot of my friends who run investment firms that have that classic, mysterious website that's just a logo and an info at email address and nothing else. Basically, the digital velvet rope, which I love. I'm close with a lot of these investors. And indeed, oftentimes, they are literally the best investors. And so, I respect the hell out of almost all of the people that have that website. I joke that one of my goals, but how am I going to, as an investor now, say with positive sum, how am I going to beat one of these illustrious, incredible

firms with track records and crazy brands and everything? It's to do literally the opposite of that, right? To be the most open, the most non-proprietary investor on planet earth, where I'm externalizing all the things that you're normally buying from them. Like if you get one of these great investors to be on your cap table, you're, you're accessing this thing in their brain that they've built up over time. And I'm just saying, no, actually forget that. Like you're not getting my brain. You're getting the positive side effects of me externalizing that process in a radically transparent way. I think it would be very hard for most of those firms to completely change their attitude on this topic to say nothing of their behavior. They've been

doing a certain thing a certain way for a long time. So that would be counter-positioning. Do you think that OSAM today has counter-positioning or do you think it's actually that it's vulnerable to counter- counter positioning and that it's more of the sort of incumbent that derives its power from what you would think branding and maybe scale economies? So I think it's very counter positioned because to be able to build canvas, you basically need a heavy quant background. Like firms that don't have that skill set. This is a seriously complex problem that we're solving. I mean, it is non-trivial to build.

I mean, each of these things requires a complex modeling exercise. They all have to integrate. There's crazy optimizations that happen. There's quite a lot of compute understanding that is required to make things happen fast. This is a really complicated problem. Most of the firms that I would get scared to hear that they're launching a canvas competitor are the most well-known quantitative hedge funds, not long only firms and they have a different business model. And their whole thing is that

they're proprietary, you know, research and insight and data that isn't shared. So it's like the Bezos thing when he, you know, was asked about, you know, other big tech competitors and laughing saying, you know, those guys are used to software margins. Like I'm a retailer, you know, It's like the Bezos thing when he was asked about other big tech competitors and laughing, saying, those guys are used to software margins. I'm a retailer. It's an advantage sometimes to not be as fat and happy and have lived on a different business model. And so I think we're very counter-positioned with Canvas specifically against the firms

that would most scare me to be competitors. And it's a lower margin business. So I'm not worried about them. We're not as up to speed on probably who those current people are. But like 10 years ago, if SAC is like, we're building Canvas, that would terrify you. But like, they're not going to do that because they make their money from performance, their hedge fund. I'll use a salacious example.

SAC actually wouldn't be one of them. Like the most obvious example would be like Renaissance Technologies, right? It's the most extreme example because it's absurd hedge fund. I'll use a salacious example. And the SAC actually wouldn't be one of them. Like the most obvious example would be like Renaissance technologies, right? Like that it's the most extreme example because it's absurd, right? They charge five and 50 or whatever it is and still produce, you know, 40, 50% returns annually on their own capital. Like they're not launching a canvas competitor, but they could, and it would be awesome. That's the sort of thing I mean, like the most sophisticated and advanced research shops, quantitative research shops, just doesn't make sense for them to do this right now. And we'll have at least a few years head start.

The other one I think about is, you're going to get me going down all these now. There's kind of a fun one in cornered resource, which Hamilton also acknowledges is the least common of the seven powers, but nonetheless is an interesting one, which is through a program that we call Research Partners at OSAM, which is a very simple trade. We effectively give away our entire data library infrastructure and access to our team to independent researchers in order for them to do their own thing at their own pace in whatever way they want, where the trade is we own the intellectual property that gets created. For the most part, these are retired engineers,

people in completely different fields. The most famous of them is an anonymous guy on Twitter, who's I think probably the smartest person I've ever met in my life. Not modest, Jesse Livermore is his name, although modest, a very close friend and actually next week's podcast guest. So Jesse, as he goes by, has an engineering background of sorts, very technical background. Again, literally the smartest human being. If I could stick a human being on understanding a complex problem, it would be him. And he does these months-long deep dives with our data and teaches us as he goes. And because we offer so much flexibility and we offer this data set for free, again, the thing that most firms like us keep as the most proprietary asset, they become contractors with us. And as a result, we've captured some of

the most interesting people like this in the world and I think have the best value proposition to them. So that's a super tiny example of a cornered resource, but we have benefited tremendously from those research partnerships. And this is the one where I will admit to thinking about that program because of reading seven case may be fair because you're obviously the CEO and major owner of the firm. But one of the things I love from the book and Hamilton's work is that people are not cornered resources. It has to be like what you're describing. People are not cornered resources because somebody else can hire them. They're arbitrageable. It has to be non-arbitrageable. And I love this.

It's like a cornered resource plus counter positioning that you've built this practice up. I would argue, I don't know which, maybe you guys could tell me where you would put this power. But I think of this more as just a flywheel than a power, but there's got to be something in there. So, and traditionally like this flywheel would normally manifest as scale economies, but maybe it's network effect here. On the podcast side, it's something like every week you get more listeners who are incredible, who can have a positive impact on the guest, which then helps you get ever more interesting guests who then help you grow the audience and you spin that flywheel.

And therefore, the best guests are just going to every week have a better reason to do yours instead of someone else's with their precious time. And you just have to be patient with that. Like I always talk about it, like someday, you know, I'll have, I'll have Bezos and, and, and Elon on like back-to-back weeks. Like I'm just, I'm convinced I will. Like I know how compounding works and maybe it's two years from now, maybe it's five years from now, like it's going to happen. That's, I think, something that is a very hard to compete with what power it should be assigned under. I have no idea, but it's something to do with that kind of growth flywheel that, that I, again, and I think this is a Ben Thompsonism, laddering up, where once you sort of have someone on some rung, then they become a part of the way that you're able to describe the show to the next great guest. Well, let's move on to playbook. We've touched on several sort of playbook themes here, and I think we should introduce a couple of new ones and kind

of surmise our takeaways, where if you wanted to run a playbook similar to what Patrick has done over the various stages of these different businesses, kind of what would it be? David, I'm curious, you've got one here that we haven't touched specifically on, but I think it's just an awesome observation. There was a really interesting exchange on Twitter. I think Ben, you sent this to me. You texted this to me when it happened a couple of weeks ago of Taylor Pearson and Austin Reif from Morning Brew talking about the media business. And I think, you know, referring to you, Patrick, and others as well, you know, Turner Novak's done such a great job building a platform for investing on Twitter, you know, Blake Robbins, Matthew Ball, so many people. And then Austin responded, it's not just the investment business, every business is turning into the media business

in some way, shape or form. Wasn't premeditated, it sounds like for you to necessarily, Patrick, but like, how do you think about that? Yeah. How do you think about this? You know, very often I think observations like this are benefit from hindsight and it happens to be a strategy that just has worked for a lot of people in the last five to 10 years and therefore feels tempting to go do the same thing. I don't know how long

the runway is for this, like, you know, learn in public orientation in the investing business or just in general in businesses. I think there's always an opportunity to have a content mindset. I love Red Bull as an example that, you know, Red Bull is just a content media business that happens to sell this weird drink. I think that's really neat. And there are some businesses that just really the thing they actually do well is the media thing. And then the product is just like a value capture mechanism versus usually it's the other way around, right? We think of businesses as a product or service and then figure out how to distribute it or market it. So I do think that the internet has created this funny inversion where with no gatekeepers to reaching the end audience, it behooves you to create media or content because that's the way they're going

to notice you. Like you have to stand out. And the way to do that is to be, as we discussed earlier at the tail of a distribution in some way, don't be the Walter Cronkite solution that, that pleases the most people, the most average amount. Like that's a recipe for death on the internet. Go study mischief, go study the extreme version, Red Bull, go study the extreme versions of this that are sort of unapologetic about their uniqueness and, and then do your version of that thing. I think it needs to just feel natural that like, if you're having a strategy session about this once a week, it's probably going to suck. Like you can't, you can't engineer your way to a good version of this. I think you just have to like make a decision to be public about your thinking

process and have a really high, I'll use Toby's phrase again, have a really high minimum quality bar for what gets shared. Like I, I type and delete a lot of stuff. I write a lot of stuff that never sees the light of day. I like there needs to be that curation filter for people to continue to trust you. So if you can do all that power to you, I think it's a great way to reach whoever your end audiences. I'm always hesitant when everyone's starting to agree that the one right way of doing things is X, Y, or Z because that's happened to work. Like any distribution channel, you know, Facebook in the early days was super cheap and it's not now. Ditto Google, ditto everywhere. So this was a really

quote unquote cheap acquisition strategy for the last five or 10 years. Whether or not it will be in the next five or 10 is an open question that I don't have the answer to. Yeah. Really interesting thing is once you're at scale, so this is contrasted against Facebook and Google. Once you're at scale, this channel continues to be cheap, at least relative to new entrants. And I think you've definitely seen this with your podcast. We've seen it with ours, where because we had a call it four-year head start on the podcast mania and planted our flags in our respective niches and said, this is the thing we're weird on the internet about, come join us. Like, if we had to sort of pay per listener, and we were doing that, you know, against anybody else who wanted to start a podcast for the same sort of reason, like, we don't have to do that because

there's just so much organic goodness that comes out there from building that brand that's compounded over the years. Yeah, I think a great question to ask too is like, do I personally already consume anything like what I'm contemplating putting out there? And when I started the podcast, the answer to that question was no, that it didn't exist. And it certainly didn't exist in the channel that I was going to do it in. And so I just think like, if you can just have that filter, you know, everyone was joking about these LinkedIn stories yesterday. When I saw that, I was like, Ooh, like, like I don't follow anyone on LinkedIn stories. And I'll bet you that I'm going to in, if it succeeds as a product in two years, there's going to be some, you know, some star there that has currently has zero, zero followers in that, in that venue. So when I see that sort of thing, I get kind of excited because it's, it's novel and, you know, early, whereas right now, like, I think it's an

interesting question. If I were to launch this podcast with episode one tomorrow, would I get anywhere? Maybe not, even though the quality is good. So I do think that like, you want that mindset of, do I already consume a lot of stuff like this? And if the answer is yes, like good luck. Um, and if the answer is no, you're probably onto something. I mean, that's like a perfect playbook for our discussion thus far. One thing I want to make sure we do is given, you know, you're not starting with episode one tomorrow. You've done four years of episodes. We talked about this before the show. Um are some playbook themes you've learned from your guests and your episodes over the years? Like as you look back, the top things that have influenced you that have come out of your episodes, what stands out? Fire some off to you. I'll just do that. So I'll just go down a mental list here. Chetan Puttagunta taught me that in enterprise software, you want to take what he calls the go slow to go fast approach of picking very carefully your early customers and then patiently

building for them well beyond what feels comfortable. Meaning don't go get new customers beyond the original cohort before you let the product mature because you then make a much stronger product that fits the market better and can handle the scaling. Like one of the things that we've lived with Canvas. I mean, we literally just, Chathan told us to do something and we just did it with Canvas. And we didn't, I didn't question it. It made sense to me. It was, I would have done the opposite naturally, which is like go up into the right as fast as possible. As many customers as possible. And thank God we didn't because the system, any system is fragile, right? In the early days. And

it needs to have that slow organic growth. One of my all-time favorite book is the systems Bible by John Gall. And one of my favorite lessons from that book is you can't just airdrop a complex system and have it work. It's got to have evolved from a simple system. And so there's incredible wisdom in Chathan's advice to go very slow in the early days with enterprise software specifically and reach product maturity. That's one example. I'll never forget when I messaged Bill Gurley, Chathan's partner, and someone had raised this idea of creating a marketplace for obituary writers. And the idea was, can you have obituary writers on one side and living people on the other side that commission the writers to write a really high quality retrospective obituary type thing on their life? Because newspapers no longer really did this as much as part of cost cutting.

And I thought, wow, that's kind of, and the stories were amazing. Like I read a couple of them that the person with this idea had produced. And I was like, wow, like that, I would definitely buy that. And I said, message, you know, Gurley is one of the smartest guys on so many things, but marketplaces is one of them. And so I remember messaging him and saying, you know, what do you think? And he just drew this little chart conceptually, which was on one axis, the producer penetration. So what percent of obituary writers do you have signed on? And on the other axis was the benefit to consumers. So basically, conceptually, think about it as, does the service keep getting better as you penetrate deeper into the supplier

pool? So that line should look straight. And I think he said, once you penetrate at a certain amount, the marginal supplier is not going to make the service better. And that's going to happen pretty early. So you're going to get this little bump and then a flat line. And that's not a good marketplace business. He then talked about that concept on your episode, right? I think so. Yeah. And so like that little concept of just that little plot in my, every time I see a marketplace now, that's the very first thing I think of.

I've had benchmark guys on and girls on recently. So I'm thinking about them, but Chathan's idea that, that open source as a business model is not about saving an R and D it's about building differentiated distribution among developers, Matt balls idea in media, that if we reach a metaverse, it's not about, you know, ready player one. idea in media that if we reach a metaverse, it's not about Ready Player One. It's about the interoperability of the systems that let you move value through the system. So there's not these like walled gardens. It's creating like a common layer, a portable layer of information and value that would ultimately represent what a metaverse is. Charlie Songhurst's idea that the best way to think about labor

is to search in uncompetitive markets, that Silicon Valley is a terrible place to look for labor, but that's where everyone looks for labor, that you should probably be looking in Bulgaria or something like this because there's talent everywhere and just on the internet. And we've seen this having gone fully remote. So go to uncompetitive places when you're looking for stuff. I could do this all day. I love Katrina Lake's idea that, you know, the next that legacy e-commerce, she's the CEO of Stitch Fix, that legacy e-commerce was all about speed, convenience, and price, and that the future of

e-commerce will be about personalization. It's the same concept we were talking about earlier where early internet was the explosion of information. Now it's like, it's too much. We need to curate it down. You know, Daniel X idea about seeing around corners as a company scales and having that felt experience of what you're going to need if you're growing 30% a month in six months is not what the human brain is designed to process. Thinking about what a scale-up looks like and getting around those corners as early as you can. There's this amazing story that a woman named Kat Cole, who was the chief operating officer for Focus Brands, which oversees Cinnabon and several other, you know, Carvel, Jamba Juice, several other related big food brands. She told me this story about these guys. She was a Hooters waitress as her first job. And these guys kept giving her a hard time about chicken wings because they would order 50 and

then insist when they ate all the bones that they'd only been given 45. And they would give her a hard time every Friday. And so finally one Friday as they were nearing the end, she just showed up with 10 extra wings and sort of gave them hell about it. All the guy's buddies, you know, chastised them. And from then on they tipped well, they thanked her, you know, she, she just like, she completely like inverted this whole thing on them. And I find that that I've seen that a lot of ways, like this inversion to deal with challenging people by going right back at them is incredibly powerful. I could probably do like a whole nother segment on everything Sarah Tavel has taught me.

I mean, like everything she puts out is like a toolkit to be messed with and thought about. And maybe the last one I'll close with is one of my all-time favorites, which is another venture investor named Josh Wolf, who runs Lux Capital, and his idea of the directional arrow of progress, which is, I think, one of the most obvious ideas after the fact that you can encounter, which is basically just like a lot of these technology trends are plotting. And you can sort of see what's going to happen based on what's happened in the past. In my world, like the cost of a commission for a trade in a brokerage account is a great example of this. You can just see technology making that

cost go down every couple of years. And Robinhood's genius was they said, let's extrapolate this directional arrow to its endpoint and go to zero. Let's jump the line. So I think jumping the line on these directional arrows of progress is a really interesting way to generate business ideas. And in many ways, that's what we're trying to do with Canvas. We've learned so much from covering China tech, well, Chinese companies, period, but China tech on acquired. And that's one thing that really strikes me as a difference about the Chinese startup tech and venture ecosystem is like, that's the primary thing that I think people think

about over there. Like, what's the trend? What's like, what's the plot? And where's it going to end up? That's not as common here in the West, but should be. When you meet these people, I'm choosing one just for that. I realized that wasn't brief, but, but like trying to just distill something down, you know, there's 10 of those per person often. So, I mean, that's the most fun part of this whole thing is just trying to extract these ideas. Patrick, you really should start some kind of like knowledge platform to explore ideas with passion like that. Great idea. I might take you up on that. I love it. Well, Patrick, I teed you up earlier to tell

us about a new podcast laying on us. Yeah. So starting, I guess it will have already come out when this comes out on Thursdays, it'll be on the same feed as the Invest Like the Best podcast. We'll call it like a mini series or a sub series, which is going to be called Founders Field Guide. So from that point forward, Tuesdays will be for conversations with investors and sort of miscellaneous other. Thursdays will be for conversations with founders and CEOs and builders. Maybe builders is the right word. It'll often be a founder. What's interesting about this is that it's often quite hard to get investors talking, and that's a fun challenge. It's not hard to get founders talking. So the access and the depth of conversation so far has been exemplary. And I think we've already recorded maybe eight.

There's just going to be a wide, wide range of really interesting private and public markets, CEOs and founders that join us for that. And the whole idea will be lessons from building. Their stories, sort of portable things that we could take away for other people, and trying to, again, draw the lines between concepts and, and, and industries and, and ways of building things that are valuable to people. So we're really excited about that. It'll be every Thursday. Um, and then who knows where we go from there. I think we'll, we'll, we'll end up publishing a lot of audio content in a variety of different ways as we, as we do this learning process ever more transparently and in public. That's awesome. Can't wait to listen.

Well, let's move to grading as acquired listeners. No, well, Hey, we're not going to let Patrick out of here without doing some grading, but B for acquisitions and companies and deals that is more of a history, we will render a grade, a definitive grade on how it's gone. For situations that are still fluid, we predict scenarios in the future and paint the A plus versus the F scenarios five, 10 years out. I think it'd be fun to do both of these with Patrick here. So the first spin on this is looking at your own tenure over the last couple of years as OSAM CEO and what you've done, how would you grade yourself? I think there's just always room for improvement. I think we have a platform now that has an extremely bright future and has a very large potential future. It's still very early. We don't share how much we're managing on that platform. It's

a significant amount. This is Canvas? Canvas, yeah. That has put us in a position, again, that's just different from most long-only asset managers. That's a sleepy business to be in. More of the market is just hiring Vanguard. So I wouldn't really want to be playing in that space long-term. So I think we're in a position now that we can benefit from technology versus being disrupted by it. And therefore, there's some points for that. But as with everything, it's all about execution and we're in the very early days. So I think I'll give us a tentative B plus to give us lots of room for improvement. But because we have established something that we can really see building on for decades to come, I think that's hard to do. And,

and the team, to be clear, not me, the team has done that building in insane fashion over the last 18 months. It's kind of wild what they've built with a relatively small team. And how many engineers do you guys have? So it's, I'm like ashamed to admit it because we're trying to build this team out a lot. You know, it know, it's full-time engineers, maybe five. I think people that see it think we have 30. So these people are absolutely cranking. The research team are very technical. So that's been a huge help and they've been a huge part of this as well.

But it's a team that's going to grow a lot. To help us put some shape to the Canvas business, and you don't have to talk in numbers at all, how do you price it and how does that compare to the pricing of a traditional asset manager? And then how, what's the sort of scaling factor on that? Yeah, so it's incredibly simple pricing, which I think people like it's dynamic. So it depends on the settings you choose. And all we're doing is we establish a minimum fee, which is very competitive with whatever and low. So we won't go below that minimum fee.

So if the settings are the most vanilla, we'll still charge that number. Above that, it's simply a prorated version of our normal fee for our services. So if you're allocating more kind of away from the very basic public market index portfolio, we do some of that too, a lot of that. But if you're allocating away from that, the more different you get, the higher fee you pay. And it's a sliding scale up to a max where even the max is lower than what a lot of long only asset managers would charge. So it's dependent on the settings you choose. We don't charge for extras, you know, like everything is included in one asset-based price.

Clients have really liked that because it puts them in the driver's seat of, if fee is a really important variable to them, it's under their control. And we're a platform that fulfills. We don't dictate the terms. So they can decide themselves, and that's worked really nicely. And in terms of scale, again, we talked about this earlier. The reason there's no performance fee in this is if you told me we had to ingest a hundred billion dollars to use an absurd number into this platform, we could do it over the next year. And in many cases, it would be a crap ton of work. But in many cases, you know, we would still end up owning a modest amount of these huge public companies, um, and, and hopefully not affecting their prices. So, so it scales extremely well to very large numbers and that's how we think about it. Cool. All right. So the future, what's the A plus

scenario for OSAM and you over the next five years, what's keeping you up at night? What's the nightmare F scenario? Um, well, you know, I guess the F scenario is the easiest one to think about, right? That everything just stops working and we've, you know, the software fails or there's large errors or, you know, technical problems or team problems or whatever. And others just do a better job than we do. Again, everything's execution. So the F scenario is that we fail and no one uses our service. It's very hard for me to imagine a failure scenario in, I'll call it the media side, because I'm just going to keep doing this unless I get sick or infirmed or something like, I think it will work to some degree. I guess the failure would be status quo, right? That it just doesn't change from what it is today. It doesn't help people

any more than it does today. It's no more interesting. It's no more navigable as we talked about earlier, but I can assure you that F scenario is not going to happen. That would be F. A plus is hard for me to talk about because of this growth without goals idea that I sort of live by, which is, I really don't think about this sort of thing. We don't have five or 10 year goals. Personally, for me, they're wrong and dangerous. I'm much better putting one foot in front of the other and having really strong habits that we can hang our hats on. And so I try to engender that in our businesses as much as I can.

The furthest I'll go is to, I was a video game player growing up. The furthest I'll go is think about them like boss battles. Like what's the next boss that we face? And that's always very present and near term and objective. And that's about as far of a goal as I'll set or try to reach. The rest is more about principles. And we've talked about all those things already. So public learning and clear value delivery, customization for investors, technology,

flexible technology, chassis, and platform. Those are all key things that I just want to keep getting better at. What that looks like in 10 years, I honestly have no idea. And I won't let myself speculate or think about it because I just think it gets me off course. Okay. Well, we got one last question for you that, of course, we have to ask. Patrick, what's the kindest thing that anyone has ever done for you? So it's so hard to answer. I've, I've done this a few times where I've been asked the question and I've always want to give a new answer, right? I try to optimize for novelty. So the most common answers to these questions are people making a bet on other people early in their lives, that or something, you know,

family support. I love those answers. Like whenever someone mentions some, you know, big wig making a huge bet on a 20 something year old, uh, with no real evidence of prior success, that just, that makes me feel really good. And that happened to me, God, so many times. The true answer is something my cousin did for me, which people can listen to in other podcasts. He introduced me to my wife and my best man and several others in a really interesting fashion in college where, you know, he's my cousin. So he was obligated to bring me out for one night, but he brought me out for like six

months straight and just made it his personal mission to get me set up socially. And my marriage resulted. So I'm extremely thankful to him. His name was Tim. And then just the ongoing kindness of my family, my wife, my kids, my extended family. Those are the answers that are kind of, they're the real answers, but they're kind of boring. I've given them before. So I'll come up with a unique one that's business related. So actually we referenced it earlier and then we didn't circle back. And so I'll close the loop. So this has to do with the Royal bank of Canada. So when I was 20, let's see when I was 23 or so, this is right after the financial crisis had happened. The market had crashed. Like I said, they were our largest client. Um, we manage money for everyday Canadian

citizens, right? Through mutual funds. And in many cases, 60%, at the worst case, in the worst time, 60% of their money was gone. And we were the ones that were responsible for that money. Now the market obviously was down a lot, but so were we. That was painful. I mean, that, so what happened was I was sent around all over Canada. We had all hands on deck and I was, I was a free resource. So I was tasked with effectively going and explaining to a large chunk of Canada as a whole, why we sucked so bad. And you're like 23 at this time? I was 23. As I mentioned, I was introverted though. I was always a good public speaker.

And so that's part of the reason they sent me, but I was green. I mean, I was always a good public speaker. And so that's part of the reason they sent me. But I was green. I mean, I was really scared about being asked questions that I couldn't answer because I didn't know the strategies well enough. I went on like a three-week tour. And so the kindest thing, I think, was this group that I traveled with from the Royal Bank. I'll do a special call out to a gentleman named Bill Hill.

Bill was the one who was the head of a major group there at RBC at the time. He was with me the whole time. And then it was a rotating band of other people. He took a big risk doing this. There was no other 23 year olds explaining performance of this magnitude at this scale to a whole country at the time. I was legitimately scared. Like I, I was really worried flying up to this trip.

I brought like way too many suits and he made fun of me for having like a carry on suitcase. And it was an ordeal. And Bill really held my hand through that whole process, coached me up in an extremely positive way. After every presentation, I probably gave 50 presentations to rooms of like 50 to 150 people. And every presentation, he would let me suffer through the bad parts. There was one time I tried to quote like a German philosopher and I forgot the quote in the middle. And he let me suffer through it. He didn't like try to come save me. Like he let me get through it and then coached me afterwards. You know, if he ever listens to this, he'll be surprised that this is my answer. But it was very formative for me of just like gutting something out, getting better, realizing that like you just got to keep going and learning a lot in a very compressed period of time because of that pressure.

So he didn't have to do that. He took a big risk by doing it. I could have sucked for all he knew. And thankfully, I didn't. But I grew up a lot in that, you know, in that short period of time. And so I'm, I remain very thankful to Bill and the whole RBC team for, for kind of holding my hand through that process. I can't imagine getting 50 presentations about, about that, to rooms of 50 to 100 people. You're a better, better person for it, I'm sure. Indeed. Yeah. Everything after that was a little more straightforward, but it was good trial by fire and a great kindness. I love it.

Well, Patrick, I normally wrap the show up by letting folks know that if they like Acquired and they want to go deeper, they can become an LP. Why don't I turn that over to you? And if you're open to it, let people know why they might think about that. Yeah, I'm a wholehearted supporter of this thing. You know, it's so simple, right? Which is this little deeper dive into what you guys have built, that I think, at least from my perspective, is actually even more enjoyable than the main show. It feels special to me, because I know that it's a group of people, like everyone listening to it has opted in and gone the extra mile to support you guys a little bit, but also is just hyper curious. And the episodes are as good or better than the main ones to say nothing of all the other stuff that comes with being an LP. And so it's one of the best,

like little small chunks of money that I spend. And I know a ton of these LPs that have done the same because I've sent them there. And I would just encourage everyone listening to check it out. It won't break your wallet, but it will definitely expand your mind if you're interested in these topics that we've been talking about today and how businesses get built and how this investing business works. I think it's awesome. So you didn't coach me on this. That's entirely my opinion. And I highly encourage everyone, go become an LP.

Well, thank you for taking that ball I passed you without letting you know that the past was coming. It's like a LeBron assist there. It was amazing. I believe. I believe in the LP. Thanks, Patrick. We want to thank our longtime friend of the show, Vanta, the leading trust management platform. Vanta, of course, automates your security reviews

and compliance efforts. So frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance and monitoring, Vanta takes care of these otherwise incredibly time and resource draining efforts for your organization and makes them fast and simple. Yeah, Vanta is the of these otherwise incredibly time and resource draining efforts for your organization and makes them fast and simple. Yeah, Vanta is the perfect example of the quote that we talk about all the time here on Acquired.

Jeff Bezos, his idea that a company should only focus on what actually makes your beer taste better, i.e. spend your time and resources only on what's actually going to move the needle for your product and your customers and outsource everything else that doesn't. Every company needs compliance and trust with their vendors and customers. It plays a major role in enabling revenue because customers and partners demand it, but yet it adds zero flavor to your actual product. Vanta takes care of all of it for you. No more spreadsheets, no fragmented tools, no manual reviews to cobble together your security and compliance requirements. It is one single software pane of glass that connects to all of your services via APIs and eliminates countless hours of work

for your organization. There are now AI capabilities to make this even more powerful, and they even integrate with over 300 external tools. Plus, they let customers build private integrations with their internal systems. And perhaps most importantly, your security reviews are now real-time instead of static, so you can monitor and share with your customers and partners to give them added confidence. So whether you're a startup or a large enterprise and your company is ready to automate compliance and streamline security reviews like Vanta's 7,000 customers around the globe, and go back to making your beer taste better, head on over to vanta.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. And thanks to friend of the show, Christina, Vanta's CEO, all acquired listeners

get $1,000 of free credit. Vanta.com slash acquired. Well, thanks so much, listeners. If you like the show, feel free to subscribe. If you like Patrick's show and want to tell folks, this is where you can get more background on Patrick, feel free to share it from your favorite local social media hilltop or with a friend or co-worker. Go subscribe to Invest Like the Best. It is absolutely safe to say I've learned more from Invest Like the Best than any other podcast. And it is the one that I have the highest percentage likelihood to listen to any given episode just because I know and I have deep trust that if Patrick is having someone on, I am going to learn something radical and new. And even if it's a person I know like Jathan or that I've heard on 10 different talks because I'm obsessed, like Michael Mauboussin,

there's always going to be a reason that you decided to have that person back on. So it's an amazing show. I know many of you already listened, but check it out if you don't. Amen. Guys, thank you so much for having me. This has been awesome. I really appreciate it. Yeah, yeah. All right, listeners. Well, with that, we'll see you next time. See you next time.