How I Invest with David Weisburd - E387: Where Alpha Hides in Private Equity | Josh Adams

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

What if the best private equity opportunities are hiding inside businesses that everyone else thinks are too complicated to touch? In this episode, I sit down with Josh Adams, Partner at OpenGate Capital, to discuss why complexity has become one of the firm's greatest competitive advantages. Josh explains how OpenGate built a specialization around corporate carve-outs, why Europe offers more inefficiency than North America, and how operational improvements drive value creation in today's market. We also discuss sourcing, specialization, alignment, decision-making, and why focus has become increasingly important as private equity continues to evolve.

Complexity to us that comes in the form of these complex unloved businesses, orphan assets, that ultimately have led to the businesses being really challenged. We think about ourselves as not financial engineers, but operational engineers. How do you create value? It has to be an alpha-generating kind of returns. And that, to us, has always come in the form of what's in your control, operational improvements. Josh, you're a partner at OpenGate Capital, a billion-dollar firm based in New York and Paris. Before we started recording, you mentioned that you guys are shifting more towards the European market. Why is that?

Yeah. Well, we've been investing since 2005 and originally founded back in Los Angeles, which is part of the DNA of myself and Andrew Neku, the founder of the firm, who came from platinum equity, which also is based there in Los Angeles. There's a little bit of history of Europe. Europe has a tremendous amount of complexity, one of which that we've navigated since 2007. We opened an office in Paris, which is a little bit of a unique place to do it. Being a Brit, it wasn't something I was that comfortable with at the time, but joined in 2012, we quickly saw the amount of opportunity in the European market. Later, we've now seen many firms move to Europe saying, oh, this is a great opportunity to be there.

With all due respect, you've seen a lot of American suit casing back and forth there, but you need to have a local presence with locals on the ground, and in Europe more so than anywhere. So for me, it's been a great opportunity of what we invest in, complexity. So operationally focused firm investing in industrial corporate carbouts has been one of our biggest things over the last 20 years. In Europe, they're plentiful. And the complexity is a plentiful. So it really has become a bigger opportunity for us. So still investing in North America, but also shifting, I would say, to 70, 80% of our time now in Europe.

And I've now actually relocated from the North American market. market back to Europe as well. Why do you lean into complexity? Because it's a differentiator at the end of the day. I mean, if you want to step back and think holistically about how capital allocators and investors think, over time, they are now looking more and more for people who can differentiate themselves. We as a firm have done a great job of doing that now, having, you know, kind of learned some lessons

along the way of, you know, what are we really good at and how do we get there? We had 10 years of investing our own capital, which is a pretty unique story. And then in the 10 years of institutional capital we've put to work, that in itself has allowed us to say, who are we and what are we very good at? And ultimately, the response of that has been we play into this level of complexity where others shy away from it. So complexity to us comes in the form of these complex multi-jurisdictional corporate carve-outs, embedded businesses within large corporations, unloved businesses, orphan assets, whatever you want to call them, that ultimately have led to the businesses being really challenged in a market because they haven't had the ability to grow, to have the capital to be put behind them,

or they've gone through some market environmental shift. We've been able to come in, really push on those situations, pull on those opportunities, and create standalone entities for a strategic buyer down the line. So we see more of that in Europe. And I think it's also fair to say that the North American market, which I'm so grateful that I've had 13, 14 years of living here and breathing this, is such an efficient market that the inefficiency of Europe is where opportunity lies, and that's created a great opportunity for Oakland Gate.

I have this three-hour dinner with one of the chairman of the largest banks in the U.S. multi-billionaire, epic investor. And the way he looks at Alpha is he looks for things that are boring and hard and ideally both. If you take a step back and if you think about where is Alpha in the private markets or in private equity specifically, it's the areas that are hard, meaning it takes a lot of work. It's not an auction process that you just submit your bid and go back to the golf range. And it's also things that are boring, things that might not be exciting, things that you might not want to talk about at a cocktail party.

I think that's true. I can echo those comments. Like, I think we think about ourselves as not financial engineers, but operational engineers. And the only way you create alpha today in this market, and you have to step back again, like what market we in post-GFC, we've had a shift from a cost of capital point of view. Interest rates are changing drastically, global, you know, macro dynamics happening politically as well. They are all kind of leaning into creating value and how do you create value. It has to be an alpha-generating kind of returns. to us has always come in the form of what's in your control, operational improvements. So a value creation plan. I said, well, you've checked the bingo mark of value creation plan, but tell me what you believe that is, because to me, that means a lot of different things. And there's one thing about saying it, but how do you actually execute upon it? But we believe in a value creation plan of a carve-out from a standalone to create a standalone

entity, there are multiple pitfalls. There are multiple traps that you can fall into. If you don't do things correctly pretty soon, it doesn't just become boring. It becomes a bit of a minefield, and you have to be mindful of how you work through that. So for me, the operational kind of engineering platform that we've created, we've done 37 corporate cardouts in 20 years. It's been a labor of love now creating our own playbook, understanding the business, and going to places where other people will shy away from, which is back to somewhat boring for some people. But for us, it's been, you know, it's been very rewarding. boring for some people, exciting for others.

You guys have one of the most unique founding stories in terms of how you started from Platinum Equity. Talk to me about that and how that affects how you are as an organization today. Obviously, I'll speak on Andrew's behalf here, and he won't mind me saying so. I think Andrew joined Platinum in 2001, left in 2004. He spent time actually ironically in L.A. and in Paris. Their original office was in Paris for Europe. It later moved to London, which is when I joined them. So it's kind of a nice kind of sliding door moment between Andrew and I.

We didn't work together, but we got to know each other pretty quickly. The DNA that you learned through platinum, honestly, it's an incredible firm, and you see where they are today, and you have huge credit, because they've gone into other strategies like credit and others that other big firms have had to do, too. But at the core of that, the DNA of how they go to market was origination, execution, and operations, three distinct pillars, which Andrew built at Oakingate. He took that finding principle and said, I've learned something here, and I think this is replicable. So all of that led to foundation, but also an opportunity. So Andrew left in 2004, set up open gate in 2005. And his story is remarkable.

I mean, Andrew, you know, grew up in Vancouver, moved to Los Angeles, went to USC, basically at the age of 20, 5, 6, basically took a 30,000 dollars out of his 401K, rolled it into a formation of a company and started trying to do a deal, found someone who wanted to back him on the deal, realized that he could actually just flip the business pretty quickly and take out a significant portion of capital in a deal, almost in the form of a deal finder, if you will, and introducing a deal to someone, which was then the foundation of Andrew having capital to go in source deals, to go meet management teams, to go due diligence. That was in 2005, 2006, 2007, he brought on my partner, Julian Lagrez. Julian's based at Paris. He founded the European

team and has done a fantastic job in Europe. And the story of that from 2005 to 15 was we basically invested our own capital and for full transparency. I joined in 2012. So my story of those earlier years is I'm intimately aware of them, but they did a fantastic job of rolling all of the recycling, all of the capital they had, because it's all they had. 100% GP commit, everything they had was in that business. And they put that into recycling any dividend. They didn't take dividends. They just wanted to use that capital to go and put in and make several other investments. I was there for the back end of it between 2005 and 2015. And it turned out to be an incredible story. You know, it was Europe, US. This is kind of part of the journey.

It was never really what can we do? It was always a case of how can I take from one, if I put $1 in, how can I make five? But it wasn't really. about the equity story. That's something that came a little bit later for us. We went in by doing, coming in, carving businesses out, standing them alone, and then creating a larger enterprise by improvements of the business. There are in many ways making money on the buy. Yeah, it was right. Look, I'll be candid with value investors. To find value means you have to be willing to step into complexity and take on things that people wouldn't do. And in 2007 and eight, if you go kind of all that cast our mind back to that time frame, the global financial crisis was on us.

And the story of them buying a business in the automotive sector, and they turned that around and made a good outcome of it two and a half years later. So they had sold it to a strategic. So they basically found a system that worked. And then in 2012, when I joined, we then kind of accelerated that by bringing in myself and a few other individuals who I would say had more institutional background, have been at larger firms and funds. And then we really kind of accelerated that over the next three years.

That was the vision to say, we should go raise a fund. It's one of the second order effects of having a specialty is you start to be known in the market as you do this kind of thing. And the more unique it is, the more of a market position you have. Did you find that over a certain amount of time? You became this complex corporate carve-out firm and people would just find you for the next two. Yeah, we never relied on that to be candid. When I joined a firm, I came in and led the origination team. We always had a mindset of, we always had this imposter syndrome that we shouldn't be in the room for these conversations, but we are.

And the reason why we were is because how we went to market. So we went and spoke to the corporates directly. And we never called the corporate and said, hey, Mr. Corporate, what are you selling? Because 10, 15, 20 other people were doing that. This is back in 2012. Now 50 people are trying to do that, probably all through AI. What we did at that time was we were there focused on speaking to the corporate, the head of M&A, the CFO, the CEO of these public companies. and talking some about their business in their sectors.

So we quickly took a sector approach, which also became a distraction, which we should come back to, because it's a fascinating lesson learned on our side as well, but predominantly in front of these larger corporations to understand what their M&A activity was, not what they were selling, but what they were looking at, what they were looking to do.

So we were playing the longer game, and so every single investment that we have made from 2006, 7 to to date, there's always been a story, a connection. We weren't just waiting for a banker to call us and go, oh, you guys are the corporate carver guys. I mean, then they're obviously making 20, 30 other calls. So we were in front of the corporate ahead of time. And there's some great stories of that leading to transactions that have come to fruition, where we've been the buyer. There was a story where we bought a business in 2016,

17, where we were in head of the process. We were way affront of it, speaking to the corporate team in front of the board presenting to them what we wanted to do and buy. And it was all because this was a business. So this was a zinc chemical business. Not the most super sexy business to many people, but the parent company had sold their larger upstream part of their zinc business, a zinc mining business. So, okay, so you have two distinct divisions below that. What are you doing with them? It was just a simple question that if you're an equity research analyst, you would ask as well. What are your plans to do with the downstream elements of the business you just sold? We were in front of that we had that conversation we presented a scenario where we could buy both

they said no no we can't sell both okay no problem but they wanted to sell one we said okay great well let us take a look we take some information we start to enjoy you know back and forth conversations we're going back to Brussels which is where they're based to have these meetings and then the CEO one day pops up and says on this public earnings we're considering alternatives for our zinc chemical business so then process stops every man in this dog picks up the phone and says says, well, I just saw that you're thinking about selling that business. They hired an investment bank. They hadn't hired an investment bank. And so we're now saying

to us, are we going to be able to compete? And we did. So we were in front of the process. And we had that connectivity. And most importantly, we had the credibility of doing so many corporate carve-outs and saying to people, this is what we're going to do and we actually do it. That was a credibility, I think, gave us a big step up in the European market, both with the banks involved, because there was some real banks involved. And so sourcing to us was a very critical item of how do we get in front of the corporate community as quickly as possible. And then we always talk about this as a bit of a, we're just talking off camera about the Knicks and what they've done this year, but the triangle offense, right?

This is, this is kind of, the Chicago Bulls. The Chicago Bulls and. Exactly. And being a Brit, I got pretty clued up on this pretty quickly, but Andrew loved this. This analogy is a huge basketball guy. But it was very quickly the triangle offense and how do we work. So it was corporate focused. It was executives led.

So working with executives in the industry who are subject matter experts. And then you have the investment banking community, which is where you triangulate all of that information to make sure the intelligence you're gathering through that process of sourcing these deals really resonates. And you have a higher success rate. But it's also, and this is probably the British part of me, which I think it took Andrew a little bit of time to get used to doing that was where I was just like, we're not going to push as hard as, quote unquote, the American kind of mindset may be. It was more consultative, and I think that really resonated. And as I said, it's put us in good stead. That's really credit to kind of the team here. Expert calls have always been one of the most powerful ways to build conviction.

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The first to see wins. The rest follow. Learn more at Alpha-sense.com slash how I invest. I want to distill the distinction in your sourcing versus traditional sourcing. There's different variations of sourcing, but what you're talking about is a lot of private equity firms will wait until bankers reach out to them, or they'll come to corporates and they'll ask them, what are you selling today? Your process was different. Maybe you could distill as a layperson why your process was different, and what exactly about your process was what led to the excellence. Great question. I think ultimately what you see for most people is, they get a banker pitchbook, list of opportunities.

We think these guys may do this. And what bankers are trying to do at the end of the day is to spark something that they can go back to their client on or a prospective client and say, we have a potential buyer. We were doing that ourselves. So we are in front of the corporate spending time with them to get an advantage in the deal. Because back to that imposter syndrome, we didn't think we should have been in the deal because there was other people who had large funds and firms who could easily do these deals. but we had to present ourselves differently, quickly and efficiently. So our biggest way that we focus our time and energy is speed and certainty.

That's how we win deal, speed and certainty. But if we're doing the upfront work of being... Meaning speed, meaning you act faster than your competitors or larger funds have multiple layers of governance. Correct. And certainty, you're more likely to close or you have a reputation of closing. Correct. Especially with the corporate community, you can continue to say, and we bought businesses from multiple sellers, multiple times. So we have a credibility in the market.

And so we leaned into it specifically with the corporates by getting in front of them, positioning us off early, being a known quantity to them. So we weren't just saying, hey, Mr. Corporate, what are you selling and picking up the phone? We know the head of M&A. We know the corporate strategy team. We know the CFO. And we've had a dialogue with them over the years. And so that has really compounded over time.

Obviously these M&A professionals are always thinking about what they're selling. You are a thought partner for them before they decided to say. sell. How are you front-running that process? It's research driven. You're spending time ahead of time. Are you ever telling them what they should be thinking about selling as well? You don't like to tell people what to do, but it's, you kind of plant a seed here and there, and I think that's helpful. Look, I think it's kind of the investment research is critical to it without question, but you are looking at what they've done and what they're doing. You're looking at the reporting of their businesses, but you're also kind of like now, and this is evolved. So I'm talking about originally

in 2012. As we've evolved as a firm, we've become a more sector-focused. And that sectors within the industrial sphere in particular means that we can talk the language of a chemist in many deals. So on the chemistry side, we can look at chemical deals and understand all the different nuances of those businesses. So we're now having an educated conversation with the corporate M&A guy or with the divisional lead of these businesses. Sometimes we've gone to the divisional lead of the business unit that may be sold and built a relationship there, knowing that that will filter his way back up to the corporate M&A team. So it's all being intelligence led. And by the way, the investment banking community is a big part of that too.

I mean, friends of ours and mine that we've had now over the years, we're going to them and planting a seed with them knowing that they're going to do the same thing. And so the triangle offense is that if people are coming together, then something will start to hit at some point. The Roger Federer kind of quotes of, you know, 51% of games, matches he won. Dartmouth commencement. Exactly. Well, incredible speech.

I mean, it's still to this day, I think. But, like, you look at those moments. It's like, we don't have that hit rate. Private equity, you don't. You typically have a better 5 to 10% hit rate on deals that you are in late stages on at certain points. And you want to increase the certainty of that over time. And for us, we've put that in a foundational way and understanding of how we know the corporate and what's important to them. Perhaps a dumb question, but certainty.

Why does that even matter if there's a banker process? 50 firms submit their offers. Why does it matter that you have certainty? Is it that some people win the auction, don't close? Yes. Happens a lot because they tell them what a lot of people will say and do. So there's two points to it. First of all, speed and certainty together is a very, very powerful kind of...

Even during an auction process. Yes. Yeah. The ability to move quickly and do to work and lean in on those things is incredibly important. Even in many ways, speed is a subset of certainty. Absolutely. If you work really slowly at some point, the deal might die. And they turn around and say, well, you're not credible.

The amount of times we're in a situation where they're saying, why have you not marked up? Or you may not have capital or all these downstream consequences. Anyway, I'm going back and forth between the pre-fund stage and the institutional phase of our life. In the early days, you had to appear to be doing everything to move very quickly. Later life, when you have the committed capital fund, you want to make sure you're doing that and what we do.

But we would pick out, because of what we did in the early days, we would pick a horse pretty quickly and we go all in on it. This is what we're buying. We feel comfortable with this. The certainty point back to that, your question, is some people will say that they can do a corporate carve-out. They'll hire a Big Ford County firm or someone. But the reality is that they don't.

But if you look at everyone's websites in what we all do today, they all say they do corporate carve-outs. So again, without... And then sometimes there for them to do that is they want to show more deal-furt. They want to see deals. And they've seen that... They want this optionality. They've seen that the platinum equities of the world

have created a tremendous amount of value for their investors and for themselves by doing corporate carve-outs. Corporate carveouts are unloved businesses where, you know, if you can take that from a 30 million EBGA to a 100 million EBGA, which sounds a crazy leap of faith. But if you cleaned up a business to a strategic buyer who wants to buy or a private equity buyer, who there's a tremendous amount of that today. So that value you're creating is significant enough for other people to say, oh, we can do this. And oftentimes these corporate carveouts are orphaned assets. No one's really invested in no one show them love.

So there's more upside. One of the theories that I'm evolving on private equity, venture capital, and these top managers is that what makes them great is not necessarily one or two things, although that's kind of the narrative that they put into the market. It's hundreds of little optimizations every day that they do that makes them better, and that just compounds over many years. To what extent do you believe that to be true? I haven't been there now for 14, 15 years. I have seen the reason why they continue to be so successful is kind of what you're saying is process. it's not about one individual. It's about a process.

Even less sexy than Carvats. Yeah. Honestly, what you're seeing today more than ever is private equity firms are now being consolidated into asset management companies. I mean, this has to be the theme, right? You look at LPs, we could talk for hours on this. When you look at how LPs have, their money has gone into private equity firms that have them being sold in secondary markets to different private companies or being bought by other private equity firms, which is they're also invested in, the whole ecosystem has been changed drastically. And when you do that once, but then you do that

a hundred times and it compounds, to your point, it becomes a bit of an issue. And that issue now is becoming consolidated. What I mean by that is, you know, there's a reason why LPs have gone, we don't want to write a $25 million check. We want to write a $250 million check. So we're going to write one, 250 versus 10 at 25. It's not just administrative. At that point, we don't want to write a $25 million. is pretty simple, but it's also placing bigger bets in the bigger guys, the bigger, big firms we all know, and that and themselves, they've all now become true asset management companies. They are now buying insurance companies. They have their own banks.

It's even happening in venture capital. If someone shared that. General catalysts is literally buying healthcare companies. It's amazing when you, so they're now using their own balance sheets to go and do this as a management company, which credit to them. But what's going to have to change, though, what really will come out of that, in my opinion, is specialist firms will continue to exist until potentially they're ever acquired

by someone who says we want that to happen. But ultimately, I do truly believe that OpenGate being a true specialist in what we do, corporate carve-outs, is going to continue to grow in that environment because otherwise the whole market is shifted and they've gone to 10 private equity firms asset management companies

that now are the only guys in the game. So it's either that or option B, which is more the family office model, which is just past, you know, kind of more patient capital, which they have a different cost of capital as well. So that can be a possible outcome. So I think your working thesis is a subject of a good title. What is upstream of processes? Decision-making and leadership. Is it culture and hiring? Is there anything else? Absolutely. I would put those into the leadership. But maybe hiring and then culture is a subset of hiring.

Yeah. A lot of people lose sight of the importance of hiring, right? It's an incredibly important part of any business and any growth of business. Sometimes you're not trying to hire for the skill set anymore. You're trying to bring in the right person, which I think kind of gets lost in some larger organizations. I'm a big fan, and I'm not just speaking in my own book. I just a big fan of smaller is better. And you've seen the growth of private equity now go,

well, we want to be 500 million, we want to be 1.5 billion. We want to be 5 billion. That's all good and everything. But the diminishing returns is pretty clear. I mean, the facts are out there when you have a higher a U.M or higher fund, you know, the returns of being, the negatively correlates it. So for me, I open game and myself, Andrew and Julian, the three of us, have always had a very

clear distinction of let's do what we do well and let's do it within in our own kind of ecosystem. Let's not try to be something bigger than we're not. We want to grow up to here and just do what you do well. But that now has been allowing us to really focus on what we do. I mean, I've always had this mindset of like the benefit of focus is immediate, the benefit of, the benefit of Synergy is theoretical. Like you need to have something you really hone in on. And we are as focus as we've ever been because the distractions have been distraction. A couple different things to unpack there. I've interviewed over 10 trillion in AUM from the LP side. Yeah. So once you've done that many interviews and talk to that many people, a lot of things become extremely obvious. And this

whole trend of putting more capital behind fewer managers is one of the persistence trend in the private markets and there's two reasons why that's happening the first is that lPs are no longer fetishizing diversification as they once did it's no longer seen as this infinitely free lunch and people understand the declining value of diversification and the second one is fees if you could write large checks you could write smaller smaller fees that being said paradoxically the returns are probably going to actually even accelerate for smaller funds specific in private equity here's why Intuitively, if you have more capital to deploy, you're going to get into the incrementally worst deals.

You're going to go upmarket, all these things that hurt returns has helped. The lower mill market has outperform large buyouts. That's actually only going to increase. And the reason for that is retail. 95% of retail capital today is in five firms. Yeah. Five buyout firms. Yeah.

What does that mean? That means trillions and trillions of dollars are going into the large buyout firms. Where are they going to deploy that capital? They're not going to go into the public markets. They have to go into the private markets. And what is downstream of large buyout? It's the lower middle market and smaller buyouts. So those assets are going to get a trillion dollars in supply,

waiting on the sidelines, trying to pick off those assets. So not only are we going to see declining returns in large buyouts, we're also going to see this almost infinite supply of institutional capital going after the same smaller, smaller buyout assets. This is where it kind of gets a little dystopian. You have to like step back and realize kind of what's happening. But it's the broader ecosystem of the capital allocators, the LPs. I mean, they, again, I mentioned it briefly earlier, but you see the amount of capital that goes into primaries today versus secondaries is huge.

And the pocket of secondaries has now grown tremendously because secondary capital isn't just where they did secondaries. It's now where they do co-investments, direct investments. It's where the majority of them pull their capital from. And as we've seen, co-investments is a way to do everything you just said. from lowering fees, to have less diversification, to have direct exposure, and so a better understanding of the risk tolerance. So the blind pool concept has also taken a bit of a turn as well. It'd be very interesting to see what happens. I still think that I agree with your comment. The large five firms in particular have to invest that capital. By virtue of that, they have to go

somewhere. So it's going to come downstream. And it has to go into the private markets. And it has go into private markets. Absolutely. So, but then, unfortunately, that will water down returns at the higher end of the markets, or they're going to be overpaying the things in to put capital to work, which we've all seen that movie before. So I think it's, to me, very much so a difficult to see, but there is definitely a change happening. There is something happening in private equity today where if that continues, or now to retail capital to your point, which is a fascinating point to pull on, it's only going to be impacting the private equity ecosystem and it brought away. You also have to go back to like, who are the investors? Insurance companies, you know,

in particular, and public pensions and some of those public pensions go into teachers and the like. I mean, it's something that we consciously thought of. And so in 2015, when we raised our first fund, we were one of the largest LPs in their own fund. One, because we wanted to have the ability to make these decisions and know that the impact wasn't just to an, you know, to a investors we've never met, you know, kind of individuals who are getting the benefit or not. The best way to show alignment is to be aligned. Be aligned. Write a check. And it was a meaningful check. But we've continued to do it in every fund. If you're going to have a bad investment, you need to feel the pain of it because it doesn't work if it's someone else's money.

And that's been a conscious approach to this. And I think that's where at the higher end of the market, the larger groups, what I've just described as the asset management companies, they, do they feel that pinch? No. They don't feel it at all. But for us, it hurts. And I think that's important to have that realization, to have that. And if you're really honest, it also changes behavior. It makes you take that incremental meeting.

It makes you stay up when your kids might be, have a school play, but you know you have to close this deal because it's existential. Your money, your family's money is on the line. And it's a great razor to not only incentivize associates, analysts, vice presidents, but also to incentivize yourself. Wasn't it Charlie Munger who said, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome? I mean, it's just a very specific way of saying exactly that. If you know, you know what the outcome is going to be, then I'll incentivize you to get there.

To me, it's a fascinating place to be where you are building something. And I feel very fortunate because I think we've, not only have we built something, but we're still learning. And if we're not learning, then why are we doing this, right? Because we have made some strategic changes in our firm to make sure we're going in the right direction and really believing in that directional shift, which is, as we touch. on is Europe for us, which has been a fascinating shift and we're kind of going very heavily into that market. That, to me, is us leaning into what we do well. And none of us will sleep until we've been successful at that. Just because you've been successful in the past, I mean,

you will go forward. So I think that's kind of where today we are very focused as a firm and will continue to me. If you go back to when you had just started at platinum equity and you can give yourself one piece of timeless advice, what would that be? It's funny. When we say the word compounding, everyone goes through financial compounding. But to me, what I've had tremendous success in personally has been the relationship side of things. If I knew the impact of the relationships I built in 2007, 2008 to where they are today, I would go all in on that because I know the impact it's had. I have gone all in on it, but I'm so grateful for the relationships I build. You would have even gone more. I would have gone all in because we're at a different

point in our life at that point and it's hindsight. But between that and the one thing I've always done. And this is my personal approach is, of course, back it by the understanding and analysis, but I trust my gut and my judgment. I would tell myself, always trust your judgment. Don't second it, guess it. We have a pretty unique way of our investment committee. There's four members of the investment committee. And we all have an individual vote. And it's, you know, we kind of go down that path. But I want to hear how the analysts, the intern, the associate, the VP, anyone who's worked on that deal, I want to hear their take on it. But I have my own opinion. on it, but I want to hear everyone else's. I want to look through a different lens. I wish I was

given that opportunity back in 2008 because I wanted to have a voice. And I knew that pretty early on. And I realized that that was just kind of my maybe personality type. So for me, it was very much, I would want to encourage finding my voice as early as possible, trusting my gut and investing in a relationship. That's the Karl Popper technique. Carl Popper was his philosopher and he talked about this epistemological search for truth. So how do you actually learn what is true? And the most effective way to do that is to go around, have conversations. Yeah. And have people correct you with new information, update your priors and essentially improve your

LLM until you get closer and closer to ground truth. This is the exact reason why I do this podcast. Yeah. I say my theory. I have the smartest people in the world to correct me. And then I get closer and closer to ground truth. Yeah. And a lot of people, they want to be around people that just agree with everything that they say,

yes, men, yes, women. And that is extremely dangerous. thing to put yourself into because then you become further and further from ground truth. You start to make mistakes and there's all sorts of downstream consequence. I would agree with that. And it's actually one of the benefits. We have Andrew Julian and I have worked together since 2007. Andrew and I have known each other since 2010 and Julian.

Ironically, we bumped into each other on a deal in 2010. We met each other at the airport. Do you remember when there was that Icelandic... The volcano. The volcano ash. I was stuck in Finland. So try and get home from there. It wasn't easy.

And who do I bump into Andrew and Julian on this deal that they later acquired credit to them? So I've known Andrews and Julian since 2010. But the three of us in particular, as the three partners, we agree on a lot, but we have some very healthy debates about it. And all three of us don't, I don't want someone to tell me yes, for the sake of saying, yes. I want someone to challenge. And fortunately, Andrew and Julian both see the same side of that too. It's been a fun kind of journey in that regard. My wife, Jessica, commented one time when me and my business partner, Curtis.

this, she said, why do you guys argue like that? I'm like, what do you mean? She basically said, you keep on leaving off where the other person ends and improving upon it's not a real, like, why do you argue like that? I'm like, I guess that is a form of argument, which is non zero sum talking, which is you say something, somebody else improves upon it, you improve on themselves. That's just how we talk. Yeah.

And so those are the best relationships, by the way, right? Isn't that the case of wanting to get better and understand that about each other? Absolutely. Well, Josh, thanks so much. much for jumping on the podcast. Looking forward to doing this again soon. I'd love so. Thank you again. Appreciate it.