How I Invest with David Weisburd - E409: Hidden Markets: Where Great Investors Find Their Edge

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

Most investors chase what's exciting. Jason Koenig built a $6.5 billion firm by investing where almost nobody was looking. In this conversation, Jason explains why overlooked industrial assets can produce exceptional long-term returns, how ITE grew from $60 million to $6.5 billion in assets under management, why culture compounds just like capital, and the leadership lessons he learned while scaling an investment firm from startup to institutional platform.

Jason, you've built ITE into a platform that has $6.5 billion assets under management. Going after an overlooked sector, why do you think the market's underprice overlooked sectors? I grew up in the Midwest. Actually, I'm looking at on the wall, you've got a license plate that says VAB 5. Actually, played against Chris Weber in basketball and high school. I'm about 5'10 on a good day. So I decided I had to go into asset management. We've grown up, at least you and I, in a period. of time when everybody's looking at the coasts. You're looking at Silicon Valley for what's coming out of it technology-wise and now it's

AI. Or you're looking at New York City where it's all finance, but nobody really paid attention to what's going on in the middle of the country, which happens to be most of the country. And what we saw in the middle of the country was industry. And the rhetoric that we're seeing today is that industry has been forgotten. And we started noticing industry and industrial assets about 15, 16 years ago when, again, And this was right when we were emerging from the financial crisis when most everybody I knew was paying attention to their iPad and what app could they make. And we looked the other way and said, well, what's that thing rusting in the middle of country and moving things around?

Maybe you could unpack that from a capital market's perspective. Why does that translate into these opportunities? The industrial supply chain actually grew up with our country, our rail system, our shipping system, our trucking system. It's incredibly flexible, but it grew up very regionally because our country. country grew up geographically regional. You had grain in the Midwest, you had the energy in Texas, you had lumber in the northwest. So all of these companies and industries kind of grew up as mom and pop sectors. They kind of emerged and no one paid a lot of attention to them because it was hard. You had to be really involved in these businesses. As our country grew, you started seeing a little

bit more a conglomeration or aggregation of these companies. When we emerged from the financial crisis, my background is actually distressed buyout guy. And so I'm actually a contrarian by nature. And so, again, as everybody was looking around toward the coast about what's the next great technology thing, we started looking at, well, what's the least volatile thing we could possibly imagine? And I started poking around at big balance sheet items. I started poking around at long-term contracts. I started poking around at just really, what is nobody paying attention to? Today, you have $6.5 billion under management, your minority owned by Blackstone. But you didn't start that way. Tell me the story.

about how you went from zero to one. Post-financial crisis, I was investing in distress companies. And distress companies are actually, I don't think, very complicated, as long as you focus on balance sheet and cash flow, right? So you kind of have a burning building, something's wrong. But if you've got a good structure, you can go in and fix it. And then when we ended the financial crisis,

I started looking around and thinking two things. One, there's behavioral change, so there are no more distressed companies out there. And two, I was really worried about inflation which I think I was right, but only 20 years too early. So then I started looking around and poking around at leasing companies because I wanted something that was what I knew, balance sheet and cash, but had no volatility.

And I also kind of thought of myself as sort of a hybrid operator because I'd run some of the distressed companies, even though I'm not really. So I was looking for something for a moat. And as I mentioned in the opening of when we started speaking, one of the things is I was just sitting by a train track and watching the train go by was, I think, oil tankers or hopper cars. And I started actually remember thinking, who owns these assets?

Like, it never occurred to me. And then it's actually kind of fun if you drive around or look at things and just start thinking about who owns everything. There's all these little companies that own all different things. My partner, he kind of approached it from a different perspective. He was running an insurance company and he was buying fixed rate debt related to rail assets. And he started looking at the asset and the debt was generating about a three or 4% return for him. But when he really penciled it out, he saw the debts five years. An average

lease term was five or six years. The math seemed to indicate that the owner of the asset was generating 15 to 20% cash on cash yields. And so we both kind of triangulated and saw, well, this is a great asset. How come nobody's doing it? So you saw the opportunity. How did you get started? My wife will tell you that I tell her that I'm super clever all the time. But as clever as I think I might be, I didn't know a single thing about rail cars. I looked at it and thought, oh, this is box. Like, how hard can it be? It turns out, by the way, it's incredibly hard. It's incredibly technical, incredibly customer-centric. So we needed somebody who could guide us. I probably interviewed about 20 different people within the rail industry

who to see if they could work with me. And I was really fortunate to meet a gentleman. He's now more or less retired. He's our chairman of emeritus. His name is Jim Unger. And he ran one of the largest rail car manufacturers and rail car leasing companies in North America under the Carl Icon umbrella. Jim had just retired, and he lives in St. Louis, and we flew out to visit him and talked with him, and for reasons that I still to the life and we don't understand, he agreed to join us. And so Jim actually gave us instant credibility into the rail space. And I should say, I should back up a little bit. This wasn't without a lot of research. I probably I spent a year learning about the rail cars because I thought they were super interesting.

And we saw an opportunity where what I saw was great cash flow, inflation, downside protection, tax efficiency, actually, if you're a taxpayer. And no one was paying attention to it and I tried to buy it myself, as did my partner. And we couldn't find any way to buy it. And so we thought, here's a really interesting asset. Here's one that I would like to own because it seems like it's unique. but I can't get it. If I want it, maybe other people want it.

And so now we started thinking, like, well, how do we build a business? And when we first started, we thought if we could just own a bunch of these would be a really fun investment to own. It was almost like our own little industrial VC company. We met Jim, and he kind of gave us instant credibility within the marketplace. And then we saw an opening within the manufacturing base and started talking to manufacturers to solve what really was a cash flow and balance sheet problem. And so we went to manufacturers, we set up partnerships with them, and just started buying rail cars off their balance sheet. We were fortunate that we went around to a bunch of friends and family, right? We'd made money for a bunch of people over the past decade or two.

And we raised about $60 million to start. And we told them exactly what we're going to do. And again, just like Jim joining us, you had a bunch of intrepid investors who thought, well, you guys seem smart. I don't really understand what you're talking about half the time, but it seems like, like a clever idea. And we started just buying up rail cars. And the model proved everything we said we were going to do actually happened.

And so we raised $60 million in the first six months. And then we deployed that and everything performed as expected. And then we raised quickly another $110 million. And then we just slowly started growing. In some respects, it's a little bit like VC that you and I were talking about before. I think we were lucky. We were a first move of advantage is enormous.

I think that it allowed us to kind of grab a bunch of land very quickly when other people weren't looking. And that allowed us to then start putting our stakes in the ground and creating a moat around what we were doing. When we started raising capital, I had quit my job. I just had a second child. We had our first investor that was going to commit to us, I think it was $15 million. He told us everything was approved and ready to go on a Friday. I went to sleep Friday thinking everything was great. I woke up on Monday morning, called him and no answer.

And then I still didn't hear him by noon. I called my partner and said, huh, I wonder where this guy is. I hope he didn't get fired. Ha, ha, ha, ha. And sure enough, I learned about two hours later, they got fired. And so our first $15 million, we were getting ready to go, disappeared. And I remember sitting there like in a cold February dark New York City night. And my second child was just there and thinking like, boy, this had better work.

because otherwise I'm going to have to go find another job or do something much more, not quite as entrepreneur. What were you thinking at the time? I was thinking at the time that a very forgiving wife. But it was one of those things where, I think to be an entrepreneur, you have to be so committed and you have to have unbelievable blinders on

in order to do what you're doing because what you're really doing is you're starting something that everybody thinks is silly. right? Because if everybody didn't think it was silly, they would do it themselves. So you're starting something. You talk to people. They tell you no. You hear no a million times. And you just have to keep going, constantly, constantly, constantly. So at that point in time, I probably myopically didn't think too much of it because I was so committed to just going, going, going. And I'd given myself like about two years to see if we get it. And we were pretty fortunate. We actually raised that $60 million in about

six months, which was super fast. Then we raised the next 110 in about six months after that. So we started having a flywheel that started really going. I learned that subsequently, I asked people why did they invest. And first, they liked us. They liked the story. I think they liked my Midwest roots. Jim certainly gave us a patina of credibility. But also I subsequently learned that we were a great cocktail party discussion. Like everybody was talking about the different things that they were investing in. They all were fairly great, but maybe all sounded the same. And then someone said, well, have you heard about the rail car leasing business? And I think that actually gave us an enormous flow of folks that called us, if nothing else, just to hear something different. So it kind of helped

us out a lot. Novelty is such an underrated aspect that human beings and smartest investors unconsciously look for. Everyone thinks they're immune to this novelty bias, but then they end up making these crazy investments when they had a perfectly good portfolio. So sometimes a little bit novelty could be great. I have a working theory on what you talked about these blinders. I call it the V-shaped ego of the entrepreneur. I think when you start as entrepreneur, paradoxically, you want to have a very high ego, almost to a point of arrogance, because why else would you start? And then a lot of people actually stop there, and they don't actually end up developing. And I think you need to go as quickly

as possible to a low ego position and start to learn, start to iterate. And then as you scale, you have to go back to a high ego position. Why? Because you have to have to, have enough knowledge, but you want to keep on pushing the envelope, you want to keep on taking big bets. Now you start getting criticism. What do you think about this theory? I fully subscribe. Actually, when my partner and I first started, I remember our conversation where he said, and his name is David, by the way, David said, listen, I'm not a great partner. I'm hard to get in touch with sometimes. I kind of go off on my own and start thinking, and I said, that's great because I don't want to listen to anybody. And I think there's an element of like, I think to be an investor

and to be an entrepreneur, you have to have an incredible amount of hubris to think that I know better than you. And especially when you go into an industry that you've never been in. Well, not only that, at least for my case, I was going into an industry that's been around for a hundred years, right? So what can I possibly know that hadn't been discovered a hundred years go. It turns out we were approaching it. This industry needed new ideas. Frankly, I still think the rail industry is stuck in the 80s or 90s, and we're trying to bring it into at least the early 2000s. You have to go in with such confidence in yourself because you are going to, you got to make bets. And I think bet is the wrong word. You're making an educated guess based on

the information you have. So it's a little bit, it's not gambling, but you are taking a shot that other people don't have. And then I agree with you. You're going to get really good. real low because not only, I define leadership as like eating a sandwich of like a garbage sandwich every day. You have to listen to what everybody's saying. People come to you with your problems all the time and you have to just constantly just listen, listen, listen and solve these problems. And so it actually is super low ego. But at the same time, you've got to balance it with that hubris, which at the end of the day is, I know better, which is a weird thing to have because you're raised, particularly in the Midwest, you're raised to have deference to your elders,

deference to other people, deference to people who know. But sometimes you just have to go. I will say I learned that a couple of ways. And again, this is the hubris speaking right now and the ego speaking. But I learned early in my investment experience so that when I was making investments in the distress space, I had a real conviction, but I listened to people that were older or had been doing it longer. And I thought, well, I should give them a deference.

And what I found was that I was right. I didn't like the investment. I didn't raise my voice enough. I didn't sound the alarm bells enough. Or I deferred. And I think you have to have those experiences where you learn, where you didn't follow your instinct, you didn't follow your gut, you didn't follow your knowledge, and you made a mistake. And then you just started having confidence in your own decisions. And then I got some great advice when I went to law school originally.

And then I went to business school. When I graduated from law school, a senior partner from. one of the large law firms, I asked him for some advice. And he told me two things. The first one is he said, just make choices. He said, most people don't make choices. And when you're young, you don't really appreciate that all the time. But as you get older, you realize how important it is. And also how few people actually want to make decisions and want to make choices. So I've always tried to make choices. And you don't have to be right all the time. You have to be right much of the time, but not all the time. And most of the choices you make, you can correct if you're

wrong. So making those choices became incredibly important. The other thing he told me was to buy a sob. He said BMWs and Audies are too flashy when you're just starting your career. And Ford and at the time, this was in the 90s. They weren't making that good a car. So he said, sob tells everybody exactly, you're like conservative, thoughtful, but also making smart choices. Of course, I never followed that because I'm from Detroit, so I have to buy Ford and GM cars. I don't know if Christ was a Detroit car anymore. But Ford and GM cars all the time. I've had them ever since. Most investors don't lose because they lack information.

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If you're an investor looking to gain an edge through AI-enabled insights, I think you'll find this conversation valuable. You can access this limited release episode by going to alpha-sense.com slash how I invest. That's alpha-sense.com slash how I invest. Double clicking on this V-shaped theory. One of the intricacies there is a lot of people think a lot of leaders are egotistical. That's probably right because in order to get started, it's a barrier to entry. So everybody that is a business leader that has built something big at some point, unless they had daddy's money, they had to basically start with some arrogant assumption. But the ones that really get to the other side, they need to have humility in order to integrate. And then at

some point, they need to reenter the egotistical position, not because of entitlement or because thinking that they're the world's greatest person, but because they've gone through this arc of humility, they now actually do know better than the market. There's even more to that. I think that as you and I were speaking a little bit earlier, you find a lot of entrepreneurs didn't come from much. I had a professor in college who was really encouraging me to be a writer,

and I was better at math. I really liked writing, and I thought it was a very romantic thought to me. Like any college student, I was particularly in the 90s when there was a period of grunge, I was enamored by Jack Kerouac and like on the road and all those things. And I thought it was a romantic life. But I was better at math, so I went into finance and investing. But he also commented me that he saw a lot of students who came from kind of middle class

or upper middle class backgrounds. And because they had a little bit to lose or even a lot to lose, they were afraid to take chances. And I do think there's something where you don't have as much where it gives you a lot more license to take chances. It's also kind of a funny thing. I did go to law school, and I remember there was a saying where the A students became judges, the B students became lawyers, and the C students became billionaires. And I think that also was the idea that the C students, like, didn't have the options open to them that the A students and the B students had. So they just, like a little bit like Cortez, they just had to burn their boats and just head off into whatever direction they wanted to.

In fact, I remember a lot of my classmates, the ones that really struggle to get jobs, ended up with the most interesting careers because they had to take directions that other people didn't go. So all this gets a lot to the contrarian point of view, right, where you're forced to make choices because other areas aren't open to you. From my perspective, I do ascribe to the confidence and arrogance technique. I just never really wanted to work for somebody. I felt like I had my own ideas. I felt like over time you learn, I've got teenage daughters now and I still still.

say to them, you should really question everything that anybody over 30 tells you because we're probably wrong. The world's changing so fast. And I was always questioning everybody and everything. I actually put on my cubbyhole in my first job, I wrote why, W-H-Y. Because every question I was asking everything I was told to do, I asked myself, like, well, why am I doing this? And most of the time, you don't really know why you're doing anything. And so this gets to like, one, what are the path's open to you, too. Why are you listening to other people? You have to start thinking that you know a little bit better than them. You have to be young, I think, to do it too, because you have to have nothing to lose. It's obviously a lot harder to do when you get a little bit older. So my whole

career and my whole path has been, frankly, moving around to try and not work for anybody else and start creating my own business. So you got to have a lot of ego to do that. And then the second point that you said is you've got to go in there and then you're going to make mistakes. And you've got to be terrified. And I remember making some investments that I was convinced were the right investments. We actually did a take private of American rail car industries, which was a rail manufacturer with a really big rail car balance sheet. How big was that deal?

That for us, that was a big deal for us. That was about $2 billion of enterprise value. And most of the value, like we saw the value. We thought it was a public company. We thought it was the rail car. This is, again, folks hadn't really focused. on infrastructure and real assets. And we saw that, we thought that the balance sheet was undervalued.

It was largely controlled by Carl Icon, which also makes you question whether you're making the right move or wrong move. It was a super fun negotiation to be able to negotiate against him and his firm. But we bought that business and I had real conviction about it. And then everyone, and it had a small manufacturer. And when we took that business private, I would say 50% of my investors called me, really asking me, like, what right did I have to be buying a company from Carl Icon that also had a small manufacturer, which was complicated? And I remember just being terrified. And I couldn't sleep. And I started

questioning myself and thinking like, oh, I made the wrong decision. And my wife was very supportive. And then I started explaining to my investors. They were still skeptical, but then we just started proving out the model and proving out what we were doing. And I think that ability to take criticism and then forge forward, I think is really important. It teaches you how to kind of manage through things. But again, it also kind of keeps your ego in check because for a moment there, I thought I was really wrong. And I had all these smart people that were telling me that were critical of it. And I thought, oh, my goodness, I'm really wrong. And I'm going to take the responsibility of investing other people's money incredibly seriously. It's a trust business. You've got to be

transparent and open and you've got to maintain that trust with them all the time. And so I was worried that I'd kind of breach that trust, but it worked. But we were right and it was undervalued and we knew what we're doing and it proved outright. So I think that was a little bit of the humility piece. As you grow more and more, you have to maintain that humility because if you get over your skis and you get too confident, I think you do start seeing people go outside of what they're good at. The one area I would say the ego part is, as you do this more and more, I think that you have to have confidence in your abilities and you have to know what you're doing and trust yourself, but I do think you have to get rid of the hubris and the ego that you started with because you're growing,

it becomes harder and harder to manage. The humility is really important. because I think if you want to grow your business and interact with people and continue with that trust, I think the humility to know that you're not always going to be right, and the humility to know that you need other people to grow the business becomes ever more important. And the thing that I've learned the most is I've grown my business, and this is cliche, but I guess it's because cliché is often are true, are that you really do need other people. people and you need other people to do their job. And I think that's really hard for a founder, by the way, to give them autonomy and give them

choice and give them freedom to make their own mistakes. So I think you start high ego, you start questioning yourself a little bit, you work your way out of it, and then you have to be a little even keeled. I know a lot of tech CEOs and entrepreneurs are mercurial, and you read all these stories, and there's a lot of movies made from them. Maybe it's industrial, so I'm industrial Midwest. so you've got to be a little more even keeled, but at least what I've found

is that the humility is really important. The distinction there is if once you're successful, you need to keep on using ego to push ideas on people, you probably have the wrong people around you. There's a difference between ego and inspiration, right? So I think as I've learned and as I hope I've grown as a leader, and it's funny, you probably hear this from a lot of your entrepreneurs. Like, I think I'm a good investor,

and I started with some good ideas, and then I've grown, you end up doing less investing and more managing. It's unclear that any of us are really good managers. As I've grown more and more, I've learned that it's really important to kind of set direction and wave the flag. And you have to be really, at least my style is you have to be really transparent and really truthful, both with your investors and your employees and the companies that you are investing in or the people that you're working with. But you also have to kind of give the big vision because I think that's really important. We all want to rally around a big vision.

And I think that's really important. And that requires the, again, getting back to ego, like enough ego that you feel confident to say, here's where we're going and here's what we're doing and here's why we're doing it. And again, we're going to do something different than everybody else. But then again, enough humility to say to people, come follow me, but like we got to do it together. And within my organization, the team orientation is really critical. And it's really important. I hate titles. I think titles are the worst possible thing because you end up having people work to their title. Or you have people managing other people based on their title when I was younger and I'm sure you were the same. Like, I wanted as much responsibility and I wanted to do as much as possible. I didn't care if I was an

analyst and associate. So I think that it's important to kind of create a flatter organization where you have give people the room to kind of reach and grow. That takes a lot of confidence, too. So you may hate titles. People love titles. And in theory, they're also cheap or free for you to give out. How do you balance those two things? I fight tooth and nail, actually.

Our firm is almost 15 years old. We've only had titles for about four years. We got to a point where we did need them largely for what you said because people love them. We first started by having only three titles. We said associate director and managing director. In order to be a managing director, you had to actually manage somebody. So I kept fighting it. I thought titles should be descriptive of actually what you do.

And again, that fails over time because people do want to get promoted. The cynical part is, which you've heard, actually my wife was working at one of the large banks, and they promoted her and gave her much more responsibility and a big title and no more money. And so I thought, oh, well, that's clever. Now we want everybody to make a lot of money and grow, but to your point, titles are a cheap way of recognizing people. But I do think you got to put meaning around it because it should mean something. If we're going to do it, it should mean something. And so the way that we approach it is you have to, it's almost like I remember learning how to ski in Michigan at a little hill.

And you had to be able to do a certain turn, a stem turn, and a certain hockey stop. So same thing with titles. We got to make sure people can do the STEM. term term, we got to make sure they can do the hockey stop. Maybe they can hit the moguls properly. So that's kind of, that's how we approach it. Started with the $60 million in assets. You're now $6.5 billion in assets under management and 13.5 billion in assets that you own and manage. What's been the biggest challenge in terms of scaling? The biggest challenge of scaling has been, I'll get back to leadership and

management because the investments and the assets like we're doing from an investment point of view what I kind of preach to everybody is like we should be like McDonald's we should be doing the same thing over and over again we don't need to reinvent the wheel once we get that flywheel going that's hard to do by the way to get people to do the same thing over and over again because they seek that novelty again they do seek that it's exactly right how do you solve for this novelty that people need you're constantly course correct I find it amazing. It's a little bit, I don't sail, but I imagine it's like sailing.

Like you set your due north and you find that over time you drifted. It's even with investment presentations. We created a template. It's a simple template. Like just fill the boxes in and put the things in there. And after about three or four months, the template looks nothing like we've given to people. They're kind of going all over the place, extrapolating. I can't read it quickly enough.

And so then you just have to sit back and ask people to do it again and read it. do it. And it's actually contrary to what you and I talked about because we started these businesses with the idea that we're going to do something totally, totally different. And I actually think I almost like in being an entrepreneur like you're on a pirate ship and we're going to be the pirates and we're going to sail to the different islands and we're going to raid and pillage and we're going to do all these wonderful things. But I really want a bunch of bean counters on my pirate ship who are just doing the same thing over and over and over again. Over time, you want also other pirates with you because you can't really conquer new lands unless

you have other pirates with you. It's this constant balance. And I think it's healthy because if you don't bring other people that are coming up with new ideas and asking you to do things differently, then you're going to miss it too. It's that innovator's dilemma, right? So you kind of have to balance it that way. You use the analogy of pirates and conquering new land. To use a baseball analogy, is that a position issue, which is you want your pitcher to be

extremely good at starting new products and you want your catcher to be really good at using these templates. Is that a positioning issue? It becomes a positioning issue. I think initially as you're growing your business, you have a lot of utility infielders. And then over time, as you kind of move up the ranks in the majors, you realize that like, okay, great, I need great starting pitcher, and I need a great shortstop, and I need a great center fielder. And so over time, you either have to train those utility infielders to become specialists or you have to bring in specialists. So I do think, again, this gets to your question,

going back to your question about what's the hardest thing? I think the hardest thing is, from my point of view, it's actually letting go and bringing in those specialists and not directing every single play to all those utility infielders, but being a manager who's sitting back and saying, okay, great, I've got my top starting pitcher that I frankly paid a lot of money for. He's really good. He knows or she knows what they're doing and letting them do their job. I think that's unbelievably hard to do. I find it very confusing because we all read a lot of books

about what makes good managers and what makes good leaders. And I talk to a lot of great managers and great leaders to learn how they manage. And I find these two constant threads that are contrary to each other. First is that these founders and leaders and managers know everything about their business. They can tell you the scheduling, the different small P&L items. They know all the minutia. But at the same time, they're clever enough to hire really great people where they give those people the room to make their own choices. And I don't think that those two things don't always come together naturally and they also seem like a bit contrary to me.

So I'm very much in the details and know everything that's going on. but at the same time I'm bringing on new talent and letting them kind of grow and run the business themselves. You mentioned that at some point you want to get that star pitcher. Does that kind of coalesce with the organization growth that at some point you're actually able to attract that star pitcher? Or is it just a matter of it's not yet time to get that person? From a hiring perspective, one of the things that I've learned

is that you've got to hire one to two to three years out. If you really want to grow and you really want to scale your business, you've got to hire for the future, not for today. There's a couple things that come together. One, you have to think about tomorrow. Almost everything that we're doing, we don't think one year out. We think three, five, ten years out. So the same thing goes for hiring.

Same thing goes for organization structure. Two, you have to find people that agree with your ethos. And so, for example, what I tend to say to folks, and Blackstone's a great partner for us, and we work with a lot of these big banks. But if you want to go work for a big institution, you're probably not going to want to come work for us. Right? So we're looking for those people that are really looking for a smaller, flat, organization that will think about things a little differently, will constantly feel pressure

because we know the bigger folks are looking at us and could come at us. And so you've got to be a step ahead all the time. So I think it requires a certain type of person. I think you've got to hire in advance. And then I think this is where the leadership comes in, which we talked about before, which is that I think you have to really paint them a vision that they believe in. Growing up, I thought managing money met paying bills and balancing a checkbook. but as you know, that is only a small piece of the financial puzzle.

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I think people can tell when you're being genuine and they can tell when you're excited about it. So those three things come to play. And I think everybody that's joined us has been somebody who didn't want to go work for a large organization, particularly our leadership, didn't want to go work for a large organization, felt a little bit that they had something to prove. And then also like the idea of being a little bit on the pirate chip. And I think that's really important. You mentioned something that didn't surprise me, but the scale of it did surprise me hiring one to two to three years ahead.

Maybe you could double click on why you do that. First of all, hiring is unbelievably hard. I did distress buyouts for about 10 years. And I think the number one thing that I learned is culture is everything. We came up with pithy sayings like a fish stinks from its head. but culture is critical, and I saw more good businesses blown up because of bad leadership and bad culture. The cultural element was so important. So what we really look for are we hire and we think far ahead, we really look for people that are focused on teamwork,

that are comfortable initially with a lack of a clear path. Because when you're creating a business and you're, investing. We own, we started with rail and now we own chassis and trailers and containers and tank containers and we moved into aviation and engines and we're doing some work in kind of port and infrastructure. All those things you have to kind of create yourself. So you have to have people that are really comfortable with working as a team, being collaborative, but also being a little bit uncomfortable about where the direction is going to go. Because it takes us a couple of years to actually figure out what we're doing and where we want to go. So all of that boils down to, like,

I spend a lot of time looking around. Like, I think one of my biggest roles is to find people, right? As a leader now, I think about growth. So it's people, opportunities, and frankly, in raising capital. The people parts the hardest. You meet a ton of people. It takes six to 12 months to find the right people. It takes another 12 months for those right people to actually figure out where the bathroom is half the time, like where to go. So I'm already two years behind if I start now, right? So I'm starting now thinking three, four years from now that I'll have that person that's going to be working and doing the job by the time we need it. It's the same thing for investing, by the way. Like if you're waiting for when the investment makes total sense, you're going to

have missed it. You've got to take a little bit of a leap about where you want to go. I wonder if a lot of that is when you bring in new people, they don't just fit into specific box, they bring a new way of thinking into the organization, and you need that new paradigm in order to grow. So the new person will come in with a different paradigm and say, holy, like, why aren't you guys doing this thing? And it pulls you in that direction versus just plugging an existing whole. I think that's right. But also on the flip side, we work with a lot of folks from, that come from big industry. We've found like the people that our best leaders are not the investors,

not people that come from the banks, it's people that come from industry because they understand the assets, they understand the industry, and they're going to approach it a little differently. But they've also come from really big organizations sometimes, and we want to make sure that they're not bringing in some of those big institutional habits,

which I think can be dangerous. What's an example? I'll tell you, a funny one was really like, maybe this is a little simple, but we hired somebody, and the first thing they said is, where's my EA? Where's my executive assistant? And I said, we have the saying, like, you got to screw in your own light bulb.

And I said, we don't have executive assistance here. I think it was emblematic of like we're in the weeds. We're doing our own work. You got to do your own thinking. And it also is a cultural element of you, like we want to be lean and hungry. That was just one area where we're not just managing. We're doing and we're managing. And I think that's a really important cultural element.

So to me, that's always a red flag when people say, well, where's my executive assistant? Eventually, we do need them because it ends up wasting time. But we tend to issue that. We really want people. Talking about doing and managing, there's also this paradigm of great individual performance versus being a great teammate. How do you find people that at both? It's a balance of ego. It's the hardest hire.

The best folks that we have hired are people that have succeeded and then, failed and then succeeded again. And you can see it within their career path. And I don't mean failed, but they just were in experiences that were hard or terrifying, or they made bad choice here and there. That is the experience that we found works well because they've got the confidence to move forward. They have been leaders before, but the humility again to know that they can't do it all themselves. I do think that comp structure, we're all incentive driven at the end of the day.

I think comp structure is incredibly important. So we do spend a lot of time thinking about compensation. So we've got a bunch of different verticals that are, and we've got a bunch of different teams that are investing in those different verticals, but all compensation goes into one pool. And I think that folks are compensated in part by their own performance and in part by the pool because we want people to be working with each other. So I'd say you've got to have the humility from past experience. You've got to have compensation aligned. And then I do think we

spend a ton of time just breaking down walls. Like walls are constantly built up internally. People get focused. They get siloed. They want to do their own thing. And there's no great answer to this.