Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Live from ONE: NYC!

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

We took Motley Fool Money on the road to our ONE member event in NYC, and we’ve got a special episode of analyst insights and listener questions.   (00:21) Asit Sharma and Andy Cross discuss: - The Nasdaq building in NYC, and how the company and exchange have fared in 2023. - Some sneak peeks at the sessions for our member event - One Fool stock that isn’t getting enough attention, and another that has surprised the investing team.  (14:08) We take questions from our ONE members in NYC – Andy and Asit weigh in on PayPal, how high rates impact investing decisions, and some companies that have done succession well recently. Companies discussed: NDAQ, ASML, META, PYPL, COST Host: Dylan Lewis Guests: Asit Sharma, Andy Cross Engineers: Rick Engdahl, Dan Boyd  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Live from New York, it's Motley Fool Money. What an introduction, I love it. I'm Dylan Lewis, and I'm joined on the floor of our NYC One member event with Motley Fool analysts Asit Sharma and Annie Cross. Gentlemen, great to have you both here. Hey, Dylan. Great to be here, Dylan. Even better to have all these members here in the audience with our live taping. This is an absolutely fantastic event, and I think it's a pretty cool podcast taping for us.

We've got thoughts on the stock exchange. We've got some sneak peeks at what One members are getting here at this event in New York City. And we've got some overlooked pool stocks, maybe a little bit of member fund there, too. We're going to kick off, though, talking about the NASDAQ. Andy Ossett, last night we were there overlooking Times Square for the kickoff and the reception for this member event. I'm curious, Andy, what were some of your thoughts just being there, being at the exchange where all the action happens? Well, it was a super cool event and venue. It was maybe a little bit chilly to be on the outside part of it.

But for those of us who did have a chance to go out there, I think it was really cool to be able to look across just a magnificent city and see just all the energy. You know, you come to New York. I'm from Washington, D.C., so it's a very easy train ride, pop-up. You just get this energy and the vibe that you can't get anywhere else, at least in my opinion. And that just came through last night at the event. The one members we spoke to are just some of the most passionate investors we have as part of our member base. We have a lot of great members, but the one member brings something special, and it was really neat to be back at the NASDAQ for that.

Asit, you agree, chilly but worth it? Oh, absolutely, Dylan. I used to live here downtown in the 1990s, and it's good to see the city come back. So much energy on the streets and so much energy from our members. I also had some wonderful conversations last night, maybe 50% investing, 50% favorite topics from podcasts, members sharing literature they love, places they've traveled, the kinds of things that I just enjoy talking about. So, it was great. That feels like the right ratio to me. I don't know, 50-50 sounds about right.

It seems like a natural opportunity for us to check in on the exchange itself, because it's an exchange, but it's also a publicly traded company. And also, just kind of the state of investing, because the NASDAQ itself is, in a lot of ways, a proxy for the activity that we see out in the investing world. Andy, kind of a rough year for the NASDAQ. Well, for the stock, yeah, for the stock itself, it's down, gosh, almost 20%, probably when you think about what has been going on in the markets, the activity, the trading activity still coming off the COVID premiums, the COVID times when so much individual investor activity and institutional activity was in the markets. So, they're dealing a little bit with

that lower volume. The IPO market has really slowed down, so that has not happened. And that's affected NASDAQ's growth. So, their growth has turned negative. Their sales growth has turned negative for the past few quarters. That's showing up in the stock. It's not the fastest-growing stock as it is historically. However, they did have a really great surge in that 2021 period that showed up in the financials, and now they're coming off that, and that's reflected in the stock price. And they made some acquisitions, levered the balance sheet up. So, just some concerns, I think, with the investing community, whether NASDAQ, at what point do they get back to the growth days that represents a good stock value at what price that happens?

Asit, we always love seeing new names come out to the market because it's something new for us to check out as investors. I know NASDAQ in particular, very excited to see new names come out because it means more money for them as a business. Yeah, absolutely. So NASDAQ really thrives when multiple IPOs come out in a year and that market is very healthy. It draws new investors in and it also draws attention to all their proprietary products. So when you have a great IPO market, it's sort of a pipeline of volume of interest as well. And this has a really great payoff for NASDAQ in that institutional investors get excited. They want to have more products based on NASDAQ's IP.

And then all the other suites of products that follow also get a boost. And they have really branched out into compliance. Andy and I were talking about their financial anti-crimes unit before the taping. I mean, they are trying to really diversify that business away from being so volume-dependent. So, when you have some IPOs that come to market that bring interest, bring volume, it's good for the entire pipeline of their business. I'll just say, Adina Friedman, who is the CEO, came on a few years ago. I think she's done a really admirable job through different choppy market periods.

She's brought a lot of tech focus, made lots of, Allison and I were talking, made lots of smaller little acquisitions that take the debt on the balance sheet up to a level that's now about 150% of equity. So, they have levered up that balance sheet. It's very profitable. They generate a lot of profits. They have operating margins. They've done a nice job maintaining their cost control.

Operating margins, they're very respectable. What you would expect from a really large exchange-driven kind of business that takes a little lick from the lollipop, to use Tom's metaphor. So, it's very profitable, and she's done a very nice job, but that balance sheet has gotten a little levered, and I think investors are wondering, okay, what is next? What's the next thing that's going to get that growth moving? And right now, you're not really paying a lot for the stock. You're only paying 18 times forward earnings and probably can grow in the mid-single digits. So, you tell yourself, that's about a market multiple. Is that what I'm willing to pay?

I kind of think we probably think that's about the returns you'll get from the stock going forward. All right. The NASDAQ was yesterday. Today, we are on the Upper East Side of New York City for our event. We've got members, we've got fools on site, we have guest speakers and plenty of sessions. I want to give our podcast listeners that can't be here a little bit of a sneak peek at what you guys are excited about on the event agenda. Asit, what jumps out to you? Well, I have to see Tom Gardner interview Michael Lewis, the author of Going Infinite. This is the book that Michael Lewis wrote about Sam Bankman Freed and the stunning collapse of his trading company. It's been a controversial book out in the marketplace because those who have read it

think that maybe Michael Lewis got a little too enamored of his subject and couldn't objectively see where Sam Bankman Freed went wrong and couldn't see that perhaps this was just a big fraud perpetrated on behalf of Almeida Trading, which is the trading arm of SBF's empire. I think Tom Gardner will give a really balanced interview. There's a lot in that book, which is very interesting, gives you an inside view of the crypto world. So I think this will be a possibly electric conversation and I can't miss it. You teed me up too well. I was going to plug this and you just gave me the opportunity. We're going to be having some of that conversation on Friday's radio show in our interview segment. We're going to be airing a lot of that conversation

in our weekend show this upcoming weekend as well. Andy, you look at the agenda. What do you see? What's exciting to you? Well, another interview that Tim Byers is doing with Melissa Schilling, who is a professor of innovation at NYU, an exceptional thinker when it comes to innovation. She's written a lot about innovation, what makes great innovators, what are the qualities. One of her books, among many publications she's written, is called Quirky, The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the world. And she looks at Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, a lot of the most wonderful thinkers when it comes to innovation.

What are the qualities behind what drives them? What are the good things? What are the bad things? And Tim is a wonderful tech-focused, not exclusively tech-focused, but tech-focused investor here at The Motley Fool, thinks a lot about innovation. So I'm really interested to hear that conversation, what nuggets of information when it comes to innovators who really are the ones that are changing the world. Many of them are out in the public space. Many are not. Some of the qualities that those innovators have to get under the skin, so to speak, of those innovators and listen to Melissa talk about the factors that go into great innovation. I'm looking forward to Tim unwrapping that. One of the aims of these events is always to get stock ideas in

front of our members. I know we have some sessions that are specifically geared towards that. And I don't want to give away everything that we're going to be talking about, but I do want to get some stock ideas and some thoughts on a couple of companies from you guys out there for our podcast listeners. Asit, I'm going to start with you. What is a company that you feel in the Fool universe might be a little underappreciated or maybe just isn't getting enough attention this year? Well, this may seem counterintuitive because it's getting a lot of attention, but one company that I'm focused on is ASML. And I think it's, while widely followed in the full universe, I think it's maybe underloved. It's almost in the too hard pile, right? This is the company that makes some of the

most complex machines on the planet. They specialize in deep ultraviolet lithography and extreme ultraviolet lithography. So these processes are used to pack information on semiconductor chips and they power everything we do. They're powering this whole podcast today, among so many other things on our world. So what I like about this company is really a company past that five-year horizon. We're always talking about holding stocks for at least five years.

This is really a five to 10 to 15-year holding company. They have a tremendous backlog and they're projecting that next year will be flat. There are a lot of dynamics I'm sure our members are familiar with. The Chinese market has come under restrictions from the U.S. government. but the Chinese buy a lot of the DUV machines. So that's not as complex lithography. The EUV

machines are the two nanometer process, highly specialized machines. What really interests me is that Peter Wenick, the CEO, has said, look, we've never built our business country up. We never went to China thinking that's going to be our market. We've built our company macro up and macro down. And what he means by that is that demand will persist. It'll go someplace else. You look around the world, there is a big fab coming up in Arizona. Japan is starting to build its own fabs after so many decades. So they're going to be selling the highly complex EUV machines there. And it's just an interesting company with great margins. At the peak of their margin cycle. They do 30% plus operating margin, Dylan, on $30 to $40 billion of revenue. This is

what they will achieve somewhere between 2025 and 2026. And I think it's one that Fools should look more closely at maybe dollar cost average into a company like this. All right, Andy, I'm going to throw a slightly different prompt at you. What is a company in the Fool universe that has surprised you in 2023? Well, for me, it's got to be Meta, which I know many are familiar with, the owner of operator of Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, to name a few. And the business and the stock and the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg came under deep questions over the last two years. And for good reasons. As their business slowed, they made massive investments into Reality Labs, which has lost, gosh, I think more than $20 billion or something exceptional as they made

investments into the metaverse and changed their name. But this year, Dylan, the stock is up more than 150%. I hope many, many members watching this, listening to this, have held on to that stock because it has really outperformed. As Mark Zuckerberg introduced his year of efficiency, which got a lot of press, including from us, and talked a lot about bringing back cost discipline, talking about the focus of how artificial intelligence is playing with the metaverse, And at the recent MetaConnect, they unveiled their MetaGlasses, talked a lot about different avatars and different ways that AI is going into Facebook and Instagram, which I think are really quite cool.

They're pretty neat when you think about the innovations they're making. So the fact that this massive business, which is one of those big drivers of the NASDAQ index overall and NASDAQ 100, up more than 150%, the business is still kind of finding itself when it comes to its core advertising business, which has suffered, but they're starting to see this turnaround. That business does well. They do better on the profit margins, maybe not lose as much on the reality lab side. You're just starting to see that come back, and that really the stock was selling at a very reasonable cheap multiple earlier this year, less than 20 times earnings, and now it's actually obviously rebounded to go up much

more than that. But it's really surprised, I think, so many of us. But for long-term investors, I mean, the stock is, over the last 10 years, up more than 500%. The last five years, both of those have beaten the market, even including that big dip and then the rebound. It's beaten the market over those time periods and certainly over the last year. So, a really impressive rebound for Meta, the stock, and Meta, the business, and Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder. I think we all needed a little reminder that Facebook was, in fact, a digital ad business. We kind of lost sight of that a little bit. All right.

We are going to switch gears and start taking questions from the audience in just a minute. But for the folks that are not here in the audience, you can always write in to podcasts at fool.com and send your questions in there. For the folks that are here in person with us, we're going to be taking questions. Our producer over here, Matt Greer, is going to be going around with the microphone. If you have a question, raise your hand. We'd love questions about stocks, trends, and topics. Just as a general reminder, can't take any questions that would lead to personalized financial advice.

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don't just file a ticket and wait weeks for an outdated report. Describe what you need and have Rippling AI build it instantly from your live people and business data. Whether it's a dashboard with detailed charts or automated workflows with the right triggers, conditions, and approvals. Ready to rule your business? head to rippling.ai slash fool to get the only AI built to give you full visibility and take complex actions across your entire organization. That's r-i-p-p-l-i-n-g dot a-i slash f-o-o-l. Sign up for exclusive access today, rippling.ai slash fool. I see one right there. Good morning. Any thoughts on PayPal? They've dropped quite a lot in the last period. Yeah, it's a great question.

PayPal, it certainly has struggled as a business, as a new CEO coming, who comes over from the end to it, from the business side, as Dan Schulman steps away. Super competitive space in the payments, as they continue to be the largest player in that world, so by not inconsequential amount, when you look at the accounts they serve through PayPal and Venmo, but it's gotten very competitive. Their whiteboard space, the product they have that is not the PayPal brand, is doing quite well, but it's lower margin. So that growth is doing well, but that part is not as high a margin. So the new CEO is coming in.

I'm excited to see what he can bring when it comes to the relationships, similar relationships he had on the Intuit business side to help continue to drive the business side to PayPal. not just the consumer side with many of us around here, but on the business side. But it is a very competitive space. The stock has gotten very cheap relative to its profits and to its, importantly, free cash flow, where they're going to use to buy back a lot of stock, which is good. But I've been saying it's gotten cheap for the past few months, and it's gotten cheaper, unfortunately. So I'm still a holder. I'm still encouraged by what we can see from PayPal, the brand and the position they have, but it'll take some time for that, for the new CEO to kind of get his legs underneath him. But I think in general, PayPal continues to be a buy and one

to hold for the next few years. I agree with that. And we'll just add that the new CEO not only led the small business group into it, but was part of an executive group that really made a cohesive of hole out of MailChimp, out of the personal finance product, TurboTax. So, an understudy to Sasan Ghadarzi, who's really a master at figuring out, okay, you've got all these disparate businesses. How do you make it into something that's really going to turn up the cash flow generation? So, this is what PayPal needs. Dan Schulman got enamored of the super apps in China. And at one point, he said, I want to make a super app that does everything like Alibaba has. And I think they lost some focus there in an environment which is super competitive, as you say, Andy.

They lost sight of what they have to do day in and day out, and that's compete and have a product that people will return to. Yeah, and I think that's right, Asit. I think when you think about the various brands and offerings PayPal has, bringing in someone who has experience in doing that and a lot of success as Intuit, so much of the value of Intuit has been driven by the corporate side and from the professional services side, not just from those of us who use TurboTax. But bringing those, as Asit mentioned, the Mailchimp, bringing those together has been

very successful for them. And so, I'm very encouraged by what he will bring to PayPal. And furthermore, lastly, they handle that succession very well. Dan, unlike others who have struggled with it, Disney, they handled it very well. They set a timeline out. They gave updates to the market. They said that Dan Shulman will be here through the year, I think, or through the time of that. And they met the deadline to be able to bring in the new CEO and keep Dan on board.

So, that at least was inspiring that the leadership team is continuing to focus on the right things. And now the CEO will be on board and I'll be excited to see what he brings. Last point on that, Andy. I agree. They did a great job with that transition. But leading up to the transition, my bald spot got a little bigger with all the stress of waiting. What is Dan Schulman doing?

For a moment, it looked like he just wanted to keep running PayPal and was trying to find a way to do that. Yeah, you mean before the announcement? Before the announcement. Yeah, and you're seeing that with CEOs. CEOs are sticking around longer and longer in S&P 500 companies for some reason. And legacy, I don't know what it is. Money, I'm not sure.

But they are sticking around longer and longer. And that always is not in the benefit of shareholders. We love long-term CEOs, but those who tend to have founder tie-ins. While we're waiting for another question, Andy, you mentioned Succession there earlier. And I'm immediately thinking of the recent news of another Fool favorite and some leadership changes there. We saw that Craig Jelinek was going to be leaving Costco. And I look at that and I say, we have seen Succession that maybe wasn't done all that well recently. You name-checked Disney there.

that seemed to me like one worth studying because we saw the promotion of someone who had been at the company for 40 years and maybe was an example of succession done right well it's an old dominion freight line did this maybe two years ago they had the same thing they had a long-term executive or long-term employee of old dominion freight line which is a which is a trucking company and very successful the most i think the most successful trucking company logistics company in that space and done exceptionally well for stock advisor for our scorecard and hopefully for members who have also owned it. They did succession very well.

They had tapped into a person. I didn't even know if they made an announcement, they were looking, they just kind of made the announcement one day. I may have that wrong, but they did that well. You saw Costco coming in and doing it very well. It's not always that you can find someone inside your organization that can step in or maybe the business is going through a shift and PayPal is going through a little bit of a strategic shift in some of their offerings away from just the consumer side.

they needed some new blood for that. Maybe they didn't have that. But that, there's lots of ways to do secession. Disney and Bob Iger have really struggled at it, and the board, and hopefully they can get that right this time. Others have struggled through it at different points. But ideally, I think the Costco, Old Dominion Freight Lines, if you can do that, that is the preferred way to make the transition. Yeah, and there's maybe a more global point here that occurs to me, Andy, and Dylan. It's interesting, the best companies, the ones that have these super strong cultures and have been around for decades, like Costco, Old Dominion Freight Line, they mirror like mobile societies. So if you have a society in which you can move up, there's upward mobility economically.

If you find a company which keeps promoting from within, you can start as a forklift driver, end up as the CEO decades later. It says something about that culture, that it's seeking talent, It's seeking innovation, and it pushes that up, the value chain. It doesn't seek to dispose of people quickly or hire from without and look at their employees as transactional pieces. I think we have another question out in the crowd. I'd love, if you're comfortable, your name and your question. Sure. My name is Ed Daly, and the question is the 10-year rate was above, I think, 5% this morning.

So, I'd be curious just about, you know, how you guys think about or to what extent you take into account interest rates and thinking about investments and companies you want to invest in, particularly in the growth area. Before Andy hops in on this one, Andy brought this up in our prep meeting this morning and was like, are we going to talk about this? Is this something that's going to make it onto today's show? Asi, do you want to go? Do you want to jump in first? Well, obviously the implications are far-reaching, right? Because two things happen simultaneously. If you're an investor who looks for cash flow growth, then those cash flows are worth a little less in the future

because the cost of financing your business is going up. Simultaneously, if you're a stock investor, you're looking over your shoulder. I mean, I certainly have moved money into some CDs, some money market funds over the past year. Even though I'm an avid investor, I invest in index funds, I invest in so many individual stocks, that draws money away from the equity markets. And I think, you know, the implications are, however you look at it, whether you think this is shorter term and the Fed will reverse a little bit as the U.S. economy normalizes,

or you think we're in a new normal period for the next 10 years, your focus should be and change as an investor, you're always trying to find companies that can grow in excess of their industry, in excess of competitors, in excess of the effects of inflation and interest rates. Those with super strong balance sheets, maybe that aren't over levered, are in a prime position to do that now. So my focus is more on companies that are equity funded and have put earnings on their balance sheet through retained earnings. So, they built up resources over time. They already are in markets that are pulling the products forward. They innovate very fiercely. Those are going to have a great return vis-a-vis companies that are over-levered, those that are getting caught up in

the fact that, look, you know, the 10-year is up at 5%. Our debt, like our bridge debt, if we need it, is up at 9% or 10%. So, I think for investors, it's sort of the same as it always was. Find great companies run by management teams that know how to use those resources and build them and keep some on the balance sheet. They don't distribute everything out. I think the question is, as Asa said, in some ways it's the way it always has been. As Warren Buffett has said, and I've mentioned this before, he considers interest rates to financial assets is like gravity to physical assets. So the higher the interest rates, the lower the value of financial assets, the higher the gravity, the more pull on those physical assets. So interest rates are very important

when you go through your analysis as an analyst to think about what is the value of future cash flows? How do I think those cash flows are going to grow? What is the balance sheet going to look like? All of those very nuanced things when it comes to investing. However, you can also get too far down into the weeds if there's too much focus on trying to get the very specifics around that, rather than really trying to find businesses that over the next five years are going to be more meaningful than they are today. Management teams we can believe in, maybe a founder structure that either has a founder ownership or other investors that we have a lot of confidence in, a business model that can succeed and hopefully eventually, either now or very soon, those profits and cash

flows can grow and accrue such that the return on the investments they're making far exceeds the cost of that capital, which now has gone up to well north of, gosh, if you think about most of those companies where you might be thinking about a cost of capital in the 7% to 8% range a few years ago, now those costs of capital are up to 9%, 10%, maybe even higher. And then for growth companies, the cost of that capital even goes up higher, especially if they don't have the ability to sustain their own growth and they have to go to others to be able to fund that. That's one of the key practices of principles of rule breaker investing is trying to find businesses that can sustain their own. They have the balance sheet or the model to be able to sustain their own growth

rather than rely on others. If you have to rely on others, that's a lot more expensive these days than it was three years ago. And that is going to impact the profitability of the company. So that's where, as Asa was saying, paying attention to it and thinking about it, looking out over the next few years is something we do think a lot about. I think we're looking at about eight or 10 minutes left and we certainly have time for another couple of questions from the audience. But if I'm not mistaken, I think Andy, you might have a question that you want to ask the crowd. I was just going to say how many have moved money into a high yield savings account in the past 12 months and that high yield savings account is probably four and a half percentage something around that

if i write around around there and then how do you all well i guess so that's not surprising because money chases yield and they and and as it should and sometimes that money chases the yield in very short-term natures nature and sometimes it's it's hopefully a little bit longer term when You think about our investment, the ability for a company to be able to return on its cost of capital and its assets to be able to grow the stock price many, many years ahead. But in the short term, that now has a very steep competition. I think we talked about this a little bit last night in some of the Q&A, that now, rather than putting it into the market, you might see people starting to put money more into

alternatives for the first time. High-yield savings account, that's taking maybe some activity out of the market. NASDAQ is seeing it maybe in their trading activities. So all of these things do matter as an analyst when we're thinking about studying our businesses and talking about the opportunities, but also understanding, as Asit said, a lot of it still, in many ways, hasn't changed the approach we think about trying to identify the businesses over the next five years that are going to be the winners for us. Looking out to the crowd to see, I'll make sure I'm not missing any questions.

In the meantime, I'll ask one. Thinking about the higher rate environment and just what it means for businesses, I generally think of it being something that forces discipline, both for investors, because there are other decisions out there, but just in the internal decisions that companies make, and maybe the way we should judge some of those internal decisions in terms of how they're putting capital to work. Asit, do you feel like you have seen either companies do that really well over the last year, or maybe companies not do that so well?

Andy mentioned Meta before. Yeah, I think that we're seeing a lot of normalization of utilization of resources. So, companies that were very freewheeling when markets were going up and capital was easy to come by, they made a lot of undisciplined decisions. Now, there are a certain class of companies, big tech companies in particular, that just have so much firepower that it doesn't matter in good times, they can afford to be lax. And when money tightens up, they don't need it. They make a show of, as Meta did and Amazon did, they make a show of letting go like whole tranches of employees. And even those are a small percentage of the total employee base. But I think you're

seeing now that companies are worrying about this idea, okay, if money is at 5%, and as Andy was alluding to, for those of you who model spreadsheets, like 10% is the new 8%. So if the hurdle is higher, then the decision I'm making today really needs to go through a finer process. And we talked about this in an internal meeting on our research team the other day. Companies don't think like you and me. We look at the debt holders, the equity holders. We try to figure out, well, what is the cost of capital? What's the incremental return on that? You know, companies model by project, all they do at the beginning of the process is to say, is the net present value of these cash flows coming in going to be greater than the net present value of the cash flows going

out? They start with a very simple equation, those companies that are in manufacturing especially, and then they build it up from there. And I think so many businesses that we love lost a little bit of that basic nuts and bolts thinking over the past few years. And now you can bet that division managers all are looking down to the micro level to see what's being expended from coffee to the cost of projects. We're seeing a lot of that. And I think just to name one company, no one is doing that better than amazon.com. They have really worked through every single reporting operating unit in their business and asked, number one, is this essential? Number two, what's the return on this. Andrew Jassy, we often forget he was the CEO of the cloud business. He grew Amazon Web

Services. He's a fierce competitor. And he's going back to this sort of roll up your sleeves discipline. I really like to see that. I think that can also have a bad part of the spectrum too, Andy. You can go overboard in trying to optimize your business and lose sight of culture. Well, certainly, if that basically is driving your investment case, is cost efficiency cutting the bottom line that's going to help the the profit picture in the near term as we're starting to see but but at what cost long term another company we could have featured about the surprising is shopify when they sold off their logistics business that they put a lot of money into over the last year and a half and then they sold it off to flex point port if anyone's been

following the drama that's happening in the logistics space and the challenges flex sports having their CEO, their founder, back into the mix. They let go of the former CEO, who we had a lot of respect from, who came over from the Amazon side, I think, right? Came over from the Amazon side and helped Amazon build the logistics business up. Those investments, the decision that Shopify and that board made, and the consequences when it comes to their employee base, their asset base. That was a very bold decision. And obviously, Toby Lukey put out a lot of different written pieces about a little bit of egg in my face, the learnings I had. Those kinds of decisions, you know, those are the investments that when you look in the new environment,

companies are being forced to make now because the cost of capital, the inflation rates, the cost of their employee base is just so much different than it was two or three years ago. And you're looking for, as investors, we should be looking to the board, holding the board accountable for that, and to the CEO, making sure they are making the right decisions, both in the short term, but without killing the golden goose that might be those long-term returns. That's a balance that we talk about a lot on the team, the investments they're making for today versus the investments they're making longer term. And what are those investments and how long they're going to pay off

and will they be the right ones? I think we are just up on our time, but Andy, Asit, thank you guys so much for sharing your insights. I want to thank all of our One members here for coming and also just asking questions. This was probably one of the easiest podcast tapings I've ever recorded

because I didn't have to ask all the questions. You guys took care of it for me. I'm going to wrap up the show as I always do with our disclosure and our outro. As always, people on the program may own stocks mentioned on the show and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against,

so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear. I'm Dylan Lewis, live from New York. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow. Thank you.