Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
My guests this week are both veterans of the podcast, Jason Zweig and Morgan Housel. They are two of the best in the world at making the complicated, simple, and in that spirit, I'll keep this introduction short. Morgan shifted from public markets to private markets a year ago when he joined the Collaborative Fund. So we begin with what he has learned about venture capital in his first year on the job.
Morgan
I got disenchanted with a lot of the investing industry just because it was so heavily focused on markets and not business. And I viewed venture capital as the closest as you could get to the actual businesses. And actually, the farthest away that you could get from markets. I viewed it as just the purest form of making an investment in a direct business where you were getting your hands dirty and you are really seeing day to day, the daily knife fight that Brent Beshore talks about, of how dirty and ugly and difficult it is to run a business, which is why I got interested in investing in the first place when I was a teenager. It wasn't markets, it wasn't the stock market. It was business that I really liked and my career gravitated towards markets as I think a lot of ours has, but I wanted to get back closer to businesses. And I really thought a year ago, Patrick, that I was going to have to learn a completely new skill. I was being so far removed from the markets business that I had spent my career in, that I was going into a completely different field. And I think what has shocked me the most over the last year, is how wrong that was. If you make a Venn diagram with VC on one hand, and public markets on the other, the overlap is way larger than I thought it would be. And there are of course some huge differences between the two, but the overlap is been so much more substantial than I thought. And a lot of the really key drivers of public markets investing transfer, not only a little bit, but I would say perfectly into venture investing. And I think no matter the stage or size investment you are making, no matter the industry, there are some elements of change that drive competition.