Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
My guest today is Mario Cibelli. Mario is the managing partner of Marathon Partners Equity Management, a long-biased, concentrated investment firm that he's run for over 20 years. In our conversation, we discuss how his firm figured out Blockbuster's DVD volume and told Reed Hastings and Netflix about their numbers, why visiting a company's distribution center can be an edge for investors, Mario's interesting foray into the world of tequila, and how a few "cornerstone" investing insights have led to many of Marathon's long positions. I hope you enjoy my great conversation with Mario.
Netflix and Blockbuster
Patrick
So Mario, you and I discussed a place to begin this conversation a couple of days ago, and I think it's hard to pick something better than an amazing story that you were a part of, that's been written about publicly in the book Netflixed. And I think you've never told the full story from your perspective in a setting like this, so I just think it's an amazing wedge into a conversation about doing extremely deep dives on companies. And I'll just leave it there. I'll let you begin with the Netflix DC story. You tell us how this started and walk us through it.