Coburn Ventures Podcast

We seem to be in a time in which the pressure is on. In high pressure times, "practical" solutions that no one can argue with often rise to the top. This is useful to an extent, but it can also result in becoming tight, and small, and this is out of step with our job descriptions, which presume some ability to generate uncommon investable insights.

Today we’re pulling up a piece from our library with Dr. Morris Pickens, who describes determining what your “athletic moment” may be, in order to build a routine that is consistent and supportive, in any and all environments. Let’s jump in.

In the past two weeks, I think we’ve made some great progress here on a concept that seems immovable: time. With Irwin, we spoke not of time management but understanding ourselves IN time. With Rudy, we began to see time as variable, not fixed.

Given that these are deep-rooted understandings and experiences of time AND given that our ultimate goal here is to bridge these neat insights to the investors' day to day effectiveness, we’ve invited Matt Wallaert, a behavioral scientist, to help us move into some ways of being that just might work better for us. Let’s jump in.

In our recent conversation with Rudy, I think we arrived on at least five important reframings of how we conceptualize time and therefore what we are really talking about when we want to handle “time management”. The topics range from the abstract exploration of the nature of time itself, to deploying higher quality questions and developing an allergy to low impact conversations and relationships. There are no life hacks here, and testing these ideas will take self-knowledge and observation. Let’s jump in.

At many of our gatherings, the topic in outside conversations that often become group conversation can turn to how in the world do we all manage the responsibilities of being an investor or business leader, typically senior in our firms, with many increasing responsibilities around marketing or managing or whatever it is, and how do we do that while also being real humans with many interests and ways to contribute to others in our lives? Work life has shifted in the last few decades as the internet and wireless devices introduced Always On culture. We seem to be devoting more of our time and energy to work, but without the sensation of completion or a job well done at any given moment. 

We’ve had a couple of breakthrough moments in these conversations… the breakthroughs that don’t change the circumstances one bit but do bring some sense-making to it, and certainly help direct the attention rather than swirl in the disillusion of time management industry tools. Today we’re sharing one of those concepts with you with our very wise friend Irwin Kula. Let’s jump in.

Today we’re back with a second stock disaster. We will sprinkle these in sporadically throughout the year for you. The reason? We think this a valuable way we can learn from others mistakes... or well, in this case, our mistakes. 

For the second, (but not last) time, we are happy to offer you, what NOT to do!

We’ve often talked about how much value there can be in sharing the occasional stock disaster, especially to newer analysts who haven't made (many) mistakes yet. Not only do we humans perk up and log into our memories how to AVOID said disaster, but by sharing, we encourage just that smidgen of vulnerability that might, just might, create a culture that is better at seeing a potential disaster BEFORE it happens, including better identifying nuanced things like noticing when a colleague is struggling to explain reservations they have or are just not getting through to the investment committee or PMs to offer a countervailing view.

We thought we would make this easy on you, in case you are not jumping up to share your own stock disasters or "war stories": in the next two episodes we will give you just enough fodder to share from our own experiences. So, if you don't want to share your own, here are some stories from our past that you can send around to your analysts to open up the conversation. We are happy (sort of!) to offer you, stock disasters!

Since the drop of ChatGPT, GenAI and other large language models we’ve been offering short “waypoints” or check-ins so that we can learn together about the impact of GenAI on companies and culture. Last week we discussed some avenues for talking about GenAI with management teams. This week, we checked in with Mike Lee, who gave us three surprises that stuck out to him in the last few months. Let’s jump in.

Since the drop of ChatGPT and other large language models we’ve been offering short waypoints or check-ins every once in a while in the podcast lineup, so that we can learn and navigate this technology's broader impact together. Today, we want to know how to better discern the shifts these tools are creating in the sectors and companies we cover via our conversations with and questions to management. Let's jump in.

As investors, we hear all of the time about how complex everything is: our global economy, geopolitics, managing people, government. Yet our models don’t usually reflect complex adaptive systems, they reflect the end results of a lot of complexity boiled down into spreadsheets of numbers. Hey, there’s a part of me that really likes it that way. So, we look for linear answers to the strategic problems we see in our linear spreadsheets. What could we be missing? Today we asked our friend Bob Gower, who lives in a space including software design and team design, what we might be able to better understand characteristics of a complex adaptive system which I think will spur valuable thinking the tracking error between our linear representation and the real system companies are grappling with, maybe even giving us a better chance at pinpointing when the evidence of a complex system is about to show up in that spreadsheet.

Our final guest, (for now!) in this mini-series on the analyst to portfolio manager transition is Matt Iorio. We discuss his view on what’s different about the two roles, how to become great at the different stages in the PM role, and what he means by the down 20% test. Let's jump in.

This conversation today, part of our series on mentoring, highlights the importance of understanding the different types of questions we ask to advance our thesis, understand our lines of inquiry, our paths to wisdom, our research path or whatever you call the process of being a great investor that can generate uncommon insights. We are lucky to have Gunnar Miller joining us, so lets jump in.

For our second conversation on the transition from analyst to portfolio manager, we are joined by Scott Booth, who has a long career as an equity investor and a growth equity investor and advisor. For years, Scott has taught us about really deeply understanding risk and probability in order to get into position to see a different set of factors at work, which is why we are so excited to ask Scott about the transition from analyst to portfolio manager. Let’s jump in.

After last week's preview, we are joined today by our friend and longtime fund manager, Steve Salopek. In his second-career, Steve is now a professor at “THE” Ohio State University. Steve builds off his work experience to teach courses and offer leadership at the University. Steve truly is developing the next generation of business leaders and maybe even, analysts and fund managers. For this conversation, we ask him for his reflections on the difference between the two roles and what he learned during the transition to portfolio manager. 

Let's jump in.

The skills required to be a portfolio manager are related but largely very different from being an analyst, yet in most cases, one doesn’t become a portfolio manager without having been an analyst first. Given that scenario, let’s flush that out, so that if you are in that position, we might be able to help you get oriented and figure out your approach quickly.

Continuing our miniseries on mentoring the next great investment analysts, we have with us our special guest, longtime investor and CEO of Granahan Investment Management, Jane White. What I love about Jane’s reflections is that they are supremely focused on getting the best research and analysis for clients, and she has been able to do that in part by getting nonsense that can be common in the industry out of the way. Jane is a leader, and I will say, a trailblazer, and it's a real treat to have her. Let's jump in.

Continuing our miniseries on mentoring the next great investment analysts, we have with us our special guest, longtime investor, friend, fellow Utah native, and former CEO of Wasatch Advisors Jeff Cardon. Jeff’s stories are firmly planted in his deep knowledge and experience in the world of investing, but he also has the ability to zoom out, and the stories he brings to the conversation offer a lot of wisdom. Let’s jump in.

It’s the third week in November and in the US that means Thanksgiving, so like last year, we're going to use the space on this podcast a little differently. I’m so excited to welcome our special guests! Let's jump in...

For this next conversation on Clash and Integration, we asked JP Rangaswami to join in. JP has been in leadership positions at Salesforce, BT and Deutsche Telekom, to name a few, and already, you can see that would give him a vantage point into many iterations of both clash and integration of cultures and technologies within organizations. In our conversation, you’ll see the thread emerge: what is needed to see clash and integration coming and then what are the conditions that indicate a business will not just survive but, thrive? Let’s jump in.

As we work to observe and identify Rogue Waves, one of the lenses we are using is called The Clash and Integration of Civilizations. When I think of Clash and Integration of Civilizations, I can't help but start thinking about China, and that means, touching base with Zak Dychtwald. We are so happy to chat with Zak today about three shifts he is noticing in China right now. Zak is the author of Young China and often acts as a helpful bridge between two worlds looking at each other, wondering about one another, and clashing and integrating all the while. Let’s jump in.

Henry David Thoreau said, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see…” To see more clearly, we introduce a few methods to nudge us toward better, clearer “seeing”. This conversation is made more complete by the presence of longtime friend Steph Jacobs, who brings the perspective of a clear thinking strategic mind with decades of experience steeped in the media, much of it as an executive at CBS News. Let’s jump in.

Instead of experiencing an information overload, what can we do to receive the best information, at the best possible time, without a lot of effort, and maybe even with a layer of really useful, uncorrelated inputs? So many of us understand that we are not getting the best inputs we could from our daily media diet, or even from our colleagues or other amazing sources like seemingly helpful interviews and meetings. We know that we are getting a lot of great information, but not the information that we can regularly and powerfully put together for investable insights. Instead, we may actually brace ourselves for information overload, but see it as a necessary part of the job, staying up on things, taking it all in as it's pushed to us! In this short discussion, we offer up one specific antidote: it's called surgical sharing, and we hope it give you a burst of benefit that increases your ability to do your job, with just a few tweaks to your approach. Let's jump in.

Today’s topic addresses a paradox. We love paradoxes because oftentimes, there are huge market opportunities associated with any progress along solving a paradox! Here is today's: there has been a quantum change in connectivity without a significant change in relationship, and that imbalance is leaving a lot of humans overwhelmed by connectivity and tipping into isolation, loneliness and dehumanizing behavior and world views. What are humans doing to adapt, and where does business come into this extraordinary mismatch? We will discuss three types of businesses: accelerants, coping mechanism businesses and solvers, and why market forces might be a help toward identifying and encouraging the solvers of this paradox. Let’s jump in.

For investors, it's not enough to find a great business at a price you believe is undervalued, a key part of the analysis comes down to whether or not you think you have the right executive team to steer the company through whatever industry opportunities and business climate they may be faced with, and if that team has supported a business culture that matches the unique job that company needs to do. This is no easy task, and takes a massive level of insightful work on the part of the investor.

Which is why we are so happy to have investor Rayna Lesser Hannaway with us today. Rayna studies management and company cultures very deeply as a core part of her ability to gain conviction in the long-term value of a stock, and shares with us some of the qualities she is looking for to identify strong and successful businesses. Let’s jump in.

We’ve been studying monumental change and applying it to investing here at Coburn Ventures for nearly two decades, and it never gets boring. Today, we are introducing you to five lenses that we will be using over the next 18 months to further identify monumental changes and the rogue waves spewing out of these massive changes. These lenses are intended to be one more tool that we hope that you can also use daily as you discern signal from noise with your specific investment process and philosophy. Without further ado, here is Agenda 2024 featuring, the Five Rogue Wave Lenses.

We’re back with another quick take on AI, this time with Irwin Kula, who offers up three different uses for AI that he uses to poke and prod his own mind for fruitful threads to pursue. For investors, I would call this widening and then honing down the research path and using uncommon comparisons and questions up against a LLM engine to refine and gain conviction on fruitful next steps. That’s a mouthful but just listen to Irwin’s examples and I think you’ll get what I mean.

As a reminder, we are calling these waypoints for a reason, they are markers for the journey. We are not planting stakes and saying, “this is the way”, we are navigating and marking waypoints in order to chart ahead, avoid the swirl that is nearly ceaseless, and refine how we use the tool and assess how companies are using it. Let's jump in.

A rogue wave lens is a tool to hold up to our eyes to see the shifts creating the rogue waves underneath the surface, before the wave is cresting over our heads. Today, we introduce you to our second Rogue Wave Lens for 2024: The Meaning of Life is to be Entertained, 2.0. Believe it or not, we first introduced this lens in 2006. Looking back, our initial ideas about where entertainment would reach seem almost quaint. Let's jump in.

We are calling up a conversation we had in 2021 with Amber Gentry, a nutritional psychologist, about abundance vs. scarcity. Why are we highlighting this now? When we look to work, leadership and investing in the next few years, it seems that a more holistic, abundance-oriented mindset is formulating quickly (Porter's Shared Values), leaving behind a mindset purely about scarcity and power asymmetries (Porter's Five Forces). This conversation has helped us internalize abundance vs. scarcity over the last few years in order to see it as a useful lens for evaluating businesses and we thought it might be helpful for you, too. Let's jump in!

Continuing on our topic of "What is a great business today?", we get to speak with our friend Silvia Hernandez. Silvia gets to work with businesses on all types of leadership and management issues, and today we want to ask her about what it takes to be an organization that is able to evolve from older views of competition and organizational structure (Porters Five Forces) toward Porters Shared Value. Our culture is changing, our employees and customers are changing, so how is leadership and organizational structure changing? Let’s jump in.

Today we introduce one of the five Rogue Wave “lenses” that we will be working with frequently into 2024: we will be applying these to the broader Rogue Wave work, in order to adapt and gain some agility in riding these waves as investors, as they just keep coming!

We discuss a lens evolved from Samuel Huntington’s work The Clash of Civilizations, except we add on the clash and integration of civilizations: the continual, constant bumping into and each other physically and digitally that our modern age requires and desires, that is spewing out rogue wave after rogue wave. Come along for the ride, let’s jump in.

We’re back with another quick take on AI, this time with architect and all-around inspiring thinker Matthias Hollwich. We discuss hiring in the age of AI, what it means to be creative or employ creativity, and why AI is like a "little toddler". 

These waypoints are intended to be markers for the journey. We are not planting stakes and saying, “this is the way”, but we are hoping to navigate and mark waypoints in order to chart ahead, so let’s jump in!

One of the best things about having really bright, sincere clients is that they ask really bright, sincere questions...even the questions that seem like we should all know the answer to, such as, "What is a GREAT company these days?". Talk about a foundational question that is rooted in an understanding that what we define and measure to be a great business may not stay fixed over time, even though we think we have a pretty great standard in a focus on profits, cash flows and earnings growth! These are wonderful, but they are metrics or outputs, and how they are generated successfully may also rest on faulty assumptions. So much to talk about! Can we explore that a bit without scaring off my fellow CFA-types? I think we can! Today Pip walks through some developing thinking around what makes a great business. We have Irwin Kula on as well so that he and I can add in some questions along the way. Let’s jump in.

Time and time again, we have been alerted by our friends in industry that what makes a great manager and executive is changing. The skills required to steer an organization through todays rogue waves are very different than what might have worked a decade or two ago. When we step back, we can understand this rationally, of course, but I know that I might be carrying around some of the older heuristics in my head, not realizing that overlay might be just a bit off kilter.

Today we get more granular in our discussion on assessing management. We get to specific skills by the end, especially those that our friends in industry have been shouting from the rooftops about, so let’s jump in.

We promised continual, quick takes on AI throughout the next few months, so today Mike Lee joins us. We talk about jobs of the future, why English is the new programming language, his customized, turbo-charged Chat GPT for food, and whether or not this tool will actually help investors. 

Let’s jump in.

Our framework of the History and Future of Asking Questions seemed helpful to describe the moment back in the 2000's and 2010’s when search engines and smartphones came forth as this amazing tool to quickly think of a question or a directed search and magically, in an instant, get a match back. This was new! We are used to it now but there’s value in taking a second to turn around and observe the impact. It was like a tectonic shift… unearthing all these latent questions we had and activating the answers.

The earth is rumbling again and brings us a whole slew of AI tools. We have a new moment within this broader era of the connectivity and communication revolutions. So let’s jump in, and see how we as investors and business managers can ride yet another wave.

This is truly a short, hopefully thought-provoking podcast today. We’ll describe Goodharts Law -- which we believe to be very helpful in understanding and working with targets, KPIs, measurements and assessing whether or not they will be effective -- and offer a few examples. Our hope was to get this concept out to all of you to let you start ruminating on it, and maybe even let it provide a little clarity and relief. Let's jump in.

Today we are highlighting a very interesting case, offered to us by Pip’s son Eamon, who sent on an article from Wake Forest Law Review, not our typical reading list, which is perhaps why we found it to be such a gem. The case involves an organization representing and comprising of farmworkers in Florida, the tomatoes they harvest, supply chains, and Taco Bell.

In examining this case, we see how honoring the complex system the farmworkers were a part of and then finding and assessing each point of leverage throughout the entire supply chain resulted in the roadmap for a successful engagement. Let’s jump in.

** Episode #66 with Jags Walia is a great compliment to this episode. **

You'll find this refrain at the end of CV Fridays: "The brain tells the body what to do but the breath tells the brain first." While it may seem self-explanatory, of course there is much more to the story, both to why the quote is there, and what it means. Today the author of the refrain, Elise Jones, joins us in conversation. Many of you met her at Sundance this year and last. She teaches us so much more about the breath and how it affects our bodies, our headspace, our ability to make decisions, stay grounded and alter our ability to take in difficult information.

Let's jump in.

Sometimes, when there’s a new "moment" reverberating through tech, like AI right now, it's helpful to start placing waypoints. A waypoint is a navigation term, but for us, it's a place to pause, mark down coordinates, reflect, and then decide and set the next course. 

That’s what we will be doing with regard to AI and Chat GPT over the next few months. Today, we have Rudy Karsan joining us for a the conversation. Every few episodes, we will be discussing AI, and for the next two, we have samplings from our community of how they are using Chat GPT or AI - I loved receiving these, they are disparate but are all really inspiring examples of what these tools can do. Let's jump in.

This is a dive into the most fruitful question to have written on your soul if you are an active investor:

what are the opportunities for arbitrage that are unique to your investment process and philosophy, and how do you go about finding, generating, or leveraging that arbitrage?

In other words, why would anyone give their hard-earned money to you to manage?

In this conversation, we walk through an exercise to get really clear on *your* investment philosophy... not your firm's investment philosophy, not even your teams investment philosophy, but why YOU are great at investing in a way that only you can be. Let's jump in.

Today we ask our friend Sarah Evans, who is a computer scientist and data scientist, about what’s surprising her in the world of networking. It sounds like a specific topic, but it's about the entire internet! Her answers have very broad implications even beyond competitive dynamics in one industry. Let’s jump in.

The demand for ESG considerations to be integrated into investment philosophy and process of investors is increasing. Yet, there has been backlash, with criticism regarding the more philosophical underpinnings to the political discourse that is a bit more muddled in terms of its significance. Today we talk about the difference between Upper Case ESG -- the fundamentals of ESG -- which we believe to be charging ahead, and lower case ESG, the more devolved form that is momentarily stuck in the mire. Our attempt is to put a point on the map, a waypoint if you will, of where we are and where we’re going. Let’s jump in.

In our Rogue Waves Toolkit, we will be talking to people who have a great ability to generate out-of-band thinking: those able to connect the dots in unlocking ways, or simply provide some perspective or thinking that doesn’t just go along with what the first and most immediate commentary is. After the Silicon Valley Bank upheaval, we wanted to have a conversation with an out-of-band thinker who knows so much more about banks than we do, and we immediately thought of our friend Scott Booth. Let’s jump in.

Rogue waves will not all be evenly distributed: some will hit a whole ecosystem, but others will be more focused, or in fact, ebb quickly. The great news about this is that we can look around and get some practice, perhaps, from those that don’t affect us as directly or emotionally. A few weeks ago, I got to do this with the banking issue in the US with Silicon Valley Bank, and I wrote a piece about it, aiming to step back and capture what I learned that I wanted to apply to the next rogue wave that’s sure to come. We were lucky to have Jorgen van der Sloot join us to talk about it. I hope it's helpful!

If there was a Hall of Fame for investing, what would we look at to choose who got in, and why? Sure, we can look at long-term performance, but what about the attributes that contributed to that performance? What would we look at instead of home runs, tackles, and interceptions? Trading decisions, management of tracking error, AUM? We turn to the technical, knowing that the layer beneath the technical outputs is where Hall of Fame performances come from.

We will talk about this with sports psychologist Dr. Morris Pickens, who distinguishes routine and preparation from the athletic moment, the point of performance that does or does not advance you toward your target.

We end with a neat spotlight on the impact of Mo's athletic moment at the very end, so hang tight to hear it. Let's jump in.

Today we get to bring you a conversation with the founders of an organization called the WSDA, or The Wall Street Diversity Accelerator, which seeks to help solve the "top of the funnel problem" by offering internships to diverse candidates in their first or second summers during college. The extra special part of this podcast is that you probably know these two as investment professionals but didn’t know their additional superpowers at work behind the scenes volunteering and leading a new, thoughtful, and immediately impactful internship program. Let’s jump in and have a chat with our friends, Drew Beja and John Barr.