Founder Stock Investing

This week’s podcast was incredible. I had the opportunity to interview Meagen Eisenberg, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at TripActions. Prior to joining TripActions, Meagen was CMO at Mongo Database (MDB), a company we have owned in our portfolio for more than a year, and before that, Vice President of Marketing and Customer Acquisition at Docusign (DOCU). These are three incredible companies, and in my opinion, Meagen was a big part of what made each of them successful.

I really enjoyed my conversation with Brian Stoffel. I am inspired by Brian's approach to prioritizing time with family, how he's aligned his work with his goals, and his ability to apply lessons learned from reading great books to his investing style and life in general.

It's early August and our Founder Stock portfolio is up 76% Year To Date. It's current value is $356,000. In 8 months, our portfolio has grown by $178,000. That's a lot more money than we make in a year combined. We never imagined these types of returns and it's literally changing out financial future.

During the episode we review earnings from New Relic, Twilio, Alteryx, and The Trade Desk. We don't own The Trade Desk, but listen in to hear why we probably will soon!

During this episode we discuss:

1. Our current portfolio value.

2. Why I don't worry if people call our stocks "expensive" or "overvalued"

3. Earnings reports from two of our companies, Shopify and Square

4. What I was missing about Square's growth potential

5. Three companies of ours that are reporting their earnings next week

Links Discussed:

Shopify Second Quarter 2018 Earnings Report

Square Second Quarter 2018 Earnings Report

There's always a lot of reasons not to invest. We talk about why we ignore these reasons and invest on the side of the data. Over the last 100+ years, the stock market has increased 2 out of every 3 years for an average of a 10% increase a year.

We also review Microsoft's earnings because they're a great indication of how many of our cloud and software-based portfolio holdings should perform and we talk about two of our holdings Twilio and Mongo Database.

Quick portfolio update: +$30k for July and up 62% year to date, our 4 rules for getting started investing, the 3 types of accounts we use, where we research stocks (and what sites we ignore), and grade Pivotal Software against our 10 investing criteria. Please Subscribe and listen to our new episodes every Monday

There's a lot of people who talk about stocks on the internet. Most of them don't share their results. We're different. We are going to share our results. Good or bad and share exactly what stocks we are invested in. We are not financial advisors and we are not recommending people buy the stocks we own. We want to share our process and help inspire others to do their own research, find founder-led stocks they love, and invest their own money.

A lot of people make investing sound really complicated. It doesn't have to be. Founder Stock Investing is a show about how our family invests our money. We share our process, our returns, what stocks we own, why we own them, and the emotional aspect of investing.