Bryan Lawrence on the Two Challenges Facing a Fund Manager

December 14, 2021 in Diary, Equities, Featured, Full Video, Interviews, Invest Intelligently Podcast, Latticework, Latticework Online, Member Podcasts, Transcripts

Bryan R. Lawrence, Founder of Oakcliff Capital, joined members for a fireside chat at Latticework on December 15, 2021. Bryan addressed the topic, “The Two Challenges Facing a Stock Picker: How to Generate Great Returns, and How to Deliver Them to Clients”.

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About the speaker:

Bryan R. Lawrence is the founder of Oakcliff Capital, an investment partnership which invests in publicly-traded securities. Bryan is a member of Yorktown Partners LLC, a private equity firm which invests in energy businesses, and he serves on the boards of several Yorktown portfolio companies. He is a co-founder and trustee of Public Prep, which develops and manages charter schools in New York City. His analyses of US government finances have been published by The Washington Post.

Michael Mauboussin and Saurabh Madaan on Expectations Investing

December 14, 2021 in Diary, Equities, Featured, Full Video, Interviews, Invest Intelligently Podcast, Latticework, Latticework Online, Member Podcasts, Transcripts

Saurabh Madaan, Managing Member of Manveen Asset Management, and Michael Mauboussin, Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, joined members for a fireside chat at Latticework on December 15, 2021.

Saurabh and Michael explored the topic, “Expectations Investing as Applied to Growth Businesses”. Michael is co-author with Al Rappaport of the revised and updated edition of Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns.

This conversation is available as an episode of “Invest Intelligently” and “Explore Great Books”, member podcasts of MOI Global. (Learn how to access.)

Replay this virtual fireside chat:

printable transcript
audio recording

The following transcript has been edited for space and clarity.

John Mihaljevic: A very warm welcome to all of you joining us today for this live session at Latticework 2021 featuring the one and only Michael Mauboussin, hosted by Saurabh Madaan. The topic is expectations investing as applied to today’s growth businesses.

I’ll say a few words about Saurabh and then ask Saurabh to introduce Michael properly and lead this conversation. Saurabh serves as managing member of Manveen Asset Management based in Glen Allen, Virginia. Before founding Manveen Asset Management, Saurabh was a managing director and the deputy chief investment officer at Markel Corporation where he worked closely with Markel’s co-CEO, Tom Gayner. Saurabh also spent more than seven years at Google in various roles, including senior data scientist and engineering. He holds an MS degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

I am honored to have known Saurabh for many years. He is the kind of person who provides a lot of value to those who come into contact with him, and makes those people feel like the center of attention. I remember back in the day, Saurabh, those talks at Google that you hosted — those were like Khan Academy before there was a Khan Academy. They were amazing.

Over to you, Saurabh, to say a few words about Michael and get us launched into this conversation.

Saurabh Madaan: Thank you, John, for those kind words. It reminds me of something I heard a friend say recently: “I am luckier than I deserve to be.” That’s how I feel. It’s a delight to get the chance to host this conversation with Michael because he is not only an outstanding thinker, but also an extremely generous friend and teacher to so many of us, whether we were in his Columbia Business classroom or on Twitter or just reading his books. He is our teacher. He is our friend. He is our inspiration.

Michael is head of consilient research at Counterpoint Global, the author of several best-selling books, and adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School where he is on the faculty of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing. He received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2009 and 2016. I can keep running through the list of accolades — we could fill the entire hour and still have a long way to go — but suffice to say that he is the kind of person who has, as Charlie Munger would say, a broad latticework of excellence across multiple fields.

Prior to joining Counterpoint Global, Michael was the director of research at Blue Mountain Capital, head of global financial strategies at Credit Suisse, and the chief investment strategist at Legg Mason Capital.

There’s a lot to Michael, but what we are here to talk about is that Michael is the co-author with Alfred Rappaport of Expectations Investing. The first edition of this book was published in 2001, and the book has made a significant impact on a generation of value investors. We are here today to speak with Michael about the revised and updated second edition of this book that comes almost two decades after the landmark work was originally published.

Michael, thank you for taking the time to be with us here today. It’s been eight years since we had you at Google to talk about your book discussing skill versus luck. I have been a fan of your work. On behalf of your readers and students, thank you for being a teacher to all of us. Could you set the stage by talking about what got you into writing and why you decided to release a second edition of the book two decades later?

Michael Mauboussin: Thank you so much. You’re so gracious. I had a wonderful time with you as my host at Google many years ago and have fond memories of that. You were not only kind to me, but also to my whole family, so I appreciate that.

I was a liberal arts major, not an engineer, although my parents wanted me to be an engineer! I went on to Wall Street in the mid-1980s and was quite overwhelmed by the lingo and the rules of thumb that people were using. At one point, I was in a training program at Drexel Burnham Lambert, and one of the guys in the program gave me a copy of Al Rappaport’s book Creating Shareholder Value, which was a professional epiphany for me. In the same way that people tell me my work has influenced them for the better (and I’m very grateful for that), I can say that this book completely changed my professional career.

There are three things that Rappaport talked about that I think all of us in the value investing community appreciate.

The first is that it’s ultimately about cash and not accounting numbers. Even though he made that argument in the 1980s, the argument is even more pressing and important today than it was back then. We can come back and talk about that a bit.

Second is — and I think people lose sight of this; I might tweet about this in the next few days — that competitive advantage or competitive strategy analysis and valuation should be joined at the hip, because if you want to value a business properly, you have to think about the competitive position of the company within its industry and what its prospects look like. The litmus test of a strategy, if you’re an executive, is that it creates value. We know that those two things are intimately related. Interestingly, in business schools, we do a bit of a disservice to our students because we teach those things separately. Everybody knows they’re both important, but as you become an investor, you’re operating at the pure intersection of those two things — not one or the other. They work together.

The third and final thing — and it was actually in a chapter for executives, although it was called stock market signals for managers — is that as an executive, if you want to create value for your stock price to deliver excess returns, it’s not enough just to earn above your cost of capital on your investments or even meet the consensus. Rather, you have to meet or exceed expectations over time. That has important implications, not only for remuneration, but for capital allocation and so on. Clearly, that argument of why executives need to understand their stock price is the opposite side of the same coin of why investors can use that same thing.

I started using the Rappaport research. At the time, he had a consulting firm which had software, and I somehow persuaded my bosses to buy that software. I was a junior analyst, but I was doing a lot of analysis using the Rappaport methodology. That allowed me to meet him in 1991. That was about 30 years ago. It was a thrill for me. I thought it was the apex of my whole career, just shaking the guy’s hand. He invited me to join the faculty for the executive programs at Kellogg where he was a professor, which led to our deepening relationship.

At one point, in the late 1990s, he suggested we take these ideas that I’d been working on from the investor side and marry them with the ideas from Creating Shareholder Value to write Expectations Investing. I should provide the context, because we signed the contract for the book in the late 1990s which was a bit like the period we just went through: everything was going up. Everybody’s excited and everybody’s doing their E-trade accounts or whatever it was back then.

The book actually came out on September 10, 2001. Just think about that for a moment. It was the day before a national tragedy, and — much less importantly — in the midst of a three-year bear market. We signed it when things were as hot as they could be, and the book came out when things were as cold as they could be. The book was fine. I think it did have an impact, and of course it influenced my teaching and so forth.

Over the years, obviously some of the case studies got old, plus there were some new developments in markets, including things like from public to private, from active management to indexing, and the rise of intangibles. There were a number of things that came along. In some ways, going back through it all, I was gratified that many of the bones of the arguments have held up pretty well, including lots of stuff around the core ideas around valuation, but there were still a lot of ideas that we could update, so that was the genesis of round two.

Although Rappaport is now in his late 80s, he’s still phenomenal. I talk to him all the time. I talked to him twice yesterday. He’s still full of ideas and continues to challenge our views. It’s a special thing to have a relationship with a mentor who you end up collaborating with — and not just a professional relationship but also a personal relationship, which I cherish. That’s the story of Expectations Investing 2.0. I hope the world doesn’t come apart again with the publication of a new version of the book, but certainly when the first one came out, the timing was not ideal from a marketing point of view.

Madaan: I think the timing was ideal for a lot of investors who were in their formative years. Many of my friends and a lot of people I respect tell me that the book made a huge impact on how they think about things. Of course, Warren Buffett had talked about following the cash, like you said, through this concept of owners’ earnings. Could you talk a bit about how cash is different from GAAP accounting? You say in your book that multiples can be used or misused, so help us peel that layer a little deeper with an example or two, if possible.

Mauboussin: The first point to make is that earnings themselves, and earnings growth in particular — which seems to be what drives a lot of executives and to some degree is a lot of the chatter you hear in the financial community — in and of itself is not value-creating. The thing to focus on is what creates value.

Buffett talks about the one-dollar-bill test: if I take a dollar and invest it in this business, will it be worth more than a dollar in the marketplace? That happens only when you’re earning above your cost of capital. That’s the core of business in general. You take a resource — in this case, money — and you put it to work and then it generates returns in excess of the cost of capital or the opportunity cost of that capital.

That’s the first point to make: earnings themselves and earnings growth are not indicative of value. You can have two companies with the same earnings growth rate where one creates enormous amounts of value and the other doesn’t. That ties back to return on invested capital, basically. Are they earning appropriate returns on their investment? That’s the first point.

The second thing is something we’ve been spending a lot of time on in the last couple of years, and something I think is an extraordinary source of distortion these days. When I started in this industry, tangible investments — think about physical assets: factories, machines, inventory, and so forth — were about 1.5x to 1.8x intangible investments. Intangible is by definition non-physical: branding, training, even R&D, software code writing, and so forth. That relationship has completely flipped. Our 2021 estimate — the dust hasn’t settled, obviously — is that it’s about a 2:1 ratio the other way around. Intangibles are vastly larger than tangibles. That’s important because intangible investments, for a variety of weird accounting vagary reasons, are expensed, so we’re losing the trail these days of this idea of investment and return on investment due to the accounting.

This is almost the opposite situation from the first thing I said, which is that you can have growth that’s not value-creating. In this case, you can have companies that not only are not making a lot of money, but perhaps even losing money, that are creating an enormous amount of value.

One way to make this a bit more concrete is to go back to an example, and many of you will know about this: for the first 15 years that Walmart was public — by the way, its stock price performance was 3x the benchmark, so it was a great stock — it had negative free cash flow each of those years. It had positive earnings, but they were investing more than they earned, so they had negative free cash flow.

This is one of the trick questions in business school, right? Is negative free cash flow good or bad? The answer is: it depends. If you’re investing in high returns, you want to do as much of that as you possibly can, so negative free cash flow is fantastic. You can apply the same logic to what’s going on today. You might have a simple subscription business. Usually, the customer cost is upfront and then you have the cash flow streams that come down the road. If that is an NPV transaction for the company, the faster they grow, the more they’re going to absorb these upfront costs even though they’re going to have higher cash flows down the road.

That’s the basic principle: ultimately, follow the cash. There are other issues, of course. There is a lot of judgment by management. Management has discretion as to how they think about depreciation schedules, amortization periods, warranty, reserves, and all sorts of stuff like that. There’s wiggle room that companies can operate within. The point is to look beyond all that.

You mentioned owner earnings. In the book, we argue for a focus on free cash flow, but not what most people on Wall Street talk about when they say free cash flow. It’s truly a finance term. Effectively, the levered version of free cash flow is owner earnings. It’s the same concept.

There’s a clear tie back to Buffett and how he would think about or argue how the business should be valued. Again, simplistic measures. Again, you’re getting at both sides. Some people say, “This company doesn’t make money, so I’m going to throw it out.” That doesn’t make any sense. Others say, “This company is growing rapidly and it’s fantastic.” That also doesn’t make sense. We need another layer of scrutiny to understand what’s going on.

Madaan: If I could summarize this — and correct me if I’m wrong — the key takeaway is that it all starts with returns on capital. If returns on invested capital are below your cost of capital, then growth actually takes away value rather than adds value. You want to first understand what the returns on capital are. In the book, you do a great job of using the Domino’s Pizza example to help people move from one number to another to actually concretely measure this. (I’d like to recommend to everybody on the call and those who will listen later to go through the website and the online tutorials, and by the way, I was making mistakes as I went along and I emailed Michael and he helped correct me, so thank you for that!) Can you talk a little about that?

Mauboussin: It was good you emailed me, because you’re a really smart guy, and every time you sent me an email, I’d start to sweat and panic, and thought I’d better make sure! What you were pointing out were very logical things. Because it was a franchise business, it was slightly confusing.

You’re making an important point. Al and I wanted to make sure we made these ideas accessible. If you’re a novice investor and you’ve never done any investing at all, some of these ideas could feel a bit overwhelming, even if you slowly go through the book. If you’ve been around, and you’re somewhat conversational in accounting — you’re comfortable with numbers and so forth — you’re going to find it fruitful.

I have found in this most recent wave of talking to professional investors, many of whom are former students, this has been the richest set of conversations I’ve had in a long time. They found a lot that they found provocative..

Because we wanted to make this accessible, we built a website called expectationsinvesting.com, and in addition to the typical propaganda on the authors and promotions and all that, we included a module called Online Tutorials where we offer ten tutorials, each of which discusses the principles, and in most cases, there’s a downloadable Excel spreadsheet.

You mentioned Domino’s Pizza. It’s tutorial eight: how do you do a price-implied expectations (PIE) analysis? You can go to the book and see how we did it — we share the numbers and the assumptions and so forth — but you can go to the online tutorial and download an Excel spreadsheet which will have the same numbers as what’s in the book. I’d found when I was learning from Rappaport’s book, I didn’t really understand all the details of how the calculations worked, so I created spreadsheets to replicate what he was doing. It may be good to do it on your own, but we’ve done that spreadsheet as an additional resource so you can see exactly how we came up with all these calculations. It also provides you with a free template if you want to do the exercise with other companies. You can do that as well. It’s a framework that should be fairly robust.

Thank you for pointing that out, Saurabh. It’s important that we try to give people resources to help them use these ideas, to make sure it’s as accessible as possible.

Madaan: Thank you for sharing that work with us. As I was reading the book, I found it helpful to do the tutorials one at a time, as I was going through each chapter. Could you talk about the price-implied expectations approach, which is the heart of this book? How does that differ from or complement the discounted cash flow?

Mauboussin: Of course I would love everybody to buy the book, but I’ll give you the essence of the book in about 30 seconds, and then we can break it down into different pieces. There are three steps to the process.

The first step, as you just pointed out, is understanding price-implied expectations. Second is introducing strategic and financial analysis to determine or judge whether those expectations are too high, too low, or about right (which is the truthful answer in most cases, which means you put it into the “move it on and move on” category). Third are the results, which is “Do I buy or sell? Or do I do nothing?”

Let’s start with the first step. The first argument we made is actually a follow-through for our discussion on earnings. We argued that the appropriate way to value a business is the present value of future cash flows. I don’t think anybody — certainly in theory — disagrees with that. The question is how do we make that a practical set of concepts? There’s a lot of the devil in the details in terms of things like continuing value and so forth, but we argue that on balance, if you do these things intelligently, you can get a lot of insight.

I was trying to study the psychological phenomenon behind the fact that everybody seems to want to place a value on a company, and then compare the value to the price. They feel like it’s worth 12 times EBITDA, for example, or 25 times earnings. They feel like they have to value it. It’s almost like a volition.

As you gathered from Expectations Investing, we’re taking a different tack which is to say, “The only thing we know for certain in this world is the stock price,” so let’s reverse engineer. Essentially, what we’re doing in the price-implied expectations exercise is saying, “Using a discounted cash flow model, what do I have to believe about the value drivers?” Those are predominantly sales, margins, and capital intensity. “What do I have to believe for this stock price to make sense?” If you’re doing price-implied expectations correctly, you should have no judgment. You simply say, “What do I have to believe?” You’re looking at XYZ Company. What is priced in? What do you have to believe?

The second step is where you’re rolling up your sleeves. You’re examining history — the company’s performance, and maybe the industry history. You’re doing strategic and competitive strategy analysis to say, “Given what we know about how the business works and how it’s going to unfold and its opportunity set, does this set of expectations seem too high, too low, or appropriate?”

It’s important that when you leave that step, you should have scenarios — upside, downside — and it shouldn’t be just bull-bear case. It should be more than that. You should have scenarios and associated probabilities, and we can talk about how to do that.

Now you’re thinking more in terms of expected value. To me, the notion of value is expected value, and margin of safety — which is one of the core ideas from Graham and something we continue to teach at Columbia Business School — would be that the price is substantially below the expected value. There are ways I can lose, but there are many, many more ways that I can win, so I built that in. Then, you make your buy/sell decisions. For the buy/sell decisions, we introduce things like sensitivity to taxes and friction costs and so forth.

That’s the basic idea of how to do this. The key — in step one in particular — is to use the best of the DCF model without necessarily forcing your own assumptions on it.

The last thing I’ll mention is a couple of ideas in the book that I found to be so important but that are not used as well as they should be — and by the way, when you explain expectations investing to investors, everybody nods and goes, “Yeah, I get that,” and everybody thinks that they’re doing it, but in reality, it’s remarkable how few people actually do it this way. It’s quite scarce in terms of people’s approaches.

The first is chapter three, about this concept called the expectations infrastructure. There’s a long story behind how we came up with this but, basically, this is how you do sensitivity analysis. The key is what we call value triggers, which are sales, costs, and investments. Every business everywhere in the world has these three things, but those are too blunt to map onto the ultimate value drivers which drive the DCF model, so we refined them through what we call the value factors. These are six microeconomic shapers — the ultimate value drivers. This allows you to understand sensitivities. It’s key issues, such as operating leverage. Operating leverage is about absorbing pre-production costs. I build a factory for 100 widgets and I’m now making 50. As I go from 50 to 100, I’m absorbing pre-production costs and that improves my profitability. Or economies of scale: as I get bigger, I can do things cheaper.

We want to be overt as we think about different scenarios, for example, sales growth — how those flow through the value factors and what that means for ultimate value. This is a way to have a much richer thought process and a much richer dialogue, how to capture these key issues, how delta EBIT and delta sales relate to one another. That’s the first big idea.

The second big idea is this idea of base rates. This goes into the decision-making literature to a great degree, but the argument here is that instead of looking at every company uniquely (as if you’re the only person ever having done the work before), rather say, “Let’s think about this company as an instance of a reference class. Can we select an appropriate reference class and understand how things have unfolded for that reference class? Does that inform how we should think about the prospects for this particular company?”

When you explain the idea, everybody gets it, but most investors and most analysts operate as if they’re unique in some way and their analysis is everything, versus understanding the sweep of corporate performance which can be informative for understanding prospects.

Those are two big ideas. If nothing else, people should look at expectations infrastructure, and then secondly, integrating base rates is valuable and vastly underutilized as a tool for investing.

Madaan: Let’s go through an example here. I worked in a tech company before. In learning about investing on my own, what I have found is that sometimes you encounter these two extremes of viewpoints. On the one side is the idea that valuation is the lowest earnings multiple. The other extreme — and I’m not necessarily saying these are right or wrong — is that growth is all that matters. If you’re buying a good-quality business and it’s growing, the multiples will take care of themselves.

What your work brought home for me was that we should be — and let me quote Ted Lasso here — curious, not judgmental. That element of approaching this with curiosity rather than a preconceived judgment or opinion was helpful. You said that as intangibles have grown, we can not necessarily depend on GAAP accounting to do our valuation work for us. As Mr. Buffett said, don’t just look at earnings. Look at owner’s earnings by taking account of investments on the cash flow statement. You said that even on the income statement, what you see as an operating expense could actually be a capital expenditure. In one of your talks, you used Microsoft as an example. I’m sure this is a company that will be familiar to many in our audience. I was wondering if you could take that as an example and make this a little more concrete for everybody here.

Mauboussin: Certainly and thank you for that introduction to the idea. We wrote a piece in the fall of 2020 — a little over a year ago — called One Job where we go through the Microsoft piece. If anybody wants to read the whole piece, just search for “One Job Mauboussin” or something like that, and I’m sure it’ll pop up.

The reason we selected Microsoft is precisely for all the reasons you just cited: it’s been around for a long time, it’s a very profitable company, they’ve reported in a very consistent fashion for a long period of time, but there’s one other little backstory to this. There’s a whole academic community working on these issues of intangibles. Carol Corrado is one of the most famous, but there’s a guy named Charles Hulton — Chuck Hulton — at the University of Maryland. Hulton wrote a paper specifically about Microsoft.

One of the challenges with this intangible thing is it’s very easy to say that this is a big issue in the aggregate, but actually, it’s one of these weird things that when you get down to the specifics, it becomes even more difficult.

I’m taking SG&A and I’m thinking to myself, “How do I separate SG&A into what I need to run the business — to keep the trains running on time and deliver the mail — and what’s discretionary, which is an investment. The first big question is what percent of SG&A is in each bucket? The second question — which is secondary — is what is an appropriate asset life or amortization period for those things? Hulton did this in a paper in 2006, so rather than having a big debate about this, we decided to default to the Hulton numbers.

We’re going to argue that what matters at the end of the day is free cash flow. You can use the term owner earnings — it’s an equivalent concept. To be clear about what free cash flow is, first, you start with NOPAT which is net operating profit after taxes. NOPAT is an incredibly important number to use in finance because it’s the unlevered cash earnings of a business. It’s a super handy number because it’s the numerator of ROIC, which you alluded to before; it’s a number from which we subtract investments to come up with free cash flow; it’s a number from which you subtract a capital charge to do economic profit. NOPAT is your central number in finance.

From NOPAT, we subtract investments in future growth. Classically stated, investments are: working capital changes — which, in Microsoft’s case, by the way, is actually a source of cash because they have a negative cash conversion cycle; capex — which we typically express net of depreciation, so it’s capex above and beyond depreciation, so we’re assuming that maintenance capex and depreciation are roughly a push (and we can come back to that — by the way, it’s something we’re working on right now); and then, acquisitions — we need to account for acquisitions as well.

NOPAT minus investments is free cash flow. Free cash flow then becomes, by definition, the pool of cash available for distribution to all the claim holders. Let me make a side note that when companies or many investors talk about free cash flow, what they’re talking about is cash flow from operations minus capex which, if you just heard my definition, is actually a different number. I’m using a finance term, but when you hear people talk about it every day or read an analysis report, they may be using a different definition, so let’s be clear about that.

With the Hulton guidance, what we’re doing is taking some of those expenses and, as you correctly pointed out, we’re making them capital investments. Essentially, what you’re doing is moving something from the NOPAT line down to the investment line. What happens, of course, is NOPAT goes up, and investment goes up by the exact same amount. Free cash flow doesn’t change, but the mix changes quite dramatically.

I’m going to get these numbers wrong, but roughly speaking, the NOPAT numbers for Microsoft go up by I think it’s seven or eight billion. It’s about a 10 or 15 percent lift. Investment goes up by a higher percentage because obviously they invest a lot less, so the investment goes up by, say, 80 percent, and then free cash flow doesn’t change.

Why, then, are we going through all this effort if free cash flow is the same? What’s the big deal? The answer is exactly the point that Saurabh correctly made: what we need to understand is how much money we are investing. What’s the return on investment? That’s going to generate your future NOPAT. If I don’t know what my investment magnitude is, if I’m confusing it between my income and my investments, then I really don’t have a grasp on the business. That’s why we called the piece One Job. We argue that the one job of an investor is to understand the most basic unit of analysis of how the company makes money, and you need to make these adjustments.

Here’s the thing. Microsoft is old. It’s big. It’s super profitable. It’s a spectacular business, just to be clear. Another thing I should mention is that when you do capitalize the intangibles, you place them on the balance sheet. That means their balance sheet becomes much bigger. Their ROIC goes from something in the high 50s — which is spectacular, obviously — to something in the high 30s — which is still in the realm of spectacular, but not quite as much. That’s a step toward reality. You know that 50 seems high, and 30 seems more grounded. There are some other adjustments you can make to get an even more realistic estimate. We wrote a piece earlier this year called Market-Expected Return on Investment (MEROI). It’s very technical, but if you do MEROI, it’s actually even lower than that number, which I think is another step toward reality.

Microsoft is a good example, but when I say it’s a 10 to 15 percent lift, that’s actually fairly muted. When you go into younger companies that are investing an even higher proportion of SG&A, the lift is even bigger. You can imagine you get an extremely different portrayal.

We wrote a piece a few months ago called Categorizing for Clarity in which we argue that there are at least three — maybe even four — adjustments that you need to make to the standard statement of cash flows in order to understand the business. (By the way, I actually really like the statement of cash flows; it’s usually where I start when I look at things, because although I can’t get margin structures, I can get net income and I can get working capital — I can get a feel for things pretty quickly.) The way it’s presented is wrong. Taking Amazon as an example, when you make these adjustments, Amazon’s earnings, by our reckoning, would almost double from what they reported. Instead of earning $20 billion, they earned roughly $40 billion. That means, all things being equal, the multiple is half of what people claim it is. Even with the EBITDA numbers, if you make the adjustments we suggest, the multiple essentially gets cut in half.

You get a very different portrayal of the economics of the business by making these adjustments. I’m not pretending that any of our assumptions are perfect, but I do think they’re all steps toward reality. This is incredibly exciting as an investor because what we have is this massive misspecification in our accounting. What we have is a lot of people who are using rules of thumb and are lazy. If we as a community can do a slightly better job of understanding the core economics of the business and being able to recast the financial statements to get a better and clearer view of what’s going on, that’s exciting. That’s what I tell my students. Sure, investing is hard and it’s a grind, but I’m telling them that this is a cool, exciting time, because if you are just a little ahead of everybody else and have better insights than everybody else, it should be productive. That’s a long-winded answer to your excellent question.

Madaan: That was very helpful and hopefully sets the context for my next question. You said that despite the fact that your approach makes so much sense, and despite everybody nodding their heads and saying it makes sense, very few people actually do the work and use this approach. Why is that?

Mauboussin: I don’t know. It’s a good question. In my first day of class at Columbia Business School, I assign some stuff from security analysis — nothing too detailed, but the high-level concepts of the importance of margin of safety and Mr. Market metaphors and so forth — but the other thing I assign is a 13-page chapter from a book about betting on horseracing. The chapter is called Crist on Value. It’s written by Steven Crist who is a horse handicapper by training. Crist is an entertaining, colorful guy. He grew up in New York, he’s a great piano player. He went to Harvard and studied English literature or something like that. One day, his friends dragged him out to the dog racetrack, and he was enamored with all the numbers. After graduating from Harvard, he ended up getting a job at the New York Times as the horseracing correspondent.

He wrote this 13-page summary, Crist on Value, about how to think about handicapping, broadly speaking. I recommend that everybody reads it because it’s one of the best pieces you’ll read about investing. You can go through the document and replace the word “horse” with the word “stock” and it completely applies to what we do every day.

He’s got this one line where he’s basically saying it’s all about expectations. He says something like, “Most people think that they’re doing this, but very few actually do.” I don’t know why that is. That’s why I said before, I’d love to find out the psychology behind it. You’re more in control if you say, “I’ve calculated value and then I’m going to compare that to the price,” than if you say, “The price is this thing.” I’m reacting versus being proactive.

Crist’s point on handicapping is you don’t make money by figuring out which horse is going to win the race. You make money by figuring out which horse has mispriced odds. Likewise, in investing, we know that growth investing has struggled at certain times. Why? Because expectations are running too high. These could be fantastic businesses, wonderful value-creating businesses, but all those beautiful things are priced in and then some. Consequently, they may not be great stocks. It’s the old thing — great companies are not always great stocks. This is exactly the point of all that.

I don’t know psychologically why we don’t do more of this or don’t feel comfortable with it. It completely resonated with me from the beginning. The questions, “What do I have to believe for me to invest?” or “What do I have to believe for the stock to make sense?” are sensible questions.

I want to add one other thing because I thought this is where you were going to go with it — we have a chapter dedicated to this (I think it’s chapter eight). We argue that If it’s hard for you to come up with a value based on what you can touch and feel in the business today, you don’t want to completely dismiss the stock, because there could be the potential for real options. I don’t want to get too carried away with this because people should be measured in how they think about this, but it’s also important to not dismiss it completely. What do I mean by a “real option”? We’re all familiar with the concept of a financial option, which is the right but not the obligation to do something: typically, a call option is to buy a stock at a certain price within a certain period of time, and a put option would be to sell a stock at a certain price. A real option would be the corporate equivalent of that, which is the right but not the obligation to make an investment in a business. These real options can be potentially valuable.

The classic example is an extraction industry. You have an oil well that is productive. It’s NPV-positive or value-creating if oil is $60 a barrel or higher. Oil today happens to be $40 a barrel, so it’s NPV-negative to drill, but is that valueless?” No. It’s not valueless because there’s some probability that oil will go over $60. We measure that usually with volatility. Consequently, there’s some option value to that — the right but not the obligation to do something if the conditions are met.

I like to say that certain companies have real options. That’s usually associated with great management teams that understand how to nurture and ultimately exercise options appropriately. Typically it’s early industries — it has to be a volatile industry. There has to be a lot a lot of change going on.

Madaan: In the book, you use Shopify as an example.

Mauboussin: In the first version of the book, we used Amazon. You talked about luck before, and it was mostly luck we used Amazon. AWS was not a twinkle in Jeff Bezos’ eye back in 2001, and that ends up being a big part of their story. That worked out. We use shop Shopify in this second edition of the book.
I think Tobi, Shopify’s CEO, gets this. It’s a fast-changing and burgeoning industry, where market leaders tend to be better than others.

You mentioned 2001 being an interesting time. It certainly was an interesting time in one way, which was that it was a great time to invest, because you were getting things toward the bottom. The flip side is, if you’re a company and you have an option, you need access to capital. You need to be able to spend money to exercise an option. If there’s no access to capital — if capital markets are shut down because of bad equity markets, or credit markets are spooked or whatever it is — that becomes difficult.

We have a checklist of where you might want to think about this. Shopify is a good example where I would not dismiss the idea based on what I can touch or feel immediately. The key is, as value investors, we want long options but we don’t want to pay too much for them. That’s the idea. I want to acknowledge them, but I don’t want to pay too much for them at the same time.

Madaan: You said this book is not written just for investors, but it’s also for operators and business leaders. Within this framework, who are some business leaders that you have found are willing to invest with a longer-term framework that is grounded in rationality?

Mauboussin: It’s hard to beat Will Thorndike’s book The Outsiders. It’s a bit old now, and we might think about the folks we would add to our all-star Hall of Fame in terms of capital allocators. That’s the issue — capital allocation.

When you talk to CEOs and CFOs, but CEOs in particular, these are well-intentioned people. They’re hardworking, they love their companies, they want to succeed, but they don’t have a north star for capital allocation. The skills that got them in that seat are not the skills that they need to deploy every single day.

To me, it’s about capital allocation. If we were to add to that list, we would add the Rales brothers and Bezos. We’d add the obvious people that history has now demonstrated were able to distinguish themselves from others, but when I talk to a management team, the key thing I want to know is do they have a north star? Do they have a nose for value creation and understanding capital allocation in general? Capital allocation is so pivotal, both as an investor and as an executive. It’s stunning how few of these executives are great at it. It’s what Buffett talked about. The skills that get you into the seat are not the skills that you need to deploy every day. That becomes a big problem.

A lot of those executives in Thorndike’s book were quiet insiders. They came up through the organization. They had weird backgrounds and they thrived. The reason I particularly like that book is that one of the chapters is about Bill Stiritz. I was a food analyst back in the day. I covered Ralston Purina, so Bill Stiritz was one of the guys that I dealt with.

I’ll tell you one quick story — I don’t know if this is out there. I was a junior analyst, a low guy in the organization. My senior analyst says to me, “Nine to five, you’re my guy, but if you want to work on the weekends or at night, you can do whatever you want, and if you do some decent research, we’ll publish it together. My name will be on the top, your name on the bottom.” I did a report on Ralston Purina. It was pure Rappaport. It was, “Here are the businesses, here are the value drivers, cost of capital, expectations” — the whole shooting match. My senior analyst reads it. He flicks it back at me and goes, “This will be of some mild academic interest, but no one in the real world would ever care about it.”

We published the report, and a week or two later, we get a call from Stiritz’s office saying, “Bill Stiritz read your report and really liked it and would like to invite you to St. Louis to talk to the senior management team about how you think about valuing businesses.” Besides Rappaport obviously being extraordinary, this was one of those “attaboy!” moments. It was incredible to have Bill Stiritz ask us to come out and talk to them, because he was a low-key guy. He didn’t talk much to the street. Stiritz was considered the Warren Buffett of the industry. He was very early in buying back stock, for instance. Everybody thinks about it now as commonplace, but in the 1980s it was considered a bit wacky to buy back your stock.

I visited the company one time and they gave me a stack of old research reports, right from the time that Stiritz became CEO — ’81, ’82, ’83. There are analyst reports that say if they buy back stock, it’s going to erode book value and they’re going to have negative net worth, and then their credit quality is going to go to hell. It’s interesting how people approached it back then. They were not at all focused on the cash flows. They were focused on all of these accounting metrics which completely led them down the wrong trail, which is fascinating.

That’s another long-winded answer to your great question, but it boils down to value creation. You’re exactly right. Just like an investor, you want to take a long-term view of value creation.

By the way, the key is not long term per se. The key is to make money. Sometimes things pop up and they’re short term, and you take advantage of them to make money. The other thing to remember is that long term is an aggregation of short terms. They’re compatible. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. You need to deliver short-term results to get good longer-term returns. They go together.

Madaan: I like to think that you’ve got to make it through the short term to get to the long term. Thanks for these anecdotes, Michael. They are inspiring for many of us and we appreciate you sharing them.

You’ve worked with Bill Miller in the past, and you now work with Dennis Lynch. Could you compare and contrast their investment styles — maybe how each of them has employed expectations investing in their own way, if you’ve seen it? Anything in the spirit of what’s interesting and inspiring.

Mauboussin: They’re both wonderful colleagues. They’re great. I’ve known Bill for probably close to 30 years and worked with him for nine of those 30 years. By the way, they are friends, too. One of the common characteristics is that both are extraordinarily open-minded. They are readers. They are thinkers. They are intellectually restless. It’s cognitively taxing to be constantly reading and thinking and examining your own views. Both those guys do that well.

Bill grew up with a traditional, very Graham & Dodd value orientation. He founded Value Trust with Ernie Kiehne in 1982. Many people don’t know that for the first five or six years of Value Trust, it was the number one fund in America. It did better than Magellan. It was extraordinary. They were buying things at 0.3x book and selling at 0.8x book. It was very Graham & Dodd-ish. The fund then went through a difficult spell. That’s when Bill, I think, was introduced to the ROIC world. I think Dennis, also at Columbia Business School in the late 1990s and early 2000s, was introduced the ROIC kind of mindset, and I think that had a big imprint on both of those guys as well — understanding good businesses.

Dennis also started off in industries that were more traditional. I don’t like this term “growth versus value” because I think it’s a poor characterization, but both of them have been comfortable operating in spheres — we’ll call it “technology,” broadly speaking — where there’s a lot of uncertainty, but if you see certain patterns or certain strategic positioning, it could confer great advantage. Bill in the 1990s made a ton of money on AOL and Dell. Amazingly, he got out of almost all the technology stuff in 2000. It was stunning how astute he was at that. That’s the other thing I think they have in common.

Since I’m working with Dennis today, I can tell you that in addition to all that intellectual stuff, which is important, he’s a great leader. He sets the tone organizationally and thinks about every person in the organization — how they can add value. What can they do that they’re passionate about? What do they bring to the table that’s unique? He encourages them to do that in a way that serves the organization. That’s a special sensation. It’s a pretty flat organization. There’s not a lot of ego. There’s an enormous amount of sharing. The tone is set from the top. That was true for both these organizations.

At their core, they’re both learning organizations, which is super fun. If you’re a student of investing, if you’re a student of the world, if you’re curious, these are great organizations — LMCM back in the day and Counterpoint Global. They were great organizations to be embedded in. Every day is fun because you’re growing, you’re learning, you’re being challenged, you’re finding out you’re wrong.

Madaan: My final question: whether in the investing world or beyond, could you talk about some ideas or people who have made a big impact on you or been key inspirations for you?

Mauboussin: I’ve always been a big Buffett fan, of course, but I’ve taken more from Munger than I have from Buffett. Obviously, there’s the idea of the mental models approach. I don’t know if Munger himself is still advocating for it as enthusiastically as he did 25 or 30 years ago, but that framework for me has been incredibly important.

Related to that is the Santa Fe Institute where I’ve been involved for many years. I first went out there 25 years ago. I served on the board for 20 years and was Chairman of the Board for eight and a half years. It’s an institute that is dedicated to basic research. You’re a scientist at heart, too, Saurabh. The key is that it’s across disciplines. Most of the most interesting problems in the world — and it’s true for investing, too — are at the intersections of disciplines. We need to break down these disciplinary barriers. SFI has been great.

The other one I’ll mention is EO Wilson. There’s a beautiful new biography of EO Wilson by Richard Rhodes called The Scientist. EO Wilson is most famous for his work on ants. He was considered the world’s leading ant expert, but he wrote a book in 1998 or ‘99 called Consilience. You mentioned in your intro that my title is Head of Consilient Research, and I’m sure people were wondering, “What is he talking about?” Consilient is, of course, derived from consilience, which is this idea of unification of knowledge.

What Wilson argued — and, of course, I’m sympathetic to his argument — is that we’ve made enormous strides with reductionism. Scientifically, we break things down into components and understand the pieces. That’s fantastic. It’s gotten us far, but he’s saying the next wave of what we need to do is to work across disciplines. Most of the vexing interesting issues stand at the intersection of disciplines, hence we need consilience. We need this idea of bringing ideas together in order for us to proceed.

Robert Hagstrom wrote the great book Investing: The Last Liberal Art. Investing is one of the ultimate consilient industries. This is why it’s such a pain yet such a joy every day, because you’ve never got this game licked, but at the same time, it’s an exhilarating journey to learn and to evolve, and to be proven wrong sometimes and to be proven right at other times.

Madaan: Thank you so much. Let me hand it over to John to see if we have any audience questions.

Mihaljevic: We’re bulging with questions over here, so let’s see how many we can fit in. Christopher Singh, an investor I admire in New York, writes: What’s your starting point to normalizing some of the upfront costs that subscription businesses have and getting to an understanding of steady-state economics?

Mauboussin: It’s a great question and a tricky one. We wrote a big piece about this earlier this year, about the economics of customer lifetime businesses or customer subscription businesses. Christopher’s question is exactly right. You need to think about where you are in the lifecycle — they’re probably S-curves. That requires an assessment of the total addressable market — a measure of where you are with penetration and what your competition is likely to do. Those things are tricky things to sort out.

There is stuff floating around. I actually had this conversation with Trent Griffin who I’m sure you guys all know. Trent was asking me, “What are the normalized metrics that the CEO of a subscription business should be thinking about?” It depends a little on the nature of the business — if it’s pure software versus some other kind of service. That piece we wrote is the best I can say on this. What happens is your customer acquisition costs change through the lifecycle, and retention numbers change through the lifecycle. There are dynamics that are moving around. Figuring out steady state can be tricky for new industries. This is where base rates might be helpful — thinking about what we’ve seen in the past and how things have unfolded. I would refer back to that report. We spent a lot of time on that report and it’s got a lot of good stuff in it. I’ve got nothing to add to what’s in there. It’s a great question, by the way.

Mihaljevic: Here’s a little invitation to speculate, but I think it’s worthwhile speculation. Why do you think companies are so guarded about disclosing the split between discretionary (i.e. growth) SG&A and nondiscretionary or maintenance SG&A when it can often have a significant and favorable effect on valuation?

Mauboussin: I don’t think they know the answer. There’s a paper from 2018 in Management Science that got me excited, which tackles this issue. It was written by Luminita Enache and Anup Srivastava — they’re both now at University of Calgary — and was called Should Intangible Investments Be Reported Separately or Commingled with Operating Expenses?

I’ll give you one example on this. A friend of mine is the former chief marketing officer for Coca-Cola. He was in charge of a multibillion-dollar budget. I was working on this maintenance versus discretionary thing, so I called him up and said, “You had this gargantuan budget. Obviously, you need to spend some money to be competitive with Pepsi and other beverage companies around the world. How did you think about maintenance versus discretionary investment?” He says, “That’s not how we thought about it. We get a budget from the board. I basically broke it down by region and then I let the regional managers do whatever they wanted.” They don’t think about it that way, I think, to a large degree.

I mentioned at the outset that this is an exciting time because we don’t know the answers to a lot of these questions. I mentioned that recent paper from 2018. Even in the last few months, there’s a nice new paper by Iqbal and Srivastava and Rajgopal from Columbia and at least one other author, where they are starting to do some specifics by industry of breaking down what percent of SG&A should be treated as discretionary investment versus maintenance. They did some interesting work on amortization periods of the useful life of the assets. This is like Fast and Furious. The research is happening as we speak which is exciting. It’s important and useful to stay on top of it.

In the report Categorizing for Clarity, where we talk about Amazon, we used the Iqbal-Srivastava numbers as applied to Amazon. They’re using Fama-French industry classifications to try to get a handle on that. It’s imprecise, but as I mentioned before, I think it’s a step toward reality. That’s the main thing we want to do — get closer to understanding the underlying economics.

Mihaljevic: I’m indulging my own question here (sorry to everyone in the queue): Can you bring base rates into this a bit? In other words, I’m curious when you see a company trading at more than 50x sales, what are you thinking in the context of base rates?

Mauboussin: Thank you for the question. Just so we’re super clear, base rates mean that we’re going to think about our problem not as unique but rather as an instance of a reference class. The first challenge is to find an appropriate reference class. Many times, we use simple things, such as looking at companies that have revenues of a particular size. Let’s say the company has two billion in revenues. We’re going to look at every company historically at the point that they had two billion in revenues — we can adjust for inflation and so forth — and we can look at the three-year, five-year, or ten-year distribution of sales growth rates. That gives me this distribution from really fast growing to very slow growing. That is going to allow you to understand. If I were naïve, I would have some sense of what that number looks like.

An example we use in our discussions on base rates is Peloton. In September 2020, an analyst forecasted — and I don’t mean to pick on this specific analyst because I think this was the consensus at the time — that Peloton would grow something like 30 percent for a decade. They are at $1.8 billion in revenue, I think. The question to ask is, “How many companies with $1.8 billion in revenue have ever grown 30 percent a year for ten years?” The answer is that it does happen — about one or two percent manage it — but if it’s a two-percent probability, do you make that your base case? Probably not. You would be much more moderate. You might say, “I’m really bullish. I think it’s a 20-percent scenario.”

Remember that intangible assets have different characteristics from tangible assets. Some of those characteristics are bullish, and some are bearish. They’re different. An example of a bullish one is scalability, but another that’s not as bullish is obsolescence.

We re-ran the base rates, and we discovered that those industries that are most intangible-intensive have faster growth rates on average, but they also have big standard deviations. In other words, there are some companies that grow much faster than what we’ve seen historically, and some that decline much faster than what we’ve seen historically.

To me, base rates are not like tablets handed down from on high — that this is the word. They are living, breathing, dynamic things. As we have more intangibles in our society, those distributions are going to shift their form to some degree. One way to deal with that is not to throw away any of the historical data, but rather to weight it. You would weight the more recent past more than the distant past, and that gives you a bit of a better way to think about distribution.

Thank you for that question. It’s an incredibly important thing. It’s another tool that’s vastly underutilized. Again, when you explain it to people, everybody gets it, but almost nobody does it.

The last thing I’ll say — and Kahneman and Tversky wrote this in 1973 — is that the key is to blend your own analysis with the base rate. It’s not one or the other. It’s a combination of the two, and there are some mathematical ways to do that. I’m not saying you should throw away your analysis and only rely on the base rate. I’m saying you need to meld them in an intelligent fashion to give you the best sense of whether 50x sales, for example, makes sense or not.

Mihaljevic: Here’s a slightly technical question from the audience: How reliable or unreliable is using change in net operating assets as an estimate for reinvestment in the business?

Mauboussin: I would have to see how that’s defined. Net operating assets to me would be equivalent to the invested capital calculation. It is delta invested capital. As I broke it down before, NOPAT minus investment, in theory, investment equals delta invested capital from one period to the next. It gets messier in real life because of other stuff, but in theory, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

I don’t think it’s horrible. There are limitations to this as well, but one of the things we talked about is ROIIC — return on incremental invested capital. The classic way we would look at that is — and it might be that same definition as, or a slightly modified definition of, the denominator — how much money have I invested, for which you can look at delta net assets or you can look at delta invested capital. Then, we look at delta profits, delta NOPAT in the numerator. We tend to lag these and do multiyear just to take out noise (as an analyst, I should do a three-year and five-year rolling). When you start to do that, you get a sense of, on the margin, are incremental returns going up or are incremental returns going down? That can be fairly helpful.

Some industries are smooth — retailers, for example, where they’re adding stores all time. Others are lumpy, where they’re making periodic big investments. It gets a little tricky from one industry to the next but, if I understand the question correctly, that’s not a bad way to go.

Mihaljevic: One last question here (my apologies to everyone whose questions we didn’t get to): What discount rate for equities do you use in today’s interest rate environment? Should the ten-year yield still be the risk-free rate upon which we compare?

Mauboussin: This is a great question. I have a lot of friends who are Federal Reserve and central bank complainers, so they’re always complaining about all this stuff. I always say to them, “You can complain about the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world on your own time. It can be your hobby, but when you’re at work, your job is to make money. Your job is to be embedded in reality. All this other stuff, you can do on your own time, but let’s focus on what’s real.”

The ten-year treasury note trades every day. It’s a gargantuan thing. Wherever we are — 140 or 150 — on the ten-year, that’s reality. That’s the world we live off of. By the way, almost everything is pegged off of that, including credit spreads and so on and so forth.

I really like the work by Aswath Damodaran. Every month, he publishes an equity risk premium on his website to which you add that risk-free rate. That gives you an expected equity return. I think the most recent reading was 6.3% — which is nominal, by the way. If you go to the ten-year breakevens, I think inflation expectations are still around 2.5%. You’re talking about 3.5% or 4% real, which doesn’t seem horrible to me.

You may wonder, though, how good this Damodaran thing is. We looked at this just the other day. We went back to 1961 where his data starts, so we have 60 years of data now. We plotted on the X-axis Aswath’s ten-year forecast — market risk premium plus risk-free, so market return expected — and then the actual total return on the S&P 500. It comes out to about a 0.7 correlation, so it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.

In contrast, you hear some of the Buffett acolytes (which include many of my good friends) say, “I use ten percent for everything,” which is a much less robust way to think about future excess returns.

Firstly, be embedded in reality. By the way, in the new McKinsey valuation book which came out a year and a half ago, they said we should create a synthetic risk-free rate. What is that? They’re talking to corporates, but that makes no sense to me.

Secondly, in your cost of capital, there are a lot of market-based touchstones. We have credit spreads. Bonds trade all the time. The volumes for US corporates are 10 to 15 trillion dollars. Unless you say it’s all wrong, that’s a touchstone. You have things like implied volatility, you have credit default swaps. There are market-based touchstones that should guide you in understanding what the return on equity should be. You shouldn’t have to make it up. There are some ways to get yourself in the neighborhood that are pretty sensible that you should avail yourself of.

This analysis says that across the board — notwithstanding another very good year for equities in 2021 — expected returns should be quite muted. People should acknowledge that, certainly, in the States. There may be a lot of dispersion, so you can still make good excess returns, but if you just buy the benchmark, it’s going to be tricky. The current numbers suggest a fairly muted return expectation. Historically, we’ve been 6% to 7% real. At the moment, we’re probably more like 3.5% to 4% percent real, so not quite half, but maybe two-thirds of the historical returns is what a reasonable expectation should be at this point.

Mihaljevic: We’ll wrap it up there. This has been terrific, and I particularly enjoyed that anecdote about Ralston Purina and getting invited by Bill Stiritz. What a wonderful lesson in creating serendipity by going the extra mile and delivering value to others. We should all frame that and put it on the wall to remind ourselves of it every day, because that is such a great lesson — not just for business and investing, but life in general. Thank you so much, Michael and Saurabh.

About the session host:

Saurabh Madaan serves as Managing Member of Manveen Asset Management, based in Glen Allen, Virginia. Prior to founding Manveen Asset Management, Saurabh was a Managing Director and Deputy Chief Investment Officer at Markel Corporation (NYSE: MKL), where he worked closely with Markel’s Co-Chief Executive Officer Tom Gayner. Saurabh also spent more than seven years at Google in various roles, including Senior Data Scientist, Engineering. Saurabh holds an MS degree in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

About the featured guest:

Michael J. Mauboussin is Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global. Prior to joining Counterpoint Global in January 2020, he was Director of Research at BlueMountain Capital Management in New York. Before joining BlueMountain, he was a Managing Director and Head of Global Financial Strategies at Credit Suisse. Before rejoining Credit Suisse, he was Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management from 2004-2012. Michael joined Credit Suisse in 1992 as a packaged food industry analyst and was named Chief U.S. Investment Strategist in 1999. Michael is the author of three books, including The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing and is also co-author, with Alfred Rappaport, of Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns. Michael has been an adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School since 1993 and is on the faculty of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing. He earned an A.B. from Georgetown University.

Nick Devlin and Elliot Turner on the Business Model of Naked Wines

December 14, 2021 in Diary, Equities, Featured, Full Video, Ideas, Interviews, Invest Intelligently Podcast, Latticework, Latticework Online, Member Podcasts, Transcripts

Elliot Turner, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of RGA Investment Advisors, and Nick Devlin, Chief Executive Officer of Naked Wines (UK: WINE), joined members for a fireside chat at Latticework on December 16, 2021.

Elliot and Nick discussed the evolution and business model of Naked Wines and explored the topic, “Driving Customer Value via Scale Economies Shared”.

This conversation is available as an episode of “Gain Industry Insights” and “Discover Great Ideas”, member podcasts of MOI Global. (Learn how to access.)

Replay this virtual fireside chat:

printable transcript
audio recording

The following transcript has been edited for space and clarity.

John Mihaljevic: Today’s session is with Elliot Turner of RGA Investment Advisors and Nick Devlin of Naked Wines.

I’m sure many of you — if not most — know Elliot quite well. He has been so generous sharing his insights and wisdom with the MOI Global community over the years, and he is co-host with me on our podcast, This Week in Intelligent Investing.

What stands out to me about Elliot is the work he does on all of the companies he invests in. He is a long-term shareholder and tries to get to know those businesses like an operator would. That’s what sets him apart. That’s the reason that he has delivered so many great ideas to the MOI Global community in his past presentations. Elliot has a CFA as well as a law degree. He is one of the smartest guys I know in the business.

Briefly on RGA, the firm runs a long-term, low-turnover, growth-at-a-reasonable-price investment strategy, seeking out global opportunities.

I’ll now turn it over to Elliot to say a few words about Nick and get us started with this conversation.

Elliot Turner: Thank you so much, John, for that incredibly kind introduction. I am fortunate to learn from your wisdom week in, week out as my partner in crime, along with Phil, on This Week in Intelligent Investing. I’ve learned so much from the community you’ve put together, and I look forward to another opportunity for an in-person event with you. I was eager to get back to Switzerland this year — who knows what might happen. I’ve missed the personal presence as well, but I know that’ll happen again.

I’m delighted that you invited me to host this session today, and I’m grateful that Nick Devlin was willing to give us some of his time. I’ve gotten to know Nick over the past year and a half, and I’ve been enjoying our conversations. I’ve appreciated Nick’s perspective on business and have enjoyed getting to know how he thinks. He’s one of those long-term, sharp thinkers who breaks down a problem in a focused, neat way.

I’ve looked at many companies and have invested in many companies where lifetime value analysis is important. One of the things that excites me about Naked Wines is that their disclosures and the level of detail and the candor and quality of presentation is second to none. It’s a breath of fresh air. In an industry where there’s a lot of opacity, you have an honest, forward-thinking company that will tell you exactly how they see it. That’s due to Nick and the culture at Naked Wines itself.

I was lucky to have had the opportunity to meet Nick in person this past year, to get to know him and talk beyond business. He’s a great guy. He’s got a little competitive side to him which doesn’t come through as much on the conference calls, but it’s there, and it’s interesting to see. He’s a good athlete in his own right. I’m looking forward to cycling with him some time in the not-too-distant future.

With that, I want to share a couple of my favorite wines from Naked Wines because this is an incredibly fun company to diligence, and I’d encourage all of you to at least try. I always make sure to have the DRG reserve cab at home. I like the Matt Parish Trevino. The Jesse Katz Exposed is interesting and is one of the hidden gems in the wine industry — something that gives you incredible value and great bang for your buck for a special occasion. I’ll throw those out there. Nick, could you share a couple of your favorites and then tell us how you first got to Naked Wines?

Nick Devlin: You don’t have to twist my arm too much, Elliot, to talk about wine. It’s a pleasure to come on. In turn, thank you for your kind words. I’ve enjoyed our conversations a ton as well. It’s been a lot of fun getting to know each other — I learned something new about you today: I knew about your investing background, but I didn’t know you had a law degree. That explains some of the sharp, perceptive questioning that comes along.

Let’s talk about wine! I’m going to pick out a couple of favorites in the range for a couple of different reasons. One of the first wines that I fell in love with at Naked, and that brought home to me some of the things that we can do that are different, was another Matt Parish wine, but it’s a wine from El Dorado County which is in the foothills of California, so it’s a bit inland. It’s a reserve cab he makes there with a crew he calls the Pilot Hill Gang. They’re the set of growers out there. What he set out to do with that wine was answer the question, “What happens if you take Napa farming practices and you put them on to a good established cabernet vineyard in a lesser-known region?” The answer: you get a beautiful wine. He makes it exactly the same way he makes his reserve here at Napa Wines for us — the same kind of oak profile, same treatment, and same kind of vineyard. We get a beautiful product that tastes like a $50 wine that we can sell to our members at $20. I come back to that one time and time again.

Something from a little further afield is the wine I’ve been obsessed with this year — we’ve got this fantastic charismatic grower, a guy called Gerd Stepp in the fields in Germany. He’s got this professor kind of hairstyle. He spends a lot of his time out on the vineyards, and crafts these beautiful, fresh, vibrant wines. He’s brought a pinot noir rosé through to the market this year which I was drinking all summer long.

I could go on all day, and I know we’ve got a lot of topics to get through, so I’ll move on from wine and I’ll give you the short version of how I ended up in the wine industry, especially in this role at Naked.

It’s not an obvious career path when you’re growing up in the UK. I haven’t done anything as impressive as you, Elliot. I’ve got a history degree, so I needed to go and find a job. What do you do when you haven’t got any real training? You become a business consultant, so that’s what I did.

I worked for a strategy house called OC&C in London for seven and a half to eight years, mainly in their consumer and leisure practice. Towards the end of that time, I was working as an associate partner there and had a bit of good fortune. A partner I worked with closely sold a project to Phil Wrigley, who at the time was the chairman of a business called Majestic Wine. Anyone who knows the Naked story will probably recognize that name, but for those of you who don’t know, it was and still is the UK’s largest retail wine seller, a business with about 250 stores as well as an online presence.

The project was a strategic review which I led. This was 2014. The business was struggling because it had started to see systematic volume decline. It was a fascinating project for me because I’d always been passionate about the wine industry as a consumer. I won’t go too much into it because it’s not so relevant here, but for me, it solidified a desire I had. It was fascinating to work in the business. We ended up with a seven-week review and after handing over the pile of recommendations. I thought, “I’d love a chance to actually do some of this stuff.”

Long story short, our recommendations included a need for some new management at Majestic, but there was also a need for more digital capability in the business. Phil put those two things together and it corresponded at the time with the founder of Naked Wines, Rowan Gormley, looking for additional funding for the business. That was effectively the genesis of the tie-up between those two companies. That’s how I got to meet Rowan.

During the course of him closing out his due diligence, I had a chance to meet with him and James Crawford who is still in the business today. I thought they had a real vision for doing something different in the wine industry — not just disrupting the way wine is sold, although that’s part of it, but also they’ve got a passion and a vision for how to solve some of the challenges and issues faced by producers in the industry. That was what really resonated — that this was a business that was thinking about how it could solve problems for both consumers and producers, and doing something different. I was hooked pretty quickly. As a follow-up after the deal closed, I met Rowan for coffee. We had a half-hour chat and shook hands on a deal, and that’s how I started working at Naked Wines.

Turner: Rowan is an interesting character. He built an interesting culture, a mission-driven culture with a passion for testing and learning — very data-oriented. Could you talk a bit about that culture, and the fact that you’ve inherited this culture and you’ve had the opportunity to steer it a bit to leave your own imprint while maintaining the essence of it, now that Naked Wines has been given its own wings from Majestic. It’s kind of the reversal of that merger from the past.

Devlin: The great culture that we have in the business all stems from the fact that we have this authentic, clear, guiding mission. That’s why of the 11-strong team who moved with Rowan to found the business 13 and a half years ago, a decent number of those people are still working in the business today. They’re still as passionate about what we do as they were back then when it was a small group of people trying to prove to the world that this crazy idea could work. What most of us get out of bed in the morning for is thinking about how we can change the way the industry works, and how we can solve real problems on behalf of our producers — our winemakers.

When you do that and you think, “My job is to work out how to create the conditions for a talented independent producer to be able to build a viable, thriving, growing business of their own and produce world-class wine, and connect them directly to people who love drinking it, and ultimately get out of the way and break down all of these barriers that have been set up —most notably in the US, through the infrastructure of the three-tier system,” that’s something that energizes people.

That’s the root of why the culture is so strong, because everyone is here for the same reason and the same purpose. Even when times are tough or things are hard, that’s something you can latch back on to, and it’s incredibly easy to reconnect to. Any time you’re having a tough day, a conversation with one of our winemakers about the impact the business has had, or even simply opening a bottle of wine, can put things into perspective.

That’s the root of the great culture. I heard Rowan talk about this once. He said, “I never really thought about culture at all. I just thought about building a group of people who are passionate about a shared goal, and a lot of what followed, followed really naturally.” That’s the first thing.

There are some hallmarks and some elements that Rowan bequeathed to the business — whether it was by design or by force of personality and nature — that I found attractive when I joined, and am keen to preserve. One of these is that it’s a pretty flat culture, and we strongly believe in having a marketplace of ideas. There’s no monopoly of great ideas. It doesn’t follow the org chart or follow seniority, but what you do need to be rigorous about is having a culture where everyone recognizes that there’s a right way to choose between a ton of ideas. You need to work out how to put ideas to the test — how to create an agile test-and-learn culture. You need to build an organization where there’s depth of literacy in data, where people are able to have an engaged debate and discussion about results and findings, where the best ideas win and are protected.

That’s been a hallmark in lots of different elements of Naked. It’s how we’ve been able to punch a bit above our weight, and why we’ve been able to continuously grow the business. It’s something that I loved when I joined. It was so different from the environment I’d found during a lot of my consulting career, in FTSE 100 environments. It was something that stood out for me at Naked. I felt at home here. It’s something that a lot of us in the business are particularly passionate about.

Ultimately, it’s a group of people that are fun to come to work with every day because we’ve got the same goal in mind.

Turner: Naked started as a UK business, and one of the big changes since you’ve taken over is that the US has emerged as one of the largest growth opportunities. There are some distinct differences in the markets, and there are opportunities for the culture to capture and create even more value. What are the differences between the two countries, and what does that mean for your business strategy and your opportunities?

Devlin: Although I’m a Brit, I’ve spent most of my Naked career working in the US. These days I live in Napa, California. Fast forwarding my personal story, I moved down in 2017 and ran our US division from 2017 to the end of 2020 when Rowan retired and I took over as group chief executive.

It is natural to reflect on what’s different, but let me start with what’s similar. The core challenge in our business units in Australia, the UK, and the US, is pretty similar. It’s hard in the wine industry for a talented independent producer who’s making great-quality wine to turn that skill into a viable business that they can invest in and grow, and to share that product to consumers. The reasons, though, are slightly different depending on the country. In the UK and Australia, it’s around the extreme consolidation of buying power at the retailer end — whether it’s Coles and Woolies in Australia, or the big four supermarkets in the UK. They have extreme power and tend towards a commoditization of the wine category.

In Australia, there’s a focus on private-label strategy — big-production wineries, big vats of wine, create it and slap a label on it. In the UK, it’s extreme aggressive negotiation. In the US, that reaches its zenith. You have that same challenge — 70 percent of wine sold to American consumers comes from the top five producers — but you add a second challenge, which is this gatekeeper role that the big distributors play, with wine being sold through a regulated three-tier system. Those big distributors have no commercial incentive and no interest in nourishing and supporting new producers, or giving them access to market. Ultimately, they don’t want to distribute new products to help you grow a brand, so you have this situation where it’s incredibly hard for anyone to scale anything new.

That’s a common challenge, and that’s why our businesses are a lot alike, but one of the things that is different when you look at the US opportunity, is the consequence for consumers of that heavily regulated market environment. Americans pay more on average for a bottle of wine than people in pretty much any other country on Earth. I’d love to be able to say that it’s because all of the wine is better than anything that’s being drunk anywhere else, but sadly, that’s not true. Instead, it’s a function of this three-tier system. When you buy that bottle of wine at a liquor store, you’re effectively the third buyer. A winery has made it. They’ve often spent a lot of money marketing it. A distributor has extracted a markup along the way, and then the retailer sells it to you again.

When we moved to America, we found this market which was extraordinarily ripe for what we offer: a combination of using our capital together with finance drawn from our pool of nearly a million members to support independent producers and help them produce great wine at lower costs, but then using our direct-to-consumer model to strip out that intermediary role and reduce the number of margins being taken out, so that we can offer superior value for the consumer. That is ultimately why the proposition is probably the most differentiated in the US market, and why the amount of excess value we have to share — and we can talk about how we share it with the consumer — is at its greatest there.

The second thing that’s interesting is when you enter a new market, you do have a chance to almost make a bit of a fresh start, or to reconsider and reappraise how you think about yourselves. That’s one of the areas in which we have evolved the culture a little. In the UK, when we first started out, it was a team of 11 people who left another wine business — a company called Virgin Wines — and were out to prove that they could do this better. It was a real backs-against-the-wall situation. The business was founded in 2008 during a massive downturn. Everyone said it’s a terrible time to start a business, so it came with this underdog mentality of “we’re going to prove you wrong; we’re going to show you, we can do this.”

One of the things that I’ve looked to build over time is moving away from this underdog mentality. We’re the largest direct-to-consumer wine business on Earth. As you start to be a leader in a category, it’s important to think about how you can act and behave to grow the category, to grow consumer understanding, and focus more on that positive differentiation versus having that scrappy underdog spirit where you’re up for a fight with everyone. That’s probably one of the things that’s evolved a bit over the years.

Turner: Naked combines some of the best traits of marketplace and subscription businesses, and one of the misperceptions or challenges I encounter with some investors — and I think you alluded to it a little — is that people are not sure whether to think of you as a marketplace or as a wine club or as a subscription. How does the consumer relationship work and what is it like? One of the things I found most interesting is, if you go on a Zoom where Matt Parish is talking to some customers who view him as their favorite winemaker, you can see that it’s a community. It’s something more than just a wine club or more than just a subscription, and the way the customer pays you is different from the way someone would in a club, for example. The amount of reviews and engagement you get is different. Maybe talk about that element — what the consumer relationship is like and building a community as well.

Devlin: I’ll start with some of the marketplace-type elements of the model. They stem from the origin of Naked and the fact that we were focused on solving problems for both consumer and winemaker. We had this epiphany where we realized that if you can bring consumer and winemaker together, they can help each other solve those problems. Practically, the way Naked membership works is that our members (we have nearly a million members) are paying a monthly deposit into their account. We call it an angel account — we call our members angels. That gives us a pool of capital — it’s somewhere in the region of 300 million dollars a year being paid in — and that gives us an ability to go and invest in and support different winemakers to produce wine.

The consumers are therefore solving the winemakers’ problem of access to capital. We’re giving a guaranteed commitment on that wine to winemakers, and that’s solving a few problems for them. The guarantee in the volume is improving their production efficiencies, reducing their cost per bottle of production, so it’s stopping them being subscale producers making wine for too much money per bottle.

The guarantee of having an audience of members to sell back to means they don’t have to spend a lot of money on marketing, sales teams, and distribution teams, which again, reduces their costs, and it means they’ve got access to distribution — that challenge I talked about earlier where distributors normally don’t want to help support a new brand or help it gain traction in the market. You solve two problems for winemakers by pairing them up with consumers.

On the consumer side, there are a couple of common problems in the wine industry. Everyone’s been in that situation where you go into a bottle shop or a supermarket, and you’re faced with a wall of liquor. How do you choose what to buy? All you know is a label or something like that. We believe that a product is much more enjoyable when you’ve got a connection to the person who made it. We talk about the emotional differentiation in the business. We want to give you that opportunity to connect directly — whether that’s messaging Matt Parish on his wall and giving him feedback and having a live conversation with him about the product you drank, or joining him for a tasting call, or joining one of our in-person events that we run in more normal times. All of that deepens the relationship. It gives you access to a bit of that thing you’ve probably all experienced when you’ve visited a winery, or you’ve gone somewhere and you’ve tried something and you bring it home. Every time you taste it, it reminds you of that experience. We’ve found a model that, at scale, can give consumers that feeling. That helps build a sense of loyalty.

Obviously for us, all of this is not philanthropic. It’s intentional, because when consumers become intensely loyal to these winemakers, and their products are available exclusively at Naked, you’ve got an ecosystem which is engineered and designed to create these strong bonds between consumer and winemaker, but that also creates a business which is going to have high retention — a sticky, loyal consumer base. That’s one of the ways in which we think about that.

What are the differences from a pure marketplace? If you look at a business like Vivino which is the archetype of taking that to an extreme — a pure marketplace in the wine space — it still ends up being confusing for consumers. It doesn’t solve the problem of extreme choice for consumers.

If you think about a fashion business, the most successful fashion businesses don’t offer you, say, 10,000 pairs of jeans. They’ve got a distinctive edit, and they’re going to bring you a style and an identity. In the same way, our role at Naked is to scour the world and to bring you two or three producers who epitomize the best of, for example, the Russian River, as opposed to giving you 150 to choose from and expecting you to do the hard work.

There’s also a difference when it comes to the economics. Vivino is acting as a marketplace selling on behalf of retailers in the US. It’s trying to take a fourth margin out of what’s already an incredibly intense set of margins before the customer gets the product. We don’t do that. We take on the production role, we take on that funding risk, we support winemakers to produce, and we guarantee an outlet, so we get to this environment where you get a great result for the consumer — an attractive price and better wine for your money — but we’ve also got an attractive margin business. You can look at the disclosure. Groupwide, we’re running the business at just under 30-percent contribution margin on sales to our members. Actually, it’s higher than that — contribution margins are in the mid-to-high 30s in our US division, which is our fastest-growing division. You get some of the economics which look much more like traditional retail, but at good retention rates. That’s how you can think about some of the different trade-offs. We feel that we’ve arrived at a nice combination, certainly for the wine category, of some of the best elements of both.

Turner: You reference no longer being this underdog. With COVID, you’ve taken a level up in scale. Early on, you recognized this was potentially transformational for your business, and you created a $5 million COVID relief fund for winemakers. From my seat, it looks like winemakers have a different perspective of Naked Wines. In the beginning, maybe you had to recruit winemakers, and now people recognize you and want to come to you. How has that changed the business, having this new scale? Also, why do winemakers now find your offer appealing — why do they now want to be there?

Devlin: The truth is that 13 years ago, Rowan had this amazing idea about how we could solve problems for winemakers and consumers. Convincing consumers was relatively easy from day one, but winemakers were a little harder to convince. I joke that the wine industry is not the classic “oldest profession”, but it’s right up there. It’s not always a profession that adapts or moves that quickly.

What we found in our early days was that we had to court producers for a long period of time, and build relationships to convince the producer to come on board. People were concerned about doing something that was a little different. People were wondering how other producers they respected would think about them selling their wine in a different way, and what it would be like creating a brand purely online.

Over time, we’ve broken down a lot of that the best way you can, which is with a track record of consistently doing what you say you’re going to do, and building relationships one at a time. A lot of the winemakers who’ve joined us have been recommended by someone else who says, “This is amazing! They funded and supported my project. I got to make what I wanted. I’m building my own brand, and I’m actually making more money than I ever have before.” Suddenly, you start to get more people coming to you.

You’re absolutely right to identify a step change over the course of the last two years, and it comes down to two things: one that’s purely numbers, and one that’s more sentiment.

The thing that’s pure numbers is that the business is double the scale it was 24 months ago. In terms of working with new winemakers, there’s a certain amount of commitment we’re willing to make to a new producer, and we think about that in terms of purchasing risk. For the same level of risk with a new producer, I can now buy twice as much wine as I could two years ago, and about four times as much wine as I could five years ago, because the risk to us, mathematically, is the percentage of our total buy that we’re giving to a new, unknown producer. That means from the get-go, we’re able to put together a compelling commercial offer for new winemakers, and that’s really stepped up.

On the emotional side, there’s been a re-evaluation for producers around what the future is going to look like. The last 18 months have shown producers that they’ve got to have a direct-to-consumer strategy, but they can’t be reliant on physical premises to be all of their D2C strategy. They know they need to now have an online component. It’s also taught people who’ve tried to do some of this themselves that it’s not easy. It’s tough, which means people are much more receptive to the idea of doing something differently, especially when it’s with a business like Naked.

You talked about our COVID relief fund. We worked with 45 different winemakers from outside of our stable of producers and gave them help when they really needed it. That’s how we first met Jesse Katz, and that led to us co-creating the Exposed brand with Jesse. That’s a testament to the type of producer who’s now interested in working with Naked. I don’t know if you saw, but he recently set the world record for a bottle of wine – the Calling. It’s a project he created exclusively for auction, and it went for $1 million. He’s made the most expensive bottle of wine on Earth. He’s also making wine exclusively for angels, so we’re proud of that.

Turner: That’s an interesting point, because the typical perception had been that you should come to Naked to get cheap quality, but now it’s a platform where you have affordable luxury. You’ve made a product with a lot of pretension accessible to a much larger customer base. How has the perception evolved — both from the customer and the winemaker side — and what does that mean in terms of your strategy as a business?

Devlin: The first thing is that there’s something real that underpins that. In all parts of our business, we’re committed to a real continuous improvement culture. We talk a lot externally about our marketing approach, but it also applies when we think about the quality of wine we’re producing and the range and how we’ve evolved that.

One of the things that gives me the most pride is if I think back to the range we had when I first got involved with the business five and a half years ago, and the range we’ve got today, we’ve made massive steps forward. That’s because we’ve been working with good people, we’ve given them the funding and the support they need, we’ve extended the length of contracts we’ve entered into so that producers can keep dialing up the quality. That’s the first thing that’s there: the real underpinning of the quality of wine we’ve made has never been stronger.

We’re passionate about data. We spend a lot of time validating that. We look at things like our wines’ Vivino ratings against the market. You can see that quality premium, but as you say, that hasn’t always been well understood. One of the things we focused on a lot last year and something we’re still working on — I’m not in any way pretending that this is the finished article— is better communicating that quality to customers. You describe it beautifully: helping people understand that Naked Wines isn’t a business that gives you access to cheap wine. There’s already a world-class business that does cheap wine in the US. It’s called Ernest Gallo. It’s a fantastic, well-run business that produces cheap wine effectively. We don’t want to be in that game.

What we are able to do is give you access to the type of quality wine that you get from small wineries in regions like the Barossa in Australia or Napa or anywhere else you’d care to name. We can do that. We can give you access to that quality at a much lower price, and we do that because the way we work with producers lets them produce the same wine at lower cost, and the way we bring that to market strips out frictional cost. Those two things mean that we can sustainably — and with good economics for ourselves — give you access to better prices.

Shaking off the underdog spirit is also helping us communicate that. It lets us be a little more comfortable doing things like entering traditional wine awards. We enter our wines into things like the Decanter World Wine Awards, and they win tons of medals. It’s not hard but, culturally for us, there was a bit of a feeling of “that’s for the traditional wine industry, we won’t do that.” We’ve got to a point where we’re comfortable saying, “We want to showcase our producers and provide them a platform to show the great work they’re doing, and help consumers understand that what you’re getting here is a better way to buy great-quality wine, not just a solution for something that’s cheap.”

The other thing that’s interesting there is a question I often get asked, or maybe a misperception that the investment community sometimes has around “what do we need to do in terms of price point?” and “why are we talking about premiumization or this kind of idea of quality perception?”

It’s all about the opportunity we have to drive awareness and consideration. If we can get more people to understand that we’ve got a unique model that lets you produce quality for less, that’s much more valuable than just a discount. Dollar Shave Club became popular because they convinced people that it didn’t cost a lot to make a great-quality razor, which is a much more compelling argument than giving someone a cheap razor. No one wants to hack their face off with a cheap blade.

The flip side of that is the beauty of our business, and how we designed it from day one. Our margins selling wine for $10, $12, or $13 are brilliant. We don’t have any requirement to increase our average price per bottle for economic sake, but we think there’s a great opportunity if we can convince people of the quality of wine that we’re able to produce.

Turner: You often share in your investor communications this great slide that shows the customer value prop, using Vivino as the arbiter of quality, of the $10 to $15 range and upwards, where you have much more consumer surplus created at the higher levels of price.

One of the things that I’ve been reflecting on that I find interesting is you have two distinct opportunities insofar as price is concerned: one is taking your customers on a journey — introducing them to your wines and walking them up price points as they get more interested in the wine and more engaged in the community; and the other is onboarding new customers from the start at higher price points. There are two vectors that you could explore there. Your costs to ship a case of wine are fixed, so when you do sell at higher price points, you have more contribution, so you get to think about how to allocate that surplus between customers. There’s a lot in there, but it comes together as something cohesive. Could you discuss that a bit?

Devlin: One thing we already know, and we’ve proven to ourselves, is there’s plenty of demand within our existing customer base to explore and try more premium products. Just taking the US as an example, over half our members have spent more than $20 a bottle on something in the course of the last year which is a big increase from where it would have been a few years ago. We sold something like a quarter of a million dollars of Jesse Katz’s debut wine on launch day, and around $600,000 of the launch project this year of Daniel Baron, called Francophone. Baron is an amazing character and a great guy. He was the head winemaker for over a decade at Silver Oak in the Napa Valley. He also made wine at Dominus, one of the few places in Napa that’s had multiple 100-point Parker scores, so he has an extreme pedigree. You can see that there’s appetite to stretch up into more premium products. When we produce a world-class winemaker from an iconic region selling wines for $30, $40, $50 a bottle, there’s demand. The first opportunity is proven and we’re taking advantage of it.

The second opportunity is absolutely there. It probably means that, of our $20-billion TAM in the US, we know about $3 billion of that is people buying wine at over $30 a bottle. I think we can grow that section faster now that we’re building out this repertoire and range of more premium product, and as we become more effective at conveying that understanding.

The most interesting part of the question is how do we think, philosophically, about this question of a potentially greater surplus. It’s true that the more and more expensive wine gets, the more and more of what you’re paying is going on stuff that isn’t grapes and oak and winemaker talent. It’s going on either the marketing budget for a big producer in Napa or just the mathematical effect of a moderately high-cost price being ratcheted up through three sets of margin due to the three-tier system. We’re not interested in maximizing the contribution margin of Naked Wines for the sake of having a high margin. Ultimately, we want that margin to be the lowest it can be to enable us to produce high lifetime value, sufficiently valuable customers that we can invest aggressively in to grow the business, and continue delivering great returns on the cohorts we acquire.

As the business gets stronger and things improve, whether we scale the business and reduce our variable costs or we scale the business and reduce our producers’ costs, our default instinct is to share that with members. The same is true of pricing. We have pretty moderate accretion of contribution margin as we go into more luxury product. We see, instead, the greatest opportunity in getting customers drinking wines of a quality they wouldn’t be able to try elsewhere, and using that to drive loyalty. That’s always our default bias.

If you think about a subscription business, there are ultimately two paths to a long-term, high-EBIT margin. One path is where you make your contribution margin higher and higher, and that is what drives bottom-line margin at maturity. The other approach is to hold steady the contribution margin and to reinvest and give more value back to consumers, which drives higher and higher retention rates, which reduces your cost to replenish. You have fewer customers leaving. It costs less at maturity to replace them. That way, you also get to a business that sees higher and higher long-term profitability. Philosophically, the second type of business is much harder to compete with than the first one.

Turner: You mentioned TAM. Last year at this time, I presented Naked Wines at Manual of Ideas’ Best Ideas Conference. I’ve heard a lot of feedback from investors, and one of the things that some people tell me is, “I really like the business. I get the value prop. I think everything makes sense, but I’m just not sure this could get really big.” Meanwhile, I think you have a pretty conservative assessment of what your TAM is. How do you see your market opportunity? How big do you think your TAM is, and how big do you think you could get within that addressable market?

Devlin: I’ve seen other people in the category claim that their TAM is three or four times the size that we claim on ours. I agree with you. We don’t like to overpromise things.

The way we think about our TAM is like this: within the zone of wine that’s consumed at home in our addressable markets, we extract everything below the minimum price we’re interested in selling at, because we’re not in the cheap wine business, and we also extract anything that’s sold to people who aren’t regular multiple-times-a-month wine consumers, because we don’t think they’re good subscription buyers.

Taking the US example, we cut out half of the $40-billion wine market that’s sold for our home consumption to get to our $20-billion TAM. We sell spirits in the UK and Australia, but we don’t put any of the spirits market into our addressable market. Midterm, that could definitely be addressable. I’m with you — I think it’s quite conservative.

There are maybe a couple of things that people might misperceive when they think about this business as somehow niche, and when they question that even though there’s a $25-billion TAM, whether you can build a multibillion-dollar-revenue business here. Some people have characterized the online wine D2C market as a bit of this digital-niche, early-adopter market, and wonder therefore, whether it’s going to scale or generalize to the mainstream of wine consumption.

That’s why, ultimately, we designed a business to find a way to enable the best wine producers to make the best wines at the price points that most people want to pay, which is around $10 to $30 a bottle. We’ve gotten a real advantage there that’s rooted in better wine for your money. That’s very different from a business like Wink which is a classic D2C marketing story. “How can I produce a beautiful website, a little bit of digital marketing, an app, and get a bunch of people to engage with it and play around with it?”

Our focus is different: how we can create a business model that enables us to produce a differentiated product? It means that our sweet spot of consumer that we tend to do best with looks like the core or the heart of the American wine-drinking market. They’re people who’ve got kids at home or are post kids at home, they’re regular wine drinkers, they love wine but don’t feel super confident about it. It’s a real “every man” or “every woman” portrait of the American wine drinker. The types of customer we do best with are segments of the market that have moved online a little later. A lot of these consumers who will be perfect for Naked are still buying wine in a very traditional way. There’s absolutely potential for this to be a 10-percent-share business within that TAM. What does that get you to? A couple of billion? That’s the kind of target or ambition we have internally for this business because we don’t see it as a niche opportunity.

You can already point to some early signs. You can look at the fact that we’ve got a higher level of market penetration in the UK where we’ve been trading longer, or you look at some states in the US where regulation has opened them up more recently. It’s been a bit of a Ground Zero start somewhere like Pennsylvania where we see market share in double digits, which shows that we’ve got an ability to do that. I certainly see it as an opportunity to build something at real scale.

The one thing though that we’re always careful about is not promising exactly when. Promising that you can deliver a certain revenue number in a certain time horizon goes against something else that we’ve always believed in, which is you’ve got to have the discipline and willingness to say, “We’re going to grow the business at the right rate.” That means we’re confident that every time we invest money and we acquire customers, we’re generating real value for shareholders. Maybe that’s why we have growth at a reasonable price. That’s why we’ve always got on well, Elliot.

Turner: Exactly right! Shall we move on to the audience Q&A?

Mihaljevic: A question that stood out was about competition, if you could talk about that a bit more, including from Virgin Wines and other players? How do you see the market longer-term in terms of how many companies can be successful at scale at the same time?

Devlin: I’m happy to talk about that current competitive piece. I’ll start with the US market because it’s obviously our biggest growth opportunity and it’s our largest division these days. It’s still a pretty nascent market in terms of the movement of demand online. Our best estimate is that, as of today, and post a big COVID increase, still only around 7 percent of the spend in the wine category in the US is online. Given that it’s a category where it’s easy for you to gain information online — you can read product reviews, and understand what to buy — and that it’s a big, bulky, heavy category that’s suitable for delivery, and that lots of people live in areas that aren’t well served by a specialist wine retailer, I think it is massively underpenetrated. If you take an end-of-the-decade view, whether that number is 20 percent or 30 percent, I think we’d all be confident that it’s going to head in only one direction.

With that in mind, there are going to be multiple different types of winners and winning models emerging online. You can maybe align some of the different participants against that. You see innovation and money going to certain businesses — Uber looking at Drizly, and things like that. There’s definitely one strand here which is the convenience mission. “I want to buy a bottle of wine for tonight online.” That’s not our market, so we don’t see those businesses as competitors. That is moving your local 7-Eleven spend and giving an alternative to that.

At the other end of the market, you’ve got some businesses that are looking to serve a sophisticated wine consumer who’s got a fixed idea about what they want to buy. Wine.com and Vivino are interesting companies that are competing for a customer who feels like they’ve got a high level of confidence and wine knowledge, and those companies are ultimately looking to play the long assortment game where they have a 20,000 SKU range: “Any wine you’ve ever wanted, we can give that wine to you.”

What’s interesting about those businesses is that their economics mean they work on a pretty small portion of the TAM you’ve got in the US. If you think about wine.com, it’s a 30-percent-gross-margin retail model with all the same distribution and fulfillment costs we’ve got. If you think about Vivino, it’s operating as a fourth margin at the end of the three-tier system. It works well on a trophy bottle of wine that there’s excess stock of that you can discount by 50 percent, but it’s still $50. There’s enough absolute contribution for everyone to get paid, but it struggles when it comes to monetizing demand from the everyday American wine consumer. I’m most interested in how the wines are stacking up against Costco and Trader Joe’s, and how we’re doing against the chain liquor stores and the wine ranges at a grocery, because the reality is, for over half the customers that move online to Naked and become great members, we’re the first time they’ve been buying their wine online.

That gives you a little bit of an overview of the US scene in particular.

I want to talk about Virgin Wines because everyone always asks about Virgin Wines. Compared to some of the people who’ve been in the business longer, I can be a little more dispassionate. It’s a solid, tidily run business in one of our divisions. It’s under a fifth of the total size in terms of customer base and revenue that Naked is. It’s been nicely run by its management team, and they’ve had a successful crystallization of some value and gone into the public market. It’s not been run for growth. If you look at that business over a course of a 10-year run pre-COVID, I think it netted about 2-percent compound growth, so roughly offsetting inflation — probably below inflation in terms of wine bottle prices, so probably an ex-volume growth business.

Ultimately, that reflects the fact that it hasn’t got as compelling a customer proposition. You don’t see it as a business that’s got the same level of ambition to change things for consumers. It’s also different in that it doesn’t have the same desire or willingness to build long-term relationships with producers.

You can go and have a look at the Virgin Wines IPO deck. There’s a slide in there — with apologies to our good friends across the other side in Norwich — that essentially says that the magic recipe for a great bottle of wine is one quarter great wine and three quarters cheap wine, which makes great high-margin wine. That encapsulates everything philosophically that’s different about the businesses. We believe in building long-term partnership with world-class winemakers. We think that’s how you build brands that have got real consumer appeal and authenticity behind them, which is a little different.

Turner: I see a question that you’ll recognize as something you and I have had a lot of the conversations about, but I’ll preface the question by saying that two of the foremost challenges and opportunities that I’ve seen for the business, through doing some surveys and seeing what’s happened over the last couple years, is that not many people know that you can buy wine online, and not many people know that Naked Wines exists. The unaided awareness isn’t strong. The question is: “Nick has spoken recently about launching more brand advertising for Naked Wines. How do you aim to be eye-catching and different in this marketing approach?”

Devlin: That’s a great question. We absolutely see the opportunity to tell our story as a big part of the plan over the course of the coming years. Like most D2C companies, we come from this heritage and this place of comfort where you could grow to a certain scale with an almost exclusive performance marketing mix — whole sets of channels where you know and can attribute the value all the way through, you understand the metrics, you set a target rate of return and, if you’re good operators, you hit that consistently and you scale the business. That’s what we’ve done. We’ve got a great heritage there, but we’ve got an opportunity — a breakout opportunity — to start to tell more of the story and help build the category and change consumer perception. To do that, we need, one, to tell the world our story and help people understand how and why we’re different — that we’re not just another online wine club or online wine business, but we have a model which changes the rules of the game. It changes the core economics for winemakers and therefore does create this consumer surplus that we can share back.

Then, two, we need to find a way to bring it to life and make it memorable. That’s both the biggest excitement and the thing that, frankly, is the most scary about moving into a brand advertising world. The difference in terms of impact between doing it well and doing it mediocrely is enormous. There are some things we know from our early creative testing in Australia, though, that give us some good guardrails and, in working with our creative partners, we’ve been clear on. One of them is in order to be successful, we’ve got to make sure we never forget that ultimately, we’re not really the hero of our business. The producers we work with are the talent here. They’re the stars.

Certainly in Australia, we had some good early success in terms of changing perceptions of the business and building greater awareness — both aided and unaided — and better comprehension, which we achieved through content that’s not been excessively high production but has had an unrelenting focus on our winemakers. It’s put them front and center. That’s one of the things that we know and one of the things that you can look out for.

The second thing is, even as you move into a brand challenge, it’s important you don’t forget about the things that you’re good at as a business. One of the things we do pride ourselves on is our test-and-learn culture. The way in which we’re trying to build our brand advertising strategy reflects that. Sure, it’s not the same as being able to run 20 Facebook ad sets and see the results the next day, but you can still break a problem down. For us, we broke it down into saying, “Step one, can we spend money through brand advertising and a set of different channels and change people’s minds on a cost-effective basis?”

That’s where we’ve got to so far in Australia. We have quarterly measurements through an extensive brand tracker. We’ve been able to see that in regions where we spent money above the line — in particular, on TV — we have changed perceptions. We understand what it cost us to do that. We can see that the perceptions have moved more than they have in regions where we haven’t advertised, so we understand that it’s due to the action we’ve taken.

We can move on to a step two which talks about “how do we work out the right amount of impact and impression, and how does that overall spend feed through into the performance effectiveness of other channels we have?” We can still break down a problem and we can still apply our strengths to it. That’s what we look forward to doing over the course of the next 12 months or so.

I just had a quick look at the Q&A, and there are quite a lot of people asking questions about inflation and the inflationary environment. I wonder if we should touch on that?

Turner: Absolutely. That was the one I had queued up next: “Is inflation impacting Naked Wines’ operations, and do you expect inflation to impact operations next year?”

Devlin: This is an important one. It sits in combination with what we talked earlier about, the fact that philosophically, we’re not a company that looks to create the highest-margin business for the sake of it. Our default is to share value back with our consumers, but the flip side of that is we do have an enormous amount of surplus available. A different way of expressing that is I’m confident the business has a degree of pricing power. That means we’re set up pretty well for an inflationary environment.

It’s also, to an extent, worth thinking about the different ways in which different types of inflation will affect us and affect some of our competitors.

A lot of the stuff that we’re seeing at the moment is inflation in terms of labor rates, distribution, and transport costs. Our direct-to-consumer model, being deeply involved in production and then selling direct to consumer, physically touches our product less than a traditional three-tier model. That’s one way in which the business is quite well positioned in that kind of inflation.

The second one is if you think about the impact on shelf price of a given level of inflation that everyone will have to bear on things like glass bottles which are becoming much more expensive, or international transport for imported wines. Because our model is direct — one margin — if everyone chooses to hold percentage margin, you’re going to see much less movement on the price of a wine at Naked than you are on a wine that’s been brought into the US, that’s been sold through into distribution, into retail, and then sold on to the consumer.

Wine Spectator has been looking into this recently. I think they’ve talked about expecting to see $1 to $3 per bottle on wine under $20, and $5-plus above that. For our model, we’d be able to comfortably maintain margin with the inflationary pressure we’re seeing with much lower price rises than that. From a game theory perspective, Naked is well set up for an inflationary environment. It’s not anything anyone looks forward to, but I fully anticipate we’ll come out the other side and I don’t expect to see any midterm margin erosion. Probably what you’ll see when we next go and cut that Vivino chart, we’ll actually be seeing a broadening of the differentiation and the value we’re able to offer to consumers.

Turner: This is an interesting question: “Are partnerships a possible growth engine in the future? What sort of partner would be ideal?”

Devlin: It’s worth saying that partnerships exist at lots of different levels. One of the differentiating factors for Naked is that we actually built this business off a lot of B2B2C partnership activity. We partner with over 600 different — mainly retailing —organizations in the UK, the US, and Australia and we use that to put offers into third-party packages. You might have received a Nordstrom Rack or something like that box with a Naked Wines voucher in, but I think the question here is getting to whether there are opportunities to deepen some of those partnerships, and how we might extend them.

There absolutely is that opportunity. I can mention one that we’re just putting into market at the moment. I don’t know how old anyone on the call is, so I don’t know if anyone will be likely to get the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) magazine delivered to them — and I won’t judge if you admit to it in the comments — but we’re on page two of the December edition this year. That’s a new partnership we’ve created where we’ve given an exclusive offer to members of that organization. There are over 40 million American households with at least one person subscribed to AARP. A ton of them are wine lovers, and they’re looking for that affordable luxury.

They’re typically spending $10 to $25 a bottle, looking for a high-quality product, and they have a high interest in and affinity for supporting American producers. That’s exactly the kind of partnership opportunity that makes a lot of sense where you’ve got affinity and overlap in terms of audience, and you’ve got an organization that helps boost and build the credibility of your brand. Whenever you’re trying to grow awareness and strengthen perception of a brand that’s new and innovative, partnering with someone that can help you with that dimension is helpful.

There are definitely opportunities for us to continue to build through that type of partnership. Equally, there are opportunities to find other types of partners that share our values or want collectively to help work on some of the things we’re passionate about — whether that’ll also be looking at giving back to producers, or people who are interested in working with us to help make the wine industry more sustainable, or anything like that. You can expect to see more of that type of activity.

Turner: The next question from our audience: “Why doesn’t Naked Wines have more natural organic lines?” From my side, I have noticed a few more, but I’m curious to hear about that — and maybe this says something about different tastes in different age groups, and different preferences. Maybe you could also touch on your Wine Genie offering, which was something I wanted to ask about that hadn’t come up.

Devlin: Let’s start with natural and organic. We do produce a lot of wine from organically farmed fruit. I don’t know if the question is from someone in the US, but if it is, the US is an interesting market for organic wine, and there’s an extremely strict threshold applied in the US as to what you can label as an organic wine.

To get a bit geeky, it’s not enough to just grow it from organically farmed fruit which is what most people would associate with organics. You also need to bottle it at a location that’s certified organic, and very few bottling lines are. The criteria require you to use no sulfur at all in the production of the wine. Compare this to, say, the organic criteria in France, where a small amount of sulfur will be allowed and is normal. Sulfur is essentially just a preservative to give stability to the wine to make sure you’ve got a product that’s going to behave as a consumer would expect over its normal lifetime. That’s why we don’t tend to bottle much under a pure organic label in the US.

Ultimately, we don’t think it’s in the consumer’s best interests. You tend to get far too much bottle-to-bottle variation, and you end up with a product where you can’t guarantee with confidence that it’s going to stay stable if people want to enjoy it over the course of one or two years. We have lots of organic fruit, but it doesn’t all turn up in organically labeled wine.

The natural wine question is another interesting one. The natural wine movement is stylistically similar. There’s probably an opportunity for us to have a couple more producers on the platform that really embrace that movement, but again, it’s a movement sometimes that’s more about making wines to stand out or make an impression for their own sake. They’re popular with the east- and west-coast sommelier community.

When you look at the consumer data, and you have people sample the wines, it’s not a style of wine that as many wine drinkers genuinely love. We’re ultimately a company that always believes in creating a great product that is going to be enjoyed. That’s always going to be a filter that we apply to the range, so it’s unlikely to become our heartland anytime soon.

You were going to ask me about Wine Genie? What specifically did you want to ask?

Turner: It’s two parts. You have this accelerating growth of your data asset. You have interesting data, with a lot of reviews from your community, and you’re able to put together something with that. That’s part one. Part two is, there’s a wheelhouse customer that you’ve historically been associated with, but I think that customer is different from what the Wine Genie customer base would be. Talk about how you’re taking advantage of this data asset and how it gives you opportunities to target a different kind of customer from the customer that is historically associated with Naked Wines.

Devlin: You’re right about the data. We’ve collected somewhere in the region of 28 to 29 million explicit customer ratings, and outside of that, we have a far wider dataset of implicit behavior, where we can look at a set of purchase behaviors and history and interactions to help us understand which other wines a certain customer would probably like. That’s the foundation — the IP, the assets — that we’ve used to help create the Wine Genie product, which effectively uses algorithms to recommend your next wines, given a broad set of parameters that you’re in control of. Think of it like this: you slide the dials and we work out exactly what wine you get in the time horizon you’ve asked for.

In terms of where that fits into our overall business and Naked’s opportunity — and excuse the big generalization, but the data bears this out in general — there’s a big split in terms of wine consumption preference along the dimension of age. By and large, a lot of consumers who are a bit older than me really love to have control. A lot of people will tell us in focus groups, “I know the kind of things I like. I don’t want to be surprised. I like to make my own choices.” We consciously built a wine club that was different, where you could be in charge of when you bought and what you bought, and you could pick every bottle. That’s traditionally been the heartland of Naked. About 70 percent of our sales to members come with customers picking every single bottle.

By contrast, there’s a younger generation who have an expectation, in lots of elements of their consumption, that businesses are going to help them understand what they should be consuming. Whether that’s someone who’s grown up discovering new artists by listening to Spotify or is used to the idea of someone selecting new fashion brands and things to try and sending those to them. We created Wine Genie with that type of customer in mind — someone who says, “I don’t know that much about wine, but I love what you’re doing. I like the idea of discovering more. You’ve got a bunch of the world’s best winemakers. Let’s go. Tell me what I should be trying.”

That means we’ve got an exciting opportunity. Those two types of customers can coexist well. They’re not in any way in competition with each other. As long as we can work out which customer to put which proposition in front of, we can use that to improve our overall cohort economics. You were very kind at the beginning of this chat about our disclosure, and a key performance metric that we disclose is what we call payback. It’s the ratio of five-year lifetime value to the cost of acquisition for any given cohort. If you subsegment that, you see that we’re making higher returns from customers aged 40 and up than the overall average. For customers in their late 20s and early 30s, we’re making lower returns. If we can find a proposition that better meets those differentiated needs and raises that up, that will drive overall cohort returns, and it’s going to give us the ability to reinvest and drive faster growth in the business.

That’s an exciting opportunity. The first year of live testing of that product went well, which was great to see. It gives me a lot of confidence that we can scale that up and use it to drive improved returns over the next couple of years.

Turner: That’s a good note to end on. You’ve been incredibly generous with your time. Thank you, Nick.

About the session host:

Elliot Turner is a co-founder and Managing Partner, CIO at RGA Investment Advisors, LLC. RGA Investment Advisors runs a long-term, low turnover, growth at a reasonable price investment strategy seeking out global opportunities. Elliot focuses on discovering and analyzing long-term, high quality investment opportunities and strategic portfolio management. Prior to joining RGA, Elliot managed portfolios at at AustinWeston Asset Management LLC, Chimera Securities and T3 Capital. Elliot holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation as well as a Juris Doctor from Brooklyn Law School. He also holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Emory University where he double majored in Political Science and Philosophy.

About the featured guest:

Nick Devlin serves as Chief Executive Officer of Naked Wines plc (UK: WINE). Nick was appointed Director of the Board in June 2019 and was promoted to the CEO role in January 2020. Since then, Nick has led Naked through a rapidly evolving operational and customer environment to deliver a step change in growth in 2020. Previously and as President of Nakedwines.com, Nick had grown and professionalised our US business and established it as the number one direct-to-consumer wine business in America. Nick has a background in corporate strategy, having previously worked in OC&C’s consumer practice in London. He is a passionate wine lover and advocate for the role of Naked in transforming the shape of the wine industry.

Peter Mantas on Ideas Driven by Innovation and Societal Tailwinds

December 14, 2021 in Diary, Equities, Featured, Full Video, Interviews, Invest Intelligently Podcast, Latticework, Latticework Online, Member Podcasts, Transcripts

Peter Mantas, General Partner of Logos LP, and John Mihaljevic, Chairman of MOI Global, recorded a fireside chat for Latticework 2021.

Peter and John explored the topic, “How Innovation and Societal Tailwinds Create Investment Opportunities”.

Companies mentioned include Planet Labs, Biodesix, IonQ, and Renalytix.

This conversation is available as an episode of “Discover Great Ideas” and “Gain Industry Insights”, member podcasts of MOI Global. (Learn how to access.)

Listen to the conversation (recorded on December 13):

printable transcript
download audio

The following transcript has been edited for space and clarity.

John Mihaljevic: I am delighted to welcome to Latticework 2021 Peter Mantas, a general partner at Toronto-based investment firm Logos LP. Peter is well-known to many in the MOI Global community because he has shared his wisdom and insights with members on several occasions. He has assorted business and financial experience with global institutions and holds degrees in both law and commerce. What has strongly impressed me about Peter is his views on technology, emerging technologies, and innovation and his ability to identify compelling investment themes as well as investment ideas.

At our conferences, Peter has presented multibagger ideas such as Zscaler. We’ve also had the pleasure to talk about some major tailwinds, such as quantum computing and biotech. I thought it would be fitting to invite Peter to join us at this year’s Latticework conference to talk about how innovation and societal tailwinds create investment opportunities. Welcome, Peter.

Peter Mantas: Thank you, John. It’s good to be here.

Mihaljevic: I thought we’d structure our conversation into three main buckets. First, we can talk about true innovation such as quantum AI and genomics. Secondly, we can touch on societal tailwinds – housing development, life sciences, communication, etc. Lastly, we can consider some other questions or topics. Let’s start with true innovation, how you think about it and what you’re finding particularly interesting in the major areas you’re looking at.

Mantas: Maybe I can even backtrack and talk about how we view innovation broadly. At a high level, I think one of the best ways to think about innovation is to think about the creative outputs a capitalistic economy creates. In looking for innovation or investments in innovation, we typically try to follow the Pareto principle or Price’s law. The Pareto law indicates that 90% of the output of any given organization is generated by 10% of the workforce. Those similar features – Pareto and Price’s law – are not bugs of capitalism. They lead to inequality, something capitalistic societies aren’t very good at solving, especially right now, but that is a feature of capitalism, and because of it, it’s a feature of innovation.

We try to look for companies within the respective verticals that exhibit Pareto principal characteristics. You can realize that fairly quickly just at a high level. Once you’ve divided that out into the curve – the Pareto distribution relative to creative output – you can start diving deeper into the companies that might be the best positioned to win in their respective fields.

For example, if you look at the semiconductor industry, 80% of semiconductors are created and developed by the top 20% of chip makers. If you look at the top 20% of chip makers, about 90% is done by the top 10%. In GPU power, it’s really Nvidia. It’s the same as computing. Of global cloud computing, 85% or 90% is done by the top 10. You can see that with cloud right now. In cloud infrastructure, it’s three companies – Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure.

What’s hard about innovation or innovation investing is that there are many losers. There will be a lot of institutions or market actors that will be on the lower end of that curve and will not make it out in time.

If we look at something like quantum as an example, it is already experiencing a Pareto distribution – 90% of quantum power and qubit output right now is done by 10% of the companies, and it’s essentially six companies. The industry is going to start forming in that way. The ones with the biggest leads will start to accelerate their advantages over time.

For example, going public is one advantage. This is what Pareto talks about where advantages start to compound over time. Going public is a major advantage, but it could be something simple. It could be access to the capital market or access to talent by partnering with a research university. Over time, as those things become more apparent and are strengthened, you get to see where the winners are.

Where it becomes problematic is more dependent on the market you’re in. This is where rigor analysis is required – qualitatively and quantitatively. It’s about (a) what kind of price you’re paying for those leading in the distribution or the ones that may come up and also enter in the top 10% and (b) whether that distribution is static in any way. If we look at smartphones, not too long ago, Apple was not in the top 10% of this market. One has to be a bit more rigorous in terms of their analysis, but typically, that’s how we view innovation. At the end of the day, innovation or investing in innovation is about identifying the creative outputs that will drive the economy. If you’re dealing with such outputs, they will all fall under Pareto distribution – all of them. That usually is a good start when looking for innovation.

I’ll give you more recent examples. Take the Metaverse. If this truly becomes a large industry, you’re already seeing who might win there. Facebook will probably be there as well as Unity and Epic, which are already a duopoly. Maybe Microsoft and Google. Another challenger that we don’t know yet might come in. Within the Metaverse, there’s a various number of potential other outputs, derivative outputs, and various verticals.

The main idea is that when we look at innovation, it’s a function at a high level, looking at the Pareto principle and identifying from there the qualitative and quantitative aspects that might lead to more fruitful investment.

Mihaljevic: Let’s delve into each of the three main areas. We recently did a call on quantum. Could you share your latest view on how that’s evolving and whether anything has changed since we spoke?

Mantas: Quantum is an interesting vertical because it’s so, so early. Strides are being made every day getting it closer to being a reality, and it is a reality to a degree, but having a truly functional error-free computer that’s better than the best supercomputers is still a little off. However, the advantages being created within the quantum framework are starting to compound fairly rapidly. Within quantum, there’s a number of ways that one can achieve functional quantum computing with low-error and great fidelity. Certain methods are better than others.

I’d say the quantum industry is very akin to the semiconductor industry. You’re going to have the Texas Instruments of the semiconductor industry, the Intels, and then the Nvidias, which are higher-powered, higher-end chips. It’s the same with quantum. There’s going to be ion trap quantum methods. There’s going to be cold atoms and various kinds of ion traps, for example, what Honeywell is doing. There are going to be superconductor methods. It’s more of a function of diving deep into each one and understanding where each one will play in the global economy.

If anything will fall under a Pareto distribution, it will be quantum because it’s extremely difficult to develop a quantum computer and very costly to attract talent. There are only so many quantum physicists in the United States or globally and only so many universities with the capacity to have that kind of research done at a decent level. There are only so many governments that have proper grant initiatives or programs to allow for research in quantum. It will play out over time, but it’s still quite early in its journey.

Right now, IonQ is the only public quantum. I believe Honeywell spun out a division which is in quantum through a merger with Cambridge Quantum. That might go public next year. I think Rigetti is going public next year. You’ll have a few coming out as well, but it’s still quite early in its phase. I guess the best way to think about the industry is as almost akin to the semiconductor industry.

Mihaljevic: In terms of AI, I feel like it’s a bit connected to quantum or will clearly benefit from that tailwind. How are you thinking about the impact of AI? To what extent do you see it as investable?

Mantas: You’re right. AI is very tied to quantum. At some point in the future, quantum will provide better AI. There are two ways to think about playing with AI. Inherently, an algorithm isn’t worth anything. What’s worth is the data. Google owns a lot of data, and a recent de-SPAC, Planet Labs, has 100 times the data of its nearest competitor in terms of images of the earth. It’s certainly one way to do it. What are the data plays for that? The second is what companies are leading the charge in machine learning.

You could look at companies in certain verticals. Every organization will have AI capabilities in its software or its solutions. For example, Bentley Systems, which does infrastructure software, uses AI for identifying certain cracks in foundations and things like that. Google uses AI for certain workflows. Microsoft will have an AI component for its own cloud computing. It’s extremely difficult to pick out an AI company. It’s more what verticals you think AI would benefit the most and which ones already have the lead in AI.

I don’t see why Microsoft wouldn’t be a leader in AI in the computing world over the next 10 years. I don’t see why people wouldn’t have an establishment in AI there as well. I also don’t see why certain other potential cloud vendors might use AI in either infrastructure, monitoring, or things of that nature. AI is a harder one because it’s more the tools used to create better products or services rather than someone owning AI as an industry. That’s how I would view AI in that respect. It’s something that all companies are working on and will have a need for in the respective services they provide to customers.

Mihaljevic: It sounds like you don’t believe in a generalized AI where basically only the biggest companies with the biggest AI R&D budgets would be able to compete. You see it as more broadly distributed.

Mantas: Yes, I think it does depends on the kinds of AI workflows we’re talking about. For example, AI in the healthcare or bioinformatics sectors will look quite different from the AI for computing workflows, for DevOps, for data infrastructure, or for reliability or observability. All these providers do have AI as a solution to better their services.

I think the big incumbents will be pretty well versed in AI. They’re going to make strong efforts in AI. Microsoft is going to be a leader in cloud computing and any AI workflows. Even if another competitor comes around for a certain application which is more AI-focused, is Microsoft’s cheaper bundle is going to be good enough? It’s more of a tool within these vertical sectors rather than this company is a leader in AI. At the end of the day, it’s just an algorithm. What matters is the data. The one that has or controls the data will be a valuable company. The tools or the algorithms used for AI may be sufficiently complex, but I don’t see any clear leader other than whoever is in computing.

Quantum may enter and make AI sort of super AI. That is more a function of the vertical where quantum is rather than the AI market, so to speak. There might be different verticals within AI, for example, the basic useful AI you have today all the way up to super complicated AI. Other companies we don’t know yet might also operate there in the future, but I’d be surprised if large incumbents don’t already trap those basic algorithms to provide those solutions to their customers.

Mihaljevic: Do you see any existential threats to humans from AI, or is that science fiction?

Mantas: Interesting question. I think it’s a bit too early for that. If there was to be anything, I don’t think it’d be in our lifetime. It certainly is possible. I know Elon Musk has talked about this at some point, and some others have sounded the alarm about the future of AI. What solutions will be used as the brains of a robotics company creating lifelike robots certainly is something almost Terminator-esque, but we’re still very far off from that happening, in my opinion. Right now, I don’t think we’re in a position to properly assess any real risks.

Mihaljevic: Touching on another vector of true innovation – genomics. Help us understand that a little better.

Mantas: Biotechnology in general is going through an interesting period. I just wrote a study indicating that it’s getting increasingly expensive to create a drug, and the peak sale of that drug is declining. Not only are companies spending more to develop a drug, but the fruits of their labor aren’t as long-lasting as they think.

There are companies out there using AI, for example, biosimulation of clinical trials or virtualization of trials. There’s a company called Flutura, which is, I think, owned by EQT Partners or a big chunk of it is anyway. Imagine taking the risk out of doing a clinical trial by having an AI machine learning platform that mimics the human body and what reactions humans will have pertaining to the chemistry or the organic compounds that interact with human biology. That reduces the risk in biotechnology and makes businesses better.

Companies like Schrodinger do physics-based simulation. What would it look like when certain molecules interact with each other over a particular time frame or in a particular compound? What would that feel like? How would that interact?

There are a few simulations in this space that do help pharmaceutical companies reserve the cost for the genomics or even biotechnology costs. There’s synthetic biology, which is something quite fruitful and looks highly promising. It helps in getting a vaccine very quickly and is real. There are certainly some innovations under the radar creating an interesting tailwind. The first would be biotech companies that become platform companies. Imagine you have a CAR T-cell therapy company, which is basically gene therapy for certain kinds of T-cells for autoimmune disease. Why have one disease when you can have a number of diseases and potentially viruses, or an antiviral or vaccine that helps a number of diseases in oncology, like neck cancer, throat cancer, and HPV?

You’ll start seeing companies have platforms in their biotechnological processes. They may use other things to assist them in reducing the cost of that process. The biggest risks in biotechnology or genomics are the regulatory aspects. Even picks-and-shovels companies like West Pharmaceutical, Thermo Fisher, Danaher, and Repligen are extremely innovative in their processes, solutions, and services.

For example, West Pharmaceuticals has one of the most complex supply chains in the biotech space. The company can deliver 40 billion components a year. To do this, you need to have pretty outstanding computers and technology to fill that supply chain and provide a needed service to biotechnology. People think of West Pharmaceuticals as a syringe company, but it’s more than that. There’s innovation we don’t see going on in genomics and biotechnology, and I believe it will lead to a biotechnology renaissance.

The Pareto principle applies to that. If we look at simulation software, 90% of it is done by 10% of certain software providers, five of them, in fact. If you look in the biotech industry, 80% of the research done goes through Charles River Labs. West Pharmaceuticals is responsible for 70% of the global packaging and delivery in the syringe market, and 80% of the infrastructure provided to healthcare companies is from Thermo Fisher and Danaher.

The Pareto principle is already applying to those technologies and innovations, but there are things going on under the surface that will lead to a very interesting next 10 years in biotech and genomics. Synthetic biology is one, but there might be other things that deal with longevity or oncology and certain immunotherapies.

For example, we haven’t seen a treatment for brain cancer in 20 years. The currently available treatment is for one kind of brain cancer. As of 2021, there are already a few candidates in the market, I wouldn’t say for curing but for extending the life of patients with other kinds of brain cancers. There are companies that also assist in drug delivery to the blood brain barrier. There are some innovations happening under the surface that will play out in genomics and biotech, and they are so vast. It doesn’t have to be just genomics. It could be many verticals within genomics in the biotech landscape.

Mihaljevic: Generally speaking, it seems that stock prices have underperformed in the sector. Where are you finding the most interesting risk rewards?

Mantas: There are two things. I haven’t seen this wide of a gap before between big cap – or big cap tech even – and biotech small cap. The SPI underperformance to the QQQ has been an absolute anomaly. There are reasons for that, but I haven’t seen it this bad even in the innovative companies that have sold off.

It could be for a number of reasons. It could be emerging market risk or a legitimate company that destocked and grouped with the other stocks. It’s hard for me to name sectors because everything is situational, but healthcare, some verticals in biotechnology, certain companies, and medical technology are sectors where the valuations are starting to not make sense. Even in some of the de-SPAC you’re getting low single digit valuations and price next year sales, next year revenues, even three-year EBITs, some of them have EBITDA-positive or gross margin levels that are high. Some are trading under one time next year’s revenues.

Things that have been hit in healthcare because biotech catalysts are at nine-year lows. There hadn’t been an FDA head for nine months before Biden appointed one a couple of months ago. There’s obviously recession risk. The yield curves are flattening. People are panicking that there’s going to be an immense amount of tapering, and if there’s an immense amount of tapering in a period of potential deflation, that’s not great. That sells off the entire group. Then there’s small-cap or mid-cap companies in a variety of sectors that could be undervalued based on future cashflows. Some things remain deservedly expensive even after a 50% or 60% drawdown, but as of now, I’d say there is some real value going on in some of these smaller-cap companies that are getting crushed.

Those are the areas I will be looking at. It’s hard for me to paint a broad stroke and say this entire sector is cheap. Biotech in general is at almost nine-year lows in terms of valuation, multiples, and the number of stocks trading below cash, but there are some expensive companies within that sector as well.

Mihaljevic: Among the names you’ve mentioned in the past are Biodesix, Bluebird Bio, and Renalytix. Do any of those strike you as particularly interesting to take a look at?

Mantas: Biodesix is interesting. It got hit tremendously for a few reasons. The first is building out a sales team. The second is that all the pulmonologists have been closed due to Omicron and the number of variants of COVID. The business is meant to test in the pulmonology channel, in the clinician channel. With this constrained, the stock price starts to go down, not to mention that it’s fairly illiquid as well. We think Renalytix is an interesting one at these levels. It may continue to sell at some point. The company leverages AI to serve the solution it provides.

It’s more about what kinds of catalysts we can see in the future and what price we can pay for them. Biodesix is currently trading at two times revenue. Even if we back out COVID tests, look at a pulmonology channel and assume the company hits its salesforce infrastructure, then we talk about pretty substantial returns over the next five years, let’s say. Renalytix is the same thing. It got a government contract this year. It’s being rolled out to Mount Sinai Hospital, and various hospitals are signing up partnerships with companies like Baird. I believe that might be coming up soon. It’s all relative on the valuation. What does the future cash flow look like? What does the future revenue growth look like to the price you’re paying today? Those are a bit more attractive.

The gene therapy stocks can be hit or miss. Bluebird spun off one of its divisions, and it’s going through a bit more of a transformation, which will be tough for shareholders for a while. However, the places I’d be looking at are more in that space where they were impacted by COVID or by a certain kind of channel when the stock price declines and the valuation isn’t demanding.

Another one is ClearPoint Neuro, where 90% of revenues currently are in the operating room. It is obviously going to be impacted by COVID and also by the lack of biotech catalysts because it has a number of partners where it delivers drugs in the blood brain barrier. I believe the stock is down 60% to 70%, but if you look at the analysis – like the laser business alone – if you stop at the 12 times multiple on next year’s revenue, it’s not that expensive. Competitors like Intuitive Surgical or Edwards Lifesciences are trading at 13 to 23 times this year’s revenue, so there’s value there.

It may require patience. Everything requires patience, but we’re now getting to a point in the market where valuations are bordering on irrational, and the spread between large caps and small caps is getting too wide. There will be returns made from things that haven’t been dealt with in biotech or in some of these de-SPACs. There will be winners. It’s about going through the ones that – quantitatively and qualitatively – might come out of this unscathed and see growth over the next little while.

Mihaljevic: Let’s switch gears and talk about the second big bucket here – societal tailwinds and the opportunities they are creating. What are some of the major tailwinds you’re seeing and how are you looking for opportunities?

Mantas: I think life science is very interesting. Coming out of COVID, we’ll start seeing more importance placed on the infrastructure of healthcare. I believe companies like West Pharmaceuticals and Thermo Fisher will continue to outperform. Those tailwinds won’t go anywhere. They’re going to be almost too big to fail given the pain and suffering people have gone through with COVID. We’re talking about a virus that isn’t Ebola. It’s not great, but it’s not the worst thing either.

I think we’re going to look back at this almost like 9/11, where we say, “What does defense look like? What does our national security look like? What does the world look like coming out of COVID? What is the importance of health and supply chain?”

The sustainability of the economies is going to be a major challenge. I don’t necessarily mean ESG. There is certainly ESG and hitting ESG targets, but I mean creating more of a sustainable economy using large datasets. For example, Planet Labs has over 200 satellites floating in space. In fact, half of all satellites in the world right now belong to Planet Labs and SpaceX. Through Planet Labs, you can identify the soy crop yields for every farm in the world, whether or when they require water, the biomass for some crops, the methane being exuded from certain cattle farms, or the carbon density of trees in the Amazon rainforest. This information is valuable for mining companies, governments, consumer-packaged goods, agriculture companies, finance, and insurance. Big data and its use case for sustainability will be a major tailwind. That information will be invaluable for actions in the future.

Housing development will definitely be something. The population is growing and getting older. People want more space. If we’re having a hybrid work environment, people would like more homes. There are also the emerging markets. I’m not talking just about Asia but also Africa. Not many people talk about this. I read a UN study the other day on how poverty in Africa has dropped drastically since 2000. As these people enter into the middle class, they’re going to need solutions. They’re going through a bit of a renaissance as well.

Those are the major tailwinds I see. We can also talk about some headwinds, for example, declining birth rate and infertility. These things are also pretty important and need to eventually be solved for the good of the economy. I would say the sustainability piece and the life science infrastructure are going to be essential coming out of COVID. If we look at North America, it’s big data, housing, and using more sustainable approaches to do packaging and providing services and solutions to customers.

Mihaljevic: Since you mentioned Planet Labs, there’s another de-SPAC in that space, Spire Global (ticker SPIR). If anyone’s going to look at Planet Labs, it may be worth taking a look at Spire as well. I happen to know the CEO, who has attended our St. Moritz event in the past. The company has executed pretty well, but it seems like the market is still very nascent. Spire is losing quite a bit of money. It’s somewhat of a scary income statement, but if you believe in the opportunity and that there’s valuable data to be delivered from space at some point, those companies could start creating real value.

Mantas: Yes, it’s interesting. It’s one of those things that I would say is similar to quantum, but you already are starting to see the Pareto distribution there as well – 80% or 90% of the satellites are going to be owned by 20% of the companies. Also, it’s not cheap to launch satellites. You need several hundred satellites circling the world, mission control, and process systems engineers. Good luck attracting talent from national space agencies. These are the only people who can figure this out.

It’s a fascinating area. There will be winners, but it’s still quite nascent. Nevertheless, you can start to see the business models slowly form. It’s going to be a function of which companies currently have the advantages, which have the most comprehensive amount of data, and which attract the best talent. Once those start to spiral out, like any Pareto distribution, you’ll start to see winners and losers.

Mihaljevic: Can you elaborate on the opportunity you see in housing development? What’s particularly interesting there?

Mantas: I can speak for Canada. Part of the problem in housing in the Canadian context is supply. There are not enough homes for the level of immigration coming in and for the family formation going on in the country. Unlike the United States, where a large part of the country is livable, in Canada, only a certain amount of land is livable.

If the United States and Canada open their borders to more immigration, and people demand more space – because we are working from home and don’t need to be close to the bigger cities anymore – there’s going to be an actual demand for housing, particularly detached housing, and the kind of space required for humanity to sprawl into different communities. That’s put some pressure on the building material commodities – like lumber, which has done very well this year – and that probably will continue over time. There will be also the need for renting and rentals.

The increase in family formation is necessary. It should drive the supply of homes, but housing development in Canada is regulated by the government. There are areas where you can build and certain permissions required, and there is an economic cost to not having proper housing for any given economy. If housing is too expensive, people will take less risk. They won’t start a business or take a job at a startup. They may not spend more on discretionary goods. They may not take a vacation. They may not have enough for retirement. Having such short supply of housing in general is not a good thing. If one believes that more homes will be built – and they should be built because we need them – then that’s certainly a good tailwind to ride on.

Mihaljevic: Let’s talk some more about emerging markets. You mentioned Africa, which is very rich in natural resources. It seems like it’s also becoming a bit of a geopolitical playing field for China and, as always, the US. What’s changing in Africa to make you believe it will be fertile ground for investment as opposed to the past when I’m not sure you could have invested very well as a Western-based investor?

Mantas: It’s still very difficult in Africa. I think what’s made strides is the income level, which has gone up quite a bit in the last 20 years. The quality of life has gone up over the last 40 years. Companies are starting to open up. Google opened up in Kenya. There are quite a few large industrial companies in Nigeria. I believe there’s another tech giant looking at Africa.

There is also the proliferation of communication devices. For example, WhatsApp is an effective utility in emerging markets. It’s something important for Africa and Asia in terms of communication and payments as well. The proliferation of digital and virtual banking and ease of payments into Africa will be certainly awaited to invest.

It’s hard to say. I don’t know what the correct way to invest in Africa is. For example, Sea Limited, which is the backbone of the emerging market e-commerce sector, might make a push into Africa, but I think it’s still a little early to invest in a purely Africa-centric company. I’m sure corporate giants like MasterCard, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft will start investing more in that area than what we’ve seen previously.

Mihaljevic: Let’s wrap things up with our third bucket – other considerations. Anything in particular on your mind?

Mantas: The big takeaway is that at the end of the day, what matters is not only defining winners but also paying a good price for those wanting to invest in this sector. It’s very difficult to figure out exactly what the proper price is. Are investments made today by companies that are losing money flash in the pan, money-burning ventures or durable moats over a period of time? What kind of intangibles does one need to look at to have a better glimpse as to what the future might hold for a particular company? Are these intangibles truly valuable? Are they creating moats or are they just a waste of time?

When going down the innovation spectrum, it will be like a Pareto distribution in every single vertical, whether it’s quantum, genomics, or the space race. Once you realize that and can parse the companies which are already in the lead or may become leaders, as you dive deeper into the qualities, it’s about making sure that you pay the right price. That’s harder than one can figure out, but if you pay a good price, you’ll be rewarded.

About the featured guest:

Peter Mantas serves as a general partner of Toronto-based investment firm Logos LP. Peter has an assortment of business and financial experience at global institutions. Peter’s prior experience includes senior managerial roles at large information service and enterprise technology companies in addition to legal experience within the capital markets, alternative investments and tax groups at McCarthy Tetrault LLP. Peter has also been involved in a variety of private equity transactions, ranging from retail to renewable energy, in addition to leading a proprietary trading team for a boutique desk. Prior to this, he held various economic research positions at the Export Development Bank of Canada, Statistics Canada and other various federal government departments. Peter has both an LL.B. and B.C.L. from McGill University’s Faculty of Law. Prior to studying law he obtained an Honours Baccalaureate in Commerce, Magna Cum Laude, from the University of Ottawa, Telfer School of Management, where he received several awards of excellence.

About the session host:

John Mihaljevic leads MOI Global and serves as managing editor of The Manual of Ideas. He managed a private partnership, Mihaljevic Partners LP, from 2005-2016. John is a winner of the Value Investors Club’s prize for best investment idea. He is a trained capital allocator, having studied under Yale University Chief Investment Officer David Swensen and served as Research Assistant to Nobel Laureate James Tobin. John holds a BA in Economics, summa cum laude, from Yale and is a CFA charterholder.

Dan Lewis and Ram Parameswaran on Disrupting the U.S. Trucking Industry

December 14, 2021 in Diary, Equities, Featured, Full Video, Interviews, Invest Intelligently Podcast, Latticework, Latticework Online, Member Podcasts, Transcripts

Ram Parameswaran, Founder of Octahedron Capital, and Dan Lewis, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Convoy, joined members for a fireside chat at Latticework on December 16, 2021.

Ram and Dan discussed Convoy’s vision and business model and explored the topic, “The U.S. Trucking Industry: A Case Study in Marketplace Economics”.

This conversation is available as an episode of Gain Industry Insights, a member podcast of MOI Global. (Learn how to access member podcasts.)

Replay this virtual fireside chat:

printable transcript
audio recording

The following transcript has been edited for space and clarity.

John Mihaljevic: A warm welcome to all of you joining us for this live session at Latticework 2021. I’m excited about this conversation between my good friend and terrific crossover investor, Ram Parameswaran, and Dan Lewis, an entrepreneur who is revolutionizing — if that word is not overused — the US trucking industry. Ram will say a few more words about Dan and what he’s up to with Convoy, but first I want to give a little background about Ram.

He is the founder of Octahedron Capital, a global growth-oriented investment firm that makes concentrated investments in leading public and private companies that drive the world’s internet economy. Before founding Octahedron, Ram was a partner and portfolio manager at another great crossover firm, Altimeter Capital. Ram has a tremendous amount of experience, both public and private, which informs his investments in both of those areas.

When I want to know what’s going on in terms of companies before they hit the public markets, I look to Ram to tell me what the hottest private companies are right now, and who’s doing some interesting stuff. That’s how we got to Convoy. Ram, I’ll turn it over to you to take it from here.

Ram Parameswaran: Thank you, John. I appreciate you having me and my friend, Dan Lewis, at Latticework 2021. All of the sessions you’ve done so far have been world class. I’ve learned a lot, so I encourage everyone to join in in future years.

I am excited today to chat to my friend, Dan Lewis. Dan is the CEO of Convoy, a company based in Seattle. We’re going to talk a lot about Convoy today, but before Convoy, Dan was one of the senior execs at Amazon. He was at a startup that was acquired by Google, and was a group product manager at Microsoft, so he has the triumvirate of the major companies in the Seattle area. He was a consultant before that and an undergrad at Yale. We bonded when he came over to our house for dinner one time and he stayed overnight on our couch.

Dan Lewis: I’m always trying to save a couple bucks for the company and freeload at your house in San Francisco!

Parameswaran: It’s a pleasure to have you here. I’ve known you for a few years now. It’s impressive to see how you’ve grown over the years and, more importantly, how Convoy has grown. I’m excited to work with you over the next — hopefully — decade or so.

You have this incredible background in technology and supply-chain optimization — most recently at Amazon. You’re a talented person. You could do a lot of things in your life. Talk to me about what got you started. Why did you pursue this particular space? Maybe even better, start by giving us an introduction to Convoy. What do you guys do? What is Convoy all about?

Lewis: The core business that Convoy offers today is full truckload delivery services for companies that are shipping freight in the United States. Approximately a trillion dollars is spent on trucking every year in the US. That’s about 80 percent of total freight spend. The other 20 percent goes to rail, air, pipeline, and ocean. It’s a big business.

The average trucking company has about three trucks. I did the math: I added up the number of trucks that are owned by the top 20 trucking companies, and it came to about 12 percent of the total fleet, so the industry is extremely fragmented. There are about 100,000 companies that ship truckloads of freight around the country. There are about 15,000 to 18,000 freight brokers that are helping truck drivers find jobs and match those jobs up with those shippers. It’s like a trading model where you buy and sell capacity as a broker.

At Convoy, we are changing how it works. In the role of broker, we’re orchestrating a much more efficient trucking system. Our primary customers are the top name-brand shippers in the country: Procter and Gamble, Kraft, Niagara Water, Costco, Target, Shell Oil, et cetera. They hire Convoy to move their freight. We do it through a network of 60,000 to 70,000 small trucking companies on our platform using our app. We orchestrate things so that we create round trips and backhauls, getting them the most efficient job. We created an auction system to do price discovery and to understand what the market is. We effectively clear and create this market for trucking. We take principal risk in the transaction and we’re responsible for the fulfillment of the job.

What we’ve been able to do is go from being a broker to being a national trucking company. The broker gets some of the leftovers or some of the transactional spot freight. We’re not really in that category anymore. We now operate our own fleet of trailers. We have a trailer pool. We have such visibility and connectivity into the truck drivers on our app that our customers have now put us in a new category, which is cool, where effectively we get to compete for all the freight that asset-based carriers would compete for. We’re competing with dedicated carriers.

It turns out that a robust healthy network delivers a higher quality of service than dedicating a truck and a driver to a job, because something can happen with that specific truck and driver, but a network is resilient. We’ve been able to do that business as well. We’ve become a first-class national trucking company for shippers. We do it in a more efficient, higher-visibility, and higher-data way.

We’ve now gotten our platform to the point where it’s big enough and robust enough, and it’s the only platform that has a totally digital supply side. All the carriers and drivers use our app. There’s nobody else right now in the country that has anything close to what we have from an adoption perspective. We’ve now opened it up to other brokers. Our competitors and other brokerages are now able to run on our platform. We recently launched that, and we’ve had a huge number of brokers wanting to use the Convoy platform to find capacity and find trucks that are on a digital network. I think we had 150 inbound leads come in during the first week.

We’re opening it up. We’ve started building in a fuel card and financial services for truck drivers. There’s a whole bunch of businesses on top of that core trucking business that we built, but that’s what Convoy does. We’re providing freight transportation solutions for shippers and then we’re building businesses on top of that — marketplaces and services around that.

Parameswaran: It sounds incredibly complicated. I think that’s what got you going. Leaving Amazon, you wanted to tackle a really complicated market. Is that fair?

Lewis: I left Amazon because I wanted to do three things. One, I want to be part of a story. That’s a personal goal of mine. I want to be part of a growth-stage interesting story. It’s more interesting to work on that. I looked around at the time, and I didn’t see any growth-stage companies in the Seattle area. There were several in the Bay Area I could have gone and joined (I used to live in the Bay Area), but there was nothing in Seattle with the right role and the right thing for me, so I went and started something.

I love the idea of marketplaces. I studied marketplaces in depth before starting Convoy. I also love the idea of a business that can start out as linear and grow linearly, but later become nonlinear. When I started this business, I didn’t have a ton of money saved up. My wife’s not working, and I have two kids. I thought, “How do I create a startup that has an extremely high chance of success?” I realized that one option was to think about a business where it’s not so much about luck. It’s about spending time with each of the participants and explaining to them how we can create value for them, but because it’s so commoditized, in the future it can become a nonlinear, completely digital growth business.

Trucking is that. It’s a B2B brokerage. You can spend lots of time upfront talking to every truck driver and every shipper. You can get the flywheel going and learn the mechanics, but trucking is a commoditized enough industry that you can then automate it in the future so it becomes scalable in a nonlinear way. That was a big part of why I thought it was such a cool space. I saw the opportunity for a high chance of getting it off the ground with the right discipline, but also extremely nonlinear growth through the core and adjacent businesses in the future.

Parameswaran: That’s a good segue into understanding how the industry works. If you’re a shipper, and you need to get your product from point A to point B, how do you do it? What is the process today? Walk us through the unit economics of the model. What were your big customers doing before Convoy came along? What do you provide for them? Let’s talk about the past and the current, and then we can move on to the future.

Lewis: I’ll talk about pre-Convoy and then things we’ve built as we’ve developed it, because there are a lot of fast followers out there as well.

The way these big companies would procure freight is that they would say, “What are the lanes I think I’m going to be running freight on next year?” There are 400 lanes across the country. It could be freight around the LA area. It could be freight between LA and Dallas. What are the lanes I’m going to run freight on? About how many loads am I going to be running per week? Over the next year, what is my estimate there or my forecast? I’m going to do an RFP, which will take six months. I’m going to go out there and do this RFP with dozens or a hundred-plus trucking companies and get all of them to give me bids on the lanes they want. I’ll collect all those rates, go back and negotiate with them, get them to agree on a rate for the year at a certain volume level. There’s a bunch of categories — for some of it, I’m going to have them leave trailers in my yard so I can load those trailers in advance; for some of it, I’ll load the trailers when they show up — there are different kinds of scenarios. All this stuff they’ll put in the RFP.

Six months later, after a bunch of negotiations, it’s done, and the carriers start running the loads. Inevitably, the shipper was wrong. They didn’t know how much freight they were going to need in each of these lanes. They need more in some, less in others. A new store opens somewhere so they have to deliver to that store. A store closes so they don’t deliver there anymore. Their volume changes significantly throughout the year.

The market also changes. Truck rates are volatile. They’re up 100 percent from two years ago on a lot of lanes. The transportation providers then say, “I did agree to this for a year, but I’m not going to do it anymore,” and they stop accepting the freight. That shipper is sending this freight out to the carriers that said they would do it in the RFP, but the carrier or broker that receives it says, “I don’t want to do it anymore.” It falls down what’s called the routing guide. It goes from the primary provider who was the one who said they would do it to a bunch of backups.

All the backups have the option to take it or not. If none of the backups take it at whatever rate they gave a year ago, it goes into the spot market for an auction and it gets picked up there. They have redundancy upon redundancy upon redundancy to make sure somebody actually moves the freight, because they have to move that freight to their customer. Because the world is always changing, all these contracts generally fall apart or are not honored within a few months. That situation was exaggerated during the last two years.

That’s how it worked before. Also, there was no visibility — there was no system for the shipper to see where the truck was. There was no efficient system to book an appointment. You might have a 60-mile job, but the appointment is not for 12 hours, so the truck sits and waits for 10 hours. It’s an extremely inefficient system as you’re trying to aggregate this all together.

What Convoy did is it put all the trucks on a grid and on a map so we could see them all in real time. We built a bunch of technologies that would figure out what is the optimal appointment time for every kind of job and then we’d work with our customers to get preferential access or digital access to be able to add those appointment times. It’s still a hard thing to do, but we started working on that.

We operate within the traditional model, but we created better, new, innovative products at each level of the contract: the primary provider, the backup, and the spot market. That’s why our customers love us.

We created a flexible, universal trailer pool. A company that needs to ship their goods to a bunch of retail stores wants to preload trailers, put them in the yard, and have the trucks roll in, grab the preloaded trailer, and leave. You don’t have to load when the truck shows up. It’s faster and more efficient. You can keep the stuff loaded in the trailers. It’s off your dock, it’s out of your warehouse, you don’t bottleneck everything.

The problem with this is that it’s rigid. You have to tell a carrier, “I need you to do this many loads, have this many trailers available for me.” The carrier says, “I’ll put those trailers there, but I’m not going to flex up. I’m not going to flex down.” It’s pretty rigid. The shippers get stuck because they don’t know how to do this.

We created what’s called a universal trailer pool. We have a Convoy-managed trailer pool. We make it available to any carrier in our network. We also have a technology system that predicts where the trailers will be needed and has a rent-back system. It will find jobs, and help other carriers move those trailers around. We were able to create a flexible trailer pool. Whereas others could only flex up or down by five percent, we can flex up or down by 30 to 50 percent. We can do more or less for that shipper. We can also do spot market and transactional loads preloaded on the trailers. We have a whole system for doing that.

No one had ever done that before. That is a premium product. The margins are probably twice as good as the rest of the business. It’s unique to what we’re building. It’s hard to build if you don’t have a technology system with all these trucks on the grid on the network, and nobody has that right now. That’s sold out all the time. I can’t get enough trailers. (If somebody knows how to get me trailers, please help me!)

That’s an example of what’s different. It’s a better and more flexible system, and shippers need flexibility because they can’t predict their needs. Whenever they get into these fixed situations with their carriers, it’s frustrating for them.

Another issue is you’ve got to set a price for a year, and that’s hard. Those prices fall apart. Rates change all the time and people back out of their contracts and simply stop accepting the freight. We offer a service called Guaranteed Primary, where we say to the shipper, “We’ll always have a truck available for you on these primary lanes. We’ll get better and more efficient over time. We’ll show you the underlying costs. We’ll have a fixed margin so we won’t take advantage of you, but we’ll use technology to float the rate in your system throughout the year. We have a system that can write in new rates. If you’re willing to accept a floating rate, we’ll give you all the benefits of contract — commitment, guarantee, et cetera.”

Other people couldn’t do that because they didn’t have the technology to build a floating rate in real time. They had to have a person work on it for three months to figure out what the rate would be. The floating contract rates system that we built gives our customers the ability to have the same benefits of contract freight — high reliability, always there for them, ability to get to know the same trucking company — but with a rate that can float in real time. For that contract piece, nobody had built something like that before.

When it came to the backups — the situation where the primary provider refuses the job so it goes down the tree to the backup provider — that rate was fixed for a year. Whatever you had bid in that RFP, that’s your backup rate for the year. It would never change because nobody knew how to go in there and change it. We built a technology system called Dynamic Backup. It goes in and inserts new backup rates. When their carrier fails to take the job (which happens all the time), Convoy is there with a real-time price that they can get. It saves them several hours of waiting for it to go through that routing guide and the backup guide. They can just say yes to Convoy right away. We save them a bunch of time in getting a truck locked.

I’m getting a bit in the weeds here, but those are examples of real procurement and operational things we’ve done that are different, in addition to having real-time visibility of every truck, analytics, data reporting and the like, that shippers aren’t used to having from their trucking companies.

It’s been fun. We’ve created strong value at the operational layer and the procurement layer for these companies, in addition to having this robust, visible fleet.

Parameswaran: We’ve been on a journey with you for five or maybe six years now, and during that time, you and your team — and I want to talk about your team in a minute — have put in so much effort throwing out product after product after product. Probably the reason we invested in you in this round is we saw the compounding effect of all the product improvements, and how all the different strategies have come to fruition over the last 12 months. It feels like you’ve come into your own and are seeing incredible growth rates and adoption curves.

Tell me about the team you’ve assembled. One of my beliefs is that talent density drives companies. You’ve assembled a world-class team. How did you attract some of the best people in the Seattle area to work for Convoy? Why can that talent density not be replicated by either incumbents or by fast followers? Also, could you walk us through who the fast followers are?

Lewis: Over the last two years, we have changed out effectively the whole management team. One or two people that are still on the senior leadership team were there before, but there’s been a lot of change and adjustment. We’ve had great people at Convoy since the beginning, but most of these changes have been significant improvements from the perspective of their experience, scope of responsibility, and history coming into the company. I’m proud of that and I feel great about it.

When I was starting Convoy, one of our first investors was Bezos. He’s obviously had experience building a big company with Amazon. He said something to me that I did not understand at all as an early founder. He told me, “You’re going to hit a point where you need to get to the next level and you’re going to spend a year and a half or two years just hiring.” I remember thinking, “I’m not going to spend a year and a half or two years just hiring. That doesn’t make any sense.” He’s continued, advising me, “Lean into it when it happens. Just lean into it. That’s going to matter.”

That’s exactly what happened over the last two years We hit that point. We had several different areas where we needed to stretch and improve as a company. We’ve hired fantastic leadership — strong, cross-functional technical leadership out of Amazon. Mark Okerstrom, who came in as our president, is an incredible operator and financial mind. We’ve hired folks who are extremely capable in each of the different functions. We have a new, strong operations and customer service leader who’s done this at Amazon, Expedia and other companies. It’s going to be great.

The key thing I found for getting people to want to come and do this is painting a story around all of the opportunity in this space, and why it matters. One of our values is “know why”. Why does this matter? It matters for the planet. There’s a huge amount of waste in trucking. The capacity shortage is more about inefficiency than it is about a lack of drivers. The inefficiency is real, and it drives a lot of empty miles, wait time at facilities, and a lot of unnecessary fuel burn. A lot of people care deeply that the work they’re doing every day impacts something beyond their own personal bottom line. There are a lot of options out there, so why not do something that matters. That has been important.

When someone joins our leadership team, I tell them, “You’re going to have great people on your team, but this leadership team that you’re part of is your first team. Here’s our story. Here’s the journey we’re on. Here’s our mission. Here’s what we’re trying to do. This is the narrative of the industry. This is what’s happened, and this is where it’s going.”

We get to play a key role in the disruption of one of the biggest, most interesting, most topical industries in the world right now which is supply chain. For a long time, there wasn’t much disruption or technology in trucking. When we started, we were kicking that off, especially because visibility was there.

Prior to 2015, truck drivers didn’t have smartphones. Prior to smartphones, there was no financially or logistically feasible way to get a device into every truck in the country. An independent driver with one or two trucks running around the country doesn’t want you to mail them a GPS unit. They’re not going to install it. They’re not going to use it. They certainly don’t want seven different units, one from each of the brokers they work with, so that was not even feasible. They didn’t have smartphones until the free phone supplied by AT&T and Verizon was a smartphone on Android or iOS, which happened around 2015.

This was totally a greenfield opportunity. It wasn’t even possible to do this in trucking. We can paint that picture: this is the moment in time when this is going to change the hundreds of billions of dollars that has been spent by people using offline methods — calling, emailing, faxing — to get the information around traditional boiler-room sales models that are zero-sum game, short-term thinking trucking solutions that are very one or the other — either a totally flexible brokerage or a totally rigid carrier. That whole traditional model has worked brilliantly in the past, but there’s a better way. It’s worked historically — we’ve all gotten the stuff we need — but there’s a much better way. There’s a lot of pain we can remove. That was not possible before.

That’s how we sell people. It’s the time for this to happen. Whether a Convoy is here or not, hundreds of billions of dollars is going to shift from the old way to the new way over the next decade. That’s where trucking is going. Why not help write that story and make this happen?

People are excited about being part of stories. That’s what they want to spend their time on if they’re operators. They want to feel like they could be part of the narrative of the industry. We look back and say, “How did supply chain get improved? How did trucking change during its time of renaissance or revolution?” It’s because the technology changed to make it possible, and some disruptive companies got fired up and built that storyline for the industry. That’s what we’re doing, and people get pumped about that.

Parameswaran: Quantify this a bit more because it’s clearly an archaic industry. We all know the big top-line number: 700 billion dollars or so is sent via freight. Walk us through the profit pools in the old archaic industry which is what got you guys excited and let’s talk about the future. What is your economic model? How do you guys make money?

Lewis: There are a lot of models, but the core brokerage model is a model where you make money on the spread. Historically, brokerages have had a spread anywhere from maybe 15 to 18 percent — some were in the 20 to 25 range, some were a bit lower that were doing maybe more long haul, but that was the kind of take rate on the spread. They would buy and sell trucking capacity, and that’s what they kept. The average was about 18 percent when we were starting Convoy. That’s historically where it’s been.

When we started, we adopted the same spread model because it was the fastest and cleanest way to get into the industry. There are additional ways that other companies make money. Every carrier needs a bunch of equipment and a bunch of services, so there are providers who are offering that equipment and those services to truck drivers and small trucking companies, to help them run their business. There are some virtual fleets doing that today. There are a bunch of other service providers that have those tools and services, and carriers are willing to pay for that. There’s direct monetization of carriers and the carrier experience.

Other ways people have made money over the years is through data and software for shippers that help shippers run their procurement processes, track and manage trucks, make buying decisions, try to make efficiency decisions on how they operate their warehouse and do inventory planning. Those are ways historically that people have made a lot of money.

When we look at what Convoy can do, we started with that spread model. As I mentioned, because we have a completely online network of trucks, with tens of thousands of trucking companies and hundreds of thousands of trucks that are engaged, other 3PLs can put their loads into Convoy, which creates more density and volume in our network and helps us achieve our mission. It creates density and reduces waste in our network. It helps them find trucks. They don’t have a digital network and they don’t have the resources to build this technology platform, so they’re using Convoy’s. It’s better for them. They can find a truck that’s more attractive and lower cost through the Convoy platform than they could by calling around.

When we do that, we can take a fee or a spread on that transaction with no principal risk and no downstream operating cost, so it’s a higher-margin business. Also, our carriers think of us as their provider. We’re not just a fin marketplace for them. We are their partner in trucking. They get their freight from Convoy and we pay them, so they’ll work with us on things like credit services, fuel services, and the like. There are other interesting businesses that we can start building, and you have to have that trust and relationship to do that.

When I think about all the opportunities to make money, we have our core approach, which we believe will be successful, but we also believe that there are a lot of additional businesses that are operating maybe more like traditional marketplaces that have a fee structure, or like software businesses, that have high margins.

Parameswaran: To the extent that you are willing to speak about it in an open forum, give us a sense of the financial or operating scale of your business right now.

Lewis: If you look at the revenue run-rate of the business, it’s around or over a billion on an annualized basis coming next year. I think revenue grew 45 or 50 percent this year. It depends on exactly when you’re looking at the timeframe. We have about a thousand employees.

Most of our business today comes from enterprise customers. We have several hundred customers, but there are 50 to 100 large ones where we have a small percentage of their wallet at the moment, so there’s a huge opportunity to grow a lot through our existing customers and build that up. That’s probably the right level to share at. I’ll also say our margins have expanded significantly in the last six months.

Parameswaran: That’s exactly what we got excited about. I don’t want to correct you, but I will — the 45 to 50 percent is actually on the full annual basis, but if you look at the most recent quarter, it is multiples of that, which is exciting.

Lewis: The margin stuff is interesting. People have said, “Well, isn’t it really easy because freight is hot?” That’s true, but we’re trading. We’re trading freight. Our cost structure has gone up significantly, and so we are always taking that spread in the market. It’s actually hard for us to expand margins when truck rates are going up, and truck rates have gone up in a way that we’ve never seen before. They’ve gone up for 16 or 18 months straight, which never happens. If you look over the last 18 to 24 months, in many cases they’re up over 100 percent.

When you have those contracts, as I mentioned earlier, and you are part of the RFP process, that can put a lot of strain on the economics because you’re effectively setting rates. That’s where we had to be innovative in terms of managing our risk and changing our freight portfolio, and creating new programs that de-risk it for us as the market is volatile.

Ultimately, shippers appreciate that because, while they would love to lock a rate in for a year, because it never happens, they end up in a much worse place because people walk away from them. It’s about finding the right balance and not being rigid.

Parameswaran: Let’s look at a case study — I know the case study of Niagara Water, but pick any customer you want. Talk about the journey with the customer. What happens on day one, how do you even procure the customer? We know why they work with you, but once they sign the initial contract, walk us through what the cohorts look like within their customer base.

Lewis: Let me walk through some examples. You can imagine that how this works is different today than it was three years ago as well, because the customer views us differently today.

Home Depot is a good example. I’ll keep it high level because I’m using a specific customer. When we first started working with Home Depot, they wanted to understand this new digital freight space and digital broker space. They put us in the category with the other new digital players, and they had a small amount of freight available for those players to compete for. It’s what the industry would have called the leftovers — parts of the business that other people weren’t necessarily serving directly, so they were willing to see if we could help them out with that small portion of freight.

We started doing that, and in the first year of working with them, it was about getting to know them, building trust, building that relationship, and thinking about ways to break out of being part of this spot transactional niche business that they’d carved out to learn a little about us. We did two things.

First, we said that we could start doing their contract freight. We showed them the data in certain markets. We showed them, “Here’s what our trucking capacity looks like. Here’s how many bids we get per job. We have a lot of reliable capacity in this area, so you can think of us not only as this broker that can do one-off things. We have a lot of reliable and consistent capacity in these markets, so if you work with us, we can come through on that.” In many cases, the on-time delivery was better, the tracking was better, and the visibility was better, so that helped.

The second thing we did to accelerate the process of them growing us within their businesses was we started doing analytics on our data. No other trucking companies were capturing data for every job. We had hundreds of data points because we would capture everything, from when they tendered the freight to us, all the things that happened since then, how many bids we got finding a truck, the rate, geofencing every location check-in along the way, the final outcomes, et cetera. We could correlate all that and say to them, “If you tendered the freight to us this many hours in advance, or in the morning and add the appointment time here, the rates go down by this much.” You can see how the marketplace is working. We can show our customers this and say, “Here’s how the marketplace works. Here’s where you’re doing as well as or worse than your competitors. There are ten other warehouses in your neighborhood that we work with, and you guys are number four out of the ten. Here’s why. If you did these things, your costs would go down to here because that’s what everybody else gets because they do that.”

We were able to do these comparative analyses. They’d never seen that. We were able to show them that not only could we have reliable capacity, but we could learn and help them improve in their business. Then we graduated from niche to where they said, “We’re going to let you start competing with our other providers that you’re not talking about.”

Year two was about demonstrating we could provide consistent capacity for them in a contracted scenario. Then it tipped and they said, “Now we trust what you’re doing. You now have a trailer pool that’s flexible — we’ve never had this flexible trailer pool. We are now going to open 100 percent of our freight to you, and you’re now in your own category. We used to compare you with brokers or asset carriers, but now we don’t even put you in that category. We’ll work with you on a dedicated basis or on a trailer basis or whatever.”

This is a flavor of the discussion over time with our customers. It would take a couple of years — even three years in some cases — to get to the point where you would prove to them through experience that what you’re doing is different and better. They have to see it.

Trucking works differently from a lot of businesses. Let’s say you’re selling Salesforce to somebody. That person is looking at their option set and effectively adopting Salesforce as their one solution for all their employees, and rolling it out. They do a lot of upfront work to make sure it’s the right decision, but once they’ve made the decision, they’re committed, and it’s embedded in their business.

Trucking is completely different. They work with dozens or sometimes even a hundred trucking providers. Getting in the door and getting that first business is not that hard. It’s about getting them to choose to grow with you and make you a strategic partner. The key is not the upfront sales and getting in the door. It’s more about the next year or two of proving yourself and then getting them to adopt you as a strategic partner.

Now that we’ve done this with ten companies, we expect to be able to accelerate this significantly, via references and word of mouth. Someone leaves one company and goes to another company and tells everyone what it’s like to work with us. We don’t have to go through that proving ground as much now, but it still is a cycle of getting someone to change how they thought about the world, going from “I always thought brokers were over here in this little category,” to “Now I’m going to let you compete for the whole pie.” That journey has just started — we’ve seen that change in the last year. That’s why I’m so optimistic that we can significantly grow a lot of our existing customers, because we’re now being put into a different category.

Parameswaran: That’s the entire point. It’s the multiple compounding effect. You have the product development finally bursting forth, and then you have what I call building a reputation also now bursting forth. It didn’t happen overnight. I know that it’s been a painful journey.

Let’s look at the competitive set. Amazon is the biggest shipper in America (maybe the world), and then we have Uber making a fair bit of noise on their freight business, and then there are all the publicly listed freight brokers like C.H. Robinson. First, in terms of the old industry, talk about what you think of them and why they may or may not succeed, and then, talk about what Amazon and Uber are doing specifically. Does that keep you awake at night?

Lewis: This is a great question. Let’s frame it up. The largest provider of truckload services in the United States has a few percent of the market. I was recently interviewing somebody who was at Azure, and I realized that the way they approached the interview was they think about competition every day. They spend half their day thinking about what Google and Amazon are doing.

That’s an orientation that happens when you’re in a highly concentrated market where there are only a few players and everything you do is sized and compared to those other one or two players. You end up developing a competition-focused culture.

That also happens in new categories that are created. Uber and Lyft in a sense created this new category, which became the Uber and Lyft show. Maybe there were one or two others but it was a small set of competitors, and everything would go to those set of competitors from a share perspective.

Trucking is completely different. There is no behemoth. There are some companies that have significant volume, but they’re small in the overall market. Because of that dynamic, and because there is so much spend in this industry, almost all of our energy goes into thinking about what the customer needs. How do I serve my customer? What am I doing for my customer today? How can I make their life better? If we do all that, then we’re going to get more business from them. It’s rare that we end up being limited based on other digital providers.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with a customer where they said, “I’m not sure. I’m looking at Amazon and I’m wondering how I’m going to divide the pie between you and Amazon.” Maybe once, but I can’t remember that ever happening. Sometimes, they’ll say something like, “C.H. Robinson is on this lane, JB’s on this lane, or TQL or Coyote or Schneider or XPO or NFI or this other broker — I’m working with these guys, I want to see how I fit in and I’m trying to figure it out. ” Those were the conversations with the traditional folks, but it’s such a big market and it’s so fragmented. It’s about customer value — creating clear customer value in the way you innovate, think, and move the industry forward, versus obsessing over how you position against other competitors, because they don’t ask that much. They’re just trying to solve their problems.

I found that situation to be unique to industries like this, versus industries that are oligopolies of a few leaders, or new industries with a couple of new players that are inventing an entirely new category. It becomes zero sum. Trucking is not that.

Within that, the companies that I compete with on a daily basis are the ones that I just mentioned — other big freight brokers and asset-based carriers. That is 98 percent of the conversations with my customers and what they’re thinking about. Then there are the new companies. There are some new digital providers and then there are the bigger ones like Amazon Freight and Uber Freight. (I won’t get into the legacy and history there — I have deep legacy ties with both of those projects and I have some interesting stories to tell over a beer some time.)

They’re very different. For a long time, I was thinking more of Uber as an innovative competitor. They’re still doing some interesting things. They’re doing a lot of positioning now which you can see from their announcements.

Let me step back for a moment. If our customers are working with Uber — that is one I do see — that’s better. That means they’re going to do a lot of work with Convoy because it shows that they’re willing to try, and then we can prove that we’re better or we can prove that it works, but there’s so much share that they’re giving everybody else, it’s not like Convoy and Uber are vying over some small portion of share. We’re both taking share within their business, and they’re excited about the new way. The customer doesn’t typically think of it as a choice between Uber or Convoy. They might balance it a little, but especially once you’re in there, it’s not like that.

Uber’s approach has been a bit different. When they were starting, they didn’t start from the idea that every carrier needs to use their technology, and that they were going to create a completely robust carrier marketplace on an app and on a technology platform. That came later for them. That was not their founding story and that was not the first few years.

The founding story was how they could grow top-line revenue of the freight business within Uber as fast as humanly possible before the Uber IPO under Travis in 2018, which never happened. That was the origin of the freight business. It was a third pillar to show growth with no tech, but nobody would have ever checked if there was tech or not.

Later, they built a bunch of tech. They’ve now done that, and that’s great, but it’s a business that had a different origin story and a different growth story. I guess I think of them as a complementary partner in the ecosystem that drives a lot of interest. I like customers that are excited about them because it means they’re going to be excited about Convoy and it gives us a foot in the door, and vice versa probably, but it’s not something I feel like I need to position against constantly with my customers.

Over time, we’ll need to take a look at it. They made a pretty big move to close the EBITDA gap by acquiring a company like Transplace and effectively their burn was, I think, Transplace’s EBITDA. That makes sense. That will be a challenging operational integration to work on if you’re trying to be an innovative, fast-moving tech company, because I believe that the number of employees that the other company has is greater, so it’s a big challenge. It gives them more volume. We’re keeping an eye on it, but I don’t think it made any strategic differences. No customer has ever asked me about how that’s going to change anything. It’s never come up in a customer discussion.

When it comes to Amazon, I think I was asked the question first in 2016, about whether Amazon would do this someday. The answer is always yes to that question. Of course Amazon is going to do it someday. Ask any business that question, and the answer should be yes, because they probably will do it someday. That’s the culture of the company.

They certainly have gotten the freight space. Again, it’s not something that comes up in conversations with our customers. I know that they’re building a business around this. Fundamentally, it started because they wanted to have a way to have additional capacity for their own business. They wanted their carriers to be on an app. They tried to build an app and asked their large carriers to use that app, and for a long time, the large carriers were not interested in using the app. I knew that going in, that they wouldn’t use it, because the large carriers don’t want an app on their drivers’ phones.

When the realized that wasn’t working, they decided to build an app and put it on a bunch of smaller carriers. Now, they’re building a business around that. It’s a smart move. It will give them flexibility. They need to have their own supply chain to deliver their own goods in a highly reliable way with visibility. They couldn’t get visibility from their providers. The big trucking companies and brokers they work with don’t have a great data-driven visibility platform for Amazon. Amazon’s standards are high, and they want that.

They want the world to look like Convoy, if they could get that. That’s what they want. They want that experience. They’re trying to find driver pools that will use a piece of technology on their phone, so they can have visibility into what’s going on, and operate their business better. One of the ways you do that in a viable way is you have that group of carriers also do work for others to balance things out throughout the year and make sure that carrier group’s available for your surge times.

I’m getting a bit long-winded on this answer, but neither one of them is a company we spend a lot of time worrying about. We watch what they do and we pay attention, but it’s not something our customers are asking us about, and it’s not the thing that’s going to make it or break it for Convoy in the next five to ten years. What will make it or break it for us is if we execute well and we build value for customers against the traditional incumbents.

Parameswaran: Let’s talk about the next five years for Convoy. What are your personal goals and what are your goals for the company, and — a question that’s on everybody’s mind in this forum — will you go public one day?

Lewis: I’ve never run a publicly traded company. I don’t know exactly what will happen, but when I think about it, I do think there are a bunch of good reasons why Convoy should be public, despite a lot of my friends saying it’s a painful place to be. There are a lot of reasons in this industry to do it. There are a lot of reasons for our employees, and it’s healthy from a compensation, incentive, and alignment perspective.

Our customers are traditional businesses, and they look at that. They ask us that as well. It is something they’re curious about. They believe that it’s a sign of stability and long-term viability. In our business, it does make a difference in terms of how our customers think about and view us and our carrier partners.

It provides access to capital for deals. We’ve never done an acquisition, but as I look at the industry evolving, I can see the future more clearly in terms of where I want to take this, and I can see pieces of other companies coming together around that or other deals. It provides that currency and opportunity.

We have the leadership team to do it now if we want to go do it. I mentioned that Mark Okerstrom has a lot of experience running and operating publicly traded companies. Our general counsel has done this several times. We have a mature senior leadership team at this point, and we’ve built a lot of things that make our systems much more rigorous internally.

It’s probably the right path. I want to realize the potential and opportunity of the company, and that is probably one of the ways to do that. Becoming publicly traded is probably part of the formula for achieving the potential of what Convoy can be.

Parameswaran: I know a lot of your friends are a little gun-shy about going public, but going public is a wonderful idea for a variety of reasons, and you understand that. It gives you flexibility and credibility. It makes you one of the big boys. Despite what a lot of private investors may tell you, the public markets are forward-looking and will give you stretched valuations — maybe a bit of correction here and there, but if you execute, the technology public markets are willing to give you three or four years of runway and valuation ahead of what you deserve.

Lewis: We’re doing some stuff internally to make sure that when the time is right, we are in a position where we can do that.

Parameswaran: Outside of going public, if we were to talk again in 2025, what do you think the scale and the position of Convoy would be at that point within the trucking ecosystem?

Lewis: The way our customers think about procuring and managing freight, the flexibility that they have, and the level of confidence they have in their partners will be unrecognizable from where it was a couple of years ago or even today.

Right now, the reason that these companies have 100 trucking providers and have 90 levels of redundancy is because they don’t have confidence that their partners will come through and have the flexibility to deliver for them, because every partner has one specialty thing that they do in one area, and they can’t flex, and they can’t operate at the same scale. It’s hard to operate that way with offline systems and traditional processes.

When you use technology and you have a network of trucks that are plugged in, you can do things faster and at scale more reliably. You can offer better visibility and planning to your customers, and you can give them data to help them improve. It’s going to be a partnership-based experience where they don’t have to have 50 to 100 trucking partners. They can have a few, and we will be able to offer them flexibility through a range of market scenarios and freight scenarios that will make it so that they don’t have to worry about managing all of their providers to make sure they’re covered. This fear of not being able to get trucking capacity and not being able to manage it is real, because it’s an inconsistent business.

I think it will be unrecognizable. I think Convoy will be by far the strongest, most healthy, most viable trucking option in the country. That’s my goal. There will be others. There are going to be lots of other trucking companies, but people will look at Convoy as the solution that lets them set it and forget it more than ever before.

Part of that is the transparency, the visibility, and the reporting we’re offering that will build confidence and trust. Our customers will see that we’re not going to jerk them around. We’re not going to try to screw them for that extra margin today, which is how most of the compensation structures work. We’re going to build a partnership that is flexible to our customers’ needs and has clarity around what we’re charging. That’s where we’re going with it, and our customers are so excited about that. They want to not have to stress about this all the time.

One of the investors I was talking to was saying, “Don’t shippers never give their carriers more than five or ten percent of their business?” That’s true, but you need to think about why that’s true. It’s not good for them. It’s not easier to have 50 vendors in the same category. That’s a lot of work. It’s because they don’t have confidence, so we’re fixing that.

Parameswaran: That makes total sense. I want to talk about a topic you tweeted about recently, which is your view on how self-driving and automated trucks come into this. You had a proposal for team tagging which I thought was interesting. Tell us about that little tweet you put out — what prompted that and what was on your mind there.

Lewis: The prompt is that I get asked all the time about self-driving. I’ve thought about it for years. There was a period four or five years ago where it was a much hotter topic than it is today.

What I’ve realized is that a lot of folks in the technology world — or maybe in worlds that don’t understand the day-to-day operations of trucking and how it works — tend to have these models in their heads of how self-driving should roll out that I think are theoretically great and that provide a lot of benefits, but that aren’t practical. They won’t work.

If regulators are sitting around thinking about how we are going to make laws for different states for self-driving, if we don’t include certain scenarios and we don’t solve for certain scenarios, we could end up in a situation where the theorists were able to drive some regulatory outcomes that result in a suboptimal operating environment for self-driving, and you won’t see the benefits because it’ll be too hard to make it happen.

I’ll give a couple of examples. Assume that self-driving trucks can operate on the highway but not on back roads and city streets. That’s pretty much a given at this point — that safe highway driving would happen successfully first. Take a 1,000-mile job. There are two models.

One approach is a local driver brings the trailer to a transfer station. The self-driving truck picks up that trailer, runs it on the highway portion with no driver in it, gets to another local hub outside of the destination region or metro, where a local driver picks it up and delivers it. That’s the one that gets talked about all the time — at least in my experience. I’m constantly told that’s how this is going to happen.

I think that is a hard way to do it first. Offline, I’ve gotten a lot of messages from people in trucking who agree with me on this. That model that I described will happen someday, but it’s hard to do that one first. Theoretically, it sounds right because it’s self-driving, which surely means you shouldn’t have a driver in there. If you have a driver in there, you have to pay them, and that defeats the purpose. My feeling is that you incur more cost by not having the driver in there.

The way things already work today is you have this human-to-human tag-team model. It’s a two-driver model where one person is driving, then they stop driving and the other person takes over so that the first driver can go in the back and rest, to reset their hours of service. They must have ten hours off to reset their hours of service. They hand off the driving like this, back and forth, and they can run that truck twice as fast because it’s always moving. It’s a team-driving scenario which already exists and is pretty common. It’s two drivers working together.

I think you should leave a driver in the cab and then that driver should tag-team with the truck. The driver can drive, and the truck can take over while the driver resets their hours of service. Obviously, the technology has to be ready for that to happen. Once the technology is ready for a truck to drive by itself, it certainly is ready for it to drive with somebody in that cab because it’s obviously safe enough at that point where the risk of something happening is no greater than with a human driver. That’s the model that I think is the right model.

It seems that it’s hard for people to see that because they think into the future and they imagine that we can get to this other model that could have other benefits, but it’s so logistically difficult to create those transport hubs. It’s so hard. If you’re interested, you can look at what I wrote about this. There are so many issues with handoffs. You have such limited flexibility in your driving. If there’s no driver in the truck, there will be tons of times the truck can’t actually operate on its own as we’re getting started, and it’ll take forever. I think it’s important that we have a system where the driver stays in the truck for a long time, and we’ll be able to have deliveries done in half the time. It’ll be a huge advantage for the supply chain. It’ll accelerate everything and you can roll it out much faster than if you have a leg where there’s no driver at all on the truck.

Parameswaran: We’ve got two more minutes, so do you have some closing remarks? What’s on your mind these days?

Lewis: I’ll end off by saying that this is definitely where the industry is headed: networks of trucks connected to technology platforms from a visibility data reporting perspective, better matching, combinations of jobs, reducing empty miles, optimization of appointment times, insights and analytics based on the data that help the operators, flexible procurement, flexible trailer pools — that is the future, and it’s going to happen.

I hope Convoy is the one that carries this through. I’m fired up. I believe we’re going to do it. We’re a leader in the space right now. If you’re looking at where you want to make bets, you can bet that this is going to happen over the long term, so it’s a smart bet.

As you mentioned, the last couple of years were tough for Convoy. The market was volatile, but instead of looking to just weather the storm, we went and invented a bunch of stuff. We created new solutions that are in high demand now. We used this as an opportunity to have more strategic conversations with customers, invent flexible solutions, and roll those flexible solutions out.

We’ve never been in a position where we’ve had the kind of control over our margin in our business that we have today. It’s hard. When you’re buying and selling a spread with principal risk, it’s hard in a volatile market. We’re now at a point where we have a much stronger operational system to do that — controls, tools, teams, et cetera. We now have six months of data that have shown the consistent and expanding margins around that.

I’ve never been more fired up. We have systems in place now, our customers like what we’re doing, the industry is going in this direction, supply chain is more important than ever ― there are a lot of tailwinds around where we take this. We’ve got to execute. It’s still hard. It’s hard sometimes to explain this business because it’s a complicated business, but that’s where I am. I’m super fired up, and I think we’re going to take it.

Parameswaran: I agree, and I’m happy to be part of your cap table and your journey. I think you guys are going to be incredible over the next many years. I’ve observed you and Convoy for five years now, and I want to reiterate that for me, what has us so excited investing in you is how those compounding effects of both product creation and now scale and customer love, are taking on a life of their own. Thank you so much, Dan, for your time.

About the session host:

Ram Parameswaran is the founder of Octahedron Capital, a global, growth-oriented investment firm that seeks to make concentrated investments in leading public and private companies that drive the world’s internet economy. Prior to Octahedron, Ram was a partner and portfolio manager at Altimeter Capital, a multi-billion dollar investment firm in Menlo Park, where he helped lead the firm’s investments in the internet and payments sectors, across both the hedge fund and private growth funds. Prior to Altimeter, Ram was the technology analyst at Falcon Edge Capital, co-founded the Internet research team at Sanford Bernstein, and started his career as a senior engineer at Qualcomm. Ram has an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a Masters in EE from Virginia Tech.

About the featured guest:

Dan Lewis is the Chief Executive Officer at Convoy. Before Convoy, Dan served as General Manager of New Shopping Experiences at Amazon, as well as Vice President of Product and Operations at Wavii (acquired by Google), and Group Product Manager at Microsoft. Dan started his career in technology and supply-chain consulting for Oliver Wyman, after studying cognitive science at Yale University.

Glenn Surowiec on Value-Oriented Investing on the Right Side of Change

December 14, 2021 in Diary, Equities, Featured, Full Video, Interviews, Invest Intelligently Podcast, Latticework, Latticework Online, Member Podcasts, Transcripts

Glenn Surowiec, Managing Member of GDS Investments, and John Mihaljevic, Chairman of MOI Global, recorded a fireside chat for Latticework 2021.

Glenn and John explored the topic, “Investing on the Right Side of Change While Applying Value Principles”.

This conversation is available as an episode of Invest Intelligently, a member podcast of MOI Global. (Learn how to access member podcasts.)

Listen to the conversation (recorded on December 13):

printable transcript
download audio

The following transcript has been edited for space and clarity.

John Mihaljevic: I am delighted to welcome Glenn Surowiec to this conversation at Latticework 2021. Glenn runs GDS investments which he founded in 2012. Many in the MOI Global community have gotten to know Glenn over the years from his contributions to the community and through my conversations with him. We’re truly grateful to you, Glenn, for making yourself available to share your insights and ideas.

I thought it would be fitting to invite Glenn for this conversation at Latticework because the theme of this year’s Latticework is intelligent investing on the right side of change. I plagiarized that from you, Glenn. I’m sure others have said it as well, but I heard that idea of investing on the right side of change from you. I’d love to talk to you about that, especially as I know that you do so while staying true to value investing principles as well.

It’s not just pie in the sky, “any valuation goes” investing. Rather, it’s about finding companies you believe are positioned to grow over the long term and yet are available at an attractive valuation. Maybe we could start by having you tell us a little about that approach and how you came to embrace that investment philosophy.

Glenn Surowiec: Thanks for the warm introduction! I’m certainly glad to play a role in Latticework 2021.

Let me take a step back. I’ll describe briefly what I do in terms of the companies I try to look for. I’ll also flip that upside down and talk about what I don’t do in terms of companies or situations I try to avoid. Then, I’ll build out that “what I do” section a little from there.

In a simplistic way, the more mature I get as an investor, I certainly look to buy good companies. I’m not looking to overpay, and I’m focused on partnering with talented leadership CEOs – not only leaders who understand the capital allocation process, but who also have a real special culture, a long-term vision and strategy, and who are smart and pragmatic. To borrow a phrase from Will Thorndike, I am looking for that “outsider CEO.”

In terms of what I try to avoid it, it’s a lot of common sense. This isn’t anything I’ve come up with on my own. It’s a lot of reading about what works. It’s also identifying who you are as an investor, where your skills are, where your pressure points are, and where your stress is.

Everyone has their own winning formula. Often, I think about my winning formula, about what I avoid. It’s simple. I don’t like leverage in any way. I don’t sell stocks short. I don’t buy broken businesses and hope that somehow I can do anything about that. I don’t partner with bad management teams. I don’t like overpaying.

It sounds overly simplistic, but sometimes it is, in a way. But I it’s important to put this stuff down on paper. Maybe when you’re in that period where there’s a lot going on and there’s maybe more volatility, it’s always nice to go back to these things you can grab on to.

Building out on what I do – we’ve touched on this in previous conversations – the entire system is geared toward no short-term influences. I still think the biggest edge any investor has is the ability to think or have a long-term orientation. Also, patience is probably the most underrated quality in life.

There are a lot of good stock pickers out there because they have a sense of what’s important to a particular investment – from both a quantitative and qualitative standpoint. It’s the ownership phase that shakes a lot of people out – to just be in a world overly geared toward short-term behavior and certainly everything that wraps around that.

Anything you can do to think long-term is important; that is the spirit of your original question, John.

If I can put the kinds of investments into two general buckets – it’s important to study what I call magical companies – but to do it with a value orientation. These are companies with this great value proposition where it’s a combination of convenience, selection value, and high levels of engagement in terms of the time spent on the platform. You also have a CEO who can carry out the culture and vision; the execution is there.

When you look under the hood at things like customer retention and loyalty and the size of the addressable market, you can see the stars are aligned for a long runway business. In a perfect world, those are the kinds of businesses I want to own for a long time.

To steal a phrase from Jay Hoag from TCV – I think in sports metaphors – it’s like sitting on the sidelines and just applauding a basketball player like Michael Jordan. It’s a long game, but I also think it’s a game few people are able to play.

We’ve talked in the past about how I don’t mind investing in turnarounds. I’m not willing to sacrifice the quality of business, so I’m not looking for businesses that might be under some secular threat and hope that somehow a management team will reconfigure things, hire in a different way, and pivot in a way to create value because I also know statistical headwinds apply to the ability to execute that.

Those were the two buckets of “I like to have” companies, but the underlying ingredient is I must trust management. I want to partner with people I respect and who understand capital allocation in a deep way. But I also want a business that ranges from at least above average to elite.

Mihaljevic: How do you think about change in the world and the types of companies likely to be hurt versus helped by change?

Surowiec: We live in an environment where companies can create an enormous amount of scale quickly. The corollary to that is you can also quickly evaporate a lot of what would have been structural advantages.

It’s understanding the playing field today. It’s being patient but thinking through how the competitive landscape might shift in a favorable but also an unfavorable way. You don’t need to look far to see what’s happened.

Every vertical is almost subject to some level of change. In the last two decades, the poster child vertical is traditional retail where there were structural disadvantages for virtually all of retail. You might be able to make a case like a Home Depot or TJX because of the niche they’re in. It might be hard to push those things online.

But, in general, most of what was in old retail was at a structural disadvantage from a cost standpoint to the extent that you could move that online, not have to deal with the same overhead, and also deliver. Getting back to that three-legged stool I talked about with value, convenience, and selection, you could see how traditional retail was severely disadvantaged.

But you can also make a case when you go through different verticals. You see change in terms of how people consume TV and audio. You see changes in banking. I don’t have a strong opinion about how this all shakes out, but I’m saying if you invest in banking – maybe you’re in a Vive or even a Wells Fargo or even the payment side of it.

A month ago – and I might get some of this wrong. But directionally I’m right – Amazon in the U.K. said it would not accept any Visa credit cards (not debit cards). Amazon said the cost is too much of accepting that particular card payment, and it continues to be a headwind for the larger goal that businesses are after, which is to provide the best prices for their own customers.

That is a situation I would want to understand. Visa and MasterCard are respected in terms of the underlying economics, but are the economics at the expense of its customers? That’s a legitimate question.

That’s something that, even though the stocks have pulled back, this seems to be a headache. This seems to be something people complain about; they don’t like these fees and a lot of people don’t know why they’re so high. There’s all this money floating around in the system. For once, you have a company like Amazon with enough scale to do something about it. But my guess is if Walmart looked at its cost structure, this would also be a source of headache.

I want to be in a value-creating ecosystem or platform. That’s the most desirable thing.

I listen to your podcast, John. A couple weeks ago, you talked a little about consumer product companies. Before people thought companies and the brands associated with them were irreplaceable. Today, people don’t seem to feel that way. A lot of these old stalwarts, these steady Eddy types, have been pushed aside.

Mihaljevic: One name in retail that’s done extremely well is Costco. It’s a favorite of value investors. What do you think about businesses like Costco? Are they on the right side of change?

Surowiec: Let’s unpack that a bit. Costco’s DNA is unique. Even though it’s in retail, Costco is a low-cost machine. It has built something hard to displace in some ways like what Walmart has built. Costco has everything. It knows how to make money at low margins. It has a hiring culture that results in lower turnover because employees can make decent wages even at entry-levels. You can also have benefits. Costco also has exclusive items. The Kirkland brand is in of itself not just a retailer. The Kirkland brand has tremendous value in its own right. It’s only available at Costco. If I owned Costco – Costco is in a different situation, for sure.

The online retail vacuum cleaner will probably go to weaker outfits only because it’s not in my mind, but you can also say it’s like an AutoZone for different reasons.

I try to consistently reverse-engineer companies that have done well. You must be intellectually curious, right? A lot of people talk about Amazon and Netflix. Well, what made them great?

Look at AutoZone. Here is a company that figured out a different formula. It’s in retail, but management did things differently. What is its competitive advantage? It’s been able to drive a lot of margins through private label, but when you need something, you know – because of its large inventory – that AutoZone will have it. It sells something that is hard to move online. AutoZone is legendary for its buybacks. But the fact that it has grown sales in the last ten years at around 50 percent – where per-share results are up 3X simply because the denominator is an impressive story no one understands. It’s used different things – both on the operational side but also on the balance sheet side – to flex its muscle a bit.

There will be winners, but the list of winners will be shorter. A winner must have some special quality to protect itself. My guess is Amazon would rather go after an entirely new industry it sees as disadvantaged versus going after Costco directly. It would be better off applying resources doing the former – not the latter.

Mihaljevic: It’s interesting because investing on the right side of change doesn’t mean completely avoiding some sectors because, even in sectors under threat, there can be great companies able to deliver great results for shareholders. It sounds like it’s worth keeping an open mind.

Surowiec: Absolutely. Costco has lived in this new world where so much of retail has moved online and management has figured out a way. It gets back to my earlier point about partnering with a CEO with a vision – a long-term vision – and who has developed a culture that allows people to think freely because the stuff of business is uneven and messy in many ways.

The average life cycle for great companies used to be measured in generations. It’s not like that anymore. But in some industries, you see a funneling up of companies that were big and powerful ten years ago and which have gotten bigger and even more powerful. Eventually, disruption wins.

Mihaljevic: Yes, and your point that a company in a, let’s say, threatened sector – if it will succeed big, it needs something special. AutoZone and Costco are probably in that category. It reminds me a little of IKEA and how consumers systematically undervalue their own time in assembling the furniture; they don’t price that into whatever they’re paying for IKEA furniture. With Costco, I see it as an almost enjoyable shopping experience.

I wish there were a Costco in Switzerland because I liked going to Costco when I was in the U.S. You have that experience in which the consumer doesn’t even consider a cost versus imagine shipping an average Costco shopping cart by mail and the cost that that would add. There’s your competitive advantage.

Surowiec: Coming back to that three-legged stool, how does the company fit into this idea of delivering value, convenience, and selection? Costco checks all those boxes.

Mihaljevic: Glenn, when you talked about platforms, time people spend, and having a great CEO, I couldn’t help but think of Facebook because of the CEO that Zuckerberg has been in terms of growing and delivering shareholder value over the long term. Is Facebook on your mind? Do you consider it interesting here?

Surowiec: I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. Let’s break it down. I did own it for a period when it halved at the IPO. It’s clearly a wonderful business. It’s certainly been able to pivot as consumers have changed their habits over time. There was some concern initially about its ability to pivot to mobile. It has such a monopoly on what it does.

I want to own companies that are a win-win for its owners and its customers as well. I don’t feel that way with Facebook. Once I did. I want people to be online, and I understand the entertainment feature, but the educational feature is underrated. A lot of people spend time online, and the idea that you can understand a particular subject or particular person, or you can find incredibly valuable podcasts – that feature is underrated.

I’m a big proponent of making sure it’s like owning your own inbox or whatever – just to bring it down to something people understand. But time is an incredibly valuable resource. I’m sensitive to what I subscribe to, what I listen to whether it’s “This Week in Intelligent Investing” or “Invest Like the Best” or “Business Breakdowns.” I’m sensitive to whom I talk, to what I watch. I look at what Facebook does as a large waste of time.

In one sense, I see it as clearly a great business. I don’t necessarily agree with the role it plays in a lot of important events that happen in our country and how Facebook has become a platform for distorting information. It’s become fuel for some things I’m just not crazy about. Even at its best, it’s a source of entertainment whereas I would rather partner with things that are both entertainment and educational. It just feels better, and I feel better about what I’m doing.

But that’s not to deny Facebook or Meta. It has so many wonderful qualities. If you’re looking at the business, you can isolate or ignore the qualitative stuff; there’s a lot to like about Facebook. It has a virtual monopoly, but I don’t like what it does. Maybe because of that – maybe tobacco is too strong a parallel. I don’t own it now. I’m okay not owning it.

Mihaljevic: What are some companies you would put in that first bucket that you either own, have owned, or are considering owning?

Surowiec: Certainly, Amazon is one; I’ve owned it on and off in the past. Amazon has been a huge net benefit for society both in terms of what it has done directly but also indirectly in terms of forcing competitors to change behavior. Amazon has exposed a lot of lousy economics that have stayed around simply because of an absence of someone who will say, “Well, this is ridiculous.” It’s taken a couple of verticals, and it’s kept prices low. There’s a win-win for the most part. Yes, there might be some suppliers that aren’t overly thrilled, but the amount benefit unleashed to consumers is pretty impressive.

I like to think the Netflix value proposition is a win-win in a lot of ways in terms of a creator audience. Also, consumers feel pretty good about what they pay and what they get each month.

One of my favorite CEOs is Daniel Ek from Spotify. I have a lot of respect for Spotify does. I forget how he described it, but when you mentioned Facebook, this is the first thing that came to my mind. He used the words nutritious and delicious. Facebook is delicious. I’d rather be in nutritious companies, nutritious platform companies. I have a lot of respect for what Spotify is doing. You could say it saved the music industry because the industry was pretty much broken because it was driven by a lot of piracy. The online world – at least initially – had changed the whole distribution business for the worst.

Piracy was legal – at least at the time – in every country except Sweden. Here, you have this guy who said consumers might like it, but it’s hurting the music industry because the money is not going to the creators who deserve it. A lot of money still goes to the legacy model, but he said he wanted both creators and consumers happy. He wanted a value proposition for both. He’s doing that with podcasts and things like that. There’s an opportunity here to create something within that broader audio category.

I listened to your podcast last week about Twitter. I own Twitter. I like Twitter. I use Twitter. Parag is a thoughtful, insightful CEO. Twitter brings lot of value to the table – both from an educational and entertainment perspective. It hasn’t had nearly the success of Facebook in monetizing its user base, but there’s an opportunity. It delivers to consumers more nutritious, rather than delicious, product.

Mihaljevic: Glenn, I’d love to talk a little about valuation and how you think about the right price to pay because I know you’re a value guy. You’ve invested successfully in things like the GE turnaround, which is a very different valuation case than a Twitter or a Spotify. How do you go through that process? What do you need to be comfortable?

Surowiec: Each business needs to be thought about a little differently. The more mature I get, I find that traditional quantitative measures of value tend to be a little overrated. It’s not the right way. It’s easy for people to make judgments from the number side of things. You can screen different companies. Lots of people do that. Computers do that. I don’t know that, as an individual, I will come to the table with any particular insight or edge on the quantitative stuff.

I’ve given more and more thought to the extent that there’s a critical margin of safety. It will happen more with the qualitative stuff than with the quantity of stuff. That’s what I’m getting at. I think about being right about those qualitative insights. If I have a business – if you go back to that original framework where I have something unique and I have something with a long runway – and it is this winner-take-most opportunity – then I would probably be foolish not to move forward even if the company will not screen well in any metric.

I look at price-to-sales more than I look at price-to-earnings. It’s okay in a certain environment if a company is aggressively spending to win an incredible opportunity. I know that, if you reverse engineer a company like Netflix, for example, and you look at its valuation history in the earlier part of the decade – the early stages of the last crisis like 2010 to 2012 or 2013 – it fluctuated between one and five times sales. But it didn’t screen well. It didn’t make a lot of money. It had a breakeven P&L mindset. It had low debt.

But it was investing heavily in becoming this great source of content and pricing its product at a place where consumers wouldn’t sneeze if they had to increase it five or ten percent. The market from 2014 to today revalues it from 3X to 10X. But using Netflix is like the guidepost. Even today, the irony of this is it now has profits. You can say it has a more entrenched moat. It has way more debt, but the market has revalued it much higher.

Would I be comfortable paying the multiple that Netflix has today? Absolutely not. Even though it checks a lot of those boxes from a qualitative standpoint, I’m not paying eight, nine, or ten times sales for a company. It’s probably outstripped what I’m personally comfortable paying.

With that said, I own these companies at lower prices. Let me just put a fence around what I’m about to say. I’m not pitching these today. But, at the same time, if you look at where a lot of companies have come down recently, if these companies weren’t on your radar screen six months ago and you’re now at the point of “hey, a lot has happened over the last six months” – not necessarily like Apple, Google, or Amazon, but maybe that next tier or two down within this great company sphere, like Spotify is down probably 35 or 40 percent from its high.

I have owned it for over a year, but if I were coming up with a list of companies I would want to get closer to – maybe in anticipation of another cycle of volatility – Spotify is certainly a company I would get closer to simply because it’s down so much. It might not be down enough, but it should be a company people are least teeing up for a future purchase.

Twitter is the same thing. I’m not pitching Twitter at $80.00, but it’s down somewhere around $45.00. A lot has happened. I would argue that it’s probably a net benefit. Twitter’s management has put out some decent goals for 2023. That would be a brand with a lot of relevance. The CEO change makes it better. I don’t know what people were looking for.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella was hired on February 4, 2014. I was researching this because of what happened with Twitter. Not ironically, the low in Microsoft in this last cycle was on February 5, 2014. There’s probably something at Twitter that needs to be looked at closer. My basis is a lot lower, but I follow it relatively closely. There are things there, especially with Elliot and Silver Lake. There’s enough value there. There’s enough change happening – bringing it back to our original theme – where that would be a name people need to look at.

Mihaljevic: I won’t dwell on Twitter because people have probably heard me talk about it enough on the podcast. When you talked about buying versus holding, it sounds like you’re clearly drawing a distinction. The question would be how would you think about selling – would there be something on the price valuation spectrum that would cause you to sell, or would you need to see a change to the fundamental thesis?

Surowiec: Selling is always incredibly difficult. If there is an emerging business in the early stages of attacking a large addressable market, my mindset is that there are exceptions to everything. Of course, position sizing needs to be factored into this. But, generally speaking, I am okay giving that company a long leash because psychology is such that the market will always over- and underprice them throughout its lifecycle. What I need to do is control. I have control over what I’m willing to pay for it, but also during the ownership period, it’s almost inevitable that it will get a little overvalued – even a lot overvalued – but the ability to grow into that and compound at an acceptable rate over a long period of time to me is a far more important determinant.

But there is some art. You must make sure your original judgments are correct. If your original judgments are right about the business and its management and you have a business that’s reinvesting in the core and doing so in a relatively low-risk way and not just leveraging your balance sheet, then there are lots of situations where just being tolerant and patient with those situations will serve you well. That’s where I went.

Other companies just don’t have those characteristics. If you’re a bit down the food chain in terms of quality, then your valuation parameters need to be a little tighter with how you think about valuation.

Mihaljevic: Makes sense. Let’s talk a little more about turnarounds. I’m curious how you think about the success metrics there generally. What kinds of turnarounds have you seen succeed? Conversely, what do you think are the types of turnarounds you wouldn’t touch?

Surowiec: Let me just answer the second question about conditions that I would need to see. I’ll probably just revert to GE as a case study because there’s some news on that and it’s something I’ve owned a couple years.

Turnaround investing is tricky. It’s not like I’m looking for broken businesses and hoping something magical will fix it. I want incredibly capable CEOs with a history. You can look at companies like Tyco when Ed Breen came in. Certainly, Ed Breen had a track record with Motorola. Ed Breen then goes to DuPont. That’s a situation that, if you’re investing in turnarounds and you see businesses put together in a way that doesn’t make sense anymore and are creating the synergies they originally were but you now have a CEO that can see that, then that’s a situation you need to study a little closer.

Decent business just might not be configured and optimized properly today. A CEO can carry out that vision and think about the business in a different way. If you have those things, your odds of success increase.

GE is always fascinating to talk to. It was probably the Morgan Housel quote where he said something to the effect of extreme events in one direction will cause extreme events in another. It’s so true in so many aspects of life. But, in GE, it’s especially true because Jack Welch built in the ‘80s and ‘90s a hodgepodge of companies and it created this conglomerate structure. Each vertical just went out and bought lots of different companies. You had this huge rise of GE Capital.

Then you look at what Larry Culp inherited in October 2018. He’s the first outsider CEO to run GE. He had a different mindset. On one hand you think of Jack Welch building up the company and buying lots of different companies and increasing the earnings reliance on GE Capital as the great risking. On the other hand, Larry Culp did the great de-risking. We’re coming full circle and we’ll have many more chapters now that GE announced in November it would split into three companies.

From an investor psychology standpoint, to be negative on GE today is every bit as criminal as being bullish on them 20 years ago at 60 times earnings when GE Capital made up 50 percent of the business.

As a turnaround investor, I look for a company that is built and has the balance sheet flexibility, has the underlying business strength. But I also look for a company with a CEO like Larry Culp to lead that company down the right path.

I always find it strange. The bear thesis on today equates to this huge lack of patience. You read quotes from different analysts. It’s like investors will have to wait a long time, which is like a year to potentially realize the full value of the transaction. For the whole Jack Welch era, I was just starting out in investing. But I always found it strange that the market was essentially rewarding Welch for the four acquisitions per month. It was rewarding Jack Welch for the rise of GE Capital by paying this outrageous multiple on what it was doing.

Sometimes, the market gives you false signals on both sides. In other words, GE was – in hindsight, we know this, but intelligent investors already knew this – GE was never as good as the market would have had you believe in 2000. Now GE is not nearly as bad as the market would have you believe today. That would be a turnaround worth studying.

Mihaljevic: That’s a great case study. Glenn, before we finish up, I’d love your thoughts on capital allocation and how that figures in this investment approach that you have when you take a growing business like Spotify. How do you think about capital allocation? Is that even critical there in terms of all the alternatives that exist? Or are you hoping those kinds of businesses just reinvest everything or as much as they possibly can in the business?

Surowiec: In the case of emerging growth stories, there’s no right answer. It comes down to whether there is a partnership with management. But, at the end of the day, I don’t have a controlling stack. Nor do I want one.

As an investor, we talked about balance sheet risk. I’m unwilling to take on management risk, but you must accept a little operational drift, if you will. The original vision that you think will happen over three, four, or five years might not happen because companies might pivot in different ways. I want a company with the infrastructure and governance in place so its management thinks of capital allocation like Warren Buffett or like some of our fellow MOI community members.

There are many CEOs who think about what they are doing there. Does it make sense to buy back stock? Or does it make sense to pay a dividend? I look at so many different companies, and I listen to competitors. It’s amazing, frankly, how many times you hear managements say they will buy back stock because they want to offset equity dilution in the employee comp. That’s a ridiculous reason. They also say they will pay a dividend because our shareholders expect it. Maybe that makes sense if you have a mature company where their ability to generate cash far exceeds their ability to reinvest. I get all that.

But if you’re just doing it just to do it, it doesn’t make sense. When you tie those things to the return on capital – an ideal situation is a company that can reinvest capital at a high rate of return. When they can do that, I want them reinvesting 100 percent of their capital. To the extent they can’t do that, then they have some less sexy choices to make.

But it takes a special CEO to pursue the less sexy option because they don’t have enough high return on invested capital opportunities to pursue right now. Maybe they say, “We won’t pay a dividend and we won’t buy back stock because it doesn’t make sense now. But it might make sense when there’s some shakeout here.”

I’m sure the DNA of a company like Danaher leads it to grow, but not entirely organically. Here’s the underlying M&A strategy. I don’t necessarily want Danaher to pay a dividend and I don’t necessarily want it to buy back stock unless its stock is cheap. You might want it to build up cash somewhere like Berkshire knowing it can be redeployed when opportunities arise.

There is no one-size-fits-all mentality. It’s a lot of art. It’s also a huge amount of quantitative work. But, at the end of the day, it’s having this this symbiotic relationship between shareholders and CEO where they’re not locked into any one strategy. They’re just locked into creating value in a responsible, risk-adjusted way.

Tying that back to earlier conversations about how different companies create value, we’ve almost covered everything. We covered companies with a long runway that reinvested 100 percent of capital like Amazon. I just talked about Danaher and Berkshire. They create value in different ways. We talked about turnarounds. We talked about a company like AutoZone where management figured out a different way. They’ve done things that are operational, but they’ve also done things on the balance sheet side that are unique from being like, “Hey, we want to shrink the denominator,” and they don’t pay a dividend.

There are lots of different ways, but all those companies are wed together by the numbers, the maturity, the underlying economics of the business, and the industry they’re in. They don’t try to push too hard and try to do something that just isn’t there based on the underlying business or the underlying industry. That takes some intellectual honesty at the end of the day.

About the featured guest:

Glenn Surowiec founded GDS Investments in 2012. From 2001 to 2012, he worked for Alsin Capital Management, Inc. as an equity research analyst (2001-2003), co-portfolio manager (2003-2008), and portfolio manager (2008-2012). Before joining ACM, Glenn worked for Enron Corp. as a derivatives structuring manager, and for Commerce Bancorp (now TD Bank) as a real estate credit analyst. ​Glenn has a B.A. in Management (Accounting concentration) from Gettysburg College and an MBA (Finance concentration) from Southern Methodist University. He graduated in the top 10% of his MBA class and participated in study-abroad programs both as an undergraduate (Seville, Spain) and graduate student (Melbourne, Australia). Glenn’s interests (outside investing) include running, cycling, golfing and spending time with his wife and three teenage boys.

About the session host:

John Mihaljevic leads MOI Global and serves as managing editor of The Manual of Ideas. He managed a private partnership, Mihaljevic Partners LP, from 2005-2016. John is a winner of the Value Investors Club’s prize for best investment idea. He is a trained capital allocator, having studied under Yale University Chief Investment Officer David Swensen and served as Research Assistant to Nobel Laureate James Tobin. John holds a BA in Economics, summa cum laude, from Yale and is a CFA charterholder.

Ho Nam and Rishi Gosalia on a Buffett-Style Venture Philosophy

December 13, 2021 in Diary, Equities, Featured, Full Video, Interviews, Invest Intelligently Podcast, Latticework, Latticework Online, Member Podcasts

Rishi Gosalia, Managing Partner of SF Value Capital, and Ho Nam, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Altos Ventures, joined members for a fireside chat at Latticework on December 15, 2021.

Rishi and Ho explored the topic, “A Venture Approach Inspired by the Philosophy of Warren Buffett”.

As announced in advance, this session was neither recorded nor transcribed.

About the session host:

Rishi Gosalia is the managing partner for SF Value Capital, LLC. He also works as an engineer at Google. Rishi graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Math & Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

About the featured guest:

Ho Nam is a Co-Founder and Managing Director of Altos Ventures, based in Menlo Park, California. Ho is a member of the Altos investment team. Before co-founding Altos in 1996, he worked in various sales and marketing roles at Silicon Graphics and Octel Communications. Ho began his venture career at Trinity Ventures, an early investor in both enterprise and consumer companies, including Starbucks Coffee. He began his professional career at Bain & Company in San Francisco. Ho received an MBA from Stanford University and a B.S. in Engineering with a minor in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Harvey Mudd College.

S2E12: The Future of Brands | Leadership Change at Twitter

December 8, 2021 in Audio, Podcast, This Week in Intelligent Investing

It’s a pleasure to share with you Season 2 Episode 12 of This Week in Intelligent Investing, co-hosted by

  • Phil Ordway of Anabatic Investment Partners in Chicago, Illinois;
  • Elliot Turner of RGA Investment Advisors in Stamford, Connecticut; and
  • John Mihaljevic of MOI Global in Zurich, Switzerland.

Enjoy the conversation!

download audio recording

In this episode, Phil Ordway, Elliot Turner, and John Mihaljevic discuss

  • the future of brands, and how to think about brand value; and
  • leadership change at Twitter, with Parag Agrawal becoming CEO.

Follow Up

Would you like to get in touch?

Follow This Week in Intelligent Investing on Twitter.

Engage on Twitter with Elliot, Phil, or John.

Connect on LinkedIn with Elliot, Phil, or John.

This Week in Intelligent Investing is available on Amazon Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pandora, Podbean, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, and YouTube.

If you missed any past episodes, you can listen to them here.

About the Podcast Co-Hosts

Philip Ordway is Managing Principal and Portfolio Manager of Anabatic Fund, L.P. Previously, Philip was a partner at Chicago Fundamental Investment Partners (CFIP). At CFIP, which he joined in 2007, Philip was responsible for investments across the capital structure in various industries. Prior to joining CFIP, Philip was an analyst in structured corporate finance with Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. from 2002 to 2005. Philip earned his B.S. in Education & Social Policy and Economics from Northwestern University in 2002 and his M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2007, where he now serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Finance Department.

Elliot Turner is a co-founder and Managing Partner, CIO at RGA Investment Advisors, LLC. RGA Investment Advisors runs a long-term, low turnover, growth at a reasonable price investment strategy seeking out global opportunities. Elliot focuses on discovering and analyzing long-term, high quality investment opportunities and strategic portfolio management. Prior to joining RGA, Elliot managed portfolios at at AustinWeston Asset Management LLC, Chimera Securities and T3 Capital. Elliot holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation as well as a Juris Doctor from Brooklyn Law School.. He also holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Emory University where he double majored in Political Science and Philosophy.

John Mihaljevic leads MOI Global and serves as managing editor of The Manual of Ideas. He managed a private partnership, Mihaljevic Partners LP, from 2005-2016. John is a winner of the Value Investors Club’s prize for best investment idea. He is a trained capital allocator, having studied under Yale University Chief Investment Officer David Swensen and served as Research Assistant to Nobel Laureate James Tobin. John holds a BA in Economics, summa cum laude, from Yale and is a CFA charterholder.

The content of this podcast is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security in any jurisdiction. The content is distributed for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice or a recommendation to sell or buy any security or other investment, or undertake any investment strategy. There are no warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or results obtained from any information set forth on this podcast. The podcast participants and their affiliates may have positions in and may, from time to time, make purchases or sales of the securities or other investments discussed or evaluated on this podcast. [dkpdf-remove]
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S2E11: Challenges of Forecasting in Business and Investing | Zillow’s Retreat

November 23, 2021 in Audio, Podcast, This Week in Intelligent Investing

It’s a pleasure to share with you Season 2 Episode 11 of This Week in Intelligent Investing, co-hosted by

  • Phil Ordway of Anabatic Investment Partners in Chicago, Illinois;
  • Elliot Turner of RGA Investment Advisors in Stamford, Connecticut; and
  • John Mihaljevic of MOI Global in Zurich, Switzerland.

Enjoy the conversation!

download audio recording

In this episode, Elliot Turner, Phil Ordway, and John Mihaljevic discuss

  • the challenges of forecasting, faced by businesses and investors alike; an
  • thoughts on Zillow’s retreat from ibuying.

Follow Up

Would you like to get in touch?

Follow This Week in Intelligent Investing on Twitter.

Engage on Twitter with Elliot, Phil, or John.

Connect on LinkedIn with Elliot, Phil, or John.

This Week in Intelligent Investing is available on Amazon Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pandora, Podbean, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, and YouTube.

If you missed any past episodes, you can listen to them here.

About the Podcast Co-Hosts

Philip Ordway is Managing Principal and Portfolio Manager of Anabatic Fund, L.P. Previously, Philip was a partner at Chicago Fundamental Investment Partners (CFIP). At CFIP, which he joined in 2007, Philip was responsible for investments across the capital structure in various industries. Prior to joining CFIP, Philip was an analyst in structured corporate finance with Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. from 2002 to 2005. Philip earned his B.S. in Education & Social Policy and Economics from Northwestern University in 2002 and his M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2007, where he now serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Finance Department.

Elliot Turner is a co-founder and Managing Partner, CIO at RGA Investment Advisors, LLC. RGA Investment Advisors runs a long-term, low turnover, growth at a reasonable price investment strategy seeking out global opportunities. Elliot focuses on discovering and analyzing long-term, high quality investment opportunities and strategic portfolio management. Prior to joining RGA, Elliot managed portfolios at at AustinWeston Asset Management LLC, Chimera Securities and T3 Capital. Elliot holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation as well as a Juris Doctor from Brooklyn Law School.. He also holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Emory University where he double majored in Political Science and Philosophy.

John Mihaljevic leads MOI Global and serves as managing editor of The Manual of Ideas. He managed a private partnership, Mihaljevic Partners LP, from 2005-2016. John is a winner of the Value Investors Club’s prize for best investment idea. He is a trained capital allocator, having studied under Yale University Chief Investment Officer David Swensen and served as Research Assistant to Nobel Laureate James Tobin. John holds a BA in Economics, summa cum laude, from Yale and is a CFA charterholder.

The content of this podcast is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security in any jurisdiction. The content is distributed for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice or a recommendation to sell or buy any security or other investment, or undertake any investment strategy. There are no warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or results obtained from any information set forth on this podcast. The podcast participants and their affiliates may have positions in and may, from time to time, make purchases or sales of the securities or other investments discussed or evaluated on this podcast. [dkpdf-remove]
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