Coburn Ventures Podcast

We have been having conversations about "stock disasters" over the last few months, so now let's balance the scales a bit by discussing some of the elements that can lead to stock successes. As usual, we're going to start below the ground level, at that point when you're first asking yourself that very important question: "I think I'm onto something here, but could t...

Last week we discussed forming and building up great investment teams. Today we're discussing a few tactics and strategies that we have seen activate and advance those teams and their investment work really powerfully, and that's in the design of investment meetings. Let’s jump in.

What can we do to build great investment teams? Today, we walk through six questions that we ask ourselves and work on with others when aiming to build a team from scratch or more likely, make enhancements as we go. There's something in here for everyone, and this conversation may be one of the most "worth it" we've explored: a great team is so much more than the sum of its parts...

Investing is a practice of constant adaptation… adaptation to changes in our world, society, the economy, the market, and our own industry. Today we are looking closer at just how the game has changed in the last decade or so, and some potential pathways for constructive, ongoing adaptation. Let’s jump in.

Today we’re back with a fourth stock disaster. We will sprinkle these in sporadically throughout the year for you in the hopes you can learn from our mistakes and our responses to those mistakes. Interestingly enough, we all might acknowledge that stock disasters are not commonly shared internally even though we are in an industry with a high failure rate: we are not engineers building bridges who...

For our third edition of Stock Disasters, join us in a reflection that uncovers the dangers of hubris, (sometimes anointed by your very own manager), guardrails to help when you want to trade and run, and finally, seeing clearly when you have a management team that is taking the company in one direction and one direction only... whether you see it or not. Let's jump in.

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

We are near calendar year-end which means that "review season", --the less-festive second cousin to the holiday season-- is here or coming up for many. It can take up a lot of time (and energy), which is why, perhaps, at this time of year, we field a *lot* of questions on efficacy of reviews and review systems. To gain inspiration, we turned back to this conversation we had last year with behavior...

We are calling up a conversation we had in 2021 with Amber Gentry, a nutritional psychologist, about abundance vs. scarcity. Why are we highlighting this now? When we look to work, leadership and investing in the next few years, it seems that a more holistic, abundance-oriented mindset is formulating quickly (Porter's Shared Values), leaving behind a mindset purely about scarcity and power asy...

Part of what we know about AI is that, when we look back in a few months, our understanding of how to use it today is going to seem so elementary. But for now, we want to continue pausing, getting our bearings and being very aware of our questions and our thinking on it, so we continue this week placing waypoints. This episode includes just a few thoughts from us and then moves into contributions...

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

Today we’re back on the topic of decision-making biases. We will go through three more of the most common: representativeness error, search satisfaction and commission bias. Before we jump in, I’m going to do a brief explanation of each one, so that it's easier to listen to the rest of our conversation, you’ll have the definitions in mind. Also, a point of context I've been thinking about...if we...

Welcome back! We're here for part two of our conversation with Jeff Cardon and Steve Salopek. This week we discuss what they would be doing in today’s market, more on comp and culture, and the stories behind certain decisions that influenced the creation of their teams and companies. Finally, we end with a topic that may be interesting to many of you, so keep listening all the way to the end! Let'...

For the past few weeks, we have been discussing distinct elements of the investment process, and now we get to sit down with two friends and industry veterans to talk about it all. Many of you know both Jeff Cardon and Steve Salopek, both happen to come from the small-cap world and are long-time investors, portfolio managers, and leaders in the industry. They are both now retired, and with some ti...

A discussion on shorting might seem odd to qualify in a series on just three topics on the investment process. Still, it is one of the topics that we wondered if long-only investors may under-appreciate, not only for how it all works (there are fascinating math problems with shorting) but also how it can make you a better investor overall.  Let’s jump in. This is a five-part series on investm...

THE INTEGRATED DECISION ENGINE Last week we discussed competition for capital, a philosophy that can lead to tools that increase completion, competition for our time, and clearer decision making. Today we introduce the integrated decision engines, which builds on that last tenant of clear decision making. We’ll walk through how the tool was developed, but listen for what the tool provides beyond t...

This is part one of a five part series on investment process. We’ll walk through a few tools and concepts that we hope might spark ideas or tweaks or even affirmations for your own investment process, and then we get to sit down with some friends for additional conversation. Thanks for listening. One of the most energizing moments as an investor seems to be when we discover insightful, sometimes o...

Rolando Morillo has been doing ESG at Rockefeller Capital for most of his career, well before we were even calling it ESG! When he started, the world was still in negative screening and SRI, but he and his mentors were working with a small community of companies and investors focused on deeper engagement around sustainability. Fast forward 20 years…in today's increased enthusiasm (and resulting co...

When it comes to assessing the S in ESG with a data-oriented lens, we turned to longtime friend Sasha Dichter. Sasha ended up co-founding an entire company to solve a problem he had: when it came to understanding if their programs were affecting their clients in the way they wanted, they never had the robust data they really wanted. So they asked themselves, “What if we went and got the data? Ther...

Invisible ESG is meant to give a name to the infinite little or big day-to-day practices inside organizations that will never specifically check a box in the formal ESG mechanism but really do the actual work that ESG is supposed to accomplish: remedying that gap between capitalisms efforts to build businesses and a better understanding of the negative (and positive!) externalities that may pose....

Today we have a little something different: sometime last spring as I was editing, I started to save pieces of conversation that didn’t fit with the topic. Maybe they were afterthoughts, side topics, or maybe just fun conversations. The result? We have meaty topics in small bites today, from our conversations earlier in the year with JP Rangaswami, Rudy Karsan, and Rolando Morillo. We went from bl...

Rob Rose works at high levels with marketing and executive teams. He has a seat observing how these teams adapt to interesting times and to new challenges, so we were delighted to dig in with him on the topic of adaptation. That would be meaty enough! But what this conversation then reveals are some major learnings regarding teams and divisions that have inflated and perhaps lost their purpose......

It’s fun to talk about sports a bit, but how does it relate to investing? Oh boy, there is change all over this topic, which matters because this dip into the sea change that the sports world is undergoing is likely a strong harbinger of what is to come in the broader business world. Sports so often plays that role in our society. Our friend Jack Elkins was so helpful to talk to about all of this...

In this series we discussed meetings, and we discussed qualities of collaboration worthwhile to pursue, so now we must give you something even more specific in case you’re looking for more chances to implement new methods: enter the Rocks meeting.  A "rock" is a question or problem that IF you had the solution, you would alter what you are doing right now significantly. As an example for inve...

Well, we are back again with a few more thoughts on the current market environment. We thought we were done with this last week but great questions keep coming so here’s a bit more. Today we start with a delineation between the different jobs of stock picking. It can be a fantastic orienting tool that you might want to have handy in your investor backpack when you find yourself feeling lost in the...