Coburn Ventures Podcast

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you some thinking on the current market environment and how that relates to process. This is a light spin on our conceptualization of the "Other Room" of the 2010's. Now, we look for signal in the noise about what investing looks like inside a world of increasing inflation, so we also want to know what the signs are for looking through that...

We all want to get the best out of our team and contribute deeply to our teams. We understand that 1+1 can equal three. We know we don’t know everything and have a sense that working and thinking with others makes us all better… But there is so much about what we experience about conventional collaboration that doesn’t work: group projects steeped in hierarchy and powerlessness, or a group of peop...

We work pretty deeply with most of our clients on the investment process which means we work a lot on team collaborations. Inevitably, the discussion turns to investment meetings. One of the questions we start with to gauge how things are going is,  “Would you be proud to have your clients attend these meetings? Would they be impressed and want to put more money with you?”  It’s a helpfu...

A few years ago we were doing some active consulting work with a handful of amazing not for profits. This work was so interesting and so valuable for all the reasons you can imagine: applying skillsets honed in investing that actually help real people with real problems, getting to know a whole host of new brilliant people from other sectors, but also, because, standing in these two worlds, one fo...

What better way to mark our 100th episode than to spend time with one of our friends for the last 25+ years, Angie Dalton of Signum Growth Capital. Today we get to ask Angie about what’s going on in web 3 and new media technologies: specifically, what’s going right, and what is totally off-kilter. The conversation turned out to be one for me that offers loads of new breadcrumbs to track through th...

Selling gets a bad rap, but we’re here to talk about it today because I really feel it's an underestimated power for investors for their toolkit AND an underestimated shift in society.  For investors, this tool is a double whammy of personal efficacy and investor foresight! On the first topic: understanding selling gives you a better antenna to determine signal from noise. More on that in the...

In our conversation on digital transformation, Rudy Karsan presented us with the question: "what wrong, outdated or unhelpful lenses am I using to see the world?" Today, we are here with Zak Dychtwald, Founder of The Young China Group to help bring clarity and perspective to our own (mostly) western lenses. Our goal is to improve our ability to interpret changes in China just a little more adeptly...

“Data is never the whole story…there is always a gap between the data and reality.” -- Irwin Kula Just when we think we know what we think about data, Irwin Kula is here to help us uncover the tensions and handle the polarities data brings. There are so many tensions fundamental to the role of data in our lives, just think about how the most valuable data doesn’t actually confirm what we already k...

 We have identified two sources of Rogue Waves: the Quantum Change in Connectivity and Quantum Change in Information. These are core facets of human existence and therefore a big deal. But from these comes an interesting element we will discuss today, and that is, that with connectivity and information we have an all-out war for our attention. Any tool kit to ride the rogue waves is wise to b...

If you’ve listened to the series on digital transformation, you may be wondering how to pick companies that will adapt well, and avoid companies that are going to get run over! We need some new tools in our toolkit, and today, cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken is here to help us with the first potential tool to hone: today, we learn about Assumption Hunting. We begin with some revealing sign...

After all that has been presented, Rudy Karsan is here to offer his perspective on digital transformation. Rudy’s lens is of a former HR software CEO and current venture investor who has an incredible ability to zoom in on operations and zoom out on strategy, technology and reflections on decision making. We are going to start with a part of the conversation that most podcasters would have edited...

John Dillon has been a tech executive for over 40 years. When we asked him about digital transformation, he compared it to the advent of the steam engine or electrification…so that is certainly compelling. John's real-life examples put a finer print on this picture. Let's jump in.

Last week Tim Mattison helped us understand the different levels or phases an organization might go through as they experience digital transformation. Now, JP Rangaswami is going to help us understand the larger context that is required to assess whether any technology is about to be a major part of digital transformation or a real head fake. JP reminds us that digital transformation is not about...

Last week we introduced our series on digital transformation. Now that we have some context on its importance for investors, let's get some inputs from our friends who are practitioners and decision-makers with regard to technology inside organizations. Today we are happy to have Tim Mattison, an active practitioner of all things digital transformation at AWS, the company that first showed many of...

Welcome to our series on digital transformation. We are in a period in which every product or service we touch has already been defined in some digital way: each grain of wheat, each picture on our phone, each manicure, each life insurance policy has a digital marker, trail, story, or a digital facilitator. "Digital transformation" can become a statement of the obvious, of the time and space we li...

In times of heightened uncertainty, what can we do to prepare for and handle the uncertainty rather than be tossed around by it? Is there anything we can adjust so that we can do our jobs well in these times?  Today we are speaking with behavioral scientist Matt Wallaert on this exact topic.  Matt will help us zoom out today and understand what the experience heightened uncertainty looks...

Today we flip the script as our friend and collaborator Jorgen Van der Sloot decides he wants to hear more about some of Coburn Ventures work on process and collaboration: what we do to help organizations go through change or make change last, and what is the difference between a community and a network that might hint at the future of work and collaboration for many businesses. By talking th...

At Coburn Ventures, the investment philosophy and process grew out of change investing. But to understand change investing, we might want to understand change. One of the first steps of change investing is a simple recognition of how much we subconsciously anchor to what's going on today staying the same, whereas, in reality, change is happening all around us, all the time, in ways that we do and...

Today’s conversation is with Mike Cahill, a longtime friend, and investor who has been so kind to walk through his thinking on the market, especially as it relates to the very important topic of inflation.  The debate about whether inflation will be transitory or structural has been in our ear a lot lately, but it has not always been very helpful, as pundits ping pong around recent data rather tha...

Today, our last topic in our series on The Dark Side of the Moon is "de-professionalizing" valuation. What on earth would we mean by de-professionalizing investment work on valuation?  Isn’t "professional" investment what holds up our trust in great money management?  We will get into that and much more. Let’s figure out together how some professional elements of investing may or may not...

Today in our series the Dark Side of the Moon, we are exploring value, and in particular, what to do with stocks that are perceived to be excessively valued. There are so many that fit this category and have fit this category for years now. As business models have changed with connectivity, networks, and the information age, there are more businesses that defy laws we thought applied to every busi...

In reviewing our investment process, it can be helpful to look for where we get trapped, where we feel on our heels in scenarios we didn’t anticipate and feel forced into making a decision on selling. Sell discipline is one of the areas ripe for costly errors, so let’s dig into it today and see if we can’t find a few incremental steps to take to possibly circumvent more of these situations. ...

Today we’re with Steve Salopek, small-cap and tech fund manager turned University Professor at THE Ohio State University. We’re here to explore how we can better approach thesis threats, discussions, and investigations into what can and will go wrong with a thesis or a stock position. Pip starts us off with some ideas for methods and then Steve will tell us more about building red-flagging right i...

Sometimes our most valuable work is done when we review that which we think we know for sure. So to start off this new year, we have a short but potentially really important conversation on one of the most fundamental concepts in our work: risk. What is it, fundamentally, and what are we doing to incorporate risk that is worthwhile, and what are we doing that may be wasteful?  Let’s jump in....

As we close out 2021, we wanted to offer a topic that is both interesting and supportive of year-end introspection and is also thought-provoking beyond investing as many of us step away from work over the holiday.  We’re talking about the difference between scarcity and abundance.  To help us explore the concept, our conversation today includes Amber Gentry, a nutritional psychologist. I...