Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

My guest today is Alok Vasudev. Alok is an early-stage investor who has been in the crypto space for a very long time. Before co-founding Standard Crypto, he was an investor at Benchmark and S28 Capital. Given Alok's experience and the prevailing mood right now in crypto, this is a particularly interesting discussion on the ecosystem writ large. We discuss whether the bubble can be thought of as p...

My guest today is Matthew Ball. Matt is an investor, the former head of strategy at Amazon studios, and one of the brightest minds in the media industry. Through his essays and now his book, which launches today, Matt has established himself as the foremost authority on the Metaverse, which has stormed into the public eye since I first had him on the show two years ago. The Metaverse is the focus...

Today we are dropping a special episode in the Invest Like the Best feed. You will hear the first episode of 50X – a new series from Will Thorndike and the team at Compounding Labs, in partnership with Colossus. Will’s book, The Outsiders, is one of the best business and investing books you will find. Now you will hear him continuing his work in the hosting chair as he looks in detail at investmen...

My guest today is Alice Bentinck, co-founder of Entrepreneur First. Entrepreneur First, or EF, invests pre-company by systematizing the way that talented individuals find co-founders, develop ideas, and scale into companies. They’re an incubator of teams and ideas on a mission to create impactful companies that, without their help, wouldn’t exist. I first spoke with Alice’s co-founder, Matt Cliffo...

My guest today is Jess Lee. Jess is a partner at Sequoia Capital as well as their Chief Product Officer. Before becoming an investor, Jess co-founded fashion app, Polyvore, and was an early product manager for Google Maps. Most recently, she founded All Raise, a non-profit that is changing the gender balance in tech. Our discussion ranges from Burning Man to Marvel to Sequoia’s mobile app and I ho...

My guest today is Ken Stanley. Ken is a Professor in Computer Science and a pioneer in the field of neuroevolution. He is also the co-author of a book called, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, which details a provocative idea that setting big, audacious goals can reduce the odds of achieving something great. We discuss that revelation in detail and how to apply it in our day-to-day lives. Please en...

My guest today is Lydia Jett, Managing Partner of SoftBank Investment Advisers. Lydia leads the team’s consumer, internet, and e-commerce investments and has worked with many of the most significant consumer platforms in the world, including as a board member of Coupang and Flipkart. We cover all aspects of e-commerce and explore Lydia’s evolution as an investor alongside Masa Son at SoftBank. Ple...

My guests today are Josh Wolfe and Chris Power. Josh will be a familiar voice to many of you and is the co-founder and General Partner of Lux Capital. Chris is the founder and CEO of advanced manufacturing start-up, Hadrian. Most of our discussion centers on the need to modernize the factories that supply our space and defense industries. But given the current market environment, we also talk abou...

My guest today is Martin Casado. Martin is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on digital infrastructure. Before joining a16z, Martin pioneered software-defined networking and co-founded Nicira, which was bought by VMware for $1.3 billion in 2012. Martin has studied, built, and invested in digital infrastructure his whole career and is the perfect person to discuss the most i...

My guest today is Aswath Damodaran, a Professor of Finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business. Aswath is one of the clearest teachers of investing and finance in our industry and through his blog, books, and YouTube has open-sourced his wisdom for decades. This conversation is a masterclass of key investing concepts. We discuss inflation, narratives, disruption, the evolution of alpha and edge, and...

Today, we are running a special episode of Business Breakdowns. With geopolitics playing an increasingly important role in society again, this episode with Anduril’s CEO offers an inside look at the state of the defense industry and how it is changing. If you enjoy this episode, subscribe to Business Breakdowns on your preferred podcast player, where you’ll find past episodes on Block, Goldman Sac...

My guest today is Tobi Lütke, co-founder and CEO of Shopify. Having first spoken to Tobi at the beginning of the pandemic, just two months into it, this felt an opportune moment to revisit Shopify and the world through Tobi’s eyes. Among many things, we discuss Shopify’s evolution into the world of atoms-based building through Shopify’s fulfillment network, the value of infrastructure writ large,...

My guests today are Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross. Tyler is an economics professor and creator of one of the most popular economics blogs on the internet. Daniel is the founder of start-up accelerator Pioneer, having previously been a director at Apple and a partner at Y Combinator. Both Daniel and Tyler are prolific talent spotters and that is the focus of our discussion and their new book, which...

My guest today is Jeff Jordan, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Jeff has one of the most interesting set of experiences of guests that I’ve had on the show. As an operator, he has been the General Manager of eBay.com, President of PayPal, and CEO of OpenTable. As an investor, he was one of the first General Partners at a16z and sits on the board of Airbnb, Instacart, Pinterest, and other no...

My guest today is Eric Glyman, co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is best known for its corporate cards but it has a range of software products to help finance teams save money and time. Since its founding in 2019, the business has grown rapidly and was last valued at $8 billion. Eric and I discuss Ramp’s initial marketing wedge, how the business has dealt with such fast growth, and why they hold st...

My guest today is Dmitry Balyasny. Dmitry is the Managing Partner and CIO of Balyasny Asset Management, otherwise known as BAM. BAM runs a multi-strategy, multi-PM model that aims to produce consistent absolute returns. Since its founding in 2001, it has produced only one negative year and become one of the largest firms of its kind. Please enjoy my conversation with Dmitry Balyasny.    For the fu...

My guest today is Henry Ward, co-founder and CEO of Carta. Started in 2012, Carta helps companies and investors manage their cap tables, equity plans, and ownership. Last year, they launched CartaX, a platform for private companies and their employees to access secondary market liquidity. Our discussion is a detailed exploration of private market infrastructure and Henry’s views on building an end...

My guest today is Alexandr Wang, the CEO and founder of Scale AI. Alexandr founded Scale in 2016, having been inspired to accelerate the development of AI through his work at Quora and his studies at MIT. Specifically, Alexandr realized there was a lack of infrastructure solutions for producing high quality data, the lifeblood for AI models. Today, Scale provides data solutions to leading AI teams...

My guest today is Antonio Gracias, founder, CIO, and CEO of Valor Equity Partners. Antonio is perhaps best known for his role at Tesla, as the earliest institutional investor and Director from 2007 to 2021. But he has deep operating and investing experience, having first acquired and managed a number of manufacturing and technology companies during his 20s. And it was during those formative years...

My guest today is David Rubenstein, co-founder of The Carlyle Group - one of the largest private equity firms in the world. David has worked in the White House, built a $300 billion investment institution, become a prominent philanthropist, published books, and even hosts his own TV show. It was a thrill to sit down with him and cover the whole spectrum of his experience as a father, investor, his...

My guest today is Gaurav Kapadia, founder of investment firm XN. Gaurav is a veteran of the investing arena. We cover his lessons while rising to partner at TPG Axon, co-founding Soroban Capital, and his decision to launch XN in 2020. We then discuss his approach to building XN around a culture of rigor and kindness, the importance of relationships in investing, and finding investments that are ob...

My guest today is Marko Papic, partner and chief strategist at Clocktower Group, where he leads the firm’s research on macroeconomics and markets. Marko has spent his career at the intersection of finance and geopolitics, making him a perfect person to speak to about current events in Ukraine and their potential impact further afield. Along with Russia and Ukraine, we discuss the Fed, inflation, C...

My guest today is Garry Tan, founder and managing partner of early-stage venture firm, Initialized Capital. Before starting Initialized, Garry was a partner at Y Combinator, employee number 10 at Palantir, and co-founder of YC backed blog platform Posterous. Our discussion covers what’s missing in the investment world, how to best systematize venture investments, and what he learned from Paul Grah...

My guest today is Eric Mandelblatt, founder and CIO of Soroban Capital, a $10 billion investment firm. While many of my conversations focus on technology and emerging industries, Eric has deep roots investing in the industrial economy, which made this conversation a fun change of pace. We discuss why energy and materials represent such a small share of the market today, how the global push towards...

My guest today is Sebastian Kanovich, CEO of payments company dLocal. Sebastian founded dLocal in 2016 to bridge the infrastructure gap between payments in developed and emerging markets. Since then, the initially bootstrapped start-up has enabled global merchants like Uber, Spotify, and Google to service billions of emerging market users. And in doing so, dLocal has created $10bn of equity market...