Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

My guest today is Frank Slootman, Chairman and CEO of cloud platform Snowflake. Frank has become one of the most revered CEOs in business. Over the past twenty years, he has three times taken over emerging enterprise software businesses – first Data Domain, then ServiceNow, and most recently Snowflake - and led them across the chasm into large, billion-dollar businesses. Please enjoy this great di...

My guest today is Tim Flannery, co-founder of venture fund administrator Passthrough. Passthrough is removing friction from the manual, time-consuming fundraising process by making investor onboarding as simple and automatic as possible. Their software helps investors fill out subscription documents in minutes rather than hours and allows GPs to easily track LP subscriptions during a fundraise.  ...

My guest today is IAC’s CEO, Joey Levin. IAC is a unique business in that it’s a holding company which builds world-class digital businesses. Since Barry Diller created IAC over two decades ago, it has produced 11 public companies, including Match Group, Expedia, and Live Nation. Today, the business is comprised of category-leaders like Angi, Dotdash Meredith, and Care.com.   Joey joined IAC in 20...

My guest today is Peter Chernin, who’s had a Hall of Fame career in the entertainment business. Peter ran News Corp and Fox for fifteen years between 1996 and 2009 before co-founding The Chernin Group, which has become one of the leading investment firms in the consumer space. Along the way, he has also produced a number of blockbuster films, including Titanic, Avatar, The Greatest Showman, and Th...

My guest today is entrepreneur and investor, John Pfeffer. John was a partner at private equity firm KKR in the 2000s, Chairman of leading French IT company Groupe Allium in the 90s, and now invests his own money through his private family office, Pfeffer Capital. John is one of the smartest investors I know, and our conversation spans all of John’s experience and investment ideas. We discuss the...

My guest today is the renowned tech author, consultant, and venture partner at Wildcat Ventures, Geoffrey Moore. Geoffrey has spent his career focused on the dynamics surrounding disruptive innovations and his book, Crossing the Chasm, has become a canonical work for young businesses trying to unlock mainstream markets.   This discussion is a masterclass on business strategy. We start with Geoffre...

My guest today is past guest Gavin Baker, managing partner and CIO of Atreides Management. Gavin’s focus is on consumer and tech growth investing, which makes him the perfect person to discuss the bloodbath we’ve seen in many growth equities over the past few months. We also cover inflation, semiconductors, and the disconnect between private and public markets. Please enjoy this conversation with...

Today, my guests are Sam Englebardt and Richard Kim, general partners at venture fund, Galaxy Interactive. Having come from the media and finance sectors, respectively, Sam and Richard joined forces in 2018 to invest in their shared thesis that immersive digital experiences would become the dominant way people engage with each other in the future.   Our conversation centers around the evolution of...

My guest today is Ricky Sandler, founder of Eminence Capital. Ricky is a hedge fund veteran managing over $8bn of assets across Eminence's strategies. We cover Ricky's evolution as an active investor, why he thinks this is a stock-picker's environment, and what keeps him competitive after a long and successful career. Please enjoy my conversation with Ricky Sandler.   For the full show notes, tran...

My guest today is Orlando Bravo, co-founder and Managing Partner of leading private equity firm, Thoma Bravo. Thoma Bravo manages over $90bn of assets and is best known for investing in software and technology businesses. It was Orlando who led the firm’s early entry into software buyouts some twenty years ago, and he has overseen more than 350 software acquisitions since. There are few, if any, p...

My guest today is Nick Saltarelli, co-founder of the functional chocolate bar business, Mid-Day Squares. Nick started the company with his wife and brother-in-law a few years ago to build on a simple idea: if the big chocolate bar brands were to start today, what would they look like?   In our conversation, we discuss the importance of Mid-Day Squares’ $100 million revenue target, what’s wrong wit...

My guest today is Jenny Johnson, President and CEO of one of the world’s largest asset managers, Franklin Templeton. Jenny joined the business in 1988 and has worked in the organization ever since. In early 2020 she became CEO of Franklin, which now manages some $1.5 trillion. I should, of course, note that I met Jenny as our two firms explored a partnership, which we cemented 3 months ago when we...

My guest today is Doug Colkitt. Doug has spent his career searching for and trading inefficient markets, first at Citadel’s high-frequency trading group, then for himself, and then as an operator building CrocSwap - a decentralized exchange or DEX designed to bring modern functionality to crypto markets, which is closer to what large traders have come to expect from a modern electronic market like...

My guests today are Philip Rosedale and Bill Gurley. Philip created Second Life in the early 2000s and helped build it into the largest virtual 3D world ever created at the time. Frequent listeners will recognize Bill, who was an investor in Second Life via Benchmark Capital. During the conversation, we cover the fascinating story of Second Life and the billion-dollar economy that persists through...

My guest today is Francis Davidson, founder and CEO of the hospitality brand Sonder. Francis launched Sonder in 2013 as an alternative to traditional hotels and rentals with a specific focus on technology and design. During our conversation, we discuss where Sonder fits into the hospitality ecosystem and why design is so key to their offering. We also touch on Francis’s unique views around custome...

My guest today is Niraj Shah, the CEO and co-founder of Wayfair. Wayfair started life in 2002 as a collection of independent websites selling category-specific home furniture but became a one-stop-shop for the home category in 2011 when, at $500 million in sales, the team consolidated their 240 websites into Wayfair.com. Today, the business offers 22 million products from 16 thousand suppliers to...

Today, I am excited to share our newest show, Web3 Breakdowns. Similar to our Business Breakdowns series, Web3 will have it's own dedicated feed so make sure to hit this subscribe link or find it on your preferred podcast player. The first episode of Web3 Breakdowns covers Bored Ape Yacht Club. You will hear from guest, Eric Golden, who will also be coming back to host his own Web3 Breakdowns movi...

My guest today is Will Marshall, the co-founder and CEO of Planet. Will founded Planet in 2010 with a small team of NASA scientists to build a constellation of satellites that would image the entire Earth every day. Since then, Planet has successfully built and deployed 450 satellites into space, which the company is using to create a time series of images for every place on Earth.   Our conversat...

My guest today is Roelof Botha, a partner at one of the world’s oldest and most successful venture firms, Sequoia Capital. A few days ago before I sat down with Roelof, he announced Sequoia’s boldest innovation since the firm was founded by Don Valentine in the early 1970s. Going forward, the firm will break from the traditional VC mould of fund cycles and instead restructure around a single, open...

My guest today is Sarah Friar, the CEO of Nextdoor, which connects people in local neighborhoods together. Sarah’s CV sparkles with impressive achievements at interesting businesses, and we spend a lot of time in this conversation thinking through what excellence looks like as a CEO, CFO, equity analyst, and board member. The rest of our discussion is focused on Nextdoor and how the soon-to-be pub...

Today, we are running a special episode of Business Breakdowns on our Invest Like the Best feed. When we launched Breakdowns, we hoped to cover industries and businesses that we were “well known but poorly understood.” This deep-dive on UMG and the music industry is just that - you will walk away with a whole new appreciation for artists, labels, and what streaming technology has done for a histor...

My guest today is Alex Rampell, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Alex has a long history in fintech, having co-founded six companies in his career, including Affirm and TrialPay. During our conversation, we cover Alex’s framework for positive selection in investing, why the best investments are often operating systems or systems of record, and Alex’s views on the future of fintech. For thos...

My guest today is Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of leading cryptocurrency exchange, FTX. In a little over two years, FTX has registered 1.2 million users, grown to facilitate $10.9 billion of daily trading volume, and reached an $18 billion valuation. Prior to FTX, Sam worked at Jane Street Capital before founding a quant trading firm of his own, Alameda Research. At just 29, Sam has packed a...

My guest today is Nick Neuman, CEO and co-founder of Casa. Casa helps bitcoin investors and owners keep their digital assets safe from loss or theft by providing managed self-custody services. In our discussion, we cover the history of asset custody from ancient temples to decentralized ledgers, look at the mechanics of how private keys work, and explore why people are better off holding the keys...

My guest today is Devin Finzer, co-founder and CEO of OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace. In a journey that started like many other founders in the space, Devin went deep down the crypto rabbit hole in 2017 and became particularly fascinated with the potential behind digital assets. During our conversation, we touch on the origin story of OpenSea, how Devin differentiates between the spe...