David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. We attended this class by Deborah Gordon and she has been studying this group of ants for 30 years in New Mexico. They obsess over this group of ants. They know what every ant is doing at all times. What they found was really fascinating. They found that about half of the ants of the colony weren't doing anything. They were just sort of sitting around and then they had half the hands doing these defined jobs. That's very counterintuitive. We think of ants as sort of the ultimate productivity machines. Then it turns out ants aren't optimized around productivity. They're optimized around longevity. They're optimized around resilience, around living as long as possible, let’s say it that way. That was really insightful for us. We thought, man, all these companies are optimized around productivity and Wall Street only makes it worse because we're obsessed over quarterly earnings. What if companies were really optimized around this long-term thinking? Of course, we see that with lots of companies, most of them tend to be run by founders, because founders have a lot of skin in the game, they think long-term, but there are CEOs that think that way also. We know that the average tenure of a CEO in a SP 500 is less than five years. They're not optimized like ants are. They're trying to get a lot of returns really quickly. But companies that take this long-term view are so much more interesting. When I read that, in your paper, the thing that hit me over the head, I was like, oh, this is Warren and Charlie's laziness bordering on sloth. That's exactly it.…

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