Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, right? So who knows, right? What we're trying to do with the tail of the portfolio, and I think what you guys are trying to do in venture capital investing, is maximize the probability that we get lucky. I just rip that off from [00:35:51], is very good at calling it what it is. We're just trying to maximize the probability that we get lucky. I also think just changing your mind is the hardest thing to do as an investor when you're wrong. I think if you stand in a room and say this is my highest conviction idea, it just makes it that much harder to Brinton's point. I'm just introducing bias into the equation. I also think if you invert it, I think it's fine to have an optionality position that you'd actually don't have that high of conviction on [00:36:22]. Example on Tesla, I don't think that we have super high conviction that Tesla's going to power law the EUV market, but is there some probability where they do that and it's worth multiples of what it is today? Sure. That's the way that we think about conviction. Again, I don’t want to piss anyone off that uses the word conviction similar to moats. It's fine. Everyone has their own process. We're not trying to push what we do on anyone else. This is just what has worked for us over time. One thing we're very careful about is introducing bias into our process. Luckily, everyone on our team knows each other well and can call each other out, but I do want to be careful. Well, I have two points to make. This cultural one, I think, is the second. But let me start first with, at the end of the day, this is a Buffett concept. This idea that it's better to be approximately right than exactly wrong, that's another way to describe this optionality phenomenon here, where it doesn't sound nearly as strong to stand up in front of an investment partnership and say, I have very little conviction in this. But it could totally work. If it does, it'll be really big. That's about the best I can tell you right now. That does not get everyone around the table excited. In a very Buffett sense, if it works, it's going to be so freaking successful that this is a great price to own it at. Do I know if this is the right price to own it at? Not at all. How many versions of the multiverse do we have railroads? All of them, right? They're important. How can we recreate that? We can't, it's impossible. I think you're right, Buffett and Munger say this so easily, so naturally, and we're just saying it in a much more complicated way.…

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