Patrick O'Shaughnessy: preference

Transcript context

…Modest proposal? Not Modest. Jesse Livermore is his name. Although Modest is a very close friend and actually next week's podcast guest. Jesse, as he goes by, has an engineering background of sorts—a very technical background. Again, literally, the smartest human being. I could stick a human being on understanding a complex problem, it would be him. He does these months-long deep dives with our data and teaches us as he goes. And because we offer so much flexibility and we offer this data set for free—again, the thing that most firms like us keep as the most proprietary asset—they become contractors with us. As a result, we've captured some of the most interesting people like this in the world, and I think have the best value proposition to them. That's a super tiny example of a cornered resource, but we have benefited tremendously from those research partnerships. This is the one where I will admit to thinking about that program because of reading 7 Powers. Actually, the power came before the implementation and that one's been a smaller-scale success but a huge success nonetheless. I thought you're going to say the podcast was a cornered resource, which in your case may be fair because you're obviously the CEO and you're the major owner of the firm. One of the things I love from the book and Hamilton's work is that people are not cornered resources. It has to be like what you're describing. People are not cornered resources because somebody else can hire them—they're arbitragable. It has to be non-arbitrable, and I love this. It's like a cornered resource plus counter positioning that you've built this practice of.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.