Byrne Hobart: recommendation

Transcript context

…Other than drugs I also want to ask you about the phenotype of the founder. FTX had a barber who would come in every Tuesday to cut everybody's hair. SBF could have just sat in line and gotten his haircut. The way he dressed was completely unnecessary and it was very purposeful. If that archetype of a founder who's in a t-shirt and shorts has been priced in and is beta instead of alpha now, what is the new phenotype and physiognomy of the founder? Where are you looking for alpha? I would draw the distinction between the physical type of someone versus their presentation and their dress. I'm sure someone could run some interesting numbers on that but I don't have a good sense of what exactly they'd get from that but in terms of how people publicly present themselves, my guess is that yeah, there will be this swing towards investing in people who look a little bit more formal, a little bit more boring. These things are somewhat cyclical. Part of the norm on investing in treating the suit as a negative signal is that a lot of investors have this view that when the MBAs come into an industry a lot of the alpha is gone. There's a decent market timing signal that if a lot of people from Harvard Business School go straight into some field that field is probably peaking. There's a little bit to that where the suit is some example of conformity. On the other hand wearing a suit in Silicon Valley is an example of non-conformity and outside of New York, within the US, most of the time wearing a suit as a tech company founder would be this weird sign that you don't know what you're doing, you don't know what the right signals are or you're about to testify to Congress and that's why you have a suit now. Not generally a great sign but maybe it is a sign that you are willing to do some more conformist things and that you could pay attention to details even when the details are boring and also that you are making some kind of financial investment in that particular appearance. I would guess that there will be a tilt away from the hyper informal founders. But I also think that if you treat that hyper informality as either this attempt to game the system and just say, “I'm going to try to remind people of Mark Zuckerberg circa 2005 as much as possible so I can raise money and pretend to be the next big thing” That is one thing people are signaling. And then the other thing is they're just accidentally signaling total indifference to anything except the thing they're working on. Maybe that's a good thing in unregulated domains and a really, really bad thing in regulated domains. If you're investing in a medical devices company, you probably don't want a founder who just cannot focus on anything except the product because there are rules and norms they have to follow and it gets bad if all they're focused on is this one element. If the hyper focus is just perfectly calibrated that's good. So maybe adjusting your appearances this way to say that you have correctly calibrated your hyperfocus and you're going to get one thing right and it's going to be really really right and you've identified what things matter and what things don't is good. You'll also keep track of your bank accounts. That's the dress itself but I also want to ask about the other characteristics. You had this really interesting point in that blog post about how when you try to scout for talent when the talent is young, you're over indexing for parental involvement. I'm curious, if you had to identify somebody who had to be under the age of 18 or under the age of 20, what is the metric you're looking at that least indexes for parental involvement where they're being forced or encouraged by their parents to do it?…

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