Patrick O'Shaughnessy: commitment

Transcript context

…At the same time, it has taken on this life of its own. You're doing a bunch more stuff around it. Can you tell us about what's next both for the show and how it's bled into the investment business as well for you? Sure. COVID’s been with all its misery for so many people. I've tried to take it as a personal blessing in as many ways as we can. The first of those blessings is the time I get to spend with my family now. I was traveling a lot for work. I've been home. I'm sitting in my home office right now. My kids, I can hear them in the background. I get to see them and my wife Lauren all the time. That's the first blessing. The second is it's made everyone realize the parts of what they were doing that were wasted effort or if not wasted, things they just didn’t really enjoy doing. I just believe that enjoyment aligns with good outcomes for the most part because you just have more energy for stuff. If you have more energy, you have more persistence to get through hard times, so better outcomes are possible. I ask the question, what would the perfect alignment be between my own enjoyment, curiosity, and effort in the business? I think the way that shakes out is what I'm going to do in the next 20, 30, or 40 years just trying to be a cartographer. Just try to map the best knowledge in the business and investing world in a pretty formal way. Again, probably my legacy as a quant makes me think about everything like what does the database schema look like for something like that? What is the atomic unit? If I'm writing data to a knowledge database, what does the unit of data look like? How is the database structure? How is it accessed? What front end to a build on top of it? All these questions that I think anyone in software would understand, trying to think about what I do through that same lens. That's going to be my primary focus. Now that manifests in a couple of ways. I like to be radically open with this stuff, so I'm going to publish a lot of those learning as we go. We're probably going to open source that database in some interesting way. We are just in the process of launching our first early-stage investment vehicle called Positive Sum that I'll be spending a ton of my time on because it aligns so clearly with the same exploration. I think about it as I'm just going to do one thing. I'm just going to find interesting things to learn about. I think I'm pretty good at getting to the best people in the world on those topics, and somehow convincing them to share the lessons they've learned and just try to mimic. Be a human version of all of these companies. Like Shippo or something, which is an API that sits on top of other APIs. I'm a good router. When I get a question, I'm lucky. Rather than answer it, which is who cares about my answer, I get to go ask the smartest person in the world on that topic what the answer to that question is and do it pretty quickly. I'm trying to be a router, not an originator. That's going to be my goal, and it's going to manifest inside the business in a lot of different ways. I mentioned the new fund, the podcast will be expanding. rying to be a router, not an originator. That's going to be my goal, and it's going to manifest inside the business in a lot of different ways. I mentioned the new fund, the podcast will be expanding. I'm going to try to convince even more of the calls that I do for my normal job to be recorded, which is weird and radical, but really helps the general public. As long as we're not doing any harm to any company or any individual—which we’re very careful about—or revealing sensitive information, or anything like this. I think that there's an opportunity to just hit a button—a little more often than not—when having normal conversations than anyone would have in the investment business as they’re doing diligence and research. Be radically transparent and hopefully create a lot of value for other builders out there in the process.…

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