Patrick O'Shaughnessy: uncertainty

Transcript context

…You called your vision and what you want to do here being a router going forward. To my mind, that actually undersells a little bit of what you've already been doing and the opportunity to do going forward. This listener said to me once. He’s like, hey, you’re knowledge curators. All the knowledge is out there. This is the thing about the internet—this thing about Acquired, probably the thing about you too. All your guests have been on other shows. They have interviews in other formats. They're on YouTube in various talks. The knowledge is out there. What you’re doing is you're curating it and packaging it in the best, most consumable form. Does that resonate with how you're thinking about things? Yeah, there certainly is a curation aspect. As the amount of information and knowledge explodes due to the internet, all of a sudden, it becomes valuable to be able to compress that or curate it in a helpful way. That’s 100% the part of it, but part of it too is helping others frame things in a novel or different way than they have in the past. If I'm trying to get better at anything, it's having just a really low tolerance for repetition of content with a person. When I'm interviewing somebody that's done a lot of interviews, my goal is to have as much of it be novel and to have their reaction be like, I've never thought about that question before as often as I can. I find the best way to do that is I'm just easily bored. I have consumed so much content that if I've heard something before, I'm just bored. Then I feel like I'm wasting my time. By having a low tolerance for that sort of stuff, I think that's the second function. It’s curation and eking stuff out that hasn't been explained or revealed in that specific way before. That's what I'm trying to do, and be selfish about it. Ultimately, if you're selfish in solving your problems, that's usually a good policy. Sometimes, the questions I'm asking are, I'm dealing with some problems in one of our businesses and I don't know how to solve it. I ask somebody that's really good at how to solve it and then you find something great. I have a management question on this. You have these multiple concurrent initiatives. You've got the codifying business knowledge and making it more navigable. You've launched an early-stage investment fund, which is a completely different operational animal and decision-making framework than public long-only equity investing. You've also got—which I think you should pitch listeners on—this new podcast that by the time this is out, this will be launched, that will be right up a lot of people's alley. First, what is that? And second, how on earth do you manage to do these three things concurrently while also running a large existing business? Patrick. It’s the most common question I get. The first part of the answer is I work very hard and have a lot of energy for this stuff. Sometimes, having more hours that are productive in a day is an advantage, so that's part of it. The second is I'm just ridiculously open about what I'm doing. You know all my stuff, as does everybody else. I don't have any other stuff. What I generally find in my relationships with other very successful people is they also have lots of other stuff that you just don't know about. There's a little bit of transparency making it seem like I'm doing more than others when in reality, it's really not the case in my experience of highly curious people who just tend to do a lot. The last piece of it—which is probably the most important and maybe interesting—is the way I think about it is I actually only do one thing, and it just happens to show up in a lot of different outcomes or side effects. That one thing is this scout function. I am out trying to find what is the next interesting useful concept, idea, market, area, person, product, or whatever that can be emulated, borrowed, copied, mimicked, or whatever it might be in a productive way for the people that use us for something. That takes the form of handing lessons off to my team at OSAM. I work with the senior team there that I've been with for 14 years each—all four of them. We know each other intimately well. They're all more talented in most ways, except for my talent. Maybe it is the scout function. They're all more talented than me in every other way. I work closely with them. I'm handing them stuff, that's part of it. On the venture investing side, I would actually argue that my trading in public markets is awesome preparation for the time I'm now spending here. It is different. It's much more qualitative than quantitative, but quantitative still matters a lot. What I'm finding when I'm talking to founders, especially around Series A and especially if there's a data component, or a modeling component to a product, which these days are more and more common. The kinds of questions we’re able to ask them about that—they look at us funny. You can tell they've never been asked the question by other operators and practitioners like we are. I just think it all feeds on each other to let us ask better.…

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