Security Error | Columbia Business School

It's hard to get around that, but the way you can do it is if you build in utility. And I think that is largely because advertising was a hell of a drug for these companies for so long. That is why all these big internet advertising platforms were slow to become marketplaces, because it would have a temporary negative financial impact. Th... See more

I find things that put me into a flow state are powerful. A great ski run will do that, as will video gaming. I think in a lot of ways, it's a form of helping your mind rest when you're awake.

I am not a believer in having an investment thesis.  That is the wrong way to approach investing because what you really want to do is search for disconfirming information, not confirm what you already believe.

My baseline assumption is that I'm wrong, which makes it easier to change my mind.

Yeah, so the meta, or the game within the game, is always changing in investing. 20 years ago in the NBA, three pointers were undervalued, statistically. Going for it on fourth down was undervalued in the NFL. And I would say that 20 years ago, understanding ROIC was undervalued in the market.

The meta of investing is always changing. But there are some things that are timeless, like if your return on an invested capital goes up, you are going to become more valuable. If you compound your free cash flow per share, you are going to become more valuable. There are these immutable things and a lot of those things have been written about by ... See more

Understanding the meta is part of your job and integrating that with these timeless principles from Buffett is important.

I believe in investment hypotheses. A hypothesis is a falsifiable statement and is used by the scientific community.

Almost everyone starts as a value investor. It’s funny, that's where Buffett started. And then Buffett in the early '90s became a growth investor. And so just be open-minded.