Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy on Apple Podcasts

Low-margin businesses are harder to start and operate, but that does not make them any less important 

The first question that Trae Stephens asks in every pitch meeting is: “What is the origin story of this business?” 

• Asking this question is the easiest way to measure disagreeableness in founders 


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• Many companies are started by “whiteboard founders”, where the idea is secondary to them being an entrepreneur 

Trae argues that a lot of high-margin software businesses have no impact on society, and sometimes even a negative impact on society 

• There are high-margin software companies that do important things, but many are related to advertising, capturing human attention, or creating obscure developer tools for enterprises


• These software compani

The most successful founders in history did not have the mimetic contagion gene that was in constant pursuit of social validation and that would have influenced them to build the things that everyone else was building

Important problems are often solved by businesses with low margins building with atoms, and not exclusively bits

Many young people default to tracked behaviors where they choose the safer, consensus “next step” over and over again They keep pushing decisions further out into the future, then get into their mid-30s and have no idea how they ended up where they are. Society must also encourage people to be “spikey” instead of only encouraging people t

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• Trae is a VR enthusiast and a voracious reader 


• Most of the future VR technology is limited by physics


• There is basic science research that must advance before Ready-Player-One-type VR technology will exist 


• However, it is possible to build single-purpose VR devices today that do really cool things


• Trae wanted to build a VR dev

• Many successful founders work on really boring things in their second act


• Thinkfluencer on Twitter, enterprise Software-as-a-Service venture capitalist, goofy lifestyle business, etc. 


• They choose to build what everyone else is building but attach their brand to it in hopes that their brand is what makes their second act successful 


• These

Making money is the mission of most technology founders, whether they say it out loud or not

Founders in the dynamism category are creating teams that are more mission-oriented than your average technology company 

• People who choose to join these companies are choosing to solve the strategically important problems instead of taking t