The machine Greenoaks has fine-tuned ever since is purpose-built to correct for that early error. “If there have been 100 billion people that have lived on Earth, and between 10,000 to 100,000 who have affected the technological progress of humankind,” he explained, “our job is to find the few hundred living now that could join the pantheon of great humans that have driven humanity forward. So first, we’re focused squarely on that. Second, where we’re differentially great partners, where we generate alpha, is by having a deep understanding of the business model.”

The process looks something like this: Greenoaks selects for people who believe that it’s really hard in the world of capitalism—which is filled with “me-too products swimming in a river of beta,” in Mehta’s phrase—to build something that delights human beings at a differential rate. The world therefore moves forward only through the products and companies built by generational founders who break tradeoffs and build competitive moats by creating a Jaw Dropping Customer Experience, which “usually starts with doing something perceived to be impossible, either technically or operationally, that gives competitors nightmares. Everything else is just a shell game,” Mehta believes.

Each year, Greenoaks identifies about 10–15 people who might be like this, and to whom the firm could be a uniquely close partner. Before any meetings, they set about preparing. “I don’t mean go on the website and use the product a little bit,” Mehta said. “We’ll talk to their customers, examine exactly what competitors are doing, understand the product in a granular way, study the underlying technology and how it’s evolving. There’s a series of things we’re testing for, depending on the company. We can understand from the outside-in better than almost anybody else on Earth. There’s no need to explain the 101 or go through remedial background. For a founder, that makes a first meeting with us feel like a fourth or fifth.”

Then there is the pace. “I think what we’ve become much better at,” he said, “is increasing the speed and velocity in our information asymmetry—getting much more information and being able to generate differential insight that matters to long-term enterprise value, and putting those three things together with a small team and building a flywheel for doing it over and over again every day. That’s been a sea change in the last couple of years.”

After preparing, Mehta and Peretz spend several hours discussing each company. While talking, they’ll call various partners, friends, and colleagues to join the conversation for an hour or two. Then they go home, put their kids to bed, and talk again on the phone, often from 9pm until 1am, nearly every night. The overwhelming majority of these conversations end in a decision not to pursue. “And then we just drop it and let go,” said Mehta. “Do you know how infuriating that would be to most people? But we love it. So we ‘wasted’ four hours. Who cares? We’re trying to find someone we want to partner with for decades who’s going to create art that changes the world. They’re painting their painting, and we want to find them. It has to be perfect.”

When it’s a yes, Greenoaks does not lard the process with advisors, large investment committees, or long, asynchronous diligence sessions. Mehta personally leads every first meeting with a founder, typically on site at the company rather than in the Greenoaks offices. “I want to be very explicit about this,” Peretz told me. “Neil joins every single investment process from the very first meeting with the founder.”

“If I walk out of a meeting and I don’t want to spend time on something that has five of the best firms in the world on the cap table,” Mehta said, “I feel totally comfortable killing it. I won’t lose a wink of sleep. And the opposite is true, too. If I find something incredibly interesting, but it’s a little crazy and a little out there, which a lot of the things we get excited about are, I’m totally comfortable pursuing an investment of $500 million or more in the next 36 hours. And I can marshal the resources and feel comfortable that if I’m wrong, we’ll live to fight another day, as long as we did the work.”

Monday mornings are for the Greenoaks pipeline meeting, and for spending time as a team talking about what they want to prosecute, what they want to drop, and how they want to organize time. Peretz in particular plays the role of extending the firm’s time horizon, according to Mehta. “Sometimes when things are moving really fast and you’re in the fog of war, you find yourself trying to make decisions that are optimal in the short term because you can only see that corner,” he said, with the gooey eyes he gets when discussing his partner. “Benny has an astonishing ability to step back and remind everyone, including me, what we’re trying to optimize for over the long term.” On Monday afternoons, Mehta occupies the ‘War Room’ (it’s just a room that connects Mehta and Peretz’s offices), where he talks to people about companies until around 8pm, at which point the team goes to dinner—the only night of the week he doesn’t see his daughters.

Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are for calls and company meetings. Fridays are for “deep work,” which usually means Mehta sitting alone in an office writing about a company or studying it, or reading through a pile of papers on Bitcoin, childhood gaming apps, or AI labs. On his desk, Mehta also keeps a list of the S&P 500, “and I just try to figure out what companies are not on that list today that will be on that list tomorrow, and how do I become the single most important partner they have?”

The Lean Enterprise

Jeremy Stern • The Visions of Neil Mehta