Juan Orbea

The values of a company should be a blueprint for how to be successful in that company; the canon for how the team behaves and makes decisions. As I mentioned earlier, mitochondria aren’t just good at what they do — they best embody a company’s values. That's why you can’t just interview for competence. You need to interview for values.

New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for helping the Soviet Union starve Ukraine into submission, 90 years before the Times decided to instead "stand with Ukraine".

Our guest is Brett Johnson, who was listed on America’s Most Wanted list in 2006 for cyber-crime and who the secret service once declared as the “original internet godfather.” 

The last 12 years were "up and to the right". It’s easy to make IRRs work really well in a 12-year bull market but VCs have to make money in good markets and bad.

Until 1998 BH run a levered operation by having more invested assets in the insurance operation than BH itself had in book value.

I sometimes like to call it “layered thinking”. There’s the rational layer, there’s the tacit layer, and there might be other layers. And they’re all important. And we can’t just make a decision based on any one layer, frankly, and certainly the top layer.

The smartest decision-makers don't go with their guts. Their success relies on having a future-oriented approach and the ability to consider all their options in a creative, productive way.