Coburn Ventures Podcast

Today we’re back with a fourth stock disaster. We will sprinkle these in sporadically throughout the year for you in the hopes you can learn from our mistakes and our responses to those mistakes. Interestingly enough, we all might acknowledge that stock disasters are not commonly shared internally even though we are in an industry with a high failure rate: we are not engineers building bridges who need the failure rate approaching zero, we are more like baseball players at bat: 1 in 3 will get the job done and be considered high performing! Beating the market can be done while also striking out repeatedly! Perhaps ignoring the strike outs just isn't a complete way to look at the work we do! In that vein, lets jump into today's beast offered up by Pip: General Instruments. 

We seem to be in a time in which the pressure is on. In high pressure times, "practical" solutions that no one can argue with often rise to the top. This is useful to an extent, but it can also result in becoming tight, and small, and this is out of step with our job descriptions, which presume some ability to generate uncommon investable insights.

Today we’re pulling up a piece from our library with Dr. Morris Pickens, who describes determining what your “athletic moment” may be, in order to build a routine that is consistent and supportive, in any and all environments. Let’s jump in.

We are calling up a conversation we had in 2021 with Amber Gentry, a nutritional psychologist, about abundance vs. scarcity. Why are we highlighting this now? When we look to work, leadership and investing in the next few years, it seems that a more holistic, abundance-oriented mindset is formulating quickly (Porter's Shared Values), leaving behind a mindset purely about scarcity and power asymmetries (Porter's Five Forces). This conversation has helped us internalize abundance vs. scarcity over the last few years in order to see it as a useful lens for evaluating businesses and we thought it might be helpful for you, too. Let's jump in!

If there was a Hall of Fame for investing, what would we look at to choose who got in, and why? Sure, we can look at long-term performance, but what about the attributes that contributed to that performance? What would we look at instead of home runs, tackles, and interceptions? Trading decisions, management of tracking error, AUM? We turn to the technical, knowing that the layer beneath the technical outputs is where Hall of Fame performances come from.

We will talk about this with sports psychologist Dr. Morris Pickens, who distinguishes routine and preparation from the athletic moment, the point of performance that does or does not advance you toward your target.

We end with a neat spotlight on the impact of Mo's athletic moment at the very end, so hang tight to hear it. Let's jump in.

Today we’re back on the topic of decision-making biases. We will go through three more of the most common: representativeness error, search satisfaction and commission bias. Before we jump in, I’m going to do a brief explanation of each one, so that it's easier to listen to the rest of our conversation, you’ll have the definitions in mind. Also, a point of context I've been thinking about...if we jump into examining our biases before we have a bit of experience under our belt, it might cause a low-grade analysis paralysis! For our newer investors, please do listen, but don’t worry if you feel like you want to treat this as something for the back of your mind rather than an inspiration to make changes or adjustments. For the rest of you, these two conversations and the piece on biases are actually designed to provoke and provide a few slight changes, if you’re willing… so let's jump in..

Welcome back! We're here for part two of our conversation with Jeff Cardon and Steve Salopek.

This week we discuss what they would be doing in today’s market, more on comp and culture, and the stories behind certain decisions that influenced the creation of their teams and companies. Finally, we end with a topic that may be interesting to many of you, so keep listening all the way to the end! Let's jump in...

For the past few weeks, we have been discussing distinct elements of the investment process, and now we get to sit down with two friends and industry veterans to talk about it all. Many of you know both Jeff Cardon and Steve Salopek, both happen to come from the small-cap world and are long-time investors, portfolio managers, and leaders in the industry. They are both now retired, and with some time and space away from the industry, they have some interesting insights.  Our conversation covers a whole lot, with great stories interwoven. We move from investment decision-making to structuring money management firms to teams, compensation and culture. What are we waiting for? Here’s Part 1 of our conversation... let's jump in.