The biggest moat a business can have is not technology, not patents, not brand — it's the accumulated trust of customers who would feel genuine loss if you disappeared. Trust is the only asset that appreciates purely through use and deteriorates purely through neglect.
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Most people think about incentives as financial. The real incentive is truth. If you create a culture where people can tell you the truth, you will make better decisions than your competitors. And making better decisions than your competitors over a long period of time is the only sustainable advantage.
Kareem Amin — Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
The key insight is that permanent capital changes your relationship with time. You're not managing to a fund life; you're managing to the life of the business. That means you can make decisions that are bad for the next quarter, bad for the next year, but right for the next decade.
Vlad Barbalat — Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
The best businesses we've ever seen are ones where the incremental return on capital is essentially infinite because you don't need capital to grow. And so you have a business that's generating cash and you need to decide what to do with that cash. And most of the time, the best answer is to give it back to shareholders, but sometimes the best answer is to redeploy it into new investments.
Vlad Barbalat — Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy