The a16z Show

How Bending Spoons Built a $20 Billion Compounder | Luca Ferrari

radical innovation can produce extraordinary outcomes, but systematic improvement can be more dependable, especially when paired with a model designed to compound over decades.

Acquired

Seinfeld - Full Episode (Audio)

This is a show that finished making new episodes nearly three decades ago, and yet we are all still watching it. Netflix's 2019 deal for Seinfeld, which was reported at well more than $500 million over 5 years, was the largest sum that a streamer has ever paid an outside studio to license a series that's no longer in production.

Acquired

The Home Depot: How America's aging houses built the best stock of the last 45 years (Audio)

Home Depot went public in 1981, one year after Apple Computer. And astonishingly, if you put $1,000 into Home Depot and Apple at their IPOs and you held them all today, your investment in Home Depot would beat your investment in Apple. And if you reinvested the dividends that it paid out, it has compounded at nearly 25% per year for 45 years.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.491]

The thing that I've observed about the truly great investors is that they have an absolute obsession about not losing money. It's a very different orientation from people who are obsessed with making money. The ones obsessed with not losing money tend to make a great deal of it.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.491]

The venture capital business is one of the few endeavors where you can be wrong the vast majority of the time and still be considered successful. The reason is that the gains from the rare, extraordinary winner so thoroughly dwarf the losses from all the failures combined that the overall outcome can be spectacular.

Acquired

The Home Depot: The best-performing stock in the S&P 500 since IPO (Audio)

Home Depot went public in 1981, one year after Apple Computer. And astonishingly, if you put $1,000 into Home Depot and Apple and their IPOs and you held them all today, your investment in Home Depot would beat your investment in Apple. And if you reinvested the dividends that it paid out, it has compounded at nearly 25% per year for 45 years.

The Prof G Pod

The #1 Divorce Predictor Isn’t Cheating — Ft. Divorce Attorney James Sexton | Office Hours

I think people get divorced and their relationships fall apart the same way that I think Thomas Wolf said, uh, people go bankrupt very slowly and then all at once. So, I think it's a lot of little small pieces of disconnection that eventually just catastrophically lead to the failure.

Founders

#431 How Henry Singleton Worked

"Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. If one took the hundred top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as Singleton's."

Founders

#431 How Henry Singleton Worked

Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. If one took the hundred top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as Singleton's.

TED Radio Hour

The price of creativity

What I see is not some momentary blip. But I see the payoffs of investments that were made 70 years ago. We are on a continued climb in this long process of America embracing creative culture as one of its founding core ideals.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we're approaching a moment where many instances of AI could be running, doing the work of the economy, doing scientific research. I think most people wildly underestimate how significant that would be. We would, in a short amount of time, compress decades of scientific progress.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we're at an extraordinary moment in history where the tools to solve problems that have been stuck for 100 years, or maybe never been solvable, are becoming available to us. And I think in the next few decades, we will make more scientific progress than in all of human history combined.

The Prof G Pod

Scott Galloway: Health Insurance Is a Scam | Office Hours

The way to wealth isn't making a lot of money. It's making more than you spend. My father died a near millionaire and he never made more than or you know he was making $48,000 a year but he spent 46 or 45 and he was investing and saving money even when he died.

The Prof G Pod

Should You Sell Your Stocks Right Now? | Office Hours

One of the greatest wealth hacks in history is the ability to buy equities and let them compound tax deferred. And then if you want to do the trick of billionaires, if you need cash to fund your lifestyle, maybe you borrow against those stocks, not more than say 20 30 40% at max to fund your lifestyle

Founders

#427 How Raymond Plank Built a $50 Billion Oil Company

Raymond Plank founded Apache Corporation with just $250,000 in 1954. 50 years later his company was worth $50 billion.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we're at the beginning of an era where we're going to be able to just have much more. And I think that the thing that I would most want people to understand is that technological progress is the main driver of that, and that we should think about how to accelerate it rather than slow it down, because the compounding effects of even slightly faster scientific progress are enormous.

Diet TBPN

China Considers AI Export Controls, SK Hynix $28B IPO, Banks Target Payment Business | Diet TBPN

By summer of 2026, it will be as though the digital world is going through some kind of fast evolution with some parts of it emitting a huge amount of heat and light and moving with counterintuitive speed relative to everything else. Great fortunes will be won and lost here and the powerful engines of our silicon creation will be put to work further accelerating this economy and further changing things.

The Prof G Pod

How to Be Poor: Building Wealth on Less Than $60K a Year | Office Hours

Every dollar you pay off your credit card debt, you're basically earning an 18 to 24% guaranteed return. There's no place you're going to get a guaranteed return of 18 to 24%.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that we're most excited about is the idea that the cost of intelligence could fall so dramatically that it becomes essentially free. And when something becomes essentially free, entirely new categories of application become possible that you couldn't have imagined before.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]

The most counterintuitive thing I've learned is that the more you optimize for growth, the more you actually undermine the conditions that create it. The companies that grow the fastest over long periods of time are usually the ones that were willing to grow more slowly at some earlier point to build something real.

The Prof G Pod

Is Wall Street Rigging the Game for SpaceX? | Office Hours

The IPO market has in fact become sort of the last stop on the chump train and that is when Google went public I think it was an $80 billion market cap it's up you know 500 fold retail investors have had a chance to garner a tremendous you know 500x return if you to get that from SpaceX after it goes public what would that be two trillion

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479]

The best businesses we've found are ones where the value of the business actually increases the longer you hold it, not just because of retained earnings, but because the competitive position strengthens over time. That's the opposite of what most people think about when they think about an investment decaying or having a terminal value that you have to discount back.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479]

The best businesses in the world are ones where the reinvestment rate is high and the return on incremental capital is also high. Those are very, very rare. And when you find them, the right thing to do is to do nothing, which is actually very hard to do as an investor because you're paid to do things.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479]

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.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479]

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.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The other thing that's really important in this world is that the flywheels tend to be self-reinforcing in a way that creates winner-take-most dynamics. The best models attract the most users, which generates the most data, which trains the best next models. And so you end up with a situation where the leaders tend to pull away from the pack over time rather than revert to the mean.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The companies that matter most are the ones that can actually translate technological capability into economic value, and that translation is much harder than it looks. Most technology waves produce enormous value for society but relatively little for investors, because competition drives returns to zero faster than most people expect.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The exciting part of being in technology investing is that you have these waves of innovation that create extraordinary opportunities for value creation and also value destruction. And the companies that are able to ride multiple waves are extraordinary compounders over time, but it's actually quite rare.

TBPN

Siri AI, Fable Launch, China Wakes Up, Rivian CEO Joins, IPO Filings, Learn to Weld?

You have this bookending of Siri on both sides of Tim Cook's career where sort of nothing happened in an interesting way, you know, but it but the stock did fantastically well. his Tim Cook created an immense amount of value, but it was this lighter cheaper, faster, stronger.

Acquired

Vanguard: The communist capitalist who saved investors a trillion dollars (Audio)

I view Bogle as an undercover philanthropist. And at a trillion or even half a trillion dollars, that would make him the greatest philanthropist of all time.

Prof G Conversations

Gary Stevenson: “Your Kids Will Be Poorer Than You” | Prof G Conversations

If you do not want everything to be owned by a tiny elite, you have to aggressively tax extremely high levels of wealth. Because otherwise, if you're Jeff Bezos, what is he worth? $300 billion, right? Even if he makes 5% a year, he's making $15 billion a year, right? And it's just going to grow, right? It's going to grow unbelievably quickly.

Prof G Conversations

Gary Stevenson: “Your Kids Will Be Poorer Than You” | Prof G Conversations

If you're Jeff Bezos, what is what's he worth? $300 million, $300 billion, right? Even if he makes 5% a year, right? Which he's going to make way more than that. Even if he makes 5% a year, he's making $15 billion a year, right? And it's just going to grow, right? It's going to grow unbelievably quickly.

The a16z Show

Building Blackstone, Backing Costco, with Tony James

culture, incentives, and alignment ultimately determine whether an organization compounds or stagnates

EconTalk

The Unseen Work: Stewart Brand on Maintenance and Civilization

maintenance, the quiet act of keeping things going, turns out to be the hidden force behind success and failure in nearly every domain of human endeavor.

EconTalk

The Unseen Work: Stewart Brand on Maintenance and Civilization

maintenance, the quiet act of keeping things going, turns out to be the hidden force behind success and failure in nearly every domain of human endeavor

Compound Interest

Why KKR Wants Your, Yes Your, Money

The argument in favor of allowing everyday investors to own this stuff is that this stuff has made people really rich over long periods of time and so if you only let rich people own it, they're only going to get richer and the wealth gap explodes.

Compound Interest

Bilt’s Ankur Jain On Solving The ‘Four-Banana Problem’ And Gamifying How, And Where, We Live

Housing services, which is rent, mortgages, utilities, is like 12% of the economy. Talking about, you can think about that like a $3 trillion a year subscription fee for living.

The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway

Scott's Early Career Advice, and Are Dating Apps Making Us Lonelier? | Office Hours

your 20s sort of dictate your trajectory into your 30s and 40s, and your ability to kind of get to the right positions in your 30s and 40s to really then aggregate influence and economic security are somewhat a function of the trajectory or the scale or the velocity you establish in your 20s.