Andrew Marks

But you could look at things like where rolling out stores is a big thing, Starbucks or...

the auto parts companies or Walmart or Costco, all that type of stuff.

And then also things where really attractive acquisitions and synergies were attractive or were a huge part of the story, you know, John Malone's cable roll-ups and things like that.

What's interesting is you learn that instead of looking at cash flows, there's this concept of maintenance cash flow, and then you could think about where to reinvest that.

If you can reinvest that at really high rates, really attractive rates, that's a better thing to do than just hoarding the cash or whatever.

And by the way, and Buffett talks about this when he talks about the concept of owner earnings and things like that.

And then it's not too far to then say, well, those same sorts of investments, you can make them out of the cash flow statement, but you can also make them out of the income statement.

Things like high return sales or talented engineering teams and R&D and things like that.

So I think I just got exposure incrementally to different sorts of things that traverse that spectrum.

And that's sort of where I found what made sense to me.

I think it's also really interesting because a typical value investor, you sort of look just at the fundamentals of the business and you look at the economics of the business.

And Buffett is very famous for saying that you want a business that an idiot can run.

Because eventually someone will.

Yeah, exactly.

And so he sort of talks about the primacy of business model over management.

But I think Amazon's a great example of the opposite because you could have never dreamed that if you owned Amazon when the story was about growing as a retailer, you could have never dreamed of AWS.

That shows what happens when you bet on an amazing founder who can leverage their business to create value in really compelling other ways.

And so I think it's a great business case study, but it's also a case study of putting faith in a management team and recognizing the optionality that comes with that.

I think, by the way, one other thing that I would add about Amazon that may be too wonky but also may be interesting is I think it's also an example of one of the things we sort of talk about in the memo, which is it's hard to just take a sort of knee-jerk 30,000-foot view, and you really have to sort of dive in and understand things.

So what people said for the longest time was that Amazon was losing money and could never be profitable.