Andrew Milgram

Management teams make intuition or pattern recognition-based decisions.

We want to move everybody, whether you're a middle market manufacturing company or a taxi driver, to a data-driven decision.

That data-driven decision has more persistency to it.

It has a higher probability because it's informed.

It also, you can push decisions down where they're not top driven, they're operator driven.

And the operator is going to use that data to make the decision and where they need to adjust around the edges, then they can use their intuition or their pattern based decision making to shape it around the edges.

But we're starting from a better place.

So actually our first investment was definitely, I knew at the time, but clearly in retrospect, the riskiest trade that we did.

As we went around and talked to banks, they would say, well,

There hasn't been really any transactions.

Like many markets, one of the good indication of when a sector or a company is going to tipple over is it gets super illiquid in its securities or loans or whatever.

The taxi market had gotten super illiquid.

There were no medallion transactions happening.

Buyers and sellers move too far apart, nothing ends up happening.

And one of the all-time great indicators of when something is going to really sharply move

So there'd been no transactions.

And the banks were saying to us, well, look, there's no transactions happening.

We'll give you a discount because we know it's not great out there.

But we think maybe $350,000 per medallion is where we would exit them.

So not going to pay that today.