Charlie Songhurst

It's sort of like those TV shows where you have someone profile the serial killer in like 30 seconds.

It's almost sort of a gift like that.

Then there's another investor at the same stage who almost ignores the personality of the founder and is all about the structural economics of the business, the market power, that ability to capture value.

And both those styles work beautifully.

And then I've seen a third type almost doesn't think about the underlying company.

What they actually watch is other investors and sort of like a pack of lions.

They don't try and kill the antelope.

They just steal the antelope once it's down and they just swoop in and win deals that they saw other good investors go for.

So three wildly different strategies.

All three I've seen work superbly.

And so no cookie cutter solution.

I see two main effects.

One is this sort of tech acceleration.

You've got this shift in behaviors that would have happened only over the long term from demographics.

I was a sociologist at Microsoft who once said, look, there's a thing called the rule of 1975, which is people born before that just never had computers at school.

And so they'll never have the same intuitive behaviors as people born after that.

And it sort of reminded me of the Einstein, or maybe it's Einstein, comment of science advances one funeral at a time.

And so in some ways, the natural movement of progress is as generations of people get older.

Video gaming is a classic example of this.

It was seen as something only for kids until those kids grew older and kept on doing it.