Charlie Songhurst

Possibly, the talent started to flow towards the church and away from Roman institutions, and that actually caused a weakening.

That is a generalized framework of where exceptional talent chooses to go is super interesting.

So one thought that occurs in our world is perhaps the sort of investment banks and consulting firms and law firms of tomorrow will be much less good than their precursors 20, 30 years ago because so many talented people are going into entrepreneurship and that talent has to pull out of somewhere.

Now, I think, again, from a sort of societal viewpoint, I think putting very talented people in things that can scale their products to millions of people is higher utility than putting them in effect by a high-end artisan profession like consulting at the law where their output doesn't scale.

Very simply is if you think back to sort of 30 years ago, your basic problem is lack of information.

So you sort of read about capital markets investors in the 90s and they're reading SEC firings, they're reading sell side reports, they're trying to get time with management.

But it's a fundamental lack of information problem.

Now you look at the massive growth of available information and I think it becomes much more of a filtering problem.

And in some ways, the best way to filter is to have second stage filters before your filter, which is just to find amazing people and use them as filter points.

So there's a sort of phrase, which is if you hang out with people smarter, harder working and morally better than oneself, you always live in a funnel of positive serendipity because effectively you're dragged upwards to the mean benchmark, which is higher than oneself.

So that's what I try to do.

Yes, 100%.

And I think, actually, if you could overlay amazing people in a unique configuration, you get an information flow that is both accretive to you, it pulls you up, but is also a unique lens in the world.

And from unique lenses, you get unique opportunities.

Yeah.

One of the ones that I think is always fascinating to me is just how geographically disparate networks.

Often you get these very sort of tight communities, in some ways the Valley, in some ways sort of New York, say the hedge fund community.

And sometimes the most obvious insights are just from going between one to the other and just seeing the difference in worldviews in stark relief from each other.

And so I sort of think about that constantly.

And one of the ones that's most powerful is just thinking from, say, imagine thinking about the same problem, not from a US perspective, but from, say, a Finnish perspective or an Albanian perspective.