Cliff Sosin
speaker
323 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Cliff Sosin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And in order to see it turn, what I'm going to do is we work with a third party consulting firm that basically does like analytics, like, you know, web scraping and database, you know, go get credit card data and match it and blah, blah, blah. And so we're like, okay, we're going to just go, we're going to instrument the heck out of this in a way.
We already were instrumenting it somewhat, but we're really going to turn our attention to focusing on instrumenting this. And we're going to focus on the things we think we're going to see first when we see the turn. And when we see the turn, we're going to know, and maybe we'll have to pay a little bit more, but that's when we buy the second half of the stock. And that was May.
So I bought the first half. And I think it was sort of in the mid-20s was where I ended up getting kind of most of it. And so I bought some in the 80s, some in the mid-20s. And just mentioned like 100 in the 80s and mid-20s. And then we started instrumenting and we started writing. And things just get worse and worse and worse. It's like every marginal data point was worse.
I remember the week after Thanksgiving, sales always fall off on Thanksgiving, and then they always come back the week after. It's always a little lower because of seasonality. And it was like sales fell off during Thanksgiving, and then they just didn't.
And like, you know, you're living this in real time, right? You're just like, what the heck? And so I was really glad I hadn't bought the second half. But at this point we had things pretty well instrumented. And, you know, we had all this rate data, which I hadn't had in the beginning of this process. We had just a lot, like a lot of ways to capture how cars move. There's just a lot.
So then, you know, the year ends. They put out this poison pill. And... The poison pill basically said that anyone who owns over 5%, which was like me and like two other people, can't buy more stock. And they had very good reason to do this. The reason is they had big NOLs. And there's IRS rules having to do a turnover.
And if there'd be too much turnover amongst the 5% holders, then they would have destroyed the value of those NOLs. the way they repriced it. If a certain amount of turnover happens, they repriced the NOLs based on your market cap. So the market cap was super low, and the NOLs could turnover, and there'd been a bunch of turnovers, so there was a risk they were gonna cross some threshold.
And so they put this poison pill in, which made all the sense in the world for them, but it was not particularly helpful for me. But, you know, to be honest, my initial reaction was like, well, that's annoying. But I wasn't planning to buy any right now anyway. Right.
But then as fate would have it, you know, six weeks, eight weeks later, I'm looking at all of my data and like it's all green shoots. And I'm like, darn. That wasn't what I said. It was a different word. And so I tried to reach out to see if they could make an exception. But, of course, you know, they can't, all that stuff. So we ended up not being able to buy anymore.
Now, I should say when I made the decision to buy half now and half later, I promised myself that I wouldn't beat myself up. I said, listen, Cliff, you will be a happy, successful person if you write about this, whether you buy this other half or not. So it's all good. And so I'm still telling myself that.
I'll talk about how it was super miserable, and it's pretty easy to imagine how it was super miserable. But it is worth just making a point. We were not fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. It sucked, but in the realm of human experience, I've lived a blessed life. I would say one way to think about it is there were two versions of me.
There was the me who you spoke to, who I think would sort of cogently say, well... There's this weird thing going on with rates and it can't last forever. And when it gets better, I think this will get better. And there was the me who was laying awake at night at 1 a.m. who was just kind of like, you know, my inner voice was not being kind to me. And I've always thought of myself as a person.
I think I am sort of naturally one of these people who has pretty good control over his inner monologue. And it was the first and only time in my life where I like lost control of my inner monologue. Like I, you know, would lay awake at night. I never lose sleep over monologues. things. I sleep and I would lay awake at night and I would, you know, fret and berate myself.
And it's super hard to live like that. But, you know, like again, it didn't have terminal cancer. I wasn't fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. Like it was, you know, within the realm of human experience. But like it is super difficult. And, you know, you've partners that you've let down. Right. And I mean, I say you've let them down as though you've let them down. Like, have you let them down?
Like, your view of the world is that maybe you haven't let them down. It's just like, this is just a very big wave. But, like, then your partners would, you know, some, like, you got different responses. You know, I had some smaller partners who are no longer partners who, you know, were mean.
But, like, I had other, you know, partners who would very sensibly and totally appropriately, like, want to grill me about it. But that grilling didn't, wasn't, like, mean. It was totally reasonable. But, like, it didn't come from a place of confidence, right? You know, we'll eventually get to people I'm grateful for. But there was one partner who drove, you know, a long distance.
to have lunch with me. And it turns out that was the only reason they drove this long distance. And we get to lunch and it's like, this is not going to go great. These meetings haven't been going my way recently. And we sit down and he goes, Cliff, I'm just here to express my and everyone I work with's view that you're awesome. And, you know, you're going through a lot.
And I'm just here to say, like, you're great. We support you. Let us know if we can be helpful. But, like, we're Team Cliff. And I didn't cry, but I was like, wow. What a thing. And he's like, Neil, look, we're here for lunch. I drove here just to meet with you. We can talk about investing. Yeah, we can talk about other things. I don't really care. But this is what we're doing.
And I was just like, wow. And so that would be the other thing. To that day, and I think it makes me a better person because I remember how that affected me. Like the other day, there's a CEO in a company I'm involved in. He's wrongly getting a lot of crap. from really dumb investors. So I wrote him like, I sent him like a hug. Like I sent him like a nice, like a really nice email, I think.
As nice as I could write it. But I think it makes me a better person to be on that side and to hear it and remember. So in terms of other things I'm grateful for, that would be another one. But you've let people down and you internalize that. And there's also this weird thing that happens where like,
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