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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And then it was a couple hundred thousand from some other people that I knew. Started with that. And, you know, over the years was sort of able to kind of steadily bring in a little bit of money here and there and compound and was fortunate. You know, I've had up years, I'd have down years. If you changed the order of the years, get to the same place.
But I definitely wouldn't have raised any money. So there's also a meaningful component of luck.
So I don't remember exactly how many investors we have. It's sort of between one and 200 across a few different vehicles. And the firm moves around every day, but sort of between a billion and a half, too.
The premise was always... You know, let's find a handful of businesses that are publicly traded where I can buy a piece of that business in the markets and own it with a premise of owning it forever. And then own it until basically I find something that I can upgrade that I think is even better. Or I discover that I've misunderstood the business in the first place.
And so there's two ways out of the portfolio. One is that the gap between what I think – I find something better so I can upgrade. Or the other one is that I have some view as to what makes a business successful. You can think about like a mental model of kind of how the business is competing and winning in the ecosystem. And that makes predictions about the world.
And then you get real-world data and you can compare the real-world data to – to what your predictions of your mental models are. And if you discover that your predictions aren't lining up, then you need to update your role to model. And it might be that you need to throw it out. And at some point you sort of realize you don't know which way is up anymore.
And then that would be an investment that you would jettison because you just no longer know. Over time, We've sort of had kind of between like, we'll call it four and eight. It might have been as many as 10 at one point, but that's kind of the number of investments. We tend to, over the course of time I've been investing, I think on average, I've sort of bought and or sold one thing a year.
It's a pretty sort of lethargic pace of turnover. It's this idea that like businesses compete and win in certain ways. There's sort of a minority of investors. businesses that, you know, once you sort of figure them out, like you can just tell, like they're going to be very successful relative to other similarly priced businesses.
And so, and we can talk, there's a lot of like mental models and stuff, like ways that I think businesses can be sort of a taxonomy of businesses that I've sort of think about. But those are just, you know, my ways of understanding a really complicated world and sort of trying to find a few things that work.
If you think about it, in most markets, you shouldn't have a lot of profits, right? Like profits are kind of a fluke of some sort of something about the setup that makes it so that some reason why competitive forces can't drive economic profits to zero. And those reasons, I mean, there's sort of a lot of them.
And in terms of how to think about them, I gather different examples from sort of microeconomics, from psychology, from business history, to try to understand different ways that companies have carved out a piece of the world where they are advantaged. And then they can, you know, you can think about a company's profitability over time as kind of its market opportunity times its advantage.
And so the, what, you know, I mean, I don't think there's anything particularly exciting about like what makes a great business. It's you generally want to have,
um you know multi-threaded advantages a lot of things working for you that are very hard for your competitors to replicate um you know you want to bring a lot of value to your consumers you want to you know um you want the things that are working for you to be generally invariant um with time as tech as society evolves and changes and when you kind of have all those things lined up um you should be able to
You know, have high returns on capital, reasonably good margins, you know, all those things that grow, all those things people look for. You know, of course, everyone knows everything I just said. And so, you know, the whole game is to identify the ones that other people, you know, have missed for one reason or another. And, you know, it's really important.
It's the emperor, I think investing is the emperor of intellectual activities in the sense that in academia, people write papers. They're wrong, they're right, eventually they die with a bunch of ideas. Most of them are wrong. In politics, people have views and they're definitely wrong, unlike a lot of them.
And in business, people, they have this narrow world and they kind of have to be really good about executing in their narrow world, but they don't necessarily need a deep understanding. You can run a deli. without necessarily having like a deep understanding of like why meat prices are what they are. But in investing, you know, it is wildly accountable.
You're making predictions about which businesses are going to win and which are going to lose, which, you know, to understand businesses are sort of complex social structures embedded in our society, which is a complex social structure. So what do you need to understand how a business's success or failure over time? It's like you kind of need to know everything.
So it's, and unlike all these other pursuits, this one's like highly accountable. So- I think it's the emperor of intellectual pursuits. I think that there's no arena to train people better about understanding the world. And I think if you're just curious about the world, there's nothing more interesting than to study business.
I generally think of a contained business as one where when you're trying to understand a company... If you find that it's just, the problem starts to feel intractable in the sense that it's very hard to think about how changes in, there's many things that could change in society that are changing that could cause your view of what the business could be to change over time.
That is just a tough problem to live with. you know, if because it's just, you know, it's very susceptible, like as the world evolves, like you don't know where the company is going to go. Whereas a business where the thing that makes it work or things that make it work are relatively narrow and in a sort of part of our lives that isn't evolving that much. That would be, you know, very contained.
Showing 21–40 of 323 · page 2 of 17
← Previous
Next →