Henry Ellenbogen
speaker
1,069 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 16 Dec
Henry Ellenbogen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
You surround yourself with smarter, better people, both internally and externally.
But one of them is you develop better processes.
And one of the process that we only started two years ago,
was we always did quarterly KPIs or operating reviews, but we didn't go back and look at an investment that we own for three years and just say, and when we do them, they're so simple.
We say, three years ago, we thought they would do X, and now they did Y. Now, of course, the conversation is, where was it different and why?
But actually, the preparation for that meeting was
is, at least on the written side, so simple.
It's two sides.
But then, of course, we're all human.
And even though we try to hold each other accountable, if you get together every quarter and something deviates a little bit, you tend to excuse it.
Of course, if it deviates a little bit for 12 straight quarters, actually staring you in the face, that's why we're such a big believer in investment memos.
I felt in 2022, we truly had expertise to add to the conversation.
And that was...
We, at the highest level, and by the way, I don't say we versus us, we all, every CEO I talk to, every investor I talk to, and even Durable, who is a fundamental investment firm that really values stuff on cashflow, never felt money was going to be free forever, had made simplifying assumptions based on
almost a decade of free money.
If anyone who has been taught how to value companies understands at the end of the day, all companies have to be valued on free cash flow and organic growth.
At the time, we got to a point where 30% of all treasury bills in the world actually had negative yields.
And relative to inflation, you were being paid to borrow, which basically means it was logical for venture capitalists to value companies and not care about profitability at all.
It was logical for companies in the public markets to buy low quality businesses that could never own their cost of capital, but use cheap debt to go do it.
It was logical why if you sat on company's boards, you really wouldn't ask hard questions about trading off growth, profitability, and innovation, because you didn't have to.
Showing 601–620 of 1,069 · page 31 of 54
← Previous
Next →