Justin Ishbia

They know they can agree to on their own and know they need to raise up the flagpole.

And everything for me is a function of price and terms.

I'm willing to pay you a billion dollars if it's a dollar a day for the next billion years.

So whatever it may be.

And so on the negotiation part, I like to figure out a way that

strategically, partners feel like they're part of our team from the beginning, and they're negotiating not in their employee hat, but in their shareholder hat for the long term.

And more tactically, I want to give our vice presidents, principals, and partners the autonomy to negotiate their own deal.

I'd leave the very best people on a super long leash, the appropriate chickens.

Give them that autonomy, create the rules, expectations, and then give them a scoring system.

They compete with each other.

People love competing with each other, and the best, the light shined on them, and that's what we're trying to do.

I think it's that first-time CEO, the early career energy.

Are there enough of them out there who are high enough quality that can scale up to the next level?

And so I agree with that.

So we internally have, I like to home grow.

And so we created this program six years ago.

We call it our CXR program, where we recruit from the best business schools, Stanford, Booth, Kellogg, Harvard, Wharton, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame.

We'll hire individuals that come to Short Capital.

They'll be a chief of staff, they'll go to one of our portfolio companies for four or five years.

And if they're one of our very best, we'll promise to back them next.