Kelly Granat
speaker
261 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Kelly Granat’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Like, you know, we used to be big investors in China many years ago and seeing how a lot of the entrepreneurial businesses there, the Tencent, Alibaba's got built and the leadership inside of those companies, Meituan. I look at something like MercadoLibre and what Marcos has built there over time and the team largely being the same since inception.
And like they've executed against competitors who came in and tried to disrupt their markets or much bigger, well-resourced, much bigger global companies and defeated them. And I just, there's something to the magic that happens when you have
I think strong leadership, great teams, a lot of collaboration across those teams and a lot of like ups and downs that everyone experiences together that creates so much resilience. I've seen that play out time and time again.
And it's interesting today's actually investing climate with, we've been saying this a lot, like with the cost of capital coming back and largely gonna persist, we can debate at what level, you're seeing just winners and losers across industries in ways that we have not seen for a really long time, which is super exciting obviously for us as really actively engaged research oriented investors.
who both own stocks and short stocks because executions mattering, right? And the free lunch of the zero interest rates and there's money for everyone almost forever, it felt like for many, many years, that era is over.
And so you see it across all kinds of categories and you see, you know, whether it's Boeing versus Airbus or, you know, Hermes and LVMH versus Caring and Burberry, or, you know, we can go down. DoorDash versus everyone else in that space, basically, right? Uber versus Lyft. There's so many examples of... winners and losers getting way more pronounced. And a lot of that's strategic decision.
A lot of that's leadership, honestly, and execution. And I think those things are all really, really tied together.
So I think it's a bunch of things. Number one, there's really clear strategy in terms of what are we focused on, right? I think so many companies have, eight different initiatives that are simultaneous and there's a lack of understanding when you talk to people inside of a company of what actually matters, what are we driving towards, right? That's one.
Two, there's a culture of accountability and measurement, right? Some companies have it, it seems so obvious, right? Like people are bonused off of a certain thing. They do, you know, forward-looking plans and budgets every year and they hit them where they don't.
But there's some companies that are religious about, you know, having those be thoughtful exercises and accountable exercises and ones that are not, right? And I think that shows through a lot. Three is...
Companies who treat their consumers well, whether that's a B2B enterprise, a B2C enterprise, when you talk to customers, and we do this all the time as part of our research, you hear how they are treated and it is different. There's someone for them to pick up the phone and call. Their needs are being met.
They don't feel like they're being aggressively raised, like their price is not being used as a weapon against them. They're being serviced. It's just different. There's again back to accountability and sort of a level of operating standard that is the expectation of how things are done. I think the other thing is there's a
long-term orientation that I think some companies lose their way around, particularly when you have a lot of turnover and the amount, back to people, when you have a lot of turnover, incentives get set, whether that's tied to a stock price or the metrics that drive compensation and people's incentives are not aligned, right? And that doesn't promote long-term strategic thinking or orientation.
That filters down to the culture. So now people are cutting corners. They're trying to make numbers, make budget. That's a very different way to live as a company than it is around. We may miss a quarter, but this is the right investment to make. Right. And so companies that I think do a good job of balancing short and long term one and two are able to communicate to the market, you know,
a consistent level of execution, right? We joke a lot internally that, and I say this a lot to management teams, every time you open your mouth to report your quarter, your stock's up or down 20%. What that tells me is you are not doing a good job communicating your business. You don't have good visibility around your business because you are surprising the market every time you speak.
Good and bad. That's not like multiple enhancing for your company over time, right? And so that comes from the internals of how a business is run. What are the incentives? What are the metrics? What's the culture? What's the retention? All of these things, I think, are such important glue that distinguish the better executors from the poor executors.
I think of it like from the perspective of like trade-offs in a budget meeting, right? And so in the era of zero interest rates and the market, the public markets for years rewarding growth at any cost, I think the disciplines inside of a lot of companies really went away and everyone was just motivated to find new ways to grow regardless of the cost.
And what is clear in today's era, and you have seen this from a lot of the big platform companies, particularly in the Internet space, there is just a new religion around cost where when you sit in a budget meeting or even an engineering meeting and you are putting forth two or three initiatives that you want to get funded, you are being asked how to fund them. from your budget, right?
Which is just a very different orientation of this is not an open pie that is limitless in terms of dollars that can flow to you. And if you want to do something, you have to like, you know, it's like a Sophie's Choice, right? It's like...
one of the things that you've already been approved for needs to be sacrificed because then you're going to feel the pain and it's going to really pressure the decision-making around solving for the best thing or the best two things. Right. Or if you want more resources on a project, like convince me why, right. That,
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