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.
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
cultural orientation to me is sort of the business translation of driving down cost of capital. People understanding that there are costs associated with every resource inside of a company and how to think about those in a way that is personal.
I always say that when we look at our budgets every year for our third party data sources and all the things that our analysts want to use, there's a lot of nice to haves. But what are like the must haves? And I always say to our management team, what if we made them pay for them themselves? what would they actually keep? And what would they say?
You know what, this is a nice to have, I don't need to have, right? And it would actually force different thinking around what's, let me look back, what's actually informed the decisions that I've made and has helped me make better decisions versus like an input that was one of 10 that didn't actually change anything for me, right?
Sure. I mean, we'll put aside the financial crisis because I think that was just like a... So universal. Yeah, a universal thing. For sure, it was the end of 21 and the first few months of 22. And we learned a lot. Tell me everything. So...
You know, referencing what I just said about a period in time where the market was consistently rewarding the best positioned companies who had great unit economics, but were investing meaningfully ahead of their growth rates. And the market was forgiving and encouraging, actually, of that level of investment such that many of these companies were. funding extraneous things, burning cash.
That didn't matter as long as the growth rates were continuing to accelerate and people were comfortable that the underlying unit economics were sound, right? So what happened, I think, was a lack of accountability around valuation and no near-term valuation support because everyone was looking at
multi-year out normalized, you know, margin structures to then discount back and say this is a fair price to pay for an equity. Instead of looking at if something changes and something goes bump in the night, you know, on a next 12 or next 24 months earnings or cash flow basis, is there valuation support?
And the regime changed, I think, very quickly when people started to realize, ourselves included, that the Fed was behind. And we started having this conversation in the fall of 21, really in the spring of 21, owning a lot of these businesses that were the leaders. And by the way, with the benefit of hindsight, from a 2025 perspective, are the winners, right? A
they were the right ones to own, we just paid too much for them, right? And when the regime changed and it was clear that we were gonna need to be getting into a hiking cycle quickly and aggressively, we pivoted, but not quickly enough, right?
And so we took some of that high growth exposure down that had been some of the most profitable exposure for us on the prior 24 months, but not enough and not fast enough. And so when we came into 2022, you know, as you remember, like it was just kind of the market was down. And it was super quick. And it was like a reprice mechanism that happened very, very quickly.
And we weren't quick enough to react. And to the point earlier around believing we owned different bets and payments or e-commerce or software, when the regime changed, none of that mattered. And that nuance was lost. And they all traded like one stock. And so we had too much exposure. We had lost balance in the portfolio.
And part of that, I forgive to some extent because the market had been rewarding that for many years prior, but we didn't. We didn't act quickly enough and respond quickly enough to a conversation we were having as well as the market was having at the same time around sort of a different regime from a macro perspective, an interest rate perspective. And so that was the huge mistake.
We spent a lot of time internalizing the lessons, studying all the mistakes, points in time when we had this conversation and didn't make change earlier, a year earlier, 18 months earlier. And that was the right decision.
And then the conversation we were having at the time and this decision to move some capital, but not enough and not quickly enough and really memorialized, I think, a lot of that thinking and learning around reinforcing that there are lots of ways to make money in the market. And we just got really narrow in our purview, I think, and lost the perspective on balance.
And so I think the changes we made in the first quarter of 22 and sort of resetting the book to a much more balanced book that has lots of different flavors of things in it.
Again, not top down prescriptively, but I think really prioritizing that in a different way and going back to, honestly, a lot of sectors where we had a lot of domain expertise, where we'd had a lot of success historically that we kind of got away from because the sex of the high growth,
internet-oriented kind of tech stuff had been so intoxicating, I think, for not only ourselves, but a lot of investors who are attracted to growth businesses that are creating value. We didn't own Nvidia. We didn't, you know, it wasn't three stocks that drove the whole portfolio. And they're across a number of different industries.
And so the breadth that is driving our performance is very Lone Pine-esque to me and something that we got away from. And that's the mistake, I think.
I mean, it's all the things we're all searching the globe for. We want incredible leadership.
really strong in economics, a really good moat around a business in terms of something that is different, incredible value proposition to the customer, whoever it may be, the ability to grow organically without investing meaningful capital, and a huge runway for growth that can last for many, many years without being disrupted if we're doing our jobs, right?
Showing 201–220 of 261 · page 11 of 14
← Previous
Next →