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
And so there are moments in time when it feels like the market is extending in duration, and then we can reflect some of that in how we're positioned and how we're constructing the portfolio and how we're sized in certain things. And there is times, and I would argue we're in one of them right now, where there's a lot of uncertainty, and appropriately so, right?
And so the market is, it feels much more short-term oriented, much more data point driven, You know, the tariff thing over the weekend is a good example. And there's a bunch of announcements and then some of that gets walked back on Monday. And so how does this all get implemented and executed, I think, is an open question.
And so in that type of environment, you're going to see more knee jerky type reactions to things. And that's just an awareness. We're not going to radically alter what we're doing or how we're positioned, but it's just it sort of focuses us in different ways.
Or maybe unhappened.
So we all see the news starting to come out towards the end of last week. And over the weekend, Dave, my co-CIO, and I, who I also referred to as my work husband, we've worked together for 21 years, so a long time. We're emailing back and forth like, OK, so now what do we do? These are big announcements. These are big numbers.
We start to see the responses from some other countries in terms of what they're saying. I mean, to be totally frank, there was the conversations like, I'm not really sure what we're supposed to do about this. Like, are we going to like radically alter our portfolio? I mean, is this even going to go through? What's going to happen on Monday? Right.
And we are in a moment right now of obviously very elevated. We're in an announcement cycle that seems to be accelerating with pace. Right. And so, yeah. we sort of had a back and forth a few times over the weekend. Okay, does this change anything for us? Let's come in Monday and see what happens.
So Monday morning, we sit down as a PM group every Monday and every Thursday, and we're talking obviously all the time, and Steve joins that meeting. And we sort of went back and forth and said, okay, what does this mean? What are the industries that are, let's assume it goes through, let's play this out both ways, right?
Let's assume it goes through, what are the industries that this is a huge problem for? And we sort of tick through what some of those are, autos and others, right? what will the retaliatory actions look like probably? So we walk through that. And then the other side is like, let's assume that this all gets walked back, right?
And how much is gonna get, and things are trading at crazy levels in the pre-market on Monday morning, right? That are theoretically exposed to these level of tariffs. We walk through that. And so the net of that is a lot of conversation and decision to do nothing. I mean, literally zero orders came out of this conversation, right? And some, that's not uncommon, but like for...
an event and a news cycle that is meaningful and somewhat anticipated, I would argue. And also I think with the approach with the appropriate amount of skepticism in terms of what ultimately gets implemented, a lot of debate, not doing anything about it, right? And so I think it's a conversation that's live, right? And so I don't wanna like,
All of this, all the AI stuff, these are all very live conversations that live inside of meetings, but are constantly being pushed forward via email and constant communication that we're all in. So this one I would say is consternation, what are we supposed to do about it? Not gonna react. live and learn. Like let's keep, let's keep following.
So it's some combination, I would say. For us, a lot of our process revolves around people. So it's the people who are running the businesses. And I think that companies are in some ways like families. There's a very distinct culture that characterizes and underpins companies.
And that matters immensely, I think, for how a company operates, functions, hires, retains, grows, invests, all of the things that drive sort of ultimately how they perform and execute. And so getting to know the people, what motivates them? Are they looking around corners and thinking about the thing that can disrupt them? Are they trying to disrupt themselves?
Are they attracting and empowering the people that they are hiring into their companies and retaining them by giving them a lot of responsibility and a lot of autonomy and a lot of voice and decision-making? So I think that's where it starts for us. And one of our favorite sort of themes in investing, which is not a sectoral theme, but sort of a change theme is around new people, right?
You change people, you change a company. And so there are lots of examples of in our history of businesses that are good to great businesses that we feel have been under managed. And then somebody comes in who we know from a prior life or a prior existence, or we do a bunch of work on that person if we don't and get super excited about their ability to transform.
And to me, nirvana is when you have a company that is so deficient in a certain functional area. And then you bring in a leader who is an expert in that functional area, and it's like, that's magic. And we've seen this a bunch of times. And so those opportunities, I think, are super interesting. Two, I would say, is just companies who are...
innovating at such a rapid clip and you see what's happening from a product pipeline perspective, right? They have a great monopoly incumbent business ideally, right? Or something that has an incredible unit economics and they are using a lot of that profit and power to invest and plant seeds in a bunch of other areas.
And you see some of those free seeds starting to come to fruition in terms of new products, new lines of business, new distribution channels, whatever it may be relative to the company we're talking about. And seeing that secret sauce is not just the single thing that made them great, but their ability to then recreate and innovate at like at scale, I think is super exciting to us.
Yeah. Another one from our past, which we did really well with and which was a great example of this was Ulta, when Mary Dillon took it over. This was, at the time, a small company. I think it was maybe the $3 billion market cap when she joined. And she was a...
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