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
I mean, it's probably Mark Zuckerberg.
Huge focus. Big bets. Willing to be wrong and pivot quickly when realizing that they are wrong. Meta. It's... Having, knowing when to be bold and when to be humble. Attracting, challenging, you know, motivating a really talented organization. And vulnerability.
I say all the time that, you know, What I can glean from a 30-minute interview is pretty limited in terms of someone's ultimate ability to do this job well. So that's why we have a summer internship program for MBAs, because it gives us kind of eight to 10 weeks to evaluate them and vice versa, right? To figure out if there's a fit, how this person works, how they think. So for me,
I look for a couple things. It won't surprise you to hear that I love hiring competitive athletes who have competed at a high level. I don't care the sport. It could be an instrument. That's great, too. But people who understand hard work, failure, disappointment, achievement, what that all feels like to people who have had to juggle things in their lives. Right.
So they had to work a couple of jobs while they were in college. They had some sort of misfortune in their life, you know. a relative, a sibling, or something that's happened to them that they've had to pick themselves up and work through. People who are interested in lots of things because they're curious, right? People who love to learn.
That is ultimately, we said this earlier, like foundational, I think, for being successful in this job is never being complacent and thinking that you know more, but recognizing and being humbled by the fact that there's always more work you can do But the companion skill to that is knowing when you know enough to make a decision, right?
Because I think you can get into analytical paralysis around like there's more to do, there's more to do, there's more to do, and like we're in the decision-making business, right? And so that balance of curiosity and pursuit of knowledge and learning and growth The self-awareness to admit when one is wrong, which is an incredibly important part of what we do.
And the willingness to take some level of risk or offer some kind of contrarian thinking that often can position us really well to make money.
It's so funny because the firms that we're always lined up against in the press are some of my closest friends. And none of us view it competitively at all. In fact, several former guests on your show are super close friends of mine. And... In some ways, I view our competition, honestly, as ourselves. Like we need to be better and do better.
And I think that's the bar we hold ourselves to is that we, you know, have the unique position of having been around for 27 years, which is increasingly rare in what we do. And obviously being a directional, fundamentally oriented person. Public equities firm with duration is increasingly rare at scale, I would say, relative to when I first started in the business.
And so I don't think of the pods as our competition. I mean, the market is obviously we're benchmarked in one of our products. And so that's obviously our competition and how we evaluate ourselves. But, you know, I think. We had many years of very, very strong performance.
We're sort of hopefully back on that track now with, I think, a lot of learnings and a lot of insights from mistakes we've made and a lot of growth that we've all experienced as an organization. And so I don't have like a target on my wall of XYZ firm or someone's numbers that I'm tracking to say, oh, we did better than that person.
It's actually sort of the opposite, which might be counterintuitive, is that I root for a lot of my friends. And when we do work on something and someone else calls us and they own it or they do work on it and we pass and it works and they do well, I think that's awesome, right? We want the industry to do well. We want people who leave our firm and start their own firm to do well.
That is good for the industry, right? And that matters. And so I don't have a zero-sum game attitude towards our industry or... root against certain people. I really don't.
I feel like having done this for a long time, part of what makes this really fun is the relationships of 20 plus years of going to see companies with the same people and exchanging ideas and debating ideas and challenging each other on our thinking.
And then getting to know their talent, people who work for them, who've done the deep dives on a bunch of different names and introducing them to our talent, all of us getting on Zooms and
hashing it out like that's what's really fun about doing this job is that network and I that has surprised me I think when I first entered the industry many years ago I thought it would be more sharp elbowed and competitive and instead it's been the exact opposite and maybe it starts with how we were talking earlier about sector coverage and my initial peer network being outside of the firm.
So you sort of find like-minded thinkers or people that you respect or who you think ask good questions in meetings with companies to then have conversations with about the sector. And then that grows up into, you know, these become friends. So that's been a real surprise, I would say, about the industry and maybe a little bit of a wander from the question that you asked.
But it's one thing I think is super interesting and maybe not really well understood outside in. Wow.
More, more just because I've seen so many reps, right? That's the business. We're in the pattern recognition business as a field, I would say. And what's also interesting is to see it across industries, across geographies.
Showing 161–180 of 261 · page 9 of 14
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