Neil Mehta
speaker
321 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 4 May
Neil Mehta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The spread between perception and reality for private businesses, for public companies, it could be quite significant.
I think you have to decide whether you want to be in the Hall of Fame of Returns or the Hall of Fame of AUM. And by the way, Ivory LP has to shut their ears, but that's an okay answer for attending people. The Hall of Fame of AUM is a well-trafficked game with lots of buildings in New York have names of people that have been in the Hall of Fame of AUM, and that's a great way to live life.
Not to take away from that. I think for Benny and I, and maybe it's because we had some success early, we're large investors in our own fund. It's just a more interesting way to try to be in the hall of fame of returns by partnering with the kinds of companies we like to work with. If that's the case, then you want to reach the right limit where you can invest without reducing returns.
And for us... Our largest investments are 500 million to a billion plus in size. And we do that with some regularity. We want the founders we work with to call us and say, we want 500 million to a billion dollars. We are thrilled to get that call. And we want to make sure that we can always answer that call and we can be the partner.
And that number may move up over time, but that number has served us pretty well. At least a couple of times a year, we'll get a call for, can we get 500 million to a billion from you? And we want to be able to answer that call. So that's kind of determined how we think about our funds have gone from the
I guess tens of millions to the billions, but it hasn't really been a function of the number of companies. Our funds has not changed at all. In fact, it's gone down. How many is it? 10 to 12. Yeah. That is high as 15 historically, but our numbers actually come down quite a bit. And we only have 55 companies across 15 billion of AUM. Who knows?
I could talk to every single one of our founders in half a day and still have tons of time.
Yes, we have. In fact, Reno started with the idea of an alternative capital structure. What was it? It was a holding company that owned insurance businesses, frontier and emerging market insurance companies.
Benny and I had spent a lot of time at DSHA studying insurance businesses in places like Ping An in China, Donggu in Korea, Qualitas in Mexico, Solinko in SCB in Thailand, Solinko in Sri Lanka, businesses like this. And actually, the cool thing was... If you study these P&C businesses, they all follow the same kind of curve. You could draw an XY axis. You could put GDP per capita on the X axis.
And then on the Y axis, you could put insurance penetration as a percentage of GDP. And it follows this S curve. And the S curve is basically rich country has 10% insurance penetration. The exception to this, by the way, is the Middle East countries. They get really rich on oil and then don't have insurance penetration. And then the really poor countries are at the bottom.
They have very low GDP per capita and they have low insurance penetration. And our view was, if you believe in a country's GDP per capita growth, a levered investment is to buy the best oil. insurance company, the PNC consumer insurance company. Interesting. So we did this and it was a phenomenal investment for Dongbu and Qualitas and SCB. They were really good investments.
So our idea at Green Oaks when we started, we had a traditional fund structure. Our idea was let's start a holding company where we buy anywhere between 51% and 100% of these insurance companies. We suck up those premiums, and we can invest them in a wide variety of different assets. It's a phenomenal idea on paper. In fact, we did it right when we started Green Oak.
So we went around and raised $150 million of capital from some great investors, many of our longtime investors, and we started a holding company. Now- I don't think one person asked us, have we been to Africa or Pakistan or any of these places? But we did it. And then we took a small team from McKinsey Insurance Practice, which was known for helping some of these insurance companies.
And our idea was, you can't buy Ping An in China. It's too big. But you can buy... the frontier and emerging market insurers in places like Pakistan or Rwanda or Nigeria, places like this. So the first thing we did was just get on a plane and go to these places. So we went to Nigeria. I have so many fun stories about this. I love this. Man, it was the craziest.
So we decided we started a holding company. It's called GGH. By the way, the punchline here is it went terrible. It's the single biggest mistake we've made at Green Oaks, I think. It's a funny story. So we took a team out of Zurich, Switzerland. That was our operating team. We had about 12 people. They were working with local teams. The first trip we made was to Nigeria. Actually, before...
I got on the plane to Nigeria. I was in London. There's this late night flight. And we had assembled a list of businesses that we might potentially want to buy. The list was probably six companies, seven companies. We had a banker that was on the ground that we were working with that was like only an insurance banker. We had known him for a little while.
We'd been studying our approach for maybe six months or so. The flights arrive at 10 p.m. And our banker calls. He's like, hey, I'm so excited about the trip. Can't wait for you guys to get into town. And I'm like, hey, I can't wait to get there. And he's like, I got to tell you, I got to skip dinner with you guys tonight. But when you get in, why? You know, we're really excited about our dinner.
He's like, I had a long night. I was up all night. It was kind of crazy. And we're like, oh, what happened? I had a guy from London here last night. He flew in. I was going to do with you guys. He stays at the same hotel, dropped off his bags, took him out to dinner. And we went out to this great dinner, had a bunch of drinks.
He goes back to his hotel and he proceeds to tell us the following story, which is this English banker goes up into his room. It checks into his room. There's a guy sleeping in his bed. The English banker's like, what is going on here? And he closes the door, goes downstairs, tells the person at the check-in desk, there's someone sleeping in my bed. You must have double booked the room.
This is a huge problem. The guy's like, no, no, no. That's like not possible. I'm sure. Reissues him the key. This is your room number. Go on. Goes in. Guy's still sleeping in his bed. Banker goes downstairs, goes to the front desk counter and says, you've got to come up with me. This is crazy. There's a guy sleeping in my room. I just want a different room.
Showing 241–260 of 321 · page 13 of 17
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