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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The front desk check-in person goes up with him. Sure enough, this guy's still sleeping in his bed. The front desk person goes and checks his pulse. It's cold. Dead guy in the bed. And the banker's just telling us this story. We're like, listening to it, like, where is this going to go? And the banker is furious. He's like, this is crazy. I just want to go to sleep. It's like 2 a.m.
in the morning. I got a big day tomorrow. Like, they're saying, I don't know what's going on, but just, like, figure this out. And the front desk check-in person's like, I don't think you understand. I got to call the police. There's a dead guy in the bed. You got to stay right here. And the police come. Sure enough, dead guy in the bed. And the banker's furious. It's now 3 a.m. in the morning.
He's like, this is crazy. You've got to get me. The police are like, no, no, you're a suspect now. We've got to take you to the police station. And he's freaking out. He's like, what do you mean? I don't know who this guy is. I don't know what happened. I'm just waiting in my room. There's cameras. You can check. Nope, we're taking you to the police station. And they put him in the back of the car.
They tell him he can make a call. Takes out his phone, calls our banker, whose name was Balaji. And Balaji's like, oh, this happens. Yeah. don't worry. How much money do you have on you? He's like, I got $1,000 on me. He's like, that's not enough. You probably need $10,000. Can you get a wire to them in the morning? And he's like, I don't even know how to get a wire. He's like, don't worry.
I'll take care of it. I'll get you out by 5 a.m. Balaji's up all night figuring it out. Banker gets out at 5 or 6 a.m., gets back on the plane back to London right away. So Balaji's like, so I was up all night figuring this out. And we're like, This is where we're flying in like an hour. This is terrifying. And so that was the first time we went out there was hearing this story.
It was incredibly fun. We bought 75 to 100% of an insurer out there. We bought 75% of an insurer in Pakistan, which Benny's Jewish. I'm Indian. We're both American. This is the first time I'd gone out to Karachi. He's like, I'm not going. You got to go. And so I was going out there. We were about to close this transaction. And my mom, who's from India, she's crying. She's calling my wife.
She's like, you can't go to Karachi. It's too dangerous. And it was a phenomenal experience. And we had an amazing partner in Pakistan. He did a fabulous job with the business. I have nothing but incredible things to say about him, about the country, about the business there. This is a great story about Rwanda. We bought the leading PNC insurer. We're also one of the largest real estate owners in
of the insured on all this real estate. So we're in Kigali. We buy this business. We're growing it. None of these businesses had great solvency law. I mean, this is like very early in the life cycle of how insurance work in these countries. But our view was, if you read about Rwanda, it's like the Singapore of Africa. We get on the ground. Our insurance team's there. This business is terrible.
For every dollar of premium we get, we lose $1.80, which in the insurance business, you can't make that up with investment returns. You're in a bad position. And we were the best of all of them. Why is not everyone else bankrupt? I'm like, well, it's a funny thing. Nobody really audits these companies. And as long as you continue to write more premiums the next year, you can make it work.
I'm like, well, that's not going to work for us. So we decided we might not want to be in this business as we make that decision. We get a claim and the claim is from a wealthy family that has some political connections. And it turns out that someone that we insured died in a car accident. There's a terrible thing. Now there's a pretty systematic way to think about PNC insurance globally.
There's a table for how to think about life. I hate to put it that crudely, but that's kind of how it works. And I fly out of Kigali, we got to take care of this claim. It's a big claim. And I'm like, well, we have to prosecute the claim because that's too much. That's outside of the table for how to think about the value of this accident. So we go to court.
The guy that shows up as the defendant in the claim, it's not the lawyer for the claimant. It's the claimant that died in the car accident. And we're like, I mean, case closed. The guy's right there. This is all done. And lo and behold, there's this performative jury that's like, ah, you know, this is out of bizarro world. This is crazy.
And so we're like, this is not a country we want to be operating. So it took that experience of building this insurance company where like, there's no winning here. It taught us a lot. about the kinds of founders we want to partner with, the kind of markets we want to be in, the way we want to spend our time. It costs us real time and money and years.
We haven't lost that zeal of wanting to build something really special.
I have friends that. sometimes complain about their LPs or the updates they have to do or the conversations they have to have. You just love this stuff too much. They might make different decisions if they didn't. Many have structured their lives in such a way where I really enjoy the people that we spend. I have a WhatsApp chat with my alpaca. I mean, I talk to them a decent amount.
I talk to some of my investors. They're like friends of mine. I get to do this with people I really love and admire and respect. they've oftentimes, our best ones have given us courage when we might've even lacked a little bit of it. I think about them as partners and shareholders in our business. And I think there's three reasons why. I think the first is I enjoy them.
That's like the most obvious one. I really do. If they never invested another dollar with Green Oaks, I'd still be good friends with most all of them. And that's becoming increasingly true every year at Green Oaks. The second is... We're competitive. We're deeply competitive. And it really bothers us if we're not amongst the best returning investment opportunities for our LPs.
I remember there's a table that came out in 2021, and it had the endowments by return. And I was really proud of the fact that for the three or four top ones, we drove some real performance for them. But that matters to me.
I'm sure we have tons of critics. I actively try to seek it out. So I think I can apply that to some of it. Yeah, although you feel free to add in. I just had a dinner where I met a bunch of young people. I asked them this specific question. I said, what are the most negative things you can say about Green Oaks? And I'll give you each comment because I thought all of them were valid.
So the first was Green Oaks, wildly successful early, but as of late, what have they done? And I think that's such a healthy attitude, frankly. You're only as good as your next day. And my pushback was, it takes time. The stuff you're judging us on 10 years ago, there's stuff you would judge us on in another 10 years that we did today, but it just doesn't show. So that would be the first.
Showing 261–280 of 321 · page 14 of 17
← Previous
Next →