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
I mean, maybe you and I talked about off the cuff. We did. But I was just quietly doing it. And I did it as a nonprofit because it's a terrible financial investment. I mean, just to walk through the financial math. I'm buying buildings in one street called Fillmore Street. It's in Pacific Heights, a street I grew up on.
And I'm buying stuff at like a five and a quarter cap, which treasuries were five and a quarter when I was buying this stuff. And I'm buying like illiquid, small, rundown commercial real estate that usually has no tenant or the tenant's leaving, which is why the person's selling me the building. And then I'm putting in like a mom and pop restaurant at a three cap, which barely pays its rent.
And I have to do all the TI. It's like a terrible financial investment. So we were like, oh, you're so good for doing this. No, it makes no sense to do it any way besides a nonprofit. So I started a nonprofit with a good friend of mine named Cody Allen. You came out to San Francisco during COVID. I think San Francisco is a really important city. I think it's important for America.
I think it's important because it's ground zero for a lot of the most interesting people all over the world to come and build their version of the future. It's different to New York and it's different to the finance and the real estate and other industries, which are a little bit more, I don't know, rent seeking is maybe the right word I want to use.
But I think there's something about tech and the aspirational nature of company building that San Francisco harnesses uniquely well. I don't think there's anywhere else on earth that's anywhere like it. Tel Aviv may be getting close, but it's really San Francisco. I think losing that, and we've tried really hard to kill it.
We're anti-business, we're anti-growth, we're high taxes, we're anti-family, we're a lot of things going in the wrong direction. My view was these were imminently fixable. And if we fix them, it can make San Francisco great for a long time. And I don't think you could take these things for granted.
I mean, you go back to like the 1920s, even earlier, the Hungarian physicists in Budapest, and you had all these great, you know, the von Neumanns of the world all living there in Budapest and World War II came along and Hitler came along and wiped them all out and they all dispersed to different parts. That group of physicists, they were the foundation for modern physics for like 100 years.
String theory, all the atomic weapon work that came out, it was all from that small group in Budapest. And so I think losing San Francisco to some of the progressive causes that have plagued the city would be pretty bad. And so this was one part of my little corner of the world starting to invest to make it better. But it came from a place of... Wanting to make that street beautiful.
And if we can make that one street beautiful, then you could maybe do that across other parts of the city. And you can make the city livable for families and have people still there. I started on that process about a year ago. I was just doing it quietly because what was there to share?
San Francisco has this funny progressive bend, which is we'd rather have empty buildings than have someone own them that they seem to be too wealthy to own.
Yeah. There was a guy, Aaron Peskin is the guy's name. He was a politician. He's out of office now. He had picket signs with my face on them, marching down the street, billionaire taking over city. And I wasn't doing any of that. I think they thought I was trying to develop the city.
They never reached out or called or talked about it, but I was just trying to preserve that street and make them restaurants. And I think what I take a lot of joy from is it has a very similar feel to Green Oaks, which is I'm backing other people that are building great restaurants, being in a new theater. There's a bunch of cool stuff happening on the street. There's like,
It's three or four blocks now. It's really remarkable what we've done on that street. But I mean, enabling other entrepreneurs to go build something that will delight people. This is at a little smaller scale than what we do at Green Oaks, but it's been so much fun. I don't spend all that much time with it.
I have a great team that runs it on a day-to-day basis, but I was just on the street yesterday and it was so fun to walk down and be like, oh, this is where this coffee shop's going in and we're doing an all-day diner and rebuilding the theater with a great partner. And it'll be really fun.
I think it can be distracting. I think that maybe one of the flaws I have at Green Oaks and Green Oaks has in general is we find that when we make it not about the work, when we talk about the work, it can diminish our ability to do our jobs well. I'll give you an example. We write letters.
And historically, I would write letters where I talk about an investment we made or something I was excited about. And the moment I wrote it down, it became a perspective that I had to defend. One of the flaws maybe at Green Oaks is I change my mind all the time. I'm willing to try on an opinion like a score code. And if it doesn't work, I'll throw it off.
And I have no pride in authorship or ownership. And so the ability to move opinions around as we talk about things without any touchstone of must be true has helped me. I find whenever you start to say things publicly, then it becomes part of who you are. And we haven't felt the need to do that.
A defining moment was I went to public school and then went to a private high school. I was a pretty cocky 14-year-old. I came in and I had a great mentor named Joe Rosenthal, who took me under his wing, just liked me and was like, you know, I'm going to just get to know you. He was an administrator at the school. And he would come to watch my soccer games every now and then.
And one of the soccer games we had, I scored a goal and I did what any 14-year-old hooligan. I put my shirt over my head. I spread out my arms. I started flying around on the field. I celebrated like we just won a championship. I think we actually lost the game, by the way. It was really embarrassing. And then after the game, Joe pulled me aside. He said, don't ever do that again.
I'm like, what do you mean? I scored a goal. I'm going to do that every time I score a goal. Don't ever do that again. Have some class. Know that you have teammates that helped you score that goal. Know you have people that passed. Know that you have a coach that trained you. You're better than that. Don't ever let that happen. I never did anything like that again.
Showing 301–320 of 321 · page 16 of 17
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