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
And there'll be moments where the businesses do not feel all that great. There's been, I think without exception, most of the businesses we've been invested in for more than five years have gone through a rough patch or two where the fundamental premise of the business and the quality of the business is being questioned.
And I think if you could see through it, sometimes that's right to be questioned. We were wrong. But every once in a while, you could sort of see through that and see the other side that this is just one step along the way of building a great business.
We invested a little bit under a billion in total capital across 10 years, led five V8 rounds. We invested almost every other year, if not every year in the company for 10 years until it went public. And then since it's gone public, we've
We're big believers in capitalism. The microphones we're in, the chairs we're in, the view outside, it's all built with capitalism. As far as I'm concerned, this has been the greatest invention humans have ever had. I believe it is our job to further our journey as humans within the framework of capitalism. When we started Green Oaks, we described ourselves as a growth.
We actually never used the term growth. We just said we'd like to invest in great businesses that are going to be a meaningful part of the S&P 500. To this day, I still have a list of the S&P 500 companies on my desk.
I start my list all the time, and I just try to figure out what companies are not on that list today and will be on that list tomorrow, and how to work tirelessly to become the single most important partner they have. To be honest with you, I've been surprised that people think there's other... large-scale ways to invest besides growth. I think this is by far the most interesting way to invest.
And a couple of reasons why. I mean, you could go back to the 60s and you could talk about companies like AMD and Intel that were around in the 60s. You could go to the 70s where you had Apple and Microsoft. You could go to the 80s where you had Dell, ASML. You could go to the 90s where you, of course, have Google, 2000s, you have Facebook. You
A small number of companies, I think 1% of the S&P 500 make up 90% of the value. And most of those were growth. All of those were really growth companies. They were companies that over the course of many decades, reappropriated free cash flow away from these legacy incumbents, moved it into their own purview and became a staple for how consumers enterprises work in the world.
And to me, that is such an enjoyable way to spend your time, to find founders that are hell-bent on trying to create one of those S&P 500 companies that delight customers at scale. It's also the most rewarding financially. I think the companies that we invest in will capture a lion's share of new economic value in the world. Everything else is just a shell game around it.
I have lots of friends that figure out what's happening quarterly with Netflix. It doesn't matter to me at all. I'm much more interested in figuring out, is Netflix a great compounder that is going to grow over 20, 30 years?
There's going to be a lot of people that disagree. Growth is an output, not an input. And growth for growth's sake makes no sense. But one of the unique things about our industry and about great companies, if you historically look at the growth rate of many great technology companies, they were very high for a long time.
They had a lot of growth persistence as well, or growth endurance is another way to put it. The next year, was it in the 80s or 90% of the previous year? The best companies have extraordinarily high growth persistence or growth endurance. I am a believer. There's this meme that's come out, which is too high of growth, like destroys company. I think very high growth is very good for companies.
I think like a reasonably high growth is very good for companies. And Mario Andretti quote, where it's like, if everything's under control, you're not going fast enough type thing. It is healthy in my mind, in the businesses I've been involved in. It's healthy to let a few things break here or there in order to keep pushing. And that results in a high growth.
And I'm especially for software companies or bits companies rather than Adams companies. I think it's good.
A lot. Yeah. And by the way, what's interesting is almost every company in our portfolio that's been successful has had many hundred plus year over year growth rates. Wiz is a great example.
When the war started more recently, when Hamas attacked Israel and some disproportionate share of the people involved in Wiz and the go-to-market team and the engineering team went to go serve for their country. Of course, our natural reaction, I think it was like Q3 or it was October, of course. So we're like, ah, this is the right thing.
And of course, we should just absolve the company of any expectations for November and December. Just forget even reporting. Just worry about your people and worry about the country. I think they have like one of their best quarters. They're just like, that doesn't mean we're going to slow down. We're going to keep going. Having unreasonable expectations is a competitive advantage.
Another example of this is on... who grew the business incredibly fast at Coupang for a long time. And oftentimes when you have strong product market fit, it is like your moral obligation to drive it as fast as possible. But things break along the way, especially if you're in the Adams business too. And at points we had stock outs and were constrained by what we could offer consumers.
We had to hire more drivers. We had to build more warehouses. We had a year that was like 18% year over year growth. And there were people involved in the company that were telling BOM, oh, that's good. You don't need to take it back up. Just leave it. You know, Amazon never grew more than 30% year over year. That's fine. You're good. Just get back to 30.
I remember having this conversation with BOM and I said, I think... One of the hardest things you'll ever have to do is convincing everybody at the company to be a high growth company again, to try to take that growth rate well above 30 and start to bring a growth mindset, a growth culture back to the organization. He commented to me many years later. So it was one of the hardest things we did.
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