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
I think there's a few thousand people that have that story about Henry, which is just incredible. What was your pitch to him? What was the original Green Oaks pitch? Yeah. I'd have to get back to some of the hard things we've gone through to That was one of the good things. So when you're 27 years old, There's two ways you could walk into a meeting like that.
You could walk, well, maybe on a spectrum. One of the spectrum is I'm 27. I'm really smart. I don't know what I'm going to do, but just trust me, I'm going to figure it all out and make a lot of money. The other way is I have a set of ideas. And these are ideas that I think are really interesting.
Some portion of the money you give me is going to go into these ideas and the rest is going to go into ideas like this. I was very much in the latter camp. I was describing what we were seeing at companies like Palantir, which is one of our first investments, tiny amount, flip card. kind of called oil rooms, coupon. I was starting to say, look, these are the kinds of ideas we're seeing.
This is what I like to be investing in. Invested the minimum sum of money in these businesses today. I'd like to invest a lot more tomorrow. It was driven by really three things. It was driven by the teams. It was driven by the quality of the businesses that I thought those companies were building. And it was driven by returns math.
And my view was, this is the beginning of a 20-year, 30-year opportunity ahead of us. And I articulated that over the course of maybe 30, 40 minutes. And how much of that was...
Yeah, it was. At that point, we were at well over a billion smartphones being shipped. Yeah. Facebook was already a big company. Alibaba was a big company. This was like 2011, 2012 kind of thing. Cloud and mobile were obviously going to be pretty large.
And so somewhere in that presentation were penetration curves of cloud and penetration curves of mobile and how there's 10 to 15 plus years opportunity here. There's nothing about AI. There's a little bit about FinTech, what we were seeing in China on FinTech and how that might be irrelevant for other parts of the world. I think Brazil and India and Europe were in there in that context.
But it was really across consumer internet fintech and application infrastructure software and the opportunity to build new platforms that would become future S&P 500 companies. Is it true at that time that you deleted your personal email? Yes. I do not, to this day, have a personal email, which probably is a compliance issue somewhere. But yes, I just have a Green Oaks email.
I really felt at the time, and I feel this today, that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was lucky enough to figure it out pretty early and nothing was going to stop me from doing it.
So I was at a Kane Anderson in LA buying software companies and I had a great mentor. And I think about him as a great boss named Adam Fisher, who was at D.E. Shaw. He ran a small group there, which was financed by a parent company called OPG. It's in New York. And then I moved out to Hong Kong. And when I got out to Hong Kong, this is like 2007. And you moved there on a whim.
I moved there on a whim. This is a great story. Adam called me and he's like, hey, you know, I want you to come join me. I was like, great. You know, I'm happy to do it. Wrapping up here, probably another six months and we can start to talk about it. He said, no, no, I mean Monday.
And I was like, well, I probably need to figure it all out, but I guess I could just be in the office in New York on Monday. He's like, well, I need you out in Hong Kong on Monday. And I was like, wow, that's fast. And I got out there and it was like, we were looking for office space. It was not well organized. We were figuring it all out from scratch. And it was an amazing time to be out there.
And at 24 or something like that, to be out there was amazing. It was an incredible experience. And China was taking off. I spent my time doing all sorts. It was a special situations group. So I actually spent none of my time on internet companies. I spent all my time looking at Macau real estate, Chinese real estate, India real estate, distressed debt came later.
I'll give the most favorable interpretation. If Adam was sitting here, he would describe it as, I was a benevolent but negligent boss. And I let Neil go spend time on things that were interesting to him at the cost of spending time on things that were important to me. I'm very grateful to this day for him allowing me to do that. I remember going out to Guangzhou to look at real estate.
It's like 2007. And I get out there. Guangzhou was nothing at the time. It was a couple of buildings. There's no Google Maps out there at the time. So you'd land and say, hey, I have to go through this apartment building. I have to look potentially buying this new high-rise apartment building that's just coming up. Built by a spec developer. I get to buy it and then rent it out.
The yields might be in the 12 to 15 range. Pretty good yields. Get out there. Nobody would know how to get to this apartment building because the road didn't exist six months ago. So you'd have to pay some guy on a motorcycle to take you out there. They'd take you out there to the high rise. You'd sit down in a chair and they'd auction off the apartment building.
I'd be sitting there competing with a guy that was wearing a wife beater, smoking three cigarettes. I'm like, who is this guy? I represent a multi-strat $30 billion plus investment manager. Who is this guy? There's moments you get in life where you realize there's the top.
And this was one of them where this guy just had 100% LTV financing from some bank that would eventually have to wash the NPL through their balance sheet. But at the time, I was blown away. I was like, wow, this is a pretty crazy world. But they would take out their phones, using their phone for things. And I had a BlackBerry at the time, 2007. The iPhone came out in March of 2007, I think.
The App Store in 2008. And it hadn't really got to China in any way whatsoever. And I remember the Beijing Olympics in 2008. And so I went out to Beijing. And it was really at the Beijing Olympics where I started to flip into what could be happening in technology. Where Michael Phelps won all those medals at the Beijing Olympics. And the lights would go down in the cube.
And they would spotlight the swimmers. And the first time they did that, nobody's phones were out. The last time they did it, everybody had the little glow on their face. And the BlackBerry just didn't have that same glow. I would look over and ask my friends, what are you guys using? And they're like, oh, we're using QQ, which was the predecessor to WeChat.
Showing 141–160 of 321 · page 8 of 17
← Previous
Next →