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 I remember going home and being like, QQ, what is this thing? And I'd look it up, study as much of it as I could. And I remember finding a stat, which was QQ was adding something like 30 million subscribers a month. which is still a crazy number, by the way. But at that time, that was unheard of. We'd eventually turn into WeChat.
And at the time, Adam was asking me to look at distressed banks in Europe that had been around 150 years and had 30 million total deposit holders. And this company was adding 30 million people a month. And I was like, I want to spend all my time on Tencent. I don't want to spend any of my time on some distressed bank in Europe. This is uninteresting to me.
And much to his chagrin, frankly, thanks to his support, I ended up being able to do a little bit of that there. I left at the end of 2010, beginning of 2011, and moved back to San Francisco to start Great Oaks purely because this is all I wanted to do. Can you tell me everything about Benny? Oh, sure. Yeah. I don't know if I can tell you, I can tell you a lot about Benny.
Tell me a lot about Benny. Someone asked me a couple of days ago, they were starting a firm and they asked me, how do I find someone like Benny? And it's like, how do you marry well? Yeah. It's like an impossible statement. I wish upon anybody in their life to have a partner and a partnership like what I have with Benny.
I think if Green Oaks was an abject failure and we screwed everything up, I would still be grateful for the journey I had with Benny. And by the way, I should highlight Benny is my true partner. I talk to him more than I talk to my wife, Jash, actually by a fairly large margin. Jash would agree with that. So would Cheryl, Benny's wife.
It has been 20 plus years where I don't think there's been a single day. We fight all the time. There's never been a single day where we've actually been frustrated with one another. I met Benny, we were both still in college. He was kind of between freshman and sophomore year. I was in my junior to senior year and I was working in investment bank.
And as an intern, I was working on a financial transaction It's actually a really interesting financial transaction. It had to do with cruise line ships. And the way you would finance some of these cruise line ships is you would find a country that was willing to give you 100% LTV financing. In Germany, they're called like a KD or KG structure. In Korea, they're called something else.
But these countries would do it in order to give you jobs to give their local citizens, you know, the shipyards would be full and they'd make it very tax efficient for doctors and dentists in these countries to invest. You have to really be steeped in strange financing structures in your late teens to be interested in this stuff.
So I was telling my brother, my younger brother was at Penn and he was a freshman. It was during like spring fling. I was telling my brother about this financing structure. My brother couldn't care less. Like, this is not what is interesting. And Benny, who was his roommate, was sitting on the couch and I was like, oh, KD or KG financing structures. And I was like, this kid knows.
I was one of these older brothers who thought all their younger brother's friends were like goons, not serious people. And I parked up and I was like, who is this? It was love at first sight. Benny and I became close friends. Right away, I knew Benny's zero to one clock speed. is the fastest I've ever seen to this day.
I've never seen someone look at a business or look at a model or think about a situation and so quickly get to the jugular. He's astonishing. The second thing I'd probably tell you about him that's unique is he's able to extend our time horizon as a firm pretty consistently.
Sometimes when things are moving really fast and you're in fog of war, you could find yourself constraining your time horizon. You're trying to make decisions that are optimal in the short term, just to make sure that's the corner you could see around.
And Benny is so good at stepping back and reminding everybody, including myself, especially myself, what we're trying to optimize for over the fullness of time. I mean, really, really astonishing. He is the most... clear and concise thinker one could have as a partner. So often I describe a situation that I'm thinking through.
We talk about everything at Green Oaks, down to when you walk in, what the lighting is in our office. We are micromanagers to the max. And when we talk about investments, Green Oaks, it's not atypical for us to sit around as a team and talk for three, four hours about a single company. And then we go home, we put our kids to bed, and then I'll call Benny and we'll talk from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.
in the morning. We almost do that every night. I've talked to Benny already four times this morning.
We do do a lot of that. If you just step back for AI, we're investing in a bunch of different companies across a bunch of different industries. What is the common thread? And there's this great, I forget the name of the book, but it was about the Wright brothers figuring out how to get a plane in the air. And there's all these people chasing... trying to be the first one to flight.
Of course, you look at a bird and they flap their wings. I got to replicate that. And the Wright brothers are like, wait a second. The laws of aerodynamics are the laws of aerodynamics. You're not going to change the laws of aerodynamics. You just have to figure out how to make fixed wing flight work. And of course, they make it work.
And I think business is the same, which is like the laws of great businesses are the laws of great businesses. We know how this works. Did you delight customers? Do you break trade-offs to create something operational or technically really great? Do you have a competitive advantage? Is it a large market?
Whenever we've screwed up at Green Oaks, it's usually been because we ignored the laws of crypto. No, no, you don't need a board in crypto. Don't worry about it. No, no, you don't need an auditor. It's not a thing that you need. You don't need to delight customers. It has nothing to do with customers. It has something to do with price movement and fund flows.
You know, it makes sense to me, but I guess the laws are different this time. They never are. And so we absolutely look at evals and R1 benchmark and figure out, wow, DeepSeek figured out a way to deploy a model at the 35x reduction for input-output tokens on a comparative basis to OpenAI's reasoning models. That's a pretty impressive feat.
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