Patrick O'Shaughnessy

The firm has created a moat around volume with nearly 600 acquisitions over the last three years, some of the highest numbers in the world.

We discuss identifying growth prospects, constructing a meaningful board, and the business mentality behind Main Street, not Wall Street, as Justin puts it.

Please enjoy my conversation with Justin Ishbia.

Justin, it's such a pleasure to have you joining me today.

I remember on our very first call taking more notes about how you were building your firm than about any firm introductory call that I can recall.

And I want to start with a line that you said when we first met, which is that the system is the star as you think about building your asset management firm.

Maybe describe why that term or idea is important to you and how it applies to Shore Capital.

Poking around of this system for the rest of our call is going to be so fun.

And there's so many different areas that you've had this very careful, systematic thinking for how to do great deals and run a great business.

Before we do all that, I'd love to rewind back a little bit to the origins of the business.

And you, like so many of the investors that I've found to be the most interesting, started by, I think you called it your pre-fund.

You were doing these deals without a committed capital vehicle.

You were sort of a fundless sponsor going around raising capital for great individual deals.

And it was you.

You started this.

And it's easy to say now you've got this big, amazing team, $7 billion, hundreds of deals, and so on, that there's this great system.

But it starts with a person.

And I'm curious to understand, like the formative experiences in those early deals, what you were looking for, why you were attracted to it, and then why the system began to emerge.

What was it that made you think about the market this way and want to stay disciplined, doing very small deals, almost constellation software style, rather than do what most private equity firms do, which is start to get bigger and bigger and bigger in their deal size?

So obviously you're hanging your hat on this ability to stay in the small average deal size.