Patrick O'Shaughnessy

They're very predictable and very straightforward.

What about the negative side of the ledger?

Is it just not integrity or are there other things that you've found lead to bad deals two, three years after doing them?

I'd love to ask a few more questions.

The assembly line of the deal, so to speak,

one great quote that i saw you write was that there's three times that people go insane and one of them is when they're selling a company what is the psychology like of a seller and how do you take that into account when you are negotiating the deal itself so i have a relative who's a psychologist and she told me that an otherwise perfectly sane person two times in their life

How tactically do you run these processes?

And I'm especially curious, since obviously you must have built some sort of machinery around this.

So you're doing so many acquisitions, you're not personally in there doing them all.

So what have you learned about pacing

building relationship, but keeping moving very quickly, balancing those two things, and any other relevant machinery that you found to be most helpful for doing so many of these at scale?

I'm probably more involved in M&A in the weeds.

I'm curious in each of these different company stories, how much of the M&A was you've got some grand vision, there's some puzzle and you know the puzzle pieces you need and you're going out and finding them one by one to build this picture that you've pre-built in your mind versus it being more organic and bottom-up where you just say, if something comes up that could slot in, we do that deal if it's a great deal.

So is it more bottom-up or top-down as you've built?

It's both.

What are, in your mind, the components of a fantastic business, the term you just used?

Over the long term, we'll absolutely create value.

When you think about the deals that you didn't do, how often was it price?

So if you've got this fantastical business on one side, there's no business for which a terrible price can't ruin the investment.

So how does and has price slotted up against the quality of the business?