Ravi Gupta
speaker
157 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Ravi Gupta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Probably the bigger thing I would add to my list, Patrick, is in the past, I think resilience, grit, those are things that have always been there for any founder that you like really want. I think the thing that I do believe is newly important, it's always been important, but more important for me is the like agility adaptability. It's the world-class reactor point.
It is the willingness to change on a dime with new information and the desire to go and figure out that new information. and to never hold a convenient belief and to examine it. That's probably new. And that combined with more slope for the best ones, I think that what's going to happen, the best companies are going to be worth more and the mediocre ones are going to be worth less.
I just think the gap is going to widen. And that is exciting and intimidating because you better get it right.
I don't think it's better. If you believe this is true, I think there's multiple ways to express it. So maybe a few different ways. One, I think if you are an investor in early stage companies and you pick the right founders building the right things, I think the upside is better than it's ever been. That, I think, is an amazing place to sit.
And it's about picking the right people and being lucky enough to have them pick you. So that, I think, is still an incredible privilege and lucky place to sit. I genuinely believe that. I think that if you are someone who doesn't sit here, there's different ways that are really good to make money. Figure out the public companies that are actually going to embrace this.
I think that Mark Casey at Capital Group tells this great story from a long time ago of how during like the beginning of the internet era, he was really impressed with how Home Depot was thinking about this. And his example was, we went through item by item that we sell, and we figured out the price of the item relative to the cost of the shipping.
And we specifically went through and we are tracking that over time. But the ones that are most relevant for internet sales are the ones where this ratio makes sense for a customer. And we will continue to update our opinions as we figure out shipping costs go down. And we might choose different products if customers want to buy them.
I thought that suggested they were ready for a world where people were going to shop differently than they were in retail. And I suspect Mark did really well on an investment in that company a long time ago. By the way, one of my favorite episodes, of course, was with Ken Langone. It was amazing. And the Frank Blake one too.
But anyways, figuring out what public companies are going to embrace this, what kinds of people are going to embrace this, big deal. And then I think on the private equity side, my instinct is encouraging those CEOs to get closer to what this can do and having that come back and impact their business.
The reason I laugh, I was laughing a little bit when you asked because the shared delusion of the, how are we using AI slides in a board deck that everyone sees as the board member and produces as a, operator is probably one of the funnier things out there right now, which is some 20 to 30% reduction in some sliver of your business to be like, hey, board, don't worry, we're using AI.
And the board's like, okay, cool. I'm glad you're using AI. Nobody really thinks that's enough, but everyone's doing it for each other. I would say that one way to, I think, make money is the more that you're not doing that, the more that the companies you work with are either, hey, we've looked at it, it doesn't work for us, here's why, or this is a huge deal for us.
I'm like a feel person on a lot of stuff. If you think about the only real job of a board beyond like some very highly legal corporate governance stuff, it's like, do you have the right CEO? And if you're on a board right now and you just see how you feel at each company you're on the board of, do you have the right CEO? You feel amazing right now if you have the right CEO.
truly like this is a place where I feel very, very, very lucky, which is if you have a right CEO, you're like, okay, cool. They're going to ride this wave. They're going to figure this out. They're going to go embrace this.
If you're a public company board member and you don't have that feeling right now, I think you got to examine why do you not have that feeling and what are you going to do about it? And ideally what you do is that person is somebody who actually does want to embrace this, but is nervous about something board related.
And what you want to do then is appease their fears of like, no, we want you to go and play. We want you to play free. We want you to go figure this out. I think that if you don't have somebody who wants to embrace this, not because of board fear, but because of their capabilities or because they don't want to play in this next chapter of the game, like you got to figure that out.
I definitely think as a board member, remembering that you don't get to help in a lot of ways on a public company board, but the one or two ways is really asking a good question every once in a while that makes a big difference. This is a good time to ask one of those questions and see how you feel in a world of accelerating change. This is something Doug Leone would always say.
He would talk about the accelerating change. I will add the second part. In a world of accelerating change, how do you feel about the person leading your business? You probably either feel like amazing or you feel nervous.
There's been a bunch. Maybe I'll describe it more as like the spirit of the conversation. This is probably the thing that I really hope comes through the most. The conversations that have been the most impactful to me all have this element of insane humility in them, which is, wow, there is a lot happening. I don't totally understand it. I need to go and figure out more.
All of them, they're not assertions as much as they are curiosity. They're so much of like, oh man, there is a lot going on. I got to get closer to the metal. I got to do more truth seeking. The conversations that have been the most interesting are all like that. There are people that are really trying to like listen.
There are people that are really trying to get closer and they are all people that are sort of, I don't know if confused is the right word, but certainly like, man, there is a lot going on right now. And that humility is probably the thing that I'm most attracted to in a conversation right now about these topics, which is, here's what I know. Cool.
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