Stuart Miller
speaker
308 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Stuart Miller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I think it's a principal-agent thing, that there's a way in which this paradoxical thing where if you're the principal and you treat the agent like an agent, then they become an agent. And so it's this very subtle energetic thing where you got to have this vibe of let's make money together. So what happens is somebody who's commercial-
wants more control over their life than most principles will give them. And so when the principal tries to bring an A player inside the boundary of their firm, it's not unleashing the commercial activity of the agent. And I think the fact that Stuart Miller let me set up my own company, it's possible it was path dependent because he initially gave me a smaller amount of money, 50 million.
And I ran that for a year and built trust. And then If it hadn't been like that, it's possible the market construct would have been just run my family office, but it's my thing. And it wouldn't have unleashed what it ended up unleashing. It's also like it has to be consistent with their existing aesthetic, right? I think.
So like if you had a quant guy whose family office needs a family office or wants to partner with somebody or put somebody in the business to run a family office, the underlying agent is going to need to be super mathematical, left hemisphere-y in order to have the principles map of reality overlap enough with the agents that when shit goes down,
it doesn't get wonky because inevitably something's going to go wrong. And it's those moments when it goes wrong that you either get shaken out and there's one family office that famously has gone through like 15 CIOs because of that getting the dynamic wrong.
Well, one thing was the time horizon. He just, from the beginning, had a very long time horizon. And then he's just a very skilled manager of people. I was listening to Randall Stepman, who was famously Jamie Dimon's coach. And he has this theme of they studied all the best leaders. And
They found there's this quality of the people working for the leader as feeling like the leader's rooting for them. I knew exactly what he meant because I could feel it. That's exactly the vibe Stuart had been giving me and eventually my second partner as well. That feeling of, yeah, I'm rooting for you. First and foremost, like, let's do this. In retrospect, it was kind of crazy, right? Because
I started it in 05, the initial vehicle, which was just a fund of hedge funds. And then Stuart gave me the rest of his capital outside of Lennar in early 2007. And then I convinced Adam Shapiro to leave Goldman. And we started this new venture. And we had exactly a year to do stuff before the great financial crisis hit. And so picture you're him. Stewart. And it's the beginning. 08 is happening.
And you have hired these two kids.
Yeah, exactly. And you know me pretty well, but not that well. And then all of a sudden, your stock goes down to like, I don't know, three bucks. So close to going bankrupt. And all of a sudden, all your money is with this kid that you don't know that well. Yeah.
And there's this scene I talk about in one of my essays where he and his leadership team at Lenar is going around trying to raise money at the bottom. And he comes and he notices that Adam and I are kind of depressed. We were down like 12% at the time. But we had anticipated some elements of the Great Financial Crisis and thought we'd be flat or up. And we weren't. And so we were sad and mopey.
And he said to us, you guys, what the hell do you think? Like, I knew we were at risk of losing money. You don't see me moping around. There's something about his physicality. He was like jaunty. And it was totally like... What I imagine a SEAL team captain is just going down like he's so funny.
Turned on and just cracking jokes left and right. And like no identity as... billionaire or as rich guy, just pure, this is a game. We're playing a game. It just got interesting.
Yes, exactly. There's something about that vibe of like, we're doing this together and we're grownups and we're taking risk. And I know shit could go bad. that I think to your earlier question, the principal has to set this condition where it's okay for the agent to make mistakes. And there's a lightness to it.
Because otherwise, the agent, depending on their own risk tolerance, may not take enough risk. The difference of managing your own money versus managing the optics of something can get so huge based on one word from the principal.
Yeah, I came, I guess... I mean, it was literal. I rode a lot in high school and a bit in college. And when you're holding the oar, there's a tendency to really grip it, in which case your forearm tightens up and you're kind of muscling it. Versus there's a version where your grip is... It's paradoxical. It's both solid but also loose.
And if you catch a crab, it's called catching a crab where the oar goes under the water, the blade goes under the water, and you can get thrown into the water if you're not careful. In that case, you need to be able to let go of the oar, otherwise you're going in the water. So there's this tight but loose grip that I started noticing that when I speak to certain people...
if someone's ideological about the thing they're discussing, they're kind of subtly conveying to you, it's not up for grabs. It's not debatable. They're not looking for your input on it. And so you're asking, is that the way Stewart was relating to this situation? Yeah. He had like a light grip on, I remember telling him at one point, JP Borgen, it was at the bottom in 08. And
people who were buying gold and really ready for physical gold and he cracked a joke about yeah i can just see myself graham you're gonna buy me a bunch of gold and then i'm gonna like be dragging this bag along the street with my with my brother-in-law and what are you gonna drive the car like he's basically give me a fucking break so it's like This whole thing is that life is absurd.
This whole capitalism is a construct. We're playing this game somehow. But it's the humor is embedded in the light grip, I feel like, in those situations. You're conveying to somebody else, we're going to do the best we can here, and who the hell knows what's going to happen.
Showing 1–20 of 308 · page 1 of 16
Next →