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.
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Appearances
I later, I think I found out 80% chance in retrospect, she was sleeping with the finance minister at the time. I But whatever it was, it was like very high signal and bizarrely accurate. And we had hundreds of stringers in effect. And we would be able to publish things that were more hunches than a normal newspaper would at the time.
We had the opportunity to sell it to one large news organization. The professor ultimately didn't want to sell it to them. I asked him to buy me out at that multiple, which he did. They ended up selling to the Financial Times a couple of years later. I was producing someone else's show.
I wouldn't have had the language for it at the time, but I kind of wanted to try out being source and having my thing be at the center of it. I tried to start several businesses. They were failures.
A wilderness period. I remember somebody giving me grief for how many different email addresses I had. And that really stung at the time. I was like, ah, yeah, he's right. Like, I've had like three email addresses in two years or maybe more than that, four.
I think one would be just patience and not overweighting. If you're doing that at what Bob Keegan would call the socialized stage of your life, where you're really focused on approval of other people and where you are in the system and being, quote, relevant. You got to make that as object as you can and not let it freak you out. Tom Morgan did this five-minute talk at Zone. Have you watched it?
It's great. And he closes with one of your favorite quotes, I think, on Joseph Campbell, follow your bliss. There's a follow your bliss element to it and trusting the universe that if you get in touch with the thing you're compulsive about and that you love, the world will come to you. It's a trust fall, and it's hard.
And I remember during that period thinking, I'm very interested in people and information networks. There's an element of almost being an anthropologist. And we were thinking, how does that fit in? I had that ignition around Dan Stern that we talked about, who had run Reservoir. And so that was one compass point through that period.
Yeah. The tolerance for the ambiguity, the willingness to take risk, to not play on somebody else's board. Yeah. But I think you're right that it's a nice image of you try chaos and then you go back to order as a default. And then you try chaos and it's like, a repeat iteration game. There's a quote I love from Michael Singer, who's a spiritual teacher of sorts.
And he says, eventually you will see that in the way of the Tao, you're not going to wake up, see what to do, and then go do it. In the Tao, you are blind. And you have to learn how to be blind. You can never see where the Tao is going. You can only be there with it. I think there's something like that.
It's like the tolerance to be blind and not know and just experiment and figure something out is very hard to do. at any stage of life, but particularly when your rent is due or you have a family or you have financial obligations. So that seems to come.
I had been working with one of the co-founders of Greenlight, Jeff Keswin, and running a fund of hedge funds and doing some seeding. I was keeping an eye out for how to be source on something myself and got an introduction to someone who was advising the Miller family. I wanted that sense of selecting people, empowering them. I had observed that a lot of
fund of funds people and endowment allocators had this scarcity mindset and were very focused on fees and felt like they would be taken advantage of and kind of disgruntled all the time. I thought there was an opportunity to approach it as being on the same side of the table of let's take risk together, let's make money together and have that be the overall gestalt of the place.
Adam Shapiro had been a year ahead of me at Yale, and we'd talked about working together over the years. And he was in the special situations group at Goldman. And I remember thinking, actually, Vinod Khosla has this line that if you can hire somebody that your anchor client could not hire themselves for some reason, but is blown away by, try to do that. And I remember thinking, oh, I did that.
I found it turned out Adam and Stuart knew people in common. and had been involved in similar deals. Adam had done a lot of real estate and they had a similar, enough of an overlap in sensibility that that ended up being an amazing hire. And it was more than a hire. He ended up being the co-founder and co-CIO with me. And then we built a great business.
I think it's somebody who's got similar taste in people that I do or that I can sense their taste in people and it's a subset of mine and I can constrain the things we invest into that. And then the ability to hunt for opportunity in an extremely opportunistic way.
unconstrained way where because I have so much money at risk, there's this mutual trust and credibility and it overlaps with how they're already inclined to manage money. There are no style points. The lack of gap between principal and agent is so thin. It was what I would aspire to.
and that the amount of money total provides leverage so that you can play interesting games and find interesting people and have it be worth their time. At this stage, I kind of want license to hunt big game. I already have some big opportunities in mind, and my own chip stack is not quite big enough to closing those deals. But
If somebody shares my taste and my map of reality and says, oh, yeah, you're right, then that would feel very satisfying. It's like the ease of it is a quality of it.
In terms of applying it to me, I feel like at this stage I'm very open to what the world wants. Rather than trying to assert reality, I'm more letting it unfold and trying to surrender a little bit and see what comes in. I think I'm good at, I can be of service in putting two people together.
All the source dynamics we've talked about or finding the right fit for somebody at that stage of your life. I really like giving high context advice when there's a lot at stake, whether that's picking a business partner, picking an investor. Picking a spouse, I think picking a nanny is oddly high stakes. And I really care about it on behalf of that person's kid.
Showing 281–300 of 308 · page 15 of 16
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