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
And then other places, other than what are you compulsive about, that question of have you felt a moment of ignition where you saw somebody else and you said, I want to be that. I read that in the talent code. Have you read the talent code? You said it's me. Yeah. I read that in the telegram. I was like, oh shit, I totally had that. I had that twice.
I had that when I was in eighth grade and I was rowing. It was like the sixth time I went rowing. And this senior and junior, a guy and a woman who were tall and he was handsome and she was beautiful. And they just had such... presence and mastery of rowing. They had both won national championships. And I was in eighth grade at the time.
I was like, oh, all I have to do is row four hours a day and I can be that? Done. And then I didn't look back because it was so embodied. And it was also a recognition that I have enough overlap with them that I can do this. Like it's not completely random, but then that feels like a viable path. It's not that reliable a question, actually.
A lot of people either fake it or they don't recognize those moments. It's kind of a subtle thing to catch. But Tim Galloway, the Intergame of Tennis guy, has this line, desire wants what it wants. I think it's so profound. From schools, parents, peers... Like we cover up what the desire actually wants and getting in tune with it is so powerful.
And hopefully that happens to somebody in their 20s or 30s from a career perspective. When it does click, you can hear it in their voice. You can hear it in the way they create language to capture the things they've seen.
I was working at a fund of funds and Dan Stern, who you may have met, who used to run Reservoir, the way these mutual friends described him and then his activity, which was so people-focused within investments, I was like, oh, that's my own orientation towards this. Oh, there's a path here of being an effective investor by selecting people, having very high situational awareness.
on how to set up the right platform for them that I thought, you know what? I've never met him, but I could just tell based on the friends we had in common and then how effective he'd been that, oh, that's a thing. I want to be that.
Well, I think he apprenticed under Richard Rainwater and Rainwater had this
Yeah. And then you just tell from the people he had seated, there was a consistency to his taste, which was in seating, there's massive adverse selection, of course, like the people in general. Somebody who has pulled out enough money from the market should have enough money to put themselves into business. So you have to understand why you're so lucky that you're either catching them.
I generally like catching people super young. It's like a company going IPO. There's just not that much opportunity. information yet about them. And so it makes sense there'd be inefficiency. But then other times, another pattern I liked a lot was someone's former boss damning them either with faint praise or not even with faint praise.
It's a huge structural inefficiency because if you're the guy running the platform and your star guy leaves... and you sponsor him and promote him too much, you create incentive for everybody else to do that. So I really like hair on a former situation, specifically where I know the former PM and I have a feel for why they might be a little sociopathic about it. Fair enough.
I've been on so many counseling calls with people thinking of leaving. Like at any one time, I have five to 20 conversations going with somebody who's thinking of leaving a thing. And the level of fear about how the source, the primary person of their existing platform is going to relate to them is so consistent and so high and correct.
Well, one is it's very easy to be defined almost everything online. You're thinking of doing in reaction to your current container. The genesis in part, I think, of Josh Waitzkin's cave process is that's not a healthy way to start a new thing. You can't do it in reaction. You can do it somewhat in reaction to the old thing because that informs your map of reality and what you want to change.
But if it's all reactive... There's something kind of, it's like the psychologists divide things into approach motivation and avoidance motivation. It ends up being too much avoidance motivation somehow. There's like this negativity baked into the DNA of the thing if you allow too much of that. So I feel like that's one thing. It's easy to be too cute about that.
You don't want to overweight that when someone's talking. But I feel like over time, they need to get to the point where they're articulating a proactive vision, not just... My job sucks. There is a category of it's like my friends have all started funds or they've all started whatever the thing is or all starting. You get this in Silicon Valley right now. The memetic kind of thing. Yeah.
I'm a founder. Are you not a founder yet? The founder thing is totally in this category. And it's so distinctive to my ear because I've just spent more time on it in the last couple of years. And the Silicon Valley version of it is so distinctive of founder capital F. So there's a version of it where someone is just frustrated with their current construct.
The core motivation is I want to create a new job for myself. And I think that's not a great way to start a new thing. It needs to be slightly bigger than that, I think. And then at the highest level, what they're wanting is to be priced properly.
by the market in a hedge fund context, or probably applies to startups too, of just what will VCs price me plus this opportunity at from a seed round or series A valuation? Like I have to think of it as it's like a pricing exercise. Like a guy who runs an enormous fund, I was talking with him recently and he's kind of debating whether to stay at this enormous fund.
And the question he's really asking is, if I launch my own fund, am I raising a billion or am I raising 5 billion? And it's a great question. And I think there's kind of an answer to that based on, okay, how long have you been there? Do you have a standalone track record? It's answerable. Does that square with your- 100%.
Price. What's my price? What's my price? And that should change over time. I remember there was a guy- running a regional office for a really large hedge fund and thinking that if we had been able to spring him, he would have raised $500 million to a billion. And we ideally would have seeded him, but quite possibly he wouldn't have needed it.
Showing 61–80 of 308 · page 4 of 16
← Previous
Next →