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
Yeah. I mean, I guess an example. The group of people around the Collison brothers, I feel like, is very distinctive. It's kind of nerdy. Alpha nerds. Yes. Right? It's a very specific aesthetic. And Patrick's got these public policy interests and Tyler Cowen and, like, that whole crew. It's a very specific group. And by signaling it out to the world, they attract more of it.
Yeah, and I would host these events and people would come to the event and then you'd see, oh, one guy who runs a large investment firm in San Francisco had come to one and he said, oh, he sent me a note afterwards saying, Graham, you've restored my faith in humanity, which was like such a high compliment. He's referring to the fact that it's like being at a really good wedding.
You're like, oh my God, I like all these people. There's not a bad seat in the house. And I would do business with all these people. There's a level of trust or integrity or something.
Yeah. It's creating talent density. And then to your point, it like creates a gravitational force of its own and people end up doing business with each other.
Sometimes, sometimes not. But what I do, it's just very visceral. It's like if I get stuck sitting next to this person forever. Am I neutral, psyched, or bummed? All psyched. All psyched. And then the result just takes care of itself. I came up with this back when I first started Eastrock as a way to evaluate hedge fund managers. I felt like often...
If we had like 30 people in a room pitching investment ideas, the room knew who the best people were. I'd go in with a thesis on, this guy's the best on special situations. This is the best tech long short guy. And then some percentage of the time, the room agreed with me. But then over the course of several days of thinking, talking, different people would emerge.
If you read the room correctly, the room kind of knows where the pockets of quality are most of the time.
Charlie Songhurst, who I think I introduced you to.
He had left Microsoft and he was trying to figure out what to do next. And I remember counseling him at the time. He said he really appreciated that I wasn't trying to fit him into existing concepts, but I was just trying to figure out what was best for him. His appreciation of my doing that kind of made it object to me and I tried to do it with other people.
He had been at an East Rock event, a hedge fund gathering we had, and had touted Bitcoin back when it was probably six months before we ended up buying it. But we bought a small amount at $300 a coin. And then it proceeded to go up quite a bit. And so I was trying to figure out what to do with the position, whether it was real, how to think about it. And so I went to a crypto conference.
And I've noticed this thing, I don't know if AI is like this now or not, but when you have a new field, it tends to attract the people who are available to be in that new field. And that's often unemployed people or people who are so Chicago improv that they're switching what they're doing and chasing the next thing. And so it can be kind of aesthetically distracting when there's a new thing.
Because the people who've gotten in there first are kind of scrappy, but also fly by night in this way. And crypto is like that. And so I went to this conference and I experienced a lot of the people as not like that line from Succession. They're not serious people. Yeah. And then I came across this woman who was running crypto for Facebook at the time. I was in a room of like 300 people.
I just followed her because I noticed that the room seemed to know that she was among the most credible in the room. And if I just sat near her, there was interesting incoming. And Matt Wong was at Sequoia at the time, and he came in. And then I was like, you know what? Actually, I'm going to follow him. And so I became kind of his wingman.
And it turned out, in retrospect, he and Fred Ursham were debating whether to work together on that. They had gone on this trip partly to figure that out. I ended up having a road trip. I drove the two of them to the airport and we spent a bunch of time together. And I was just struck by, I experienced them both as commercial actors that I would back, feel agnostic. I would bet on them.
individually and as partners, regardless of what they were pursuing. And I ended up interviewing CFOs for them. I like to interview team members for people because I can often add value that way. And I understand how they're approaching everything. And I learned a lot about it. And I happen to have just read the description of Enneagram One.
On the morning that I interviewed this endowment person who they were interviewing as a CFO, and she and I had this amazing deep conversation and I realized, oh my God, she's in Enneagram One. And I said to them, to Fred and Matt, I think she's an amazing hire. She's going to bring institutional credibility into the inside of the firm.
The shadow side, the one catch is she's going to have this slight vibe of, of you're trying to get away with something. I said, particularly Fred, she's going to have this vibe of like kind of getting away with something. Why are you being that way? And if you take that personally, you're going to end up firing her. But if you don't, she's going to be amazing.
And Matt recently sent me, I think that email recapping that she's ended up becoming their CFO. She's amazing. She's totally built their firm. She's their third partner. And because I was there with her before, it's like she and I share this. I noticed this recently in visiting somewhere else where I helped recruit a lot of people.
You're sharing the before and after reality with somebody and you're on the same journey in this camaraderie like way. So I've seen them go from nothing to, I think they managed like 10 billion today. And to their credit, they've consistently invested in crypto and put real money to work at multiple bottoms because of their long-term belief in it and the quality of their decision-making.
I've got kind of a front row seat to that, and that's been really fun.
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