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
Well, I think it's part of the pricing, right? You think of somebody like Musk, the terms of Musk's X.AI fundraise, I presume, are egregious, quote unquote, from an investor's perspective. They have no control. They have no transparency, whatever, right? So that's the market pricing, the fact that he's highly credible.
Part of pricing the talent, what you're pricing is the degree of autonomy, transparency, and and the fees and the duration of the capital, all those things are like, okay, what feels reasonable given where this person is in life, what their track record is, your assessment of their competence and all of that.
The way I ended up doing is if I were them at this stage with this track record, with this set of relationships, Would I feel like this is a fair deal or do I feel exploited? And if I would feel exploited, I'd try to dial it back a little bit so that it doesn't feel exploitative. And sometimes I would get it wrong, of course, but I feel like that part of pricing. Pricing talent. Pricing talent.
It's like how much money and with what constraints on the activity. Like what are your decision rights there? And how often are you going to check back in? And then I think there's a way to do it if you're the, I guess in this sense, the principal, there's a way to do it where you're Even though you formally have these rights, you're doing it with a very light touch.
You can make the experience feel like a much more open field, depending on the tone of the people who you've struck the deal with.
Back to that part about identity. If you're the principal, you need an agent who can make money through other people and not care, be kind of indifferent about whether it's, quote, yours or somebody else's. It's just net of fees. How much money did you make?
And I feel like I observed that a lot of people who allocate money to underlying GPs, they actually would prefer to be the underlying GP from a power and identity and experience perspective. You, the principal, should just want to make money. It's not all the identity claims about who did what or whatever. So many people actually are not good at making money through other people.
They can do the analysis themselves, but they actually can't. It's like the stage of a portfolio manager's development where if they've been a stock picker and then they move to being a portfolio manager and they need to own a stock that actually is their analyst's favorite idea and they aren't as deep on it as the analyst's. That's a really big moment of transition.
And a lot of people cannot make that transition. It's the equivalent transition, I feel like, in the family office CIO, where I think the ideal is just agnosticism on enough self-awareness to know where you have comparative advantage, but also an ability to interview other people and appreciate them for who they are and what they're doing without any need to make it your own somehow.
You need somebody who knows what it's like to lose money and cares in their bones about never selling puts or never doing something that could take you out of the game. Because people do weird shit. And so part of the trust is... A conservatism of like, yeah, I'll let some things go. You want the agent to view the money as though it's theirs.
And there's a price for that, which is ideally they've got enough money that they've already found a way to relate to money that way. Or they're just innately conservative. That's what I was trying to capture.
There's a guy who has a quote, I'm blanking on the guy's name. The job of the leader is to define reality on the way in and thank them on the way out. Which I think is so profound because it speaks to how each container is a different reality. And I've been thinking lately how you've heard of Gell-Mann amnesia.
Where you're reading an article, it's about a subject you know about and you're like, oh my God, the reporter doesn't know what they're talking about. And then you turn the page and then you assume the next article accurately captures reality. I've been thinking I have that and most people have that about moving from one container to another.
you're like, oh, this one is so idiosyncratic based on the source and the way the leader defined reality on the way in. Oh, I'm going to go to this next one, but that won't be the case of the next one. It'll be, quote, normal. No, every single one is so weird and idiosyncratic. And the older you get, your ability to
transition between containers gets really compromised because either you've grown up in one container or your willingness to put up with somebody else's frame on reality diminishes. And so I think the ambiguity that I was referring to when somebody's starting something new is just that act of defining the reality is a creative act. But while you're doing it, it feels...
super slippery and amorphous. And it's like, I don't know if I'm going to get the investors. I don't know if I'm going to get the team. You're holding so many 33% probability things at once that it's very taxing. And if you haven't run something yourself before, you're not used to having everything be up for grabs.
And I feel like the act of starting something new, you're sitting there on Monday morning Hopefully you have an office. If you don't have an office, you're sitting in a Starbucks and you're like, the sheer lack of strength, right? You've moved from order to chaos. There's no order. The only order comes from you asserting reality. And if you haven't done it before, you can feel fake.
It can feel disorienting. You can have vertigo. It can be like, oh my God, what did I just do? So... What is it? It's getting comfortable with that level of uncertainty. And there's also this subtle thing where I'm actually working with somebody right now who's literally doing this very masterfully. You have to pretend it's more certain than it is. Because you're pretending makes it so.
But there's something slightly intellectually dishonest about that. And it's particularly hard for hedge fund managers because many of them are kind of default skeptical. They're likely to see the downside and the risk and the calling bullshit on things. And so if you're in that mode and yet... your own thing feels like bullshit to you, it's not gonna work.
You gotta thread the needle on it's real enough. I'm gonna find the thing that's real enough to me that I'm willing to put a stake in while at the same time having a sense of humor about it.
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