Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Behring and Daniel Schwartz - Inside 3G Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.458]
10 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Most software companies try to maximize your time on their app to juice engagement. Ramp does the exact opposite. Ramp understands that no one wants to spend hours chasing receipts, reviewing expense reports, and checking for policy violations.
Chapter 2: What is the unique investment model of 3G Capital?
So they built their tools to give that time back, using AI to automate 85% of expense reviews with 99% accuracy. And since Ramp saves companies 5%, it's no wonder that Shopify runs on Ramp, Stripe runs on Ramp, and my business does too. To see what happens when you eliminate the busy work, check out ramp.com slash invest.
OpenAI, Cursor, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Vercel all have something in common. They all use WorkOS.
Chapter 3: How do great businesses maintain customer relationships?
And here's why. To achieve enterprise adoption at scale, you have to deliver on core capabilities like SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and audit logs. That's where WorkOS comes in. Instead of spending months building these mission-critical capabilities yourself, you can just use WorkOS APIs to gain all of them on day zero. That's why so many of the top AI teams you hear about already run on WorkOS.
WorkOS is the fastest way to become enterprise-ready and stay focused on what matters most, your product. Visit WorkOS.com to get started. Every investor should know about Rogo because Rogo AI's platform is not just another generic chatbot.
Instead, it was designed to support how Wall Street bankers and investors actually work, from sourcing diligence and modeling to turning analysis into deliverables. For me, three key things differentiate Rogo. First, it connects directly to your system so it can work with your actual data. Second, it understands your workflows, how work really happens across a deal or an investment.
And third, it runs end-to-end and produces real outputs the way the best people do.
Chapter 4: What are the advantages of a small investment team?
Auditable spreadsheets, investment memos, diligence materials, and slide decks that match your standards. This all comes from the fact that Rogo is built by finance professionals for finance professionals. And it's already being adopted by some of the most demanding institutions in the world. To learn more, visit rogo.ai slash invest. Hello and welcome everyone.
Chapter 5: How does ownership influence company culture?
I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing.
You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at colossus.com.
to learn more visit psum.vc
My guests today are Alex Baring and Daniel Schwartz, co-managing partners of 3G Capital. 3G's built one of the most distinctive firms in investing around a simple idea. There are only a handful of truly great businesses and even fewer great CEOs.
Chapter 6: What makes Burger King a compelling investment opportunity?
So instead of diversifying broadly, they concentrate deeply. Their model is to raise capital with the intention of making just one investment per fund, commit meaningful amounts of their own money alongside their partners, and focus all their time and the best people on that single opportunity. What sets them apart is that they come to investing as operators.
Alex previously ran the largest railroad in Latin America, and Daniel served as the CEO of Burger King, and many of their partners have spent years as CEOs, CFOs, or senior operators inside of complex organizations. When 3G buys a company, they step in as operators, align incentives with ownership, and work alongside management to improve the business.
That approach has produced a series of iconic deals, including Burger King, Tim Hortons, Hunter Douglas, and Skechers.
Chapter 7: How did 3G Capital negotiate with Tim Hortons?
Along the way, they've also become known for developing talent, giving young leaders real responsibility and ownership, and holding an unusually high bar. Please enjoy this great conversation with Alex and Daniel. Once you've heard from Alex and Daniel, I highly recommend you also read our in-depth profile on them and 3G Capital.
They gave our managing editor, Dom Cook, unprecedented access, and the outcome is an excellent profile about the 50-year history of 3G and how the model began with Jorge Paulo Leman in Brazil.
I want to start with this one investment per fund concept because, first of all, I just think it's extremely cool to think about having a big pool of capital to deploy into one thing and all the work that goes into that, what ends up being that one thing, despite looking at countless other businesses. Where did that concept come from?
Because it must dictate so much about the nature and culture of investment strategy, firm, people. One investment per fund sounds interesting, and I know it is from our past discussions. Where did that come from?
So that comes from our Brazilian roots where my co-founders had done this beer investment that had worked really well. And then as they branched off into private equity in a predecessor firm of this firm in Brazil, they attempted a bit the more traditional approach also. That went okay. But then we understood a couple of lessons from that. One was that really, really great businesses
are rare, there are not that many of them to begin with. Secondly, the ones that exist, they are not oftenly actionable. So therefore, if you are going to be in the business of putting a lot of your own capital to work, And if you're going to be very involved, the people that you're going to need to deploy there and the time are also a scarce resource.
So when I started the firm in New York in 2004, we already had those things pretty clearly understood. And that was a premise that to the extent that we would get involved with businesses on a strategic long-term basis, it would be one at a time.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can be learned from the Kraft Heinz investment?
We have this luxury of only having to find one great business at a time. And I think if you're investing your own capital, and if that's the lens through which you're looking at in the investment, you want to be really patient and wait until you find that great business. The other way to look at it is it's so hard for us to find a great business to invest in. how are we going to find 10?
It's so hard to find great people to be great CEOs. So like, how are we going to find 10? So I think it's great to be able to buy one business every once in a while and send in your A++ players to get involved.
Is there any psychological fear pressure associated with knowing that it's just one, all eggs in one basket and watch the basket very closely? Like what psychology does that feel like?
As much as the psychology, I think it drives the investment process tremendously. a very rigorous analysis of what the downside can be. And in our case, the downside has to be capital preservation with some small return of sorts. And that drives business sort of decisions. And it also drives capital structure decisions. I think that's where it manifests itself the most.
If you were to look at businesses that we didn't buy or deals that we didn't do over a long period of time, I think more often than not, that would be a function of us not being comfortable with a potential downside scenario or a downside case, as opposed to us not finding a path to a great case.
I think it's a healthy pressure that we put on ourselves to make sure that we're not compromising on business quality and we're only rather do nothing than- Our capital structure being- Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We're going to buy a great business. We're going to lever it appropriately, not too much. It definitely makes it harder to price risk.
If you think about the traditional portfolio approach where- Yeah, it's the portfolio construction part of it. Yeah, you have 10 businesses and if one has some idiosyncratic risk or whatever, it's like, It's harder to price risk. So we take that into consideration. But then on the other hand, you have this team here who they're really excited to do a great deal.
And oftentimes they're going to bet their own careers, as is the case with Alex and a railroad that he bought in Brazil, as is the case with Burger King that we bought here for me. And so when you're betting your reputation on something... You want to hold it to the highest possible standard.
If you think back to that, the very first days, 2004, thereabouts, through to today, 20 years, how has your idea of what constitutes a great business changed the most through all of these investigations and running the five, six businesses? What's most changed about your views?
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