应该说他们其实都一样,虽然一个长期持有,一个经常变换,但是对立面都考虑进去了
On good versus great investments:
"One of our theories of venture capital: Everybody thinks in investing you either make a good investment or a bad investment. I actually think that's not the big issue. The issue in venture capital is you either make a good investment or a great investment. Good is the enemy of great. We see many companies that are just fine ... founders are good, market seems good, product seems good, customers kinda like it, and they got a little revenue and it’s all fine, but those companies tend to never go anywhere. Every once in a while we'll see these companies that have some extremely strong strength, some extremely special wonderful thing going on, that by the way may have all kinds of problems and issues, but there‘s something at the core of what it is that's really special and magical. And those are the ones that we want to do. We’re trying to stock our portfolio with just investments like that."
This is similar to the notion that only a few great investments in a stock portfolio drive the majority of the returns and so investors are on a continual quest to find the holy grail. But it's not just finding them. You have to be able to buy them at a decent price. As Warren Buffett says, "Price is what you pay; value is what you get."
Many great fund managers keep a watchlist of great companies they‘d love to own at the right price (companies with huge moats, competitive advantages, great management teams, etc). And if volatility presents an opportunity, they strike, often selling 'good’ companies to replace them with 'great‘ ones.
On the importance of arguing the other side:
Andreessen then goes on to discuss his firm's investment process and the importance of arguing the other side. There are pros and cons to doing this as he warns at first that, "It‘d be very easy in a conversation about the weaknesses of something to beat the idea to death and you never invest."
At the same time, he says they can create a 'red team‘ or people designated to argue the other side (why they shouldn't invest, i.e. the bear case in public market investing). Andreessen says, "Whenever (a partner) brings in a new idea, I just beat the shit out of it ... and he does the same to me. It’s the torture test."
Two quotes from Charlie Munger highlight just that: "Invert, always invert."
and
"I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side’s argument better than they do."
Andreessen notes they're trying to take contrarian, non-consensus views to guide their investments. This is quite similar to public market value investors, or other managers who identify the consensus view and then outline their variant perception. Risk & mitigant lists are also pretty commonplace in investment pitches these days.
On other investors he studies:
"I study the people we compete with and collaborate with very closely. I (also) particularly study value investors, on the completely other side of the spectrum. Warren Buffett is the archetype but Seth Klarman, and others."
"Value investing is the only other place in the market where you can actually find long term investors."
On Warren Buffett:
"On the one hand, there's no overlap between the worlds. Anything Warren Buffett‘s willing to invest in we run screaming in the other direction and vice versa. He invests in Heinz Ketchup and the reason he invests in Heinz Ketchup is that people have been eating Ketchup on hamburgers for 100 years and therefore the best guess would be that they're going to continue to eat Heinz Ketchup for the next 100 years. We’re wired completely opposite. He's betting against change and we‘re betting for change. When he makes a mistake it's because something changes that he didn‘t expect. When we make a mistake it's because something doesn’t change that we thought would. They could not be more different in that way. But what both schools have in common is an orientation towards original thinking, willing to view things as they are as opposed to what everybody says about them or what they've believed to be."
应该说他们其实都一样,虽然一个长期持有,一个经常变换,但是对立面都考虑进去了
确实很棒的一份采访 。没想到vc对芒格巴菲特的理解这么也这么深刻。
核心是开放的心态和对真相的探究,做到不易。能力,更重要的是人的自尊心妨碍人去做到这些。
原文是否可以这样理解,对冲基金要的是liquidity , vc要的是 long term commitment. 两者可能的桥梁是都要buy in a decent price. 另外作者对思维开放不拘泥于形式框架的人特别赞赏?问题是我还是没看出来如此对比一二级,意义在哪。